Chapter Thirty Seven

It took Jake a long time to persuade both the police and his mother to let him leave Manchester, and when he got back to the flat he had then called the other band members, which had taken even longer. Sorcha had suggested that they use her standing dial-in so that he only had to do one call rather than three, but the blank look with which the suggestion had been met told her that this really was a different country, and she had a way to go before she even began to understand the way they did things there. Instead she sat, staring out at the lights of the city, trying to pretend that she wasn’t listening. By the time they were ready to leave, it was beyond late.

Jake was insistent that he wanted to drive, and that he didn’t want to wait and head back in the morning, but there was one conversation that Sorcha wanted to have before they managed to get themselves stuck back in a situation where they couldn’t really look at one another. Jake had been packing up while he was still speaking to Duncan, and had closed and locked the front door as he was telling him that he would see him in the studio the next morning, so she had to wait until they were sitting in the car.

“You do know what this all means, don’t you Pet?”

The keys were already in the ignition, and Jake’s mind was already on the road. He was trying to decide whether to go via the M1 or the M40, even though he knew it was going to be a while before he actually needed to choose.

“Which bit of it?”

Something about the way that he said it made Sorcha worry that he wasn’t going to manage to stay awake, but she was willing to have that argument again later if necessary. She took one of his hands in both of hers, to try to hold his attention.

“Unless what we found this afternoon was one huge, whacky, elaborate hoax, when they find your Dad he’s not going to be going home. He’s going to be going to jail instead, and probably for quite a long time.”

More than once in the course of the afternoon, she had been cursing her decision to take the easy way out, and spend her time churning out board minutes, and telling directors how best to keep their fat arses out of trouble. It meant that she couldn’t really help him, however hard she tried. The little bits she could remember were likely to confuse rather than help; and she was worried that there might be something in what had been done to Marty while he was being held which might make it even worse than it already was. Kidnapping, false imprisonment and some form of assault looked more or less inevitable, but it didn’t need to stop there.

Jake squeezed one of her hands, and turned to look at her. His eyes were clear, but they looked as if he knew he was holding something back.

“I know. I haven’t quite figured it all out yet, you know, but I do know.”

Sorcha found herself watching his eyes, not quite sure if he was hurting enough, before her conscience let her go on.

“I’m sorry, Pet.”

He was watching her back, and she had the sense that he was better at it than she was.

“I know you are.”

Sorcha had to fight hard to stay awake in the car. She wanted to sleep, but was afraid that if she did so Jake might nod off as well. The battle was harder than it should have been because he insisted on having the heating on full: the warmth made her drowsiness weigh down on her, and she had to keep shifting in her seat to shake it off. She tried to spend the time running through her diary for the following couple of days in her head, and working up the agendas for a couple of the meetings. It seemed better to leave Jake alone with his thoughts, although she had the impression that he had been properly prepared for the worst, so that events didn’t really have the power to surprise him. She thought about asking if she could turn the radio on, but decided that could open up a whole new can of worms. As it was, the silence sat easily over the hum of the engine.

It was Jake who broke it, once they were clear of the city centre.

“Why do you think he did it?”

The question was aimed more to the darkness than at anyone in particular, but Sorcha welcomed it as another way of staying conscious.

“Your Dad or Cameron?” When he didn’t reply, she wondered if she had been too blunt, but knew it was more likely that he was still considering his answer. He seemed to be concentrating hard on the near-empty road ahead of them.

“It’s so long ago, you know, it’s hard to properly remember. Cameron would have done anything for the band, so I reckon if he was paying for Marty to be taken he must have thought that was better for the rest of us,” He paused, concentrating while he changed lanes to allow a tanker and a couple of cars to filter in at a junction. “I mean, there was stuff in the press about Marty going off the rails, drugs and stuff. but I never really saw it. Perhaps I was just too much of an arrogant shit to have noticed.”

