Chapter Nineteen

By mid-morning on the Sunday, Sorcha had already got to the point where she wished that the day was well and truly already over and done with.

She had spent much of the previous evening watching TV news reports, which had been punishment and indulgence rolled into one: she certainly wouldn’t have wanted anyone else to know that she was doing it. Whereas Marty’s disappearance had been reported along the same lines as natural disasters or major acts of war, this was being treated more suspicion – as well as being an excuse for showing yet more archive footage of Marty either prancing around or receiving awards. There was a sense that Keith McDonald’s disappearance was a coincidence too many, and treating it as a simple, human, bad-luck story, would be pushing the bounds of even tabloid credulity. Just about every television journalist in the country who wasn’t either covering the beginning of the premiership season, or reporting on a possible weakening of the housing market, seemed to be standing either in the car park of the motorway service station or outside Jake’s front door. And all they seemed to be doing was asking questions. Even the new guys, who hadn’t worked out what speed to talk at or quite which direction to face, seemed to be at it. They just kept on asking questions, hoping that the mud which they slung with their question marks would stick in some of the right places.

From the pictures, Keith didn’t look a bit like Jake. Where Jake was tall but slight almost to the point of emaciation, his father looked like a big, cuddly, bear of a man. There was footage of him hugging Jake after the speech Jake had made about him at the previous year’s Brit awards, which had been heartfelt to the point of being utterly incomprehensible. The hug seemed to engulf Jake completely, in all directions, and it was then several seconds before bits of him started to emerge again. Even after watching it several times in the space of a couple of hours, Sorcha still found herself welling up each time she saw the clip. She kept reminding herself that she did exactly the same at the end of Peggy Sue got Married, regardless of how many times she watched it, or quite how stupid Nicolas Cage looked.

What she hadn’t been prepared for at all was quite how monumentally terrible she still felt when she woke up, early on the Sunday morning. She had expected her hangover to more or less disappear overnight, but it had failed to take its cue. It seemed to have deepened and congealed, and taken hold of a number of odd and disconnected corners of her skull. Not only did it hurt like hell; she also felt peculiarly disoriented, as if she was coming at reality from the wrong angle.

She had intended to spend a large chunk of Sunday catching up on work, so forced herself out of bed and into a taxi. She assumed that she would start feeling human again relatively soon, but it was an assumption more rooted in frustration rather than anything else. The office on a Sunday was usually an oasis of empty desks and switched off screens: she often went in for a couple of hours to catch up on things, and wander round with her shoes off and the radio on. But something about what her head was doing made it seem alien and forbidding, even with all the lights on, and twice she started back because it felt as if the books from her shelf were about to fall on her head. After the second time, she’d had enough, and retreated back home with her laptop, her in-tray and print outs of her WIP sheets. After trying and failing to get back to sleep, she had piled all of the junk up in a corner of the room and set up camp on the dining table, with the curtains pulled across to keep the light at a bearable level. Random figures seemed to swim at her, out of the pages, while she tried to figure out where her August billings were coming from.

Sorcha tried to get hold of Pippa, in the hope that she would be able to tell her where on the internet to find what was probably ridiculous gossip about Keith: it felt as if even wrong information would make her feel more connected, somehow. But she eventually got a text message telling her that Pip was stuck with her parents in Hastings and was unlikely to be able to escape until the following morning. She wasn’t much in the mood to speak to anyone except Pip – although a surprisingly high proportion of the people she had ever met, and one or two she hadn’t, all seemed to want to speak to her. Presumably they thought they would get some kind of kick out of gossiping about Keith McDonald with someone who’d once “met” his son: she offered up a muttered prayer of thanks to the person who had invented call screening.

One of the people she least wanted to speak to was Jane, although the irony was that if she had thought that Jane wanted to talk about Keith McDonald, she would have happily taken her call.

Sorcha had already screened her out three or four times, before a clearly exasperated Jane told her that if she didn’t pick up within the count of ten, she was going to try calling her at the troll’s hole. Sorcha squinted across at the phone, as Jane very slowly and deliberately read out Norman’s home phone number, and then equally slowly and deliberately started to count. Although she’d moved as quickly as she thought she safely could, Jane had already got to six by the time that Sorcha snatched up the receiver.

“Where the hell did you get that number?”

“You called me from it, at about 1 o’clock yesterday morning your time.”

Sorcha groaned, loudly and deliberately, down the phone. She’d expected it to be bad, but this was going to be worse.

“Oh Shit. I’m so sorry, sweets,” she wasn’t sure if she wanted to know, but thought that she’d better ask anyway. “What did I say?”

“It was actually very hard to tell, in particular as you had company. At one point both of you seemed to be singing something which sounded like ‘a mouldy old hole for a rancid old troll’ to the tune of ‘Pop goes the Weazel’.”

Sorcha fished around as best she could inside her head, to see if she could kick start any recollection of that part of the evening, and failed. She apologized again, flatly, which somehow made Jane mad.

“Oh for Christ’s sake! You don’t have the first clue what you did, do you?”

“Look, hun, I drank too much, and I’m still feeling like shit. I don’t need you to take me to pieces for it.”

“So you drank yourself silly and then spent the night with him?”

“Yes.” Her lawyer’s mind suddenly quibbled at whether that was strictly true. “Well, mostly.”

“For Christ’s sake Sorcha. He’s been treating you as if you were radioactive or something since your accident.” Sorcha smiled despite herself: only Jane called it that. “And as soon as he starts more or less treating you normally again you jump straight into bed with him. What the hell were you thinking?”

