Chapter Forty Eight

Sorcha knew that Norman was assuming that she would change her mind, but ultimately didn’t care. He could probably slow her down, but he certainly couldn’t stop her. The only problem was that she needed it all to speed up, not slow down. She was struggling to fill a day, let alone a week: even crying, when it happened, didn’t really take long enough. Needing to fill the time was the only thing which even vaguely tempted her back to the work routine, but there were too many things to be afraid of it for it to be much of a temptation.

She had looked at some of the press coverage of what had happened, although she was as repelled by it as she was fascinated. Because she had disappeared from view and said nothing other than the one statement which Norman had issued on her behalf, she had very quickly become little more than a footnote to the story. She would be mentioned from time to time but after one or two lurid fantasies in the tabloids at the beginning of the week, which had been printed before the police had issued a statement saying that they were satisfied that she had known nothing about what Pippa had intended to do, it was clear that the world had decided that she wasn’t the main story. She couldn’t decide whether to be glad or not. If there was something on the TV news, she mostly hit mute and then watched it without sound. She scanned newspaper headlines, but somehow didn’t really read the articles. The only part which she simply couldn’t bear to look at, at all, was the inevitable debate about mental health provision and regulation: it just made her feel sick, and want to hide. Even Jake was easier to deal with than that: a podcast in which he said thank you to fans for their messages of support had been posted on the band’s website, and it felt reassuringly abstract. It helped that it looked as if he had stopped bleeding.

Sorcha had started trying to find out more about Stephen Warren just to make the time pass at something closer to its normal speed. She started randomly googling, but quickly realised that she was both going round in circles and picking up conflicting information, without being able to remember what it was that she had seen where. The first couple of times she had just given up, and tried to distract herself with something else, before finding herself back at the computer doing the same thing all over again and getting even crosser with herself than she had been before. Eventually she went and dug out a notebook and pencil and started making notes, and tried not to think about the fact that it was almost as if she was pretending to be at work.

There was little that was officially available about him, and what there was managed to be both dull and contradictory. It didn’t take Sorcha long to move onto the mass of material in forums and blogs, and she soon hit the forum postings by the girl who had thumped Duncan. Pippa had posted using a screen-name of “Bubbles”: Sorcha didn’t like the idea that she was somehow following in her footsteps, and was almost put off by it, but the truth was that it looked as if she had been trying to do the same thing as she was. Through the forum, and blogs and websites belonging to some of the forum members, she found a mass of photos and other comments about who Stephen Warren knew and how he knew them. Not all of it was true, but at least some of it had to be, and it was better than nothing.

Jane was still there, hovering, forcing her to eat and waiting for her to break down again. They had reached a stand-off in which Sorcha’s plans were acknowledged but not discussed. Jane kept looking for an opening to talk about it without it becoming a confrontation again, but it didn’t seem to come. Instead, Sorcha just spent more and more time on the computer. Jane didn’t think much of it when she asked her to go out and get her a pay-as-you-go mobile which wouldn’t be traceable back to her, so that she still had something once she had given her Goodmans phone and blackberry back. She didn’t realise that Sorcha had gambled, correctly, on her not reading or watching much recent detective fiction: the fact that there were still a couple of very bored looking photographers outside the front of the block some mornings meant that she didn’t need to explain why anonymity mattered.

When Norman called to say that they had agreed that she could take leave for the majority of her notice period, Sorcha had a moment of panic, but there was nobody she felt she could tell. Instead, she told him that she needed to look into how long it would take to sell her flat, and would then confirm her plans.

But it didn’t take long to set up a discussion with an estate agent, either, although she had to force herself to do it. She was gradually getting used to forcing herself to do everyday things, and other things just seemed to become part of the same list. The discussion only increased her sense of inner panic, though. The estate agent had looked as if he was barely old enough to be out of school, but had seemed to think that it was possible that the sale would take weeks rather than months. Although it wasn’t bonus season there were still cash buyers in the market and there were always people interested in flats in her block. He had been excited rather than put off by the security measures which meant it wasn’t that easy to get visitors into the block, and they had arranged for him to come and view it the next day.

She felt as if she was shaking when she walked out of the office and along the King’s Road, but nobody noticed. It was a mild, dry day, and the next thing on her list was to make some phone calls: she wasn’t sure that she wanted to make them, but the deal she had done with herself was that once things were on the list they happened whether she liked it or not. Even with the mobile, she didn’t want to call from the flat. On the way back there was a small park with a children’s play area. There were a two mothers there with toddlers, talking over their heads as they pushed them on the swings. Sorcha settled herself on a bench as far away from them as possible, and tried to focus on her breathing.

In among the hundreds of photos of Stephen Warren with Marty King, and other random celebrities, there had been a handful with what looked to be old school friends. The same three of four faces had popped up in photos taken over a period of about twenty years, and there had been enough snippets of information for Sorcha to track down contact information for two of them. The plan wasn’t a very sophisticated one: she was just going to call and pretend to be a journalist again, and see if there was anything at all that they were willing to tell her. She knew that she was taking a risk, but the alternative was to do nothing at all: if she did that, it felt like she was never going to find a way to move on.

Just before she had left that morning, Sorcha had come across more photos using a link into facebook. One of the men she had the number for had been pictured with his son, in front of a container lorry.

The first call was short and sweet. She had been told to fuck off and never fucking call again before she had even finished explaining who she was. The tone had been more vicious than it needed to be, and she had started shaking again. She had almost chickened out of making the second call, but had forced herself to carry on anyway. What she could never explain, even to herself, was why she said what she did when the call was answered.

A man had answered the phone, just saying “Yes?”.

She was sitting in the open, with traffic noise, children playing and general city hum all around her, and barely even heard him say it. She almost asked him to repeat what he said, but then wondered if that would sound odd. Instead, rather than asking to speak to David Cornwall, which was the name written on the piece of paper which she was holding in front of her, she asked to speak to Stephen Warren.

There was some kind of scuffle at the other end of the line. The man who had answered the phone seemed to be threatening someone else who was in the same room, asking who the fuck they had been talking to, and then the line went dead.

Sorcha’s first thought was to run, although she had nowhere to run either to or from. Then she had to stifle a random spike of elation which suddenly appeared from nowhere and made her want to jump up and down, before taking a moment or two to get the world back the right way up. The card was still in her handbag, in the pocket in which she usually kept her phone. She called the detective leading the hunt for Stephen Warren, using an Irish accent which only her cousins usually heard, and told him where she thought he might find him, telling him that she thought he knew that his cover had been blown. Then she hung up, and walked back along the King’s Road to Peter Jones, on the basis that it was somewhere where nobody was likely to look for her; trying not to hope too much, or think about how badly she might have screwed things up again.