Chapter Seven

This time they met in a meeting room. The fact that the lawyers were going to be there meant that it would have been a tight squeeze in his suite anyway, and Jeff had decided that it wouldn’t have felt right. This was a right, proper, God-awful mess, and if everyone was sitting round a table with an agenda in front of them they were more likely to stop fooling around for long enough to sort it out.

He and Jackie were still the first ones down there, though. She rarely said much when the guys were around, but the fact that she was there made him calmer. He knew that she was keeping watch over him, too: he had caught her doing so quite literally a number of times since she and Bob had broken the news on Saturday night, and every time he caught her eye he felt guilty and grateful in equal measure.

Duncan was the first to join them. He had been the only other one of the four of them in the hotel when Stevo had gone for Jake the night before. Ed, the reception and the police had all called him in quick succession, and he had gone down to find Jake physically shaking and covered in blood, sitting with a police woman in the office behind the reception desk. He had struggled to keep his cool to start with, until he realised that most of the blood wasn’t Jake’s and that nobody was accusing Jake of doing anything other than being thumped. In the end, he had spent the whole night with Jake sorting things out as best he could, and although he needed sleep now he actually felt pretty good.

The main problem was that the police had been very clear that they wanted Jake to go to hospital to get checked over, and Jake had been equally clear that there was no way he was going. The girl had been taken away pretty quickly in the air ambulance, but a second team of paramedics had been waiting by the reception desk for what must have seemed like an age. It had taken Duncan a while to figure out what the problem was, but as soon as he did he wondered why the hell he hadn’t seen it sooner. The poor bugger already felt like he had been physically attacked twice in ten minutes, and he was shit-scared what would happen if he went anywhere else or spoke to anyone else. The fact that Stevo had done a runner in the confusion that had followed the fight made it worse, because he could easily have taken another shot at him. Duncan had put his hand on Jake’s shoulder to test the water, and he had almost leapt off the chair. That just told him that he needed to keep his hand there. Jake could be a stupid, lonely bastard, and letting him shut himself off wasn’t going to help any.

In the end, they had taken Jake back up to his suite and a doctor had been called. The only immediate patching up that he let them do was to a cut on the palm of his right hand from some broken glass, which was cleaned up and stuck together with white strip things. The police had taken Jake’s clothes, and tried to ask him why Mr Warren would have attacked him in this manner, but every time he said he didn’t know the poor bastard burst into tears again so they had to give up.

“Thanks so much for last night, mate. How is he?”

“He’s still asleep, poor sod. Reckon he’s going to hurt like hell, though, when he wakes up. Looks like some bruises on the side of his face and his arms already, and that’s just the bits I could see.”

Jeff knew that he was watching Duncan in much the same way that Jackie kept watching him.

“Did the doctor give him something, to make him sleep?”

“He left some stuff, but Jake never took it. It took ages before he stopped shaking and shivering. Silly prick kept refusing to drink tea, though that was what the doctor said to do. I ended up putting a load of sugar in that peppermint stuff he drinks. It really smelled nasty, like hot toothpaste, but we got it down him. And we had to get a load of hot water bottles, too, and wrap him up in a couple of duvets.”

Jeff was trying not to smile at the image this was conjuring up of the supposed hard man of the group, cosying up to his stricken bandmate. While he was a shit to their mothers, Duncan was great with his kids, and he couldn’t help thinking that it was Duncan the Dad who had sat up with Jake. He turned away as the tears welled up, although he managed to catch himself before it became too obvious.

“Did he say much?”

“Not really. Poor bastard hasn’t got a clue why Stevo went for him like that. He kept asking about the girl too, which was a bit difficult. Said it looked like she had been at some party, and was just standing there when she got her head smashed in.”

“Jacks called St Thomas’s this morning. They wouldn’t say much to her, but they did say her injuries were not thought to be life-threatening. Hopefully that’ll cheer him up a bit when he wakes up. Are the police coming back today?”

“Plan is to get him properly checked out first, if he can face it. I reckon he’s probably got whiplash. Might have a couple of broken ribs too, but he wouldn’t have anyone poking and prodding him last night. The police want to take a statement, but unless he suddenly thinks of some reason why Stevo would want to beat him up they aren’t in a hurry. They want statements from the rest of us, too, though.”

Jeff smiled: he felt an odd mixture of bemusement and resignation.

“Right, so we just have to deal with questioning from police on two continents, get Jake fixed up, deal with the entirety of the world’s press and get through eleven stadium dates in the next three weeks.”

“Sounds about right.” Duncan knew that Jeff was trying to be funny, but wasn’t sure why.

“Do we have any idea why he got tangled up with the press like that, though? I’d warned him what was going on.”

“Daft prick had gone for a walk, and was sitting drinking beer by the river with some computer nut who was talking about the graphics. He didn’t feel like talking to you, so he turned off his phone.”