Sorcha tried to conjure up an image of Jake’s younger self which might fit that description, and failed dismally: she suspected that was her failing, and waited for him to carry on.

“Jeff and Duncan really loved Cameron, though. Tomorrow’s going to be a bit tough.”

Sorcha knew that was probably true, but he seemed to be dancing round the edges of the conversation, rather than saying what he really meant.

“Pet, you know that I don’t know your Dad, but it is at least possible that he did it for good reasons. He might have been doing it for you, in an odd way.”

Jake knew what she was trying to do, but couldn’t help thinking that she was missing the point.

“It’s also possible that he’s an old crook who was doing it for the money, you know.” He smiled, glancing across at her, “A lovable old crook, but an old crook.”

Sorcha couldn’t think of an immediate response, and was happy to let the silence settle back over the darkness. The pieces of the jigsaw were spinning round in her head, but whichever angle she looked at it from, only some of them seemed to have a place to fall into. She waited for a while to see if Jake had anything else to say, before explaining what was on her mind.

“It’s the more recent stuff I’m struggling with.” She waited another minute or two, but he didn’t seem inclined to take on the conversation, “I’m guessing someone must have realised that your Dad was involved the first time; and it’s most likely that someone was Marty. Then I suppose that your Dad might have found out that he knew, and decided that he had to get rid of him.” Only as she said it did she realise how it sounded, but Jake didn’t flinch. “And Stephen Warren must have known or guessed that your Dad was involved, which is why he attacked you back in May, and may mean that he has taken you Dad now. But I can’t figure out why Marty would have got in touch with your Dad; whether that youth centre has anything to do with it at all; or which bits are Marty and which bits are Stephen Warren.” She sped up towards the end, and thought that Jake was probably wondering whether to laugh at her, “I hate it when I can’t figure things out.”

She sounded like a child trying to explain a tantrum: it was like a tiny chink in her rather formidable armour, giving a glimpse of who she really was or might have been. Jake knew that if he tried to remember it, it would warp into something different.

“I know it kind of sounds stupid, but I feel like I know enough already.”

He sounded distracted, and Sorcha felt guilty: it was his story and not hers, and she should have been more careful with it.

“I’m sorry, Pet. I keep forgetting that we don’t really know anything yet. I guess just about everything we think we know might turn out to be wrong,” This time there was nothing in his posture to indicate that he believed a word that she was saying, but she still had to try, “It almost always is in Agatha Christie. Otherwise there would be nothing to do in the last part of the book.”

They stopped at a service station where there were more cleaners than customers. Jake bought some very bitter, dark chocolate to keep himself awake, but even looking at the wrapper gave Sorcha a headache. The sudden temperature shift when they got out of the car seemed to stop her brain working: she needed all of the energy she had to try not to shiver. She hoped that the shock would linger, and keep her alert for the rest of the journey, but as soon as she was back in the warmth she found it even harder than it had been before. Talking was a last ditch attempt not to let her head slump down onto the seatbelt.

“Your Mum said you’d spent a long time travelling.”

Jake fidgeted with the steering wheel, not wholly comfortable with the comment.

“She likes the idea of travelling, but every time I try to persuade to her to go anywhere with me we end up going to Spain. But it’s like she’s proud that I’ve done it, although it’s something that everyone does now.”

Sorcha wondered if that meant that she was less proud of his ability to make twenty thousand women scream just by raising an eyebrow, but that part of him still felt firmly out of bounds and she was happy to leave it there. She felt safer talking about herself.

“You know, it’s not something I’ve ever done. I suppose I’ve never really taken a break in which I could have done it. I went from school to university, then to the college of law, then straight to Goodmans. I suppose I’ve never really felt like I need a break before.” She was thinking out loud, without meaning to, “I could do with one now, though. Big time.”

“Travelling isn’t escaping, you know.”

He said it in soft, slightly flat tones, which made it sound deliberately enigmatic.

