Chapter Twenty Four

Sorcha hadn’t expected Jake to call her back so quickly. She’d ascertained that he was at least not stuck in a police cell, by logging on to the BBC website once she had got enough of her act together to remember the pictures she had seen on the TV the night before. She’d closed her eyes as soon as she clicked on the short-cut, and got cross with herself for praying again; but at least when it said that he’d been released she had no reason to disbelieve it. But she had no idea whether the flunky she spoke to would even pass the message on to him – and even if he did, it was possible Jake wouldn’t realise what she meant. And Jake was presumably in the middle of the mother of all juggling acts, and not much in the mood to waste time on strangers while all sorts of things were hanging in the balance around him.

But his call left her very firmly stuck in limbo. He had said that he would try to make it round later in the day, but he had no idea when. Sorcha had explained how to get into the basement garage, to keep him away from prying eyes, but could then do nothing except wait.

She had come round, cold and aching, on the floor in the sitting room as the sun rose rather feebly in the distance. She had still been wearing the bright yellow rubber gloves, with a large tear in the sleeve of her jacket. She had decided before she had even decided to try sitting up that she was going to take the day off sick. She could have muddled her way through another day, somehow or other: she was getting good at that. But you didn’t need to be a genius to work out that the vodka-and-floors thing was in danger of spiralling out of control; let alone the rest of it. She didn’t particularly want to think about the rest of it. She needed to stop it – or, at least decide whether she could stop it, and whether she wanted to.

Thankfully Maggie hadn’t known her long enough to be able to tell the difference between a hangover and a potentially life threatening brain haemorrhage. Sorcha had felt slightly guilty as she had camped up the headaches she had had since the “accident” back in May when she first spoke to her in the morning; and then a lot more guilty when Maggie had called her back a couple of hours later, at Norman’s insistence, to ask her to join a call late afternoon. Maggie had been so worried about calling that she was almost in tears, and Sorcha had felt compelled to stay talking for a while, and assure her that she would be back in the following day with a degree of certainty that she was nowhere near feeling.

Eventually, after a lot of pacing around and random googling, Sorcha had started methodically going through the work papers which were stacked up in the dining room, with a shredder perched on the edge of the table. Once they were sorted, and the majority reduced to a black sack full of monochrome confetti, she moved onto the personal papers which were stashed in the cupboard in the spare room. It had been a year or two since she had properly been through them, and she was in a particularly ruthless frame of mind. Getting rid of things made her feel decisive and somehow lighter; even if it ultimately resolved nothing.

By the time Jake knocked, rather hesitantly, on the door, Sorcha had got most of the way through her wardrobe, too, and there were several black sacks lined up in the hallway. Although she had known he was coming, she had spent most of the day forcing herself not to think about it. She felt a fight-or-flight reaction welling up inside her, like stage fright on steroids.

The Jake who walked through the door, and looked slightly quizzical at the sight of the bin liners before following her through into the dining room, wasn’t quite what she had been expecting. In place of the dishevelled wreck from Saturday afternoon, who had looked like he was wearing jumble sale cast-offs, he looked… good, was the most respectable, least loaded term she could come up with. He was still wearing faded jeans, but with a very sharply-cut, slightly military looking jacket over a white linen shirt. The stubble looked deliberate, and his face looked alive. She knew that she had stared slightly when she had first opened the door, and it was all that she could do not to keep on staring – even when he was walking behind her.

“You’re looking good.”

The moment that she’d opened her mouth, she wished that she hadn’t. The spectre of thousands of teenage groupies rose up and grabbed her from behind, making her wish that a hole would open up and swallow her, even if they were fifteen floors up. She found herself staring at his shoes without quite meaning to: another bad habit which she was only just realising she had. But he was still wearing his battered, grubby old tennis shoes, which gave her half a chance to recover herself.

“Although, those aren’t quite the shoes … “

Jake shrugged into the jacket, and did something which came perilously close to a catwalk strut.

“What do you think?” He could only take himself seriously for a few seconds, before grinning at her, hopefully, “The lads decided I needed a bit of tidying up, because they reckoned all the pictures of me in the hoodie made me look like a yob. Jeff got Jackie to bring this stuff into the studio this afternoon. She didn’t think about shoes though, I expect because Jeff always wears proper shoes, you know, leather ones…”

Sorcha grinned back. She shouldn’t have called him, and he shouldn’t have come. He was going to be disappointed by what she had to show him, and she was still going to have to figure out whether there was a way of rescuing her career and not becoming a rather disgraceful alcoholic.

“Huge improvement, pet. You look a lot less like an ASBO waiting to happen.”

