[I was slightly traumatized by watching the Silk finale, like two years after it actually aired, and wrote this as a way of grieving.]
Clive could hear the clattering of Harriet's ridiculous high heels as she trailed behind him. Everything seemed ridiculous to him right now. Fighting for Head of Chambers, making Shoe Lane into a prosecution set, sleeping with Harriet - everything he'd done seemed ridiculous, and everything everybody else had done did too. From Amy's complaint against Billy, to the head clerk's god-awful timing, to Alan Cowdrey leaving in the first place, it was ridiculous, and everybody was acting as such.
Martha was being ridiculous too, but that didn't mean he'd stop trying to find her.
Things could have been different, Clive knew. If he'd jumped in quicker when she'd been pregnant, if Billy had spoken of his dying earlier, if he had left for Manchester when he said he would, if any number of tiny things had changed, everything would have been different. Just how different, he'd never know. But he certainly wouldn't be combing the streets of London looking for a runaway Martha Costello on the night when he should've been celebrating for all he was worth.
Clive knew Sean's trial had had its effect on her. But she was Martha, his no-nonsense Northern blonde, a hard-line defender with too much compassion for her own good. He hadn't thought a guilty verdict would have this big an effect on her.
Hadn't he?
This was Martha. Martha. 'Innocent until proven guilty' Martha, who struggled to deal with losing on a good day with a client she knew deserved a lot more than a slap on the wrists. Every guilty verdict practically made her reconsider her entire career and, by extension, her entire life. Had he really expected her friend to go down without a hitch? Had he really expected Martha to be able to rise from the ashes of Sean's case as she had done with everybody else's? Had he?
Clive couldn't answer that. So he picked up his pace and shouted her name louder.
Billy was leaning heavily on Jake's side when Clive came out of the dark alleyway a moment later. He looked like a man dying. It took Clive a few seconds longer than it should have to remember he was.
"Where's Martha?" he asked. Billy didn't reply – he made a noise, like he was trying talk but couldn't. The clerk took a deep breath, and nodded, vaguely, forward. He probably said something more specific, but Clive wasn't listening. To anything. He half heard Harriet behind him, not her high heels but her voice, shouting after him, and he almost registered the sound of a car horn blaring as he dashed across the road, barely avoiding being run over. Clive crashed into the wall on the other side and only stopped himself from toppling over by grabbing the bricks, scratching his palms in the process. He looked over the water and saw nothing. Nothing except the dark, murky depths of the Thames. Not he had expected to see anything. The river would have swallowed everything. And, Martha wouldn't have jumped.
He hoped.