Chapter Thirty Nine

Despite spending quite a long time trying, Sorcha couldn’t come up with an excuse to call Jake which didn’t make her squirm. She was left watching TV news bulletins and scouring the internet in the hope of gleaning a hint of what might be going on. An interview with an uninterested police officer, which had come close to turning into a slanging match about why she hadn’t stayed at Jake’s mother’s house until they arrived, had done little to improve her mood. She had ended up going back to the office and finally savaging her trainee, who probably didn’t deserve it even if he did have a stunningly small brain.

It took her a few days to get hold of Pippa, as well, which along with a glitch in the electronic filing system which kept filling her work inbox with random messages added to her general sense of frustration. Pip didn’t even seem to be online most of the time, which was unusual. Sorcha’s sense of relief when she did finally answer a call, early one evening, was huge, but didn’t last long.

“Pip, hun, what’s up, and what have you been doing to scare Janey?”

There was some audible huffing at the other end of the line, followed by a strangulated growl of frustration.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck. It’s Dan, Sorch: he just won’t leave me alone. When I was talking to Jane, he kept bugging me about who I was talking to. I told him to sod off, I even told him who it was, but then he refused to believe me and cut me off.”

Sorcha wished, not for the first time, that her understanding of Dan and Pippa’s relationship extended beyond just the fact that it existed, but she sensed that she did at least not need to worry too much about being polite about him.

“What the hell did he do that for?”

“God knows. He’s really, really bugging me at the moment. He won’t let me do anything, bloody fascist. He keeps cutting off phone calls; and he keeps taking my mobile and my computer away too. All I bloody well want to do is talk to people, and he keeps doing his fucking Gestapo act.”

Sorcha wasn’t sure whether she was more startled by Pip’s choice of vocabulary or Dan’s behaviour: the phrase “mostly harmless” could have been invented for Dan, in the unlikely event that anyone had stayed interested in him long enough to come up with it.

“Christ, Pip Pop. If he’s doing stuff like that, just tell him to sod off.” Sorcha tried and failed to remember what Jane had told her about Pip’s living arrangements: she thought that the flat that she and Dan lived in actually belonged to Pip’s father, but wasn’t wholly sure, “Can’t you just throw him out?”

“I’ve tried that. He threatened to call the police, and even had my Dad round here having a go at me. It’s like nobody will actually listen to me. They just listen to him instead, and tell me to behave myself. It’s like everyone thinks that I am five or something.”

Sorcha felt her hackles rise on Pip’s behalf.

“Why the hell was your Dad fighting his corner not yours? God, parents are shit, aren’t they.”

“It’s men. They always look out for one another, bloody Nazis. Neither of them will listen to anything I have to say, just because I don’t have a sodding penis. Women don’t stand a chance, even when we do manage to stand together.”

It wasn’t the first time Pip had expressed penis envy in an alarmingly direct fashion, and Sorcha found that ignoring it generally did the trick.

“God. I’m sorry it’s all so shit, Pet. If it really gets that bad, just get yourself out of there. You don’t need to put up with all that kind of crap,” she hesitated, not wanting to make the offer that she knew needed to follow, “You know that you can always stay at mine for a bit, don’t you? I even cleared up a couple of weeks back, so you wouldn’t have to go on an archaeological dig to get to the spare room bed.”

She was dreading Pip’s response: the thought of her refuge being invaded by a distressed, volatile Pip wasn’t one that she wanted to have to contemplate at length, let alone live out, although she knew that Jane would never have forgiven her if she had not suggested it. She had a sudden flash of terror at the thought of what Pip would do if she suddenly found Jake at the door, but pushed it away as too unlikely to matter.

“Believe me, if I could get away, I would. They don’t even let me out unless they’re sure that there is someone watching me,” Sorcha wanted to interrupt and tell her that she was exaggerating, but wasn’t quite sure how to without sounding unsympathetic and so let her carry on, “And I wouldn’t want you to get caught up in it all either. You’ve had enough shit this year. We’re both victims, you know.”

Sorcha winced, and suddenly wanted to distance herself from the sentiment.

“It’s not that bad, Pipsqueak. I reckon I’ll probably survive, and I reckon you will too.”

