Chapter Twenty Two

Sorcha never did quite work out which one was the final straw. The final call to arms was a combination of quite a lot of vodka, TV pictures of Jake being ushered into a police car to be taken away for questioning, and an answerphone message from her mother. She had been undecided as to what to do when she left the bar, having brazened it out one last time to fight her way back through and reclaim her credit card. Just disappearing sounded like a good option, but she had virtually no cash on her, and nothing else which would be significantly cheaper immediately sprang to mind. She took out £250 at the cashpoint on the way back to the tube, just in case.

But back in her flat, with the vodka bottle in her hand and her mother pleading in her ears, Sorcha suddenly knew, with the kind of absolute clarity which only alcohol, certain recreational pharmaceuticals, and extreme emotional turmoil can bring, what she needed to do.

First, she rummaged in the cupboard under the sink for the rubber gloves that her cleaner insisted on wearing before doing anything which involved water. They were yellow, which seemed a bit unnecessary, but they were all she had.

Then she dug an old and slightly unwieldy torch out of the storage cupboard, and switched it on and off a couple of times to check the batteries.

Then she took her shoes off, and tied two Sainsbury’s carrier bags over her feet. As she headed back to the sitting room, scrunching as she went, she slipped in the hall area and went crashing into the bathroom doorframe. So she took the carrier bags back off again and went to unearth an old pair of trainers which were at least a size too big instead.

Finally, waddling slightly in the trainers, she stood in front of the patio doors, and wished for a very big power cut. There was only a sliver of moon, and there were still large areas around the marina which had no street lights because they had yet to be developed; but it was still London, and it was never properly dark. However, given that things generally didn’t seem to be going her way, and she wasn’t anywhere near as drunk as she would have liked to have been, Sorcha didn’t actually expect a power cut to happen. Instead, she turned off her sitting room lights, and opened her patio door a fraction. She could have opened it further, but she somehow felt as if opening it only a small way was less likely to be noticed, even if she did then have to struggle slightly to force herself through the gap.

But she wasn’t completely out of luck, either. The step ladder had been left up by the concierge, who had been investigating some problems with the plumbing earlier in the day. It was at the other side of the terrace, deep in shadow, and very close to where she needed it to be. Sorcha ran over to it, wishing that her shoes fitted and wondering if she should have changed out of her suit; but she knew that in stepping out onto the patio, the Rubicon had been crossed. It still slightly niggled that she couldn’t remember what crime it was that she would be committing if she was entering without breaking, but as she climbed up the ladder, and then pulled herself over the front of the railings, she tried to at least take some very small, stale crumbs of comfort from the knowledge that it wasn’t her first criminal act of the week.

None of it actually mattered of course, because she had absolutely no expectation of being able to get into Marty King’s flat. Wandering onto the terrace was probably technically trespass, but she couldn’t see that anyone was going to get too excited about it. This was more a splendid, futile gesture, before terminal reality set in and she had to figure out how to stick the pieces of her life back together again. She would push at the window, whisper a silent “I told you so” to an imaginary Jake McDonald, and then lower herself back over the railings and into the ruins of the rest of her life.

Standing at the side of Marty’s terrace she hesitated for a moment, suddenly unsure which window it was that she was meant to push. The terrace actually went round two sides of the penthouse, and she hadn’t thought to quiz Jake on whether it was the right-hand window from the inside or the outside that he had meant. That meant four possible windows, but there were no lights on and no signs of life, and she was feeling hopelessly brave.

Working on the assumption that Jake normally looked at windows from the inside, Sorcha started by heading across to the far left-hand side of the terrace. The window was a wide double pane, and it looked as if there was a large living room behind it, which at least made it a plausible candidate as an escape route. So she poked at it, and to her palpable relief, nothing happened. But her rather over-stretched conscience wouldn’t let her stop at a half-hearted poke, even though she was afraid that she might somehow break the glass. She put her rubber-gloved hand flat on the glass, at one side of the pane, and pushed reasonably hard. Nothing. She did the same on the other side of the window. Still nothing. She was about to go to the window at the other end of this part of the terrace, when it suddenly struck her that she hadn’t been thinking properly about how the windows in the block generally worked. They were nowhere near as high-tech as they looked, and some of them just hinged outwards. She ran her fingers down the edge of the window furthest away from the end wall. The rubber gloves made it hard to get her finger nails under the thin metal edge of the frame, but when she did eventually manage it she immediately pulled her hand away, as if it had stung her.

The window had moved.

And that really hadn’t been a part of the plan.

At all.

