The Last Voice You Hear Read online

  taken off the field last night after apparently being struck by a hurled coin. A spokesman for the club said

  There were seats here, she saw immediately, and realized just how pissed off she’d have been to have to stand all the way. She took the first available – part of a four-seater round a table – making a small grateful noise as she did so. That was a thing about headphones: they made you over-ready to respond; compensating for the fact that you’d voluntarily cut yourself off from communication. This was merely an observation; not something that bothered Zoë. As she sat, though, communication happened anyway: the man by the window said something, pointing briefly at her headphones. She had to lean closer to hear.

  say they have no leads at the present time. Charles Pars

  ‘I said, this is the quiet carriage.’

  He could have fooled Zoë. The train was bucketing along: she could barely hear her radio.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘No mobiles, no personal stereos.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  She turned it off. Not naturally an obeyer of orders, she nevertheless had a well-developed sense of when she was on somebody else’s territory. The man had already forgotten her. He sat staring out of the window, or perhaps at the window itself: his eyes lacked that constantly changing focus of somebody watching a world flash by.

  The Today programme presumably carried on broadcasting. Her mind, too, kept transmitting mixed messages: stuff she needed to remember; things she’d rather forget. Amory Grayling’s address, for instance; she’d written this down, of course, but it would be pretty to think she could manage the trivia without depending on paperwork. Caroline Daniels had been his PA . . . And if the conversation had gone on longer, she thought, her journey now wouldn’t be happening: Zoë didn’t do death. What had happened to Caroline Daniels had taken her out of Zoë’s league. Amory Grayling had finalized arrangements before she’d got round to telling him that . . .

  We’ll have to fix you up with an appointment.

  She shook her head free of the unwelcome memory.

  Anyway, she thought, she’d get paid. Look on it as a day out; a trip into the city. Her mornings were nothing special. Maybe life would be stranger on a train.

  April was still new, still unsure of itself. The sky was grim, but a thick shaft of sunlight hammered down on some blessed event to the east. Through the window, in a field, by an electricity pylon, Zoë saw a tumble-dryer. It was in her past a moment later, but that’s what it had been – a tumble-dryer. How could anything get to be so out of place? And as soon as the question occurred, its answer arrived: somebody had dumped it; had loaded it into the back of a car or whatever, driven it out to that middle of nowhere, and left it for the weather to corrode. There was no real mystery why things ended up where they shouldn’t. A better question would be: How come anything ever turned out to be in the right place? Which was as well for Zoë, probably. She found people – it was one of the things she did. She was a private detective. She found people who’d ended up where they shouldn’t.

  She caught the eye of the woman sitting opposite, who smiled briefly, then bent her head to her book, a history of the labour movement. She had arranged herself, it seemed to Zoë, for maximum comfort within the space allowed; a position in which she was not directly facing anyone – so probably wasn’t too keen on repeated eye contact . . .

  Walking to the station by the towpath, Zoë had encountered one of the city invisibles: a homeless man burdened with candy-striped laundry bags and a bashed-about hold-all – a man of about forty, in a too-big suit; intensely shy of human contact. When she’d rounded the corner on to the path, he’d been making the sign of the cross, his luggage forming a Calvary at his feet. But at Zoë’s approach he’d stopped abruptly, gathered his stuff, moved on. He’d spent the night, probably, under an open sky, but couldn’t carve a private zone out of all that space. And now Zoë Boehm sat in a crowded railway carriage, and all around her travellers had claimed territory for themselves and their morning tasks; areas the size of an unfolded newspaper, a laptop, a book, or a pad and pen. It was the unconscious reflex of the property owner, she decided; this unquestioning settlement of available space. Those with salaried functions took what they needed, while those without could barely cross themselves in the open air.

  But she wouldn’t get snotty about commuters. She owed her existence to one.