Afraid that he would realise that she was wasting his time, she launched into heavily edited highlights of what had happened the previous night. She had decided the only thing he needed to know about events before she climbed the step ladder was that she’d had too much to drink; and she played up her terror at the lift noise to try to make him laugh. If he was going to find her ridiculous, she was determined that it was going to be on her own terms. But she still had no idea how he was going to react.

“All the box actually has in it is scrapbooks, which are full of cuttings about the band, back in the 90s. They seem to start from the beginning of 95, but there is nothing about Marty going missing. I’m guessing they stop just before that.” She hoped that he didn’t notice that she hadn’t got round to checking the dates: it suddenly felt like the kind of thing she ought to know, “They don’t include much which looks relevant, but they do confirm that there was some kind of link between Marty and your Dad. These were loose in the back of the final book.”

The books were the kind of cheap, generic scrapbooks, which Sorcha remembered being given to try to keep a record of her summer holidays in when she was a child: she had never seen the point, and had always managed to ditch them before they had really begun. The pages were made of what her mother had called sugar paper: it was heavy and coarse, in dull, dark blues and purples. Sorcha pushed the book across the table towards Jake, with a sheath of much newer newspaper cuttings on the open page. They were mostly pictures of Jake and Keith after the Brit Awards speech, but it was more than just that as whoever had kept the pictures had also kept small references to Keith from later magazine articles and gossip columns, and one or two later pictures of the band which had Keith in the background.

Jake started leafing through them: it was hard to know what he was thinking.

“As well as the press cuttings about your Dad, there are a few photos of him in an envelope which look as if they were taken with a zoom lens just as he was going about doing normal day to day stuff. It made me wonder whether Marty or someone could have hired a private investigator to follow him. Then there’s a map with some doodling on it, a couple of articles about a youth centre which was threatened with closure, and what looks like an older newspaper photo of a woman but with no headline or story with it. That one’s almost as yellowed as the stuff which has been stuck in, but the rest of the loose bits are a lot more recent.” Jake showed no sign of reacting, which made Sorcha nervous enough to keep talking. “I know it’s not much, and that it might not even have been Marty that collected them, but I thought that you would want to see it anyway.”

She was starting to lose conviction: Jake was slowly realising that he needed to say something.

“My Mum had scrapbooks, too. Just like this, only they didn’t stop where this one stops. She stuck everything in with Pritt stick, and it fell out after a few years. She had to stick everything back in using double-sided sticky tape.” He paused, “I haven’t looked at them for years. It always felt kind of odd, looking at them, you know; but I still like it, knowing that she has them.”

“But you don’t know why Marty would have kept cuttings about you and your Dad?”

Jake was scanning back over them, as if hoping that he had missed something.

“Nope. Not a clue.” He took the photos out of the envelope and lay them out on the table, before picking up one which seemed to show Keith walking out of the door of a house, “You know, these were taken not long after the Brits thing: Dad moved out of that place a couple of months after that. He’s moved around a lot, you see. If Marty did get someone to follow him, and take pictures and stuff, it must have been because he saw him at the Brits.”

“Could he have recognised him from the early days of the band?”

Jake couldn’t quite dismiss it, but it clearly didn’t sit right.

“I suppose so. He was never kind of officially around as my Dad, because it was about ten years after he had gone off that the band got started. But he kept showing up, and I suppose the others might have known who he was.” Jake was still looking back over the pictures, “But he didn’t have a beard or anything back then, and his hair was kind of long. When he came to those early gigs, he had like a pony tail. I’m not sure anyone who’d just seem him then would recognise him from those photos, with the beard and everything.”

“So there might be another reason why Marty or someone who knew him would want to find out more about what your Dad was doing when the band reformed?” Sorcha was feeling less and less convinced that this had been worth Jake’s while, and guilt was beginning to take hold. “I can’t figure out whether the map and the other bits belong with these photos, or whether they’ve just got shoved in the same place while someone was tidying up.”

Jake opened out the map: it was an old road map of the whole of Great Britain, which looked as if it had once come free with Shell petrol. There were pen markings along some of the roads in the Midlands, and Chester and Gloucester were ringed round several times, as if for emphasis. As he opened it out, Sorcha spotted a newspaper cutting stuck on the back of it, which she had missed. It seemed to be stuck by accident, with some glue residue from where it had fallen or been taken out of its original place in one of the books. The headline was “Lonely Road Back”, and beneath it was a very poor quality picture of a man next to a lorry stacked high with containers. Beneath that were a few lines about how pop star Jake McDonald’s estranged father was eking out a living on the road as a lorry driver, but had nothing but praise for his famous son. Sorcha flinched as she read it, but Jake seemed unperturbed.

“I suppose that he – whoever it was that marked on this map – might have been trying to mark out somewhere that Dad had been.”

