Chapter Thirty Five

It had taken Jake a while to accept what he was being told: he’d sat at the table, starting at the article and then at the mat, asking the same questions in a dozen different ways. Sorcha suspected that the confirmation of how little he had known of Keith’s life was making him even more afraid of what else he didn’t know. Eventually he fell silent, and Sorcha picked her moment to ask Mary what she meant about Keith leaving junk about the place.

Mary was still watching Jake, wishing that she could stop the things she had said from hurting him.

“He’s always kept stuff up in the loft here. He showed up…shows up from time to time to get things out and put stuff in, but I have no idea what’s up there.” Jake had zoned out, and wasn’t reacting, which made her nervous, “I’ve never checked it out, you see. The ladder broke years ago.”

Sorcha wished she could reach Jake, too, but knew that she didn’t know how to. Instead, she carried on the conversation in the hope that he would rejoin it sooner rather than later.

“Have the police been up there?”

Mary looked sadly across at Sorcha.

“Once I’d told them where I was on the day he went missing, they weren’t much interested in anything else I had to say.”

A short time later, standing on the landing with a still largely inert Jake, Sorcha was wishing she knew more about lofts than she did. Her father had been the only one to ever go into theirs, having made a huge fuss about the dangers of falling through ceilings to make sure that neither she nor Fi would ever try to join him. She’d always imagined it as dark and grimy, and full of suitcases and Christmas tree decorations. It didn’t help much that she didn’t even know how to go about getting into one: it looked as if there was a chair that she could stand on in the back bedroom, but that was still going to make her barely tall enough to open the hatch.

“Earth to Jake.” She waved her hand in front of his face: when that didn’t work she put her hands on his shoulders and shook him harder than she probably needed to. He smiled at her, wanly. “I’m about a foot too short to have any hope of doing this on my own.”

“You could go and borrow a stepladder from next door. If I do it, they sort of hug me to death.” He looked uncomfortable, “I’m not in the mood to be hugged at the moment.”

Sorcha took the statement at face value, and moved a step further away. Something about the gesture impinged on his thoughts, and made him turn and properly focus on what she was doing.

“I didn’t mean you, you idiot.” He reached up – he could put the palms of his hands flat on the hatch door, but would have to jump to get the hatch open. “Come here.”

Sorcha wasn’t sure what she was meant to do, given she was all of about three feet away from him, and frowned in the hope that he might give her a clue. Instead she found herself lifted several feet off the ground, with what felt like a steel rim of Jake’s hands clasped around her waist. She was sufficiently surprised that she almost forgot to fight back, before starting to try to twist so she could see Jake’s face.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing? I’m not one of your flimsy dancer types: this isn’t safe you lunatic!”

“Stop arguing and just push the hatch open. You should be able to just push it into the loft.”

Sorcha had started flapping her arms around, before realising that didn’t actually make it feel any less likely that she was about to go crashing to the floor.

“But what about your knee and everything? You’re going to get hurt, which is going to make this whole ungodly mess about twenty times worse.”

He put her down again, and then turned her to face him.

“I wouldn’t have done it if I thought it would be a problem. And I really don’t want to have to go and ask next door for the step ladder.” He stooped down towards her, “Please?”

Sorcha couldn’t think of anything sensible to say in response, although pleading low altitude vertigo had its attractions. Instead, she submitted to being turned back round, and swept back off her feet. The hatch slid easily to the side; but when she had expected to find herself lowered back to the ground instead she was suddenly propelled upwards. After screeching ever so slightly, she just about managed to grab hold of the edge of the hatch, and hoist herself round so that she was sitting on the edge. She peered shakily back down at him.

“I’m no good at this, Pet. I’m sorry.”

He looked guilty, and fussed about whether she had wrenched her shoulder as she had pulled herself round. Once she had convinced him that she was OK, he went rummaging in his mother’s bedroom and reappeared with a torch.

Sorcha closed her eyes for a few seconds as she turned round to start exploring, so that she could see better in the dark. It wasn’t pitch black, although the corners looked dark enough to hold all manner of horrors. More importantly, the central section had been boarded over with sheets of chipboard, which meant she had at least a fighting chance of not crashing through Jake’s mother’s ceilings. There were boxes stacked to one side, and she crawled over and started looking through them.

The first one contained bank statements running up to about six months earlier: Sorcha was disappointed to find no evidence of any conveniently suspicious payments, but reminded herself that the police almost certainly had copies of them anyway, and moved on to check what the other boxes contained. One, which had originally held tinned tomatoes, contained heaps of rental agreements and utility bills; a couple of others were full of heaps of papers and magazines which featured the original BackBeat. Sorcha was relieved to find that there was at least one other person in this slightly surreal world who didn’t spend their life making up scrapbooks; even if he did sleep with his son’s school friends and then go and get himself kidnapped. Towards the back was a box filled with much older photos and papers, including photos and an order of service from Jake’s parents wedding, which seemed to have landed from another age.