  Zoë closed her eyes. The rhythm went on around her. Repetition was how you’d survive a daily journey like this; it was both what you endured and what got you through. It was there in the noise the wheels made; it was there in the landscape outside, patiently painting the calendar day by day. It was probably there in the thoughts running through the journeyers’ heads.

  She was on her way to London to meet a man named Amory Grayling. He wanted to talk to her about Caroline Daniels. Caroline Daniels was dead.

  We’ll have to fix you up with an appointment.

  After a while the train slowed and stopped; people got off, people got on. When the man next to her departed he left his newspaper; snaffling it, she resettled by the window. A new woman claimed her old seat and produced from a briefcase an apple and a sheaf of e-mail printouts larded with acronyms. As the train pulled away, Zoë unfolded the paper to a report of a football match in which a defender had been struck by a coin flung from the crowd: a ten-pence piece had hit him above the left eye, and the resulting wound required stitching. What might have happened had he been hit an inch lower barely bore thinking about. She refolded the paper, and on the adjoining page found a photograph of Charles Parsley Sturrock, who remained as dead as he had been three days previously, when the same picture had been front-page news. A professional hit remained the popular scenario, though a police spokesman admitted no obvious leads. Which was likely, in Zoë’s opinion. Policemen generally were too busy celebrating Sturrock’s death to have done much in the way of investigating it.

  A mobile phone went off, and harsh words ensued. The guilty party fled the carriage to enjoy his conversation in the vestibule. The woman opposite, Zoë noticed, had abandoned her history book for a paperback detective novel, and was looking happier.

  And I wonder what she’d say, thought Zoë, if I told her what I did for a living.

  There was a thought. The woman would probably not have believed her, but there were days when Zoë didn’t believe it herself. She had recently read – in a novel review – that private detectives were unconvincing, and couldn’t help feeling that the critic had a point. Not that she felt unreal, exactly; was, in fact, more aware of her physical self than she’d been in years – of her heart performing its extraordinary work. Of a tingling at her fingertips, here, now. But the job – the critic had a point. The job was part anachronism, part absurdity, and called to mind, when stated baldly, the usual suspect images: trench coat, bottle of rye, wisecracks out of the side of the mouth. Fact was, like everybody else, she spent most of her working life in front of a monitor.

  Fact also was, she had once killed a man.

  The fields outside gave way to industrial estates. The train passed a brick tower with a broken clock, its hands hanging at 6.30, or almost at 6.30; in fact at a dead version of 6.30, where the minute hand hid the hour at the parallax point; an inverted midnight. She wondered whether the mechanism had just snapped of a sudden, or whether this was the result of a slow surrender to gravity, observable only by those with the time and the inclination to watch. With most faulty clocks, you could tell when they’d stopped working. This one had ceased to function so completely, it had disguised the moment of failure.

  The man she had killed (she had shot him dead) would have killed her, given the chance; a chance which would have arisen, if she hadn’t shot him first. If it mattered, her job hadn’t come into it. She’d been there, that was all; in his sights, and a gun in her hand. Him or her, the way it might have happened in a private detective novel. Nothing about her frequent rehearsing of the memory made any of it more convi
ncing. There was no possibility of relating any of this to the woman opposite, and in any case, the information would only have frightened or depressed her.

  It was time not to think about this any more. Zoë turned the page, an irritating business involving spreading paper everywhere, and when she was done, words anyway swam into nonsense; became a cacophony of newsprint containing too many adjectives. She had shot a man, and felt nothing about it, and this, in retrospect, was the problem. She felt nothing about it, but it had broken her heart. It was just that she had not known what a broken heart encompassed, imagining – or remembering previous occasions, when she’d thought she’d suffered one – that it involved hurt; an unfamiliar clenching of an overused muscle. But it meant, she’d learned, what it sounded like: a broken heart was one that no longer worked. It managed its daily labours all right – that extraordinary effort she was so aware of right now; the ceaseless pumping with its whoosh and splash of constantly propelled liquids – but the other stuff, the heart stuff, it just didn’t do any more. She felt almost nothing. She was rarely happy. She was rarely sad. She got by, that was all. She felt almost nothing. And she had not noticed the moment at which this had started happening. Her feelings had ceased to function so completely, they had disguised the moment of failure.

