Chapter Fifty One

Nothing was quite how she expected it to be.

Sorcha hadn’t been surprised that she didn’t feel liberated when she had finally closed the door behind her and handed over the keys to the flat: it was too soon. The operation on her shoulder had been meant as a sign of a new beginning, but that hadn’t felt like it either. She had felt guilty that she wanted to have it done at all, scared of the anaesthetic and generally exasperated at her own inability to get into the frame of mind she needed to be in. It hadn’t even made it all go away. The ugly red ridge had been reduced to a tiny, tidy pinkish line, but most of the rest of it had been left. She had become quite good at not even thinking about punching people when they told her that time would heal things: she had concluded that it took more energy than it was worth.

In some ways it didn’t come as a surprise when New Zealand failed to be what she wanted it to be, too. The only surprise was that it failed so quickly. She had been hoping finally to escape, and find a place where she could think without the past blocking her every way forward, but in her head that place was always lit by blazing sunshine. Instead, she had landed in Auckland under leaden skies, and she only just made it to her hotel before the heavens opened. Struggling to stay awake, she had ventured out anyway. It had only taken a few minutes before she was soaked through to the skin, and rainwater seemed to be trying to run between her sandals and her feet as she walked up the hill away from the waterfront. It felt a bit like skating, only messier and with no one to hold her up. She was looking for a city centre which didn’t really exist, and as she peered up at the skyline, in the gloom, the first names which she saw on two of the towers in the business district were those of two of her former clients. She burst into tears, knowing at least that she was so wet already it was likely to be hard to tell.

It had got better: it had mostly stopped raining, and once she had got away from Auckland it had felt more like a place worth visiting. But something about that first day had told her that it was unlikely to lead her to the answers, even if she had been willing to let it do so. One of the biggest problems with travelling alone was that you got stuck with other people who were doing the same thing. They were a weird bunch of misfits – the students who didn’t want to grow up mixed with the heartbroken, the bereaved, the unhinged and the fired. Sorcha quickly got into a routine of avoiding anything which sounded like an offer of companionship, and retreating at the first opportunity to a hotel room to call Jane and tell her how ridiculous everyone was. Jane’s patience was wearing thin, but most of the time she was calling her at work: that, and the fact that Jane was naturally considerate and polite, meant that she was unlikely to let rip.

Sorcha had been travelling around for well over a month when she joined a group spending five days hiking in a forested area near the top of South Island. The exertion of walking was welcome, and she deliberately took detours and went back on herself to try to make herself more tired, but she was becoming increasingly claustrophobic too. It didn’t matter that there were only a dozen people within miles of her: that was a dozen too many, and she constantly felt the need to get away from them. It didn’t help that there were a couple of temporarily unemployed IT strategists from Blackpool in the group, who recognised her as soon as the group had convened at a motel in Nelson. She had told them, very clearly, that there was nothing to tell, but they still kept trying to find new ways of asking questions. As she walked along, their questions started repeating in her head, in time with her feet. She began to wonder whether her only chance was to get completely away: to find somewhere where she didn’t need to interact with anybody at all. The thought scared her, but she was beginning to wonder what other options she had.

The final straw came on the final night. They were back in a hotel, with mains electricity and a hot tub, but it was still a long way from most of the rest of civilisation. Sorcha had been woken by her phone ringing in the middle of the night. She wasn’t sure whether she hoped or expected it to be someone telling her that her mother was dying, but she was angry when it wasn’t. It was one of the old codgers from Sheffield, who had been particularly active in trying to drum up resistance when Norman had put her forward for equity. It didn’t help that it didn’t occur to him that it might be nearly three o’clock in the morning for her: she had to remind herself that it was entirely possible that he didn’t own a passport.

It was when he had started asking her when she was planning on returning to the office that she had discovered that Norman had in effect never processed her resignation: the upper echelons of the firm thought that she was simply taking a period of unpaid leave. She was cross with herself for not being more suspicious that he had given in so easily, even if he had probably only intended to give her time. She would probably never have known, either, if all had gone to plan. It was just that the plan had not included Norman being suspended as a result of an investigation into suspected insider dealing, and everything that he had done being reviewed and re-reviewed by the creaking, procedure-bound old guard.

Although Sorcha knew that she was, once again, little more than collateral damage in someone else’s crisis, she struggled not to take it personally. The voice at the end of the phone had not even believed her when she had explained that she had known nothing about it because she was in the middle of a wilderness about eleven thousand miles away. It took her a while to realise that the individual in question was sufficiently off the pace that he probably still regarded the year-old rumours that she and Norman were a couple as current. The call had ended with her saying that she needed to take legal advice in relation to her return to the firm, which was almost the last thing on the planet that she wanted to do, but that she would co-operate with anything she was legally required to cooperate with. She mentioned that it would probably be better to ensure that her name was not linked with anything in the press more out of a sense of hopelessness than anything else. The tone at the other end of the line had suddenly become concerned and avuncular, before reverting to telling her that they would also consider what they believed to be her obligations under the partnership deed.

She had been left watching dawn break over what the tour guide had described as an ancient beech forest, wondering why Jane wasn’t answering her phone, and wishing that she had access to the files of papers which she had stowed away in her mother’s attic. She needed to be more sure than she was that she had done everything she needed to do: she knew that she had given formal notice in writing, which had been acknowledged, but the arrangement that they had reached was clearly a bit of a fudge and she hadn’t gone through every last comma of the partnership deed to check whether there were other things which some bastard on a mission could claim that she should have done as well. It had been part of not wanting to be a lawyer, and in the process she had somehow mislaid her professional cynicism before it was safe to do so. There seemed to be no reason not to beat herself up about it.