Pip paused to a moment or two: the sense of anger and injustice which had seen her through the first part of the conversation seemed to be wearing off, much to Sorcha’s relief. She asked Sorcha what she had been up to, and Sorcha again felt that Jake was something that didn’t need to be shared in any detail.

“Not much. I hate my job, and I’m waiting for someone to call who probably won’t. And I wish all that Marty King stuff would finally get sorted out, so I didn’t have to keep watching the news in case they say something about it.”

“The bastards never do call, do they?” Sorcha instantly regretted saying as much as she had, and was relieved when Pippa carried on, “You know, there’s a girl on one of the forums who is saying that Stephen Warren has got Keith thingummy. MacDonald. She’s trying to track down people who know him. Stephen Whatnot, I mean, because she wants to find Keith. I started sending through to her some of the stuff that I’d dug out for you, before Dan stole my sodding computer.”

There were too many people out there, trying to do too many different things. It wasn’t unlikely that Stephen was holding Keith, but the fact that a random woman was then trying to find him using an internet forum didn’t exactly make Sorcha feel warm and cosy.

“Christ. What the hell was she doing that for?”

“Seems she had a thing going with Keith. The bastards wouldn’t listen to her either, you know. She’d tried talking to the police, and she tried talking to one of the band guys too. Duncan Whatsisface. You know, they even ended up arresting her for trying to talk to him! Us girls just have to stick together.”

Sorcha screwed her face up, even though she knew that no one could see her.

“Pip Pop. Do you know her name?”

Pip giggled and Sorcha was inclined to join in, although probably not for the same reason.

“Pip Pop, Hip Hop.” Pip had to slow herself down, “It’s like hopscotch isn’t it? I used to fall over turning round at the end. Like with skipping ropes.”

Sorcha laughed, although she had a feeling that if she came across a skipping rope at the moment she was likely to view it as a weapon rather than a toy.

“Or not. I always fall over skipping ropes. The girl on the forum, did she have a name, Pip?”

“Nicola something. She wouldn’t tell any more; she was being all mysterious.”

Sorcha wasn’t quite sure whether to laugh or cry, but knew she was going to have to get creative again.

“Pip, Pet, the police mentioned someone called Nicola when they called to ask me more questions last week. I wouldn’t send her any more information, if I were you.”

Pip didn’t sound convinced, but it ultimately didn’t matter because without her computer she couldn’t contact Nicola anyway. Sorcha wondered briefly whether Dan taking the computer away might be a blessing in disguise, before feeling guilty for even thinking it. She found herself trying to persuade Pip to just go along with what Dan wanted for a day or two, to see if she could get her phone and computer back, but she didn’t seem to think that it would work and seemed agitated at the thought of the situation in general. Somehow the conversation wound back on itself.

“I find the whole idea of Stephen Warren a bit odd, you know, hun.” Sorcha hesitated, before realising that if she left it there she was likely to be told either that he was a covert member of the Waffen SS, “I mean, I can barely remember what he looked like, but every time I see the scars I feel as if I ought to remember. It’s as if there’s something wrong with me because I don’t. It’s become like it’s a name without a person attached to it. Stephen Warren.”

Pip didn’t reply immediately, but soon started laughing to herself again at the end of the phone. Sorcha had to ask her why Stephen Warren was funny.

“It’s like Watership Down isn’t it? With all the rabbits, who keep on having sex and are about to die anyway. With that huge bloody sunset about to swallow them all up, like it’s alive.” Pip cleared her throat, before started to sing, reasonably tunefully, “Is it a kind of dream, floating out on ….”

Pip couldn’t remember the rest of the words and started la-ing along, while Sorcha protested that Art Garfunkel really wasn’t the problem. Eventually Pip realised that she meant she ought to shut up.

“Sorry. I just thought that it might be easier if you thought of him as rabbits. With fluffy tails and long floppy ears, and everything.”

Sorcha found herself smiling: that much at least was true. An image of Pip wearing a large fake-fur rabbit suit, with long floppy ears on its hood, wandered into her head and had to be batted away again.

“I guess. I suppose most people are actually easier to deal with if you think of them as big fluffy rabbits, aren’t they?”