  She was staring at the woman opposite, she realized. It was as if everything had coalesced into one obvious point of blame, and this poor woman was it. Zoë closed her eyes. It wasn’t entirely true that she felt almost nothing. There were times when she remembered how capable she’d once been of hatred.

  The rhythm of the rails bore into her mind, singing We’ll have to fix you up with an appointment. She rustled her paper. Tried to concentrate. The story blurred in front of her, then reassembled itself: letters, words, paras. A photograph. An echo of a headline from the radio news . . .

  The body of a twelve-year-old had been found at the foot of a tower block on an estate in east London. The accompanying picture, a school photograph, showed a boy significantly younger than twelve, and it was not hard to draw the conclusion that this was the last available picture of him smiling – maybe the last time a lens had been aimed at him other than in anger. In the picture, the boy – Wensley Deepman, his name had been – was seven, maybe eight, and gap-toothed; and the teeth either side of the missing shone whitely out of a light-brown face in which glowed all the potential traditionally associated with children’s beaming features; features in which a doting parent might discern a future doctor or lawyer, and the child himself in later years might rediscover the astronaut or engine driver he’d always meant to be. A broken twelve-year-old body was not generally included in such forecasts. And anyway, Zoë knew, most of whatever potential had existed in this seven- or eight-year-old had been squandered long before he’d taken flight from his grim tower: the last and only time Zoë had seen him, he’d been hurling abuse as she dragged his erstwhile sidekick back to his parents. You, she’d told him. Piss the fuck off. Three years later, it appeared, that’s more or less what he’d done.

  She laid the newspaper aside, her taste for knowing what was happening in the world quite undone. Beyond the window the North Pole appeared, where the jawbones of electric trains sat abandoned, like the remnants of a future civilization, and just for a moment it appeared as if a dull grey rain were falling on everything, but that turned out to be dirt on the windows. Zoë closed her eyes. She didn’t sleep. Everything stopped for a few minutes, nevertheless.

  Paddington arrived: her ‘station stop’. An intercommed voice reminded her to take her personal belongings when she left, and encouraged her to use the exit door, though there wasn’t one specific to the purpose. From the platform, Zoë took the bridge to the Hammersmith line, and a little less than twenty minutes later caught a Tube in the City direction, which almost immediately reached an unexplained halt. She was standing – of course she was – in the middle of a strangely placid crush; its lack of angst born, presumably, of long practice. From the glass in the door her reflection stared back; and just behind that, another stared too, which could have been her older sister, if she’d had one. There were deeper lines in this one’s face, and her eyes were more extravagantly bagged. This was Zoë as she’d be nearer the end of the line. And even as the thought occurred the train shunted, farted, and heaved into life, to carry her nearer to the end of the line.

  ii

  Across the road, at an angle oblique to Zoë’s vantage point, was the side of a building which had been sheared clean of its neighbour, leaving a four-storey windowless wall naked to the air; a blank, somehow painful expanse that put her in mind of a cauterized wound. Playing on it now – stacked one atop the other, about twelve foot apart – was a column of reflections that she realized, after a moment’s thought, were of the windows of the building she now stood in. Four square, bright pictograms; light-prints beamed on to brick. They looked like they deserved a meaning beyond their accidental appearance; something suitably wise and epigrammatic. For the moment, though, they remained an unintended beauty, the way rows of TV aerials look like haiku.

  ‘He’ll only be a few moments.’

  Zoë nodded. She had been on time for the appointment, and now was being asked to wait. It wasn’t unprecedented, and it wasn’t worth getting bothered about.

  ‘Would you like a cup of coffee while you’re waiting?’

  ‘No. Thank you.’

