Chapter Twenty

Sorcha didn’t normally wash up before leaving for work. She didn’t normally wash up at all: she either left it for the cleaner, or stacked everything in the dishwasher until it was full or starting to grow mould. The fact that she chose to do the washing up that Monday morning before heading into the office was just one of a number of strategies to delay the awful moment when she got to the office; and she was both cross with herself for doing it, and frustrated that she didn’t have the willpower to just get on with brazening her way through the day.

She let the frustration vent by sweeping a heap of plates into the bowl. The cracking, crunching noise which resulted, somewhere beneath the Fairy bubbles, told her that it hadn’t been a good idea. She stared briefly at the ceiling, before going fishing under the bubbles to try to gauge the damage. One of the plates seemed to be in three or four pieces; but it was hard to tell just how many things were in bits. Cursing herself for having failed to wait, as her home economics teacher had taught her, until the water had more or less run before adding the washing up liquid, she started to scoop the bubble mountain off onto the draining board. It took three or four armfuls before she could see the water, and she immediately found herself wishing for a rewind switch again.

Bobbing towards the top of the water, screen down, was her Blackberry. Varied and murderous thoughts flooded into her head, as Sorcha tried very hard to tell herself that what she was really thinking was, “oh bother, my Blackberry seems to have got a bit wet”. She took a deep breath, fished it out and patted it dry with her favourite tea towel, which had apple green stripes round the edge. But when she tried to switch it on, nothing happened. Having reminded herself that panicking wasn’t going to help, she realised that there was an outside chance that the battery was dead, given that she hadn’t had it on charge at all over the weekend. She wondered briefly whether she ought to try to dry it out more thoroughly before plugging it in, before deciding that electrocution would probably on balance improve things. When nothing happened, she felt vaguely disappointed, before starting properly to dread the day ahead and going to leave a message for her secretary.

Not that the chances of her secretary being able to doing anything about it were particularly high: Caroline would have known a number of cunning tricks for reviving drowned handsets, and failing that would have charmed the IT guys to rustle up an immediate replacement despite the normal ten day lead-time. But Sorcha had used every last bit of Norman-free influence that she had within the firm to ensure that Caroline had been relegated to the document production unit, which was conveniently located in a windowless room down in the basement which she never went anywhere near. Her replacement was charming and not actively inefficient; but she was also nearing retirement age and prone to playing by the rules.

Which was how Sorcha came to be sitting in a very large and rather complicated meeting, still with a pounding headache in strange bits of her brain, with her mobile phone switched on, in front of her on the desk. She needed to be contactable, as there were other teams working on the same transaction who needed to feed into the negotiations, and that was her only fall-back.

Which would have been fine, except text was also one of Pippa’s preferred methods of communication, and she was back at home bouncing from one set of ridiculous online rumours about Keith and Jake to another, summarising them into impossibly concise texts, which Sorcha struggled to decode at the best of times, as she went. The phone beeped with every incoming message. Sorcha tried to be thankful that the almost complete lack of vowels did at least mean fewer messages, but her phone was still beeping every two or three minutes. The negotiations, which related to a joint venture which both sides needed but neither actually wanted, had been getting increasingly bad tempered for almost two months, and with every new beep more of the room seemed to be turning to glare at her. Texting Pip to ask her to stop had no effect at all, and switching her phone onto silent didn’t seem to stop the noise when texts came in.

The debate seemed to be stuck on the question of where the combined entity was to have its headquarters, with each side arguing for their own existing location. Of the twenty three people around the table, only five were actually doing any meaningful talking. The day therefore seemed to be settling into a slightly surreal rhythm, with a few minutes of debate around the difficulties of laying off staff in Germany and German employee consultation requirements, as compared with the lower ongoing cost base in Atlanta, followed by a beep, a lot of glaring, and then a couple of minutes deciphering such joys as “BB frm: Jake resp 4 K’s kidnap coz embrsng; or Duncan – slept with same girl, v ugly. Pxxx”, or “GspBtch: ordered by MK b4 he disappd, SW involved. V dull – no sex. P xxx.”

Eventually the rather unpleasant CEO of the other side, who looked as if he probably employed someone especially to iron his boxer shorts for him, had turned to her client and told him that if he didn’t either remove his legal counsel from the room, or at least remove her cell phone, the discussion was over and the deal was dead. Sorcha had swallowed both her general sense of cosmic frustration, and the explanation of why it was on in the first place which she had been rehearsing in her head (which would have neatly glossed over Pip, with a reference to a family friend who was in difficulties), and made a reasonably convincing, blanket apology before turning her phone off. She was left with the blank screen sitting in front of her, reproaching her, as the discussions ground round and round in circles.