“So he had no idea?” Jeff was mildly incredulous, but knew that it wasn’t the first time he had been caught out. He needed to be plugged in every moment of every day, and Duncan was pretty much the same. Jake and Mouse, on the other hand, were happiest off in their own little worlds, and often failed to connect in quite the way he expected them to. He was angry with himself for not having realised that until he had actually spoken to Jake the messages might not have got through. It was the tiniest little mistake, but it might just ruin everything.

“Not a clue. It was only when he wanted the TV on just before he fell asleep that he saw some of it. That sheriff’s statement was on, saying that they reckoned Mart had been abducted, and that they had new evidence that was what had happened before, too. And that he wanted to question everyone involved last time round. Poor bugger just looked a bit confused and asked if that was all the paps were excited about.”

“I don’t blame the poor sod for being confused. It was just mental, even before Stevo came into the picture. You know, I’ve been thinking and thinking and thinking, and still can’t think of anything at all between Stevo and Jake. All I can think is that it must be about Marty. I reckon Mart’s the only thing the two of them have ever had in common. And God alone knows what that means.”

Duncan had nothing to say to that: it would have meant thinking too much.

Deciding what to do about the shows was the easy bit. Nobody, not even any of the lawyers, was in the mood to cancel: the only question was whether Jake would be up to it. There had been a good fifteen minutes of skirting around the issue, with nobody wanting to be the first to suggest it, before Jeff finally put it to the others that what they were all saying was that they would go ahead without Jake if they had to. The truth, which was thought but not said, was that of all of them he was probably the easiest to do without. He only had one lead vocal, on ‘Dancing Days’, and they could probably scrap it from the set list if they had to so long as the band could add another minute or so onto the intro of the next track so the rest of them had time to change.

The dance routines and stagings would be harder without Jake, though. Duncan was pretty sure that he wasn’t going to be up to much on that front until at least after the Wembley dates, and the lawyers started getting excited about the insurance situation. Eventually it was agreed that Duncan and Jackie would get together with the dancers later in the day to work through alternatives, once Jake’s Dad had arrived back to be with Jake.

It was when they started to work through the rest of it that tempers got frayed. Mouse was all for all of them being very open about their confusion about what had happened; how sorry they were that someone had got hurt; and how much they all wished that Stevo would give himself up, that Marty would be found, and that everyone would live happily ever after. A fat, slightly shiny, lawyer with a distinctly plummy accent and a very nasty striped tie had responded to that in terms which made it quite clear that he thought that Mouse was a clueless idiot and that this needed to be left in the hands of the experts. Duncan had then made it equally clear that unless Mr Fat and Shiny Lawyer shut the fuck up there was going to be another fight. It was warm in the room, despite the air conditioning, and everyone was starting to go distinctly pink around the edges.

“Mr Woods, I really don’t think you have the faintest idea what we are dealing with here. The young lady that your errr… colleague chose to assault in full view of the world’s press last night wasn’t just a normal member of the public. She’s a lawyer, and she has some clever and influential friends, who I can tell you are already making life distinctly difficult for some of our friends in the press this morning. I don’t for a minute expect that they will play this clean, which means that we have to avoid giving them anything at all to use against us.”

He had kept speaking despite a number of attempted interruptions by Ed, Mouse and Duncan. Every time he was interrupted he just paused and went back to the beginning of that particular phrase, which only served to confirm the unspoken but growing consensus that he was a nasty pompous git.

“Hang about. Jake didn’t assault anyone: he was attacked, and that girl got in the way. That at least should be clear from all of the pictures.” Jeff knew that thumping Mr Fat and Shiny was unlikely to help, however much he wanted to, and hoped the others would realise it too. “But what’s this about the girl?”

“The girl is Sorcha Marie Brompton. Irish parents, hence the name, but grew up somewhere in the Midlands I think. Got an Oxford first and a distinction at the College of Law. Youngest ever partner at Goodmans: does corporate, which actually means that stuff like this really isn’t her thing. But it’s the people around her we have to be careful with. She used to live with John Warrington.” Fat and Shiny looked around the room in the expectation of a glimmer of recognition which didn’t come: the fact that it didn’t nearly knocked him off his stride. “He’s a hot shot, mostly dealing with regulation. The Tories are desperate to get him into parliament to make him Shadow Attorney General as they really don’t have much legal fire-power at the moment: he’s just been selected as PPC for somewhere in Surrey.”

“So you are saying that she’s clever and she used to date a politician?” Jeff could feel Duncan seething on his left, and wanted to keep control of the discussion.

“No, no, no, no, no. No, that’s really not it at all.” Even though it was exactly what he had just said. Jeff looked at the jumble of business cards in front of him and wished that he could be sure which one was who. Thinking of him as Mr Fat and Shiny was making it harder to keep a handle on things. “When they parted, Ms Brompton seems to have extracted rather a large cash sum from Mr Warrington. It is generally … well, it’s thought that he assaulted her, and she made him pay for her silence.”

“What the hell’s that got to do with anything?” Jeff jumped slightly: he had been watching Duncan but it was Mouse who leapt in with both feet. “She’s still hurt. I still want to say that we’re sorry for what happened. That’s just what’s right and decent, that is.”