“Pretty much the same as I was thinking before all the medical nonsense, and you know it.” Sorcha wanted to shut Jane up, while telling her as little as possible. Increasingly inconvenient fragments of the night had been coming back to her over the previous twenty four hours. She didn’t need Jane to know just how grim sex with Norman had really been, or just how much of it he’d seemed to want. She certainly didn’t need to know that bits of it had involved physical contortions which were hard to explain as anything other than a form of ritual humiliation. Or the fact that he had locked her in, after her first attempt to get away, which was how she had ended up climbing out the dining room window and into the flower pot. “For what it’s worth, I doubt that I will be doing it again in a hurry.”

Something in Sorcha’s tone of voice, flat as it was, sounded an alarm bell. For reasons that Jane had never felt the need to examine, Sorcha brought out a surprisingly fierce, protective, almost maternal streak in her, which otherwise only found expression if someone tried to hurt one of her cats. It was all Sorcha could do to get her to calm down, and not call Norman anyway to give him a piece of her mind. Jane had never told her exactly what she had done or said to John, when she had gone to collect Sorcha’s things, but the consequences had been sufficiently impressive for Sorcha to regard Jane as a weapon of last resort.

Thankfully, Jane had picked up on Keith McDonald’s disappearance from the BBC website, and was happy to change tack when Sorcha continued to stonewall her on the Norman front. Sorcha didn’t feel the need to tell her that Jake had suddenly appeared on her doorstep the previous day: it just didn’t feel relevant, somehow. But when she had given her statement to police of the bits that she could remember from Stephen Warren’s attack on Jake, she had told them that she thought that he had been yelling something about somebody’s father. Their response had been to ask, repeatedly, whether the word that she had heard might not have been “fucker” instead. Of course it could have been, and she had conceded as much, much she was increasingly sure that it hadn’t been. There had been other witnesses, but apart from Jake it was possible that none of them was a native English speaker, as the hotel staff were mostly Polish. Jane wasn’t in favour of her calling the police to remind them about it: it had all been recorded at the time. She was more worried about how tired Sorcha sounded: she almost seemed to be fading away at the end of the phone line, and had none of her normal bounce and bite.

“I know you’re going to hate me for saying this, but you sound awful.”

“I’m pretty sure I feel worse. I just wish this bloody hangover would go away.”

“That’s not it, though, is it? I know you’ve been caught up in a deal, and all, but you sound like you can barely make it to the end of each sentence. You need a break.”

“Right, because the last one did me so much good.”

Sorcha had spent a week on the Devon coast just after Jane had returned to the States. It was the only week in what had otherwise been a glorious summer when there had been near wall-to-wall rain: there had been several days when it had been impossible to see where the grey of the sea ended and the grey of the sky began. The TV news had been full of flooding, and the occasional reported sighting of either Marty or Stephen Warren had almost been a relief. And Norman hadn’t come: the holiday had been booked at his suggestion, months earlier, but he was adept at slipping out of things which seemed just too much trouble when he came to them and blaming it on somebody else. The only indication that he’d felt slightly more guilty than usual about it was a flower arrangement which would not have looked out of place in the entrance to the Lanesborough. Sorcha had been speechless in fury when she had taken delivery of it, and had waited for the florist to reverse back down the lane before placing it out of sight, where the patio met the hedge. The rain did at least mean it would rot quickly away.

“You could go somewhere where it wasn’t going to rain this time. And I’m guessing that Norman wouldn’t be invited.”

“I just can’t, OK. I’ve already had something like four or five weeks off this year, I can’t afford to go away again.”

“That was sick leave, for heaven’s sake! You’re allowed a holiday as well, you know.”

“No, actually, I’m not. Not if I’m going to have a cat’s chance in hell of making my billings for the year. And if I don’t they would probably fire me.”

“They can’t do that because you’ve been ill!”

“Of course they can, they’re a law firm. We’re a law firm.” Sorcha wasn’t sure that she could be bothered to carry on, but needed to make sure that Jane wasn’t going to pursue the point. “I’m not an employee, I don’t have lots of pinko-liberal employee rights to see me through a rough patch. There are quite a lot of elderly men in Leeds and Sheffield who never wanted me in the partnership in the first place, and who will only be too glad of an excuse to get me out. And, yes, I think there is probably a Human Rights Act angle, because there is always a sodding Human Rights Act angle to absolutely bloody everything, but that isn’t something I can invoke in order to get the right to go on holiday. I could possibly go on holiday, get fired, and then spend about seven years trying to force someone to change the law so that nobody else can be treated the same way. That wouldn’t fucking help.”

Jane was about to ask if there was someone at work she could speak to, but checked herself. Sorcha’s usual ally was Norman: it was Norman who had pushed through her promotion to the partnership, long before they had officially started their dilly-dallying about whether to jump into bed together or not. While Jane knew that she didn’t have a clue what had happened with him, it was clear that the last thing Sorcha needed was to sit down and tell him that she needed a break because she thought that she was cracking up.

“Oh pet, I’m sorry. Is it worth getting the doctor to check you out again, to see if there is anything they missed?”

Jane heard a sound like a small, explosive squeak, before the click when Sorcha hung up. She sat and listened to the buzzing of the disconnected line for longer than she needed to, before reluctantly taking the phone back to its cradle by the kitchen door.