When Maggie, Caroline’s replacement, had knocked on the door and asked Sorcha to step out of the meeting for a few minutes, Sorcha’s initial reaction was relief that she had at least thought to find another way to get hold of her. However, any sense of relief which she had experienced in the previous few months had been remarkably short-lived, and so it was again this time. Maggie pulled her into an empty meeting room further down the corridor, looking slightly frantic.

“Look, I’m really sorry about doing this, but why aren’t you picking up your phone?”

“Because Mr Big Bad Bastard American insisted that I turn my phone off.” Maggie’s look of confusion reminded Sorcha that they hadn’t been working together long enough. “He’s the CEO of the other side, and he took exception to it beeping when I got messages from a friend. Who’s been trying to get hold of me?”

“Well, it was John McDermott,” one of the client’s tax team, who was one of the people she had expected to try and get hold of her, but the way that Maggie had lingered on the “was” didn’t sound good, “but it was extremely urgent, you see, and as you were refusing to take calls, he insisted on calling Norman instead. So now it’s John McDermott, Norman, and Norman has called in one of the tax partners.” Maggie was scanning through her notes for the name, and not finding it. “I think it’s the one with the two big moles on his chin” she offered, helpfully.

At the mention of Norman’s name, it was as if Sorcha had gone into freefall but somehow left her skin behind: she could only hope that her face was staying in a relatively normal configuration. GDX was really Norman’s client, and had been for years. It had taken him a long time to convince them of Sorcha’s competence – and now she had shown herself to be unable to pick up a phone call, shortly after demonstrating to Norman that she wasn’t particularly good at climbing out of windows either. The broken sunflower loomed menacingly in the corner of her psyche.

“Where are they?”



“Norman and …” Maggie was still looking hopefully for the name, peering through gold-framed reading glasses which were slipping slowly down her nose, “ … and the tax partner are in Norman’s office. Norman asked that you join then as soon as you can.”

More than anything, Sorcha wished that she knew what Norman was really thinking about her when he had asked Maggie to go and fetch her. He was smooth and practised enough that it was unlikely to manifest itself immediately – she had the impression that he liked his revenge very, very cold - but the prospect of deferred malice aimed in her general direction wasn’t a comfortable one. In the lift on the way up to his office, she touched up her lipgloss just in case.

Norman’s office was on the top floor, and was one of the rather inconvenient consequences of his elevation to managing partner. His old office had been three down from Sorcha’s, full of junk and papers, much of it littered with post-it notes in his loopy, slightly theatrical, handwriting. The ones on his desk had tended to be lists, each one repeating most of what he had written on the previous one, with nothing ever crossed off. The ones on the books and papers had mostly been threats to whoever might be tempted to snoop or borrow: they were intended primarily for his trainees, but acted as a more general deterrent. Sorcha had warm, cosy memories of uncovering heaps of ECJ cases bearing the legend “If you move these, I will grate your ears off”; and a small toy clanger which had been squeezed so many times that its squeak had worn out, with a note saying “If I find out who has been playing with this, I will break their arms”.

It had all suddenly disappeared, quite literally overnight, when he had moved up to the room with the view. Sorcha fondly imagined it sitting in a cupboard somewhere, waiting to be reinstated in all its glory when he was kicked back downstairs at the end of his five year term: she didn’t like to acknowledge that it was much more likely that some hyper-efficient PA had culled the crap, binned the clanger and the photos and the random political pamphlets, and just sent the client papers to archive in a few very orderly boxes. The view from Norman’s new room was truly fabulous, across the roofs to St Paul’s, and the sofas and meeting tables definitely made it more versatile than their normal two-man cupboards, but its complete lack of papers and personal effects was always slightly chilling. He said it was because he never knew who was going to walk in next, which was clearly bullshit. He just didn’t want anyone else to find out who he really was.

None of which cheered Sorcha up as she emerged from the lifts onto the sparsely populated tenth floor, stowing her lipgloss back in the inside pocket of her handbag. She then immediately felt even less cheerful when she glimpsed Norman walking towards her, presumably returning to his office with two coffee-machine cups. Much as she didn’t want to acknowledge it, her reaction to being close to him was one of fear, bordering on terror. She knew that she ought to look at him, the way people normally looked at other people with whom they were having a conversation, but it was all she could do to stare at his feet.