“Mr… er.”

“Mouse.”

Jeff could feel the corners of his mouth twitching. He could feel the corners of everyone else’s mouths twitching, too, thank God. Even Mr Shiny looked ever so slightly amused, although he was also visibly sweating.

“Look. It seems that her people have already been on to YouTube this morning to get the footage of what happened taken down, as well as leaning on the papers to make sure that nothing is said about her past. If we say or do anything about it, we have to assume that her people will be examining it closely to see if there is any admission of liability, and we can’t assume that they will necessarily play fair.”

Jeff looked surprised: while there had been references to the incident having been filmed everything he had heard had indicated that the files had all been handed over to the police. He’d kind of assumed that meant that they weren’t in the public domain.

“There was stuff on You Tube? Jesus.”

“Ella called this morning in a right state. The UK channels haven’t shown it, but apparently one of the German ones did, and nearly all of the Italian ones. Even the stuff when Jake and Stevo weren’t by the window and it was just the girl and the ambulance blokes and all the blood.” Duncan was calmer, but the world was clearly ever so slightly sicker than Jeff had previously thought.

Mouse, however, wasn’t letting it drop.

“That’s sick, and it’s wrong, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t say that. None of us has done anything wrong. I hear what you are saying, but I’m not going to stop doing and saying the right thing just because some hot-shot lawyer might try to sue me for it. We’re decent guys. I mean, people know that we are decent guys, and we need them to know that.”

Jeff was inclined to go with the Mouse instinct, and it was pretty clear that Duncs was too, but there was something that he wanted to check.

“Do we know who’s been doing stuff for her this morning? I mean, she sounded in pretty bad shape last night, so she might not even be conscious.”

“So far as we call tell, it’s just Goodmans, although we are obviously continuing to monitor the situation.”

“So it’s just her company?”

“Her firm, yes. Presumably her fellow partners are a little concerned as to how they end up looking as a result of all this. In particular as a number of them were apparently caught on film tied to chairs, wearing party hats.”

“So the poor girl might well still be out cold in a hospital bed and not have the faintest idea what’s going on?”

“Well, obviously anything on that front is pure speculation…”

“So that’s yes then.”

And even once the approach was agreed, trying to sort out the logistics was a nightmare. Ed was going to beef up the security team, with Jake being guarded 24 hours a day until Stephen Warren had been found; and various people were sent away to talk to the police, but Jeff was aware that there wasn’t really any one person holding the whole thing together. There was just the four of them in the middle of it all, which was how they had chosen to do it since the reunion, but it wasn’t always the easiest way to get stuff done. He had no idea whether they needed Max Clifford, or just an extremely efficient secretary, but he knew they needed something.

Mouse and Duncan both stayed behind as well, once everyone else had left. Jackie had gone to sort out the dancers and find some rehearsal space. Hanging back at the end seemed to be turning into a habit, although this time there were only three of them. Mouse had prevailed, but was still worried:

“You know, we do still need to check all of this stuff with Jake. We said that any decision we made had to be a decision that all four of us made, and we don’t have a clue what he’ll think about it all.”

“This wasn’t exactly what we had in mind, though, was it? We have to do what we think is best for the band, and Jake’s not really in a state to be able to do that right now.” Jeff didn’t even want to think about having the last discussion all over again, with Mr Shiny doing his stuff at Jake while he was in a mess, and expected – wrongly – that Duncan would agree with him.

“We said that stuff for a reason. I’ll go ask him. I reckon he’ll just be happy that stuff’s sorted out and that there’s no more shit flying around. You know, last night he even said that he wished that Cameron was here. Cam would of loved this mess.”

“Christ. Jake said that?” Cameron had been the manager who had put the group together in the first place, and Cameron had been a part of the decision to stop it all when Marty couldn’t be found first time around. He was a fabulous, cunning, abrasive megalomaniac, and Jake had always struggled with him. Actually, both Jake and Marty had struggled, it was just that Mart tended to react by cracking a joke whereas Jake had always been more inclined to wander around brooding on things.

Neither Jake nor Marty had been at Cam’s funeral, even though Mouse had spent hours trying to persuade each of them to be there, and Jake at least had seemed to regret it since. Jeff reflected that if whatever was happening now was related to whatever it was that had happened then, at least the conspiracy theorists who had claimed that Cameron was behind it all were likely to be disproved. He had loved Cam for his sheer nerve and his general ability to work miracles. Jake was right, Cam was exactly what they all needed right now, and it was a shock to realise that he couldn’t just pick up the phone and get him to make it all right. But they couldn’t. They had to sit down and write out the formal statement which he and Mouse were going to read to the press. They had to make themselves available for police questioning, even though the dozy so-and-so in Arizona had actually not managed to contact them directly as yet despite having told the whole world that he wanted to talk to them. They had to get Jake sorted out. And the show had to go on. Please God, let the show go on.