“Or the article might just have got stuck to the back of the map by mistake.” Sorcha was getting frustrated with Jake, because he wasn’t getting frustrated with her. When she had gone through the box that morning, she had decided that it was worth telling Jake about because that was what she had wanted to decide, and she had been wrong. Looking through it again now, with him there, she was absolutely certain that this wasn’t going to help to find anyone at all. But it could still all land her in very, very deep shit. She wished that she could will him to understand the situation, “Pet, you know that we can’t hand this stuff over to the police, even if it might mean something, don’t you?”

Jake waited to hear her out.

“I’ve been a complete fucking idiot, and I shouldn’t have gone up there. But all I can do now is hope that someone finds Marty King, alive and well, so I can return this to him to show that I had no intention to permanently deprive him of his property. If I’m really lucky, I’ll even get him to give retrospective consent to my wandering around his flat, which might just about be enough to stop it being trespass. And then if nobody else ever finds out, I might just about get away with it. But I’m probably perverting the course of justice anyway.”

She managed to sound almost sardonic about it, which was a pleasant surprise given the underlying sense of panic which had welled up from nowhere like a mushroom cloud. Her head had started trying to dream up ways of mitigating the mess that she had got herself into before she was even fully awake, and it hadn’t really stopped since. She kept turning it all round and round in her mind, whether she wanted to or not, wishing she could remember what the new statutory offence which was almost the same as trespass was, and wondering what other offences she had committed without knowing that they existed, while at the same time forcing herself not to research it, for fear that doing so would somehow call further attention to herself.

Jake’s reaction wasn’t what she had expected. He moved round to her side of the table, and pulled him towards her with one arm around her shoulders and the other around her waist. It took her a split second to realise that he was hugging her, before she felt the warmth of his rather bony body against hers. She could have coped with anger from him, but simple kindness was too much to bear: she didn’t so much burst into tears as dissolve, just managing to pull back and keep her mascara off his shirt. And once the tears had started, she had no idea when or whether they would stop: the dam had been breached, and there seemed nothing left between her and … she didn’t know what. It was the not knowing which made it so much harder.

Jake just let her cry: he had never minded people crying, so long as he at least vaguely knew why and wasn’t being blamed. He fished a handkerchief out of his jeans and offered it to her: she said something which didn’t quite make sense, but took it anyway. It smelled of lavender, not the usual coins and keys: thinking that made her cry some more. She had sat down on one of the chairs, and was holding her head in her hands. Jake had sat down next to her, and was stroking the back of her hair, and wondering whether she would let him get closer.

They stayed there, neither of them in a particular hurry to move on, with Sorcha intermittently starting to sob again and then calming herself. An alarm started beeping on the other side of the room. It took a few seconds to penetrate the right parts of Sorcha’s brain: it was as if it was sounding in a parallel dimension, and she couldn’t place it. Then something snapped back into focus. It was diary alarm on her laptop, which she had parked on the sideboard and then forgotten about when she had started clearing the room that morning. She had five minutes until her call with Norman and Gordon, and she had to make a decision. Jake was an invitation to keep running away from reality; but his reassurance also gave her the strength to start facing it again. She exhaled, long and deliberately, before sitting up and looking at him.

“I think that’s my reality check. I need to do a work call in a few minutes.”

“Are you sure?” Jake looked worried, “I mean, are you sure that you are OK to do it?”

She smiled at him, trying not to think too much about what a hideous, blotchy mess she must be.

“No, but I think I want to give it a go. They won’t be able to see me, and I’m mostly just meant to be listening, so I reckon I might get away with it.” It was like choosing to turn and walk back out of Wonderland, she thought; before remembering that Alice had never actually wanted to be in Wonderland in the first place. “I don’t know how long it’ll take, though. If you want to stay, I can go and take it in the bedroom – just please don’t walk in on me.”

She wasn’t sure whether she was more worried about client confidentiality or Norman, and felt guilty that she hadn’t explained. She didn’t want to admit to herself that the biggest worry was the thought of Jake leaving: at least she was letting him go. He was looking at her, but she wasn’t quite sure why.

“Is it OK if I stay? I could do with a bit of time to think.” He paused, trying and failing to gauge her reaction. “It’s been a really chaotic couple of days.”

She looked at him, and felt what she told herself was a wave of empathy run through her.

“Of course it is, pet. I reckon you more or less know where everything is, so make yourself at home. I’m afraid that about all there is to eat is toast, but the stuff for that’s in the fridge.” He looked as if he wanted to say something at the mention of toast, but let it pass, “If you need to head off, just let yourself out.”

His hand was resting on her knee: she put her hand gently on top of it, looking down at it as she did so, before extricating herself and taking her phone and laptop through to the bedroom.