“Aha. The wanderer returns. I wasn’t sure whether I was going to have to call in the police, or just the telecoms guys.”

His shoes were ridiculously shiny, which probably meant that they were new. Sorcha wished that they was more than that to think about them.

“IT, more than telecoms. My Blackberry went for a swim in the washing up bowl this morning, so Maggie couldn’t use that to get messages to me. I could do with a hit squad for Mr Big Bad Bastard American who told Guy that he was ending negotiations unless either me or my phone left the room, though. What’s been going on?”

“Tax got a no from Counsel this morning. If the transaction goes through in the current form. Guy’s likely to find he has a tax bill of about three hundred million. It’s cross-border merger or nothing, which I’m guessing Mr Big Bad Bastard American won’t like very much.”

“Shit.” Sorcha tried to meet his gaze, but could get no further than his left knee. “How long ago did they get out?”

“An hour or so, three-quarters of which I have used to clear my diary, and talk tactics with John McD and Gordon.” Sorcha was about to ask who Gordon was, before an image of a chubby, jowly tax partner with several hairy moles on the first of his many chins popped into her head: she needed to teach Maggie not to be so polite in her descriptions, “I think we’re about ready to head down and drop the bomb now, but we need to just update you before we do that.”

“Have we got time? There are execution copies of the documents on the transfer of trade route sitting down in the room with them…”

Sorcha knew that wasn’t what was making her panic, but it was almost a valid point.

“It’s OK. We’ve managed to get a message through to Guy. That’s why he’s been letting the discussion go round in ever-decreasing circles. I was just hoping that you weren’t going to try to bash their heads together too hard to get the thing back on track.” Norman hesitated, and seemed to stoop down slightly towards her: at least, she thought that was what he had done as it made his knees sag. “Little one, this is going to be kind of tricky if you can’t actually look at me.”

At ‘little one’ she had to bite back the urge to thump him. Her right hand curled itself into a fist, without first asking her permission.

“What do you expect me to do? Smile sweetly, and bring charges for false imprisonment?”

At this point it would have been really, really helpful to be able to see his face, but Sorcha was still stuck at knee-level. Norman turned away, which nearly doubled her heart rate, but it was just so that he could put the coffee cups down on an empty desk. He turned back to her, and lifted her head with one hand. She managed not to close her eyes, and then found herself blinking hard.

“What on earth happened to you? Are you OK?”

She reached out to touch his face, but remembered who he was and where they were just in time to convert the gesture into a rather lop-sided kind of wave. There was a huge scratch, which was probably just too shallow to count as a gash, running from his cheekbone down towards his mouth. There was bruising too, around the top of it. Rather disturbingly, it suited him. He was also looking at her as if she was written in Japanese.

“The cover story is that I was putting up shelves, and got hit in the face with a falling metal bracket.”

“You! Putting up shelves? You wouldn’t even know what a shelf bracket looks like!”

“I know, I had a bit of help with the alibi. Thankfully the people around here who count don’t know enough about my domestic arrangements to understand quite how preposterous the whole thing is.”

Sorcha was waiting for a punch line which didn’t quite come, and she was beginning to wonder if she was expected to supply it. Norman was watching her, and waiting, and beginning to look at her in a slightly pitying, patronising way.

“You really don’t remember do you, little one?” he paused, just to prolong the agony “You hit me, at some point in the early hours of yesterday morning. Admittedly I think you only meant it as a slap, but you had the power of at least half a bottle of vodka behind you and were wearing what you informed me several times was your great-grandmother’s amethyst ring – which, incidentally, is still behind the chest of drawers, where it landed when you rather melodramatically flung it away.”

Sorcha had forgotten she had even been wearing the ring: it was slightly too big for her, so the stone tended to move around. It could easily have ended up facing her palm. And he could just as easily have been making it up to cover for a fight with someone else. Neither thought was any comfort, and a sense of dread spread outwards from her stomach and made her feel cold.

“Are you sure?”

Lame, she knew, but she needed him to know that she no longer trusted anything he did or said.

“Quite, quite sure, little one. But as we’re friends, I don’t think it matters whether it was common assault or ABH, do you? I tried to make you stay for your own safety, as you were far too drunk to be wandering around London on your own. So just keep your mouth shut, and I’ll do the same. Gordon and Guy are going to wonder why the entirety of the corporate department keeps on disappearing today if we don’t get our arses in there and work our magic sharpish.”

He ushered her through to his office, where Gordon was staring lumpenly out of the window, as she tried to get the words in the right order to mutter an apology about the sunflower.