“How do you mean?”

“If you’re travelling to get away from something, then it doesn’t work; not if you’re just travelling to travel. I mean, it’s like you, your self, are a part of the situation you are trying to escape from, and it doesn’t work because you always take yourself with you, if you see what I mean.” Jake knew that he was tying himself in knots, and wished that for once he had managed not to, “At least, that’s what it’s like for me. It only works if I go when I don’t need to.”

“But it must at least be a break.”

He shook his head, while keeping his eyes on the road.

“Not really. It just gives you more time to think about it, and I reckon that there’s something about being in trains and planes and stuff which just makes you think more.” He paused, trying to figure out how much to say, “I tried heading off just after the band split, and I thought I’d left it all behind me because I didn’t bother with all the first class VIP crap and carried my own bag, but all it meant was that I could think about it all twenty-four hours a day if I wanted to. I gave up after a few weeks and went back to my Mum’s. Waited until Marty had been found, and I could walk down a street without having people come up to me, and there was nothing really on my mind. Then I had the best times.”

Sorcha was afraid to ask more about the past, so tried to point him in the other direction.

“If you went away again, where would you go?”

“Depends on why I was going.”

Again the soft, slow, sphinxy voice, although this time she was sure that he was doing it deliberately.

“That’s a cop out!”

He almost seemed to accept the charge, but then fell silent while he considered his response.

“I suppose the places I like best are the ones without any people,” Sorcha coughed without quite meaning to, the image of him working a huge crowd up into a hysterical frenzy had returned, vividly and unbidden, and it was all she could do not to tell him so. “Not absolutely no people, I suppose, but where you can feel that you are in a landscape and that there is no one and nothing in the way. Parts of Asia are like that, and New Zealand. It’s just beautiful, and empty, and huge.”

Sorcha realised with sadness that what he was saying conjured up no images for her: it was too far removed from what she knew, and she didn’t even quite know how to tell him that she wanted to hear more. It was a while before he carried on.

“There was a place near the top of South Island with really great beaches. I stayed there for a couple of weeks, camping just over the road from one of them. The tide went out for miles, leaving all these wave patterns in the sand. I used to go out really early in the morning to walk out across the sand, and feel the ridges under my feet. It was like I was a part of it, at least for the hour or two that I had it to myself.” He seemed to lose himself in recollection for a moment or two, “It felt like coming alive again.”

For a moment Sorcha wondered if he was going into a kind of trance: the road was still very empty, but it still wouldn’t have been a good idea. But watching him closely, it was as if he was in two places at once: his attention was on the road, and about 11,000 miles away at the same time.

“You know, there were speed boats which used to take people out along the coast. The tide went out so far they had tractors which pulled the boats out across the beach on trailers, which left these big ugly tracks on the sand. But the sea just washed them away, and every morning it was new again. Like nobody had ever been there before.”

“And it wasn’t soft, sugary sand, the kind that gets between your toes and everything. Where the tide had gone out it was hard, and you could walk along it without leaving footprints. You knew you were there, because you could feel the sun on your skin and the ridges of the beach against the soles of your feet, but nobody else need ever know.”

For Sorcha, it was like a tiny shard of light shining in through a wall which had closed her in for so long that she’d forgotten was even there: she said nothing and listened as he talked about fjords where the only sound was the birds and the water lapping on the shore.

It was nearly three by the time they pulled into the garage under Sorcha’s block. She felt guilty for letting him go out of his way to drive her home, but it was too late for her to take a tube or a train and his place probably still had photographers camping on the doorstep. There had been something soft and luminous about the discussion in the car, but in the harsh fluorescent light of the basement he looked ill and haggard and she knew that she probably looked worse.

Jake got out of the car to retrieve her bag from the boot. When she went to take it from him, she found herself swept into a rather vicious hug, and held her breath without meaning to.

“Thank you.” he said, before letting her turn and walk to the lift.