To one side of the main heap of boxes was a shallower box, which had been stuck over so many times with parcel tape that it was impossible to tell where it had originally come from. The top had been cut back open with a knife: inside was a leather case, and a large manila envelope which looked as if it had probably been added more recently. Sorcha balanced the torch on top of the box of bank statements to free her hands: the catches on the case had rusted and her first attempt at prising them open achieved nothing more than a broken finger nail. They gave at the second time of asking, revealing shiny, faded photocopies of cheques, documents which seemed to relate to buying a van of some kind, two or three photos and a stack of cassette tapes labelled only with dates.

The cheques were for £250,000 in total, and were all dated between 1995 and 1997. They were made out to Keith McDonald, and drawn on a personal account of Cameron Wilson.

But it was the photos which grabbed her attention. Two of them looked to be of Keith with a ponytail, with a group of men she didn’t recognise; but the third was both very beautiful and absolute dynamite. It was a photo of Marty King. A very young Marty King, looking even younger because he was asleep: she had forgotten how young they had all been in the beginning. The quality wasn’t great, and it was black and white, but there was an absolute peacefulness about his eyes and forehead that she couldn’t remember seeing in any other picture of him. It made the duct tape over his mouth hard to comprehend.

Sorcha sat back on her heels for several minutes, breathing deeply and trying not to cough with the dust, before looking at the cheques and the photos again. A number of possible explanations came to mind, but several were deeply implausible and none of them was good. She couldn’t see how to avoid hurting Jake, badly, but equally she couldn’t just stay in his mother’s loft forever: even his patience would eventually snap. When she went back over to the hatch, he was sitting on the floor of the landing, with his back against the short panel of wall between the two main bedrooms. He was staring blankly at the opposite wall.

“Pet, there’s something up here you should see.”

He looked up at her, but still didn’t really focus.

“What?”

It would have been relatively simple to pick up the box and hand it down to him – it wasn’t even particularly heavy – but it wouldn’t have seemed right. He deserved to meet it first in the dust and the darkness, too, so that he could encounter it in a kind of privacy which he would definitely not be allowed to keep.

“It’s a bit complicated. Is there any way you can get up here?”

“You mean apart from going and getting the stepladder?”

Sorcha couldn’t help thinking how much easier it would all have been if she had done just that the first time the possibility was mentioned. She scanned the torch round the rest of the roof space – over the other side from the boxes was what looked to be an old loft ladder. One of the hooks at the top looked to have sheared off, which presumably meant that the mechanism to pull it down had stopped working, but the rest of seemed to be intact.

Until Jake was safely sat next to her on the chipboard, Sorcha was terrified that the ladder was going to give way beneath him, even though he seemed happy that the clips at the side were rigid enough and that it was securely enough lodged against the hatch opening. She gave him the case, with an apology, and then retreated so that she was in the shadows behind him. After a few minutes, she remembered that she had left the envelope in the bottom of the box without checking its contents. She crawled back over to retrieve it. Jake had the torch, so the only way to examine its contents was either to huddle close to him or head back over to the hatch. She chose the former, although he didn’t exactly acknowledge that she was there.

The contents of the envelope were hard to make out in second-hand torchlight. Most of it seemed to be correspondence with a lawyer handling the estate of Cameron Wilson. Keith had been left something in Cameron’s will, or rather in a second will which supplemented the one which had been made public. Sorcha had to stop herself trying to figure out how many illegal things had been referenced in a single letter, but it was at least all a lot less surprising than it would have been twenty minutes earlier. The something which Keith had been left appeared to be shares in a company incorporated in the Cayman Islands, and reference was made to it having a number of “investments”, which could mean just about anything. It was only when she found the share certificate at the back of the envelope that she realised that she had heard of the company before. The certificate recorded Keith McDonald’s ownership of 100 ordinary shares in Greencoat Investments (Cayman) Limited.

She turned to hand it to Jake, and saw him frozen in the circular shadows of the torch. He was holding the photo of Marty in one hand, and had the other clamped over his mouth. She hesitated before putting her arm around him, unsure of how general the hug ban was meant to be, but he turned towards her and held on to her for dear life. He was breathing slowly but unevenly, and Sorcha tried to regulate her breathing, in the hope that it would calm him. Tentatively, she stroked his back. She wished that she could just will it all to be right.

It felt like a very long time before he looked up, and asked what he should do.

“Call the police. Do nothing more with this lot, and hand it all over to them. It’s a nightmare, but it might be the thing that means that they find him alive.”

Jake was still struggling with the situation as a whole, and Sorcha wished with all her being that she could make it easier for him, but she knew equally well that she couldn’t.

“And then what?”

She held on to him, for both of their sakes.

“Then you carry on. It’s what people do.”