  Where she was now was an almost pathologically tidy receptionist’s room. The paper-free office was an ideal, she supposed; this was photo-free, art-free, and quite possibly sterile, with the jacket on the back of the door its only concession to mortality. Its presumed owner, the Asian woman who’d just asked about coffee, was young to be so purged of frivolous gesture. Zoë turned back to the window.

  She didn’t know London well. It had never seemed necessary. But she knew that she wasn’t far from where she’d found Andrew Kite, the day before Millennium Day; found him, squeezed the air out of him and dragged him home. And that it wasn’t far again from where Wensley Deepman had fallen to his death. Some lives described tight circles. You could get born, grow up and die on the same two pages of your A–Z. Except growing up hadn’t come into it with Wensley, and if he’d known his A and his Z, it was probably as much of the alphabet as he’d been familiar with.

  Andrew Kite, on the other hand, had been educated, not that he was an advert for it. Even for a boy his age, he’d been deeply self-absorbed. In the car, heading back to Oxford, once he’d realized that’s where she was taking him, he’d started talking. Some of it had been about his parents. Most, though, was about himself. Zoë had listened without responding. He’d been a startlingly beautiful boy, Andrew Kite, but it was his self-centred vacancy which had struck her; his rooted belief that everything impinged on his needs and wishes, as if he were still an infant in a pram, and the universe zeroed in on his well-being. The reasons he’d left were profound and important. The bastard-father. The bitch-mother. Zoë hadn’t encountered the father, and what Andrew said about the mother might have been true, but the woman she remembered had been sad and nearly broken; whatever middle-class outrages she’d inflicted on her only child – raising, feeding, clothing him, and spoiling him like a bastard – hadn’t been intended to drive him away. Maybe he’d know that by now. Keeping in touch hadn’t made it on to Zoë’s to-do list. But one more thing she did recall: that whole drive home, he hadn’t mentioned Wensley once. Already, Kid B had been out of the picture.

  ‘If you’d like to go through now.’

  We’ll have to fix you up with – ‘Ms Boehm?’

  ‘Yes. Fine.’

  Through meant a walk along the corridor; a knock on a door; a responding invitation. The young woman went in briefly and said something inaudible. Then she was leaving, and the job beginning. Zoë was meeting Amory Grayling; was shaking his hand.

  If she’d passed him on the street or a market square, she’d have clocked him as a farmer, she decided later; or as someone who work
ed with brick and mud – this not just because of the weather-beaten cast to his face (he had large, chipped features, like a totem pole’s) but for some- thing that seemed to nestle behind them; an intelligence of the kind Zoë associated with people who favoured dogs and fresh air, and long walks planned with big-scale maps. Not people she’d care to spend a whole lot of time with, necessarily, but nobody she’d instinctively dislike. But here he was on the seventh floor, which supposed a different nature of intelligence, and his handshake was a city one: its calluses moulded wielding pens and mobiles, not shovels. His suit looked the price of a season ticket. His office was large, square, neat, and its view, beyond the usual rooftops, boasted a fingernail paring of St Paul’s.

  ‘I’m sorry to keep you waiting.’ He made a gesture she was never meant to interpret, beyond the vague things-to-do-ness of it.

  ‘That’s fine.’

  ‘It’s good of you to come.’

  ‘I hope I haven’t wasted both our times.’ The time of both of us, she almost added. These times of ours. Whatever. She wished she’d had a cigarette out on the street.

  He showed her a chair, asking, ‘What makes you say so?’

  It took her half a moment to remember what she’d said.

  ‘This is about your PA. Your former PA.’

  ‘Caroline Daniels.’

  ‘You said that she was dead.’

  A pained look crossed his eyes.

  Zoë said, ‘I run a private business, Mr Grayling. I don’t investigate deaths, not any kind. Not even for insurance purposes. If Ms Daniels’ death, if you think it’s suspicious in any way, it’s the police you need to talk to.’