Sorcha retreated into the corner by the end wall for a few seconds, before going back and pulling at the window again, and then immediately ducking down below the ledge. There was now a gap of about six inches between the frame and the window, and she kept on expecting an alarm to ring out. When it didn’t, she reached up and pulled the window so that it was fully open. She lay face down on the patio for what she counted as thirty seconds, with her heart beating hard against her tonsils. Bits of her were inclined to start wondering whether she was on “You’ve Been Framed”, but still she stood up, dusted herself down, and decided that she might as well finish what she had started. She hauled herself up and over the window sill and then dived down to take cover on a rather cold, marble floor.

She was in a very large room, which had a strange, slightly industrial, smell, that might have been something to do with the police. There was no sign of any movement sensors, even though she wasn’t entirely sure what they usually looked like: there were actually no lights at all, which made her half hope that the power had been left off. After briefly considering her options, she stood up, and walked hesitantly into the room.

She was surprised how soon she forgot to be terrified. Curiosity at the layout of the flat, which was more than twice the size of hers, and a rather childish sense of excitement soon took over, helped along their way by the realisation that she didn’t have the first clue what it was that she was looking for, which made the whole thing so ridiculous that it was exhilarating. Sorcha wasn’t wholly sure that she would even be able to pick Marty out in a photo, and knew that she was unlikely to recognise Keith, so instead she went looking for papers which might actually tell her what it was that she was looking at.

Except there really weren’t many papers to be found. It could have been that there had never been any, given that nobody had properly lived there for a number of years; or that the police had taken them; or that she was simply looking in the wrong places; but all Sorcha found were a few empty drawers in a bureau in one of the bedrooms, and a very dull bookshelf with a few sci-fi paperbacks and an uninspiring DVD collection in the main living area. In fact the penthouse as a whole was very dull: it felt like a succession of large, uninhabited spaces, which happened to have some furniture in.

Sorcha was beginning to conclude that this wasn’t a particularly satisfactory adventure, and the vodka was beginning to get the better of the adrenaline, when she came to a small bedroom which felt different from the rest of the flat. Her rather battered old torch lit it up with its usual succession of ghostly circles, but she could see a couple of Star Wars posters on the walls, and a very cheap, old, fake-fur leopardskin bed cover. All it needed was a few football posters and some dirty laundry, and it could have passed for a teenage boy’s bedroom, circa 1988. There were clothes in the cupboard; things which seemed to have been kept at random, some of them in plastic covers, others folded in heaps, but none of them seemed particularly relevant. She checked the pockets of the jackets for papers, but found only cleaning tickets. Disappointed, and increasingly tired and blurry, she lay down on the bed for a moment or two, to gather the courage to head back home. The cover smelled of grime, overlaid with dust.

She could tell from the layout that she was above her own spare room; she was laying almost exactly over the top of her own spare bed. If she could just find a way to melt through the floor and back into her own flat, she could go to sleep without having to get up. In fact, almost all of the furniture was in more or less the same place as it was in the room below: the original builders must have put the wardrobes in, which didn’t leave much scope for anything else. But where her flat had a weird shelf unit, in an alcove high up the wall by the door, here there was just a smooth wall. In her flat, the shelves were filling a void above the boiler cupboard.

She took a moment or two to summon up the energy to move: looking in the bathroom on the other side of the wall, she could see that the boiler cupboard was still there. If it was Law and Order, there would be several bodies slowly rotting away in body bags behind a false wall on top of it. Sorcha really didn’t want to have to deal with bodies, especially not before she had got some sleep and calmed down a bit. But thoroughness was a habit she had never managed to be selective about: she fetched a chair from the dining area, and stood on it to investigate the wall. Not that there was very much to investigate: it was hollow when she tapped it, and felt as if it was made of some kind of plasterboard. There was a join where the plasterboard went into the back of the boiler cupboard. There could easily be a body behind it, so long as it was only a small one, but she had no idea how to get to it short of going down to the concierge and asking to borrow a sledgehammer, which would definitely be pushing her luck too far.

She leant on the wall as she went to climb back down from the chair. There was a click as something unlatched, and the wall panel swung open. Sorcha’s heart leapt back into her tonsils, and she started wishing fervently that she’d never even thought of decomposing bodies. She opened the panel out slowly, in the hope that nothing rancid was about to fall on her head. But all there was behind the panel was a single brown archive box.

Sorcha dropped it down onto the bed, latching the panel closed behind her, but before she could start investigating its contents she suddenly heard the lift mechanism swing into motion. All the time she had been exploring it, the flat had been reassuringly quiet, but it made the humming and grinding of the lift seem several times as loud and as close as it actually was. Thinking only that They (who were big and scary, if not particularly well-defined) were coming to get her, she grabbed the box and the chair, and headed back out through the living room, crashing the chair into the table on her way to the window. In her panic, she only narrowly avoided knocking the ladder over by throwing the box at it, and then caught the sleeve of her jacket on her own patio door.

Panting slightly with the exertion, she lay on the rug in the darkness; wondering whether to pray, and waiting for Them to come.