Sorcha had planned to spend the following day hiking with an American woman who had been part of the group hike. She had discovered very little about her in the few days that they had already spent together, which had been one of the reasons why she had been willing to tolerate her for longer. Sorcha wondered if it was a sign that she wasn’t meant to go when she got a message at breakfast saying that the American had a migraine and wouldn’t be joining her, but couldn’t think of anything else to do with the day. Despite her interrupted night, sleep was the last thing that she wanted – and any attempt at sedentary relaxation was likely to be doomed, too. The driver who had been booked to drop them off and pick them up again at the end of the day had seemed unhappy at the idea of her going on her own, too, but he at least had relented once she had confirmed with him the details of her route.

The majority of the trail that she was following was out along a headland, with a long section running along the top of some cliffs. Sorcha let her anger propel her rather faster than she would usually have gone. She was largely oblivious to her surroundings, because her head was bury rerunning the previous night’s conversation and trying to think of a way out of it all. It was like moving the pieces of a puzzle round and round, getting faster and faster, without them ever seeming to fit. She would probably have carried on doing it all day, had she not been thinking about slapping Norman again while right on the cliff edge, and missed her footing in the process. She managed to catch hold of a boulder on the cliff side of the path, and only parts of her left leg got as far as dangling over the edge. There was no damage done, other than some scratches on the back of her leg and a large bruise on her backside which would probably take weeks to develop, but it had been too close a shave. She had perched herself on the boulder for a while, trying to calm down. When she had eventually set off again her surroundings had at least come into focus, but rather than being able to appreciate the solitude and beauty of the place it felt dangerous. The urge to finish the stretch along the cliff as quickly as she could was fighting a battle with a newfound terror of taking risks, and she didn’t much enjoy being their battlefield.

The path along the cliffs lead down to a beach. The driver had called her just as she had finished walking down the steps which were carved into the cliff-side. It was the second time that he had called to check up on her: if she had been really wanting solitude it might have been intrusive, but as it was it just made her realise that she had reached the beach far too early. It was almost deserted, and its size meant that the few people that were there looked like tiny distant ants. It was remote and hard to get to, but it was also late February. The schools had gone back, and the forecast had been for rain. The forecast had been gloriously wrong, and the sunshine beating down on Sorcha’s face and arms and legs had been the only thing which had meant the day had not yet started to feel like an unmitigated disaster, but once she was down on the sand, looking up at the huge rock arches which stood out like islands not far from the shore, she started to feel unnerved by the strangeness and the remoteness of the place. The sand itself was the colour of quicksilver, or of cement: for a moment it made her think of a moonscape; then of the barren, toxic residue from an anonymous, devouring industrial process.

The tide was quite a long way out, and down near the water the sand was firm and easy to walk on. She let the waves lap at her boots, and tried to let some of the gremlins go with them, but all it really achieved was a salt line across her toes. Sorcha had not been aware of it being particularly windy, but a kite surfer skidded past her at great speed, almost lifting off as he turned to avoid crashing into the ocean. She wondered why he had bothered to carry his kit to such a remote location, as he was carried off and into the distance.

When she eventually got there, more cliffs cut off the other end of the beach. Sorcha had found a shady spot in which to sit and eat the lunch that the hotel had given her: she had become more or less inured to all of the odd things that you could do with ham, cheese and bread before wrapping them up in cling-film. When she had spoken to the driver for the second time, he had suggested that she hike up to their intended meeting point, at a car park a mile or so away from this end of the beach, and then hike on to a second beach over the other side of the headland. They had agreed that she would let him know if that was what she was going to do. Although she knew that she was unlikely to ever have the chance to go there again, she decided that she’d seen enough that was new for one day. There were sand dunes and some rock pools over the back of the beach she was on. She decided to spend the time exploring them instead. It meant she could go back to trying to get her thoughts in order, without having to worry about falling off cliffs again.

It was quite a distance from where she had been sitting to the sand dunes, most of it over the sand which had been compacted down by the sea. As she set off, she let the puzzle pieces start moving round in her head again as one foot moved mechanically in front of the other.

Sorcha wasn’t sure when she realised that there was someone following her. Walking on the wet sand didn’t really make a noise, and what sound there was got carried away with the breeze and swallowed up by the waves. The gremlins caught up with her again, and wouldn’t let her turn round. But still she had a sense that there was someone behind her, closing in on her. She started to walk faster, hoping that whoever it was would just decide to go in a different direction and leave her alone, but it still felt as if they were somehow following behind her.

It was only once she started to run that she knew for sure that there was someone there. They started to run too, which she could hear above the sound of the sea, and whoever it was seemed to call out. She couldn’t hear what they said, which was both frustrating and reassuring, but as she tried to run faster to make her escape the sand under her feet became drier and softer. She tried to sprint, but the sand gave way beneath her so that she barely moved forwards at all. She could hear her pursuer gaining on her, and could hear that he was calling to her to wait, which made her try frantically to run faster. The sand turned her terror into a pantomime, as she tried struggled up the foot of the dunes.

Sorcha pushed herself way beyond what she thought were her physical limits, but it was still no time at all before she could feel that he was standing behind her. She could hear his breathing, heavy and irregular as he tried to recover from running. She froze, realising that the geology had ensured that her luck had run out, and waited. An image of her mother as she had been nearly thirty years earlier on a holiday in Dorset floated into her head, and she let it stay there.

And nothing happened.

Sorcha wondered for a moment if she was beginning to suffer from delusions too: if she was, she was glad that there had been nobody watching. Braced with the cheerful thought that she was probably just imagining people following her, in broad daylight having consumed nothing more toxic than a ham and cheese bap, she turned round. Her feet slipped in the sand as she did so, and she slid part of the way back down the side of the dune.