The Last Voice You Hear Read online

  Her first impression, reaching Rivers Estate, was: it reminded her of film of anonymous Soviet cities, those postwar dystopias created in the middle of vast emptinesses, whose architecture seemed all featureless concrete, and light pollution so fierce it blinded the stars. It was always the light that disturbed her, seeing such footage; the way it seemed less intended to keep the enormous darkness at bay than to remind the marooned citizens they could be clearly seen. The cities were like literal-minded reconstructions of those mall maps with YOU ARE HERE printed in big red type. Wherever you came across one, it always knew exactly where you were.

  But then, there were always ways you could be tracked down, model citizen or not. There were databases, electoral rolls; there were credit listings and people-tracer sites. Zoë subscribed to all major available finding services, and not a few that were neither major nor well known, nor even especially legal. All, though, could be reached at a public library, if it had Internet access, and they all had that. She’d found the Deepmans within minutes: fewer than the ten she’d promised herself. It occurred to her, as long as she was online, she might as well have gone ahead and put out tracers for Alan Talmadge, but by the time she’d thought that, she was already outside, and soon after that, on the streets of Rivers Estate.

  Which, from what Zoë could make out, were arranged like the spokes of a wheel, at the hub of which stood a pair of highrises, probably twenty-odd storeys’ worth: she didn’t count. These streets were named after rivers. Zoë wondered if local councils had naming committees, or whether each hired a Womble to do this for them. The Deepmans lived on Severn Street. And there was no need to check the numbering: as she turned the corner and saw the mid-level chaos there, she knew which house it focused on, and what it was about.

  There were cars and vans parked both sides of the street; some with people inside, talking on phones; one with a man standing next to it, working a laptop resting on its roof. And there was a crowd milling about a house, more or less kept at bay by two uniformed policemen. This would be number 39: the Deepmans’. The crowd broke down neatly into crews as Zoë studied it: teams of two and three bound together by umbilical cabling. One of each bore a camera on one shoulder in pseudo-military manner, and each of these cameras was aimed at a tall black man who was standing outside 39, saying: ‘– in the next twenty minutes. So if you’ll all just be patient until then. Thank you.’ He went in. The door that closed behind him had a bouquet taped to it. The house’s curtains were drawn. She didn’t really know what she was doing here, and the crowd offered no clue as it turned inwards and burbled to itself. At what seemed the exact same moment, every member of it not holding a camera produced a phone and punched a number. Zoë imagined phones in different offices all starting to ring at once; a finely orchestrated moment far too scattered to have any impact. Another car pulled up beside her, with three men inside, each of them smoking. When they clambered out, it was like watching heroes emerging from a catastrophe: the smoke that clung to them, that blew away on their exit, was a souvenir of the danger they’d brushed. One glanced at Zoë in passing, but in a way that rendered her unimportance absolute. He was saying something about the PC to his companions: PC, press conference.

  Zoë had made the papers, when she’d shot a man. This had happened not long after her husband had died, been killed, though at the time – and didn’t the press just let it be known? – he was thought to have killed himself in remorse after supplying drugs to a dead teenager. It had not been a good time for Zoë. She received a lot of letters, most of them from men. And it had taught her this much, her brief and uncooperative encounter with the press: that when it came to the red-tops, there was no such place as the right side. The tabloid press was like the pub drunk. You didn’t want it picking on you, and you didn’t want it telling the world you were its best fucking mate. You wanted it to not notice you, and that was all; its eye to pass over you, registering your absolute unimportance. It could leave in the air behind it a trace of stale tobacco and brimstone, and that was okay, just so long as it wasn’t there any more. She felt a shudder as the men passed, but managed to keep it internal. As soon as they’d gone, she was on her way.

  . . . There’s a feeling that’s almost but not quite déjà vu: the sensation you’re creating a memory even as you’re doing something for the first time. Zoë had that now, leaving Severn Street. It was unsettling, like finding that somebody else had packed her bags for her. She didn’t want to remember this scene; neither the gathering crews of journalists, nor the way the dead boy’s house had become part of a set: Act I, Scene iii. It was part of the commercial wrapping that packages premature death, and you couldn’t read a paper, watch TV or turn on a radio without being part of it, but that didn’t mean you had to wallow. So she turned her back before the instant memory could dig itself deeper. When somebody else packed your bags, you never knew what was going to turn up in them. That was why the question was always asked at airports.

  * * *

  Around a couple of corners, from a kebab van at the side of the road, a young Turkish man was selling tea, coffee, sandwiches; probably kebabs, if the demand arose. Three men and one woman stood in the shelter of the van’s raised panel, drinking from polystyrene cups. Passing, Zoë caught the word Deepman, and slowed as if hit by the sudden need for a cuppa.

  One of the men nudged a companion. ‘Another victim, Abdul.’

  ‘I make the best tea in London,’ said Abdul, unless that wasn’t his real name.

  Zoë smiled at him – it seemed an unfamiliar exercise; maybe her first of the day – and guessed tea was the thing to order. The average age of the four customers was, say, eighty. This was a second estimate. Her first was a hundred and three. By the time her tea was poured, they’d established she wasn’t a journo, wasn’t local, that she had ‘known’ Wensley Deepman, though she kept the details to herself. Perhaps, by the time she was a hundred and three, or even eighty, her own interrogation skills would have been honed like theirs: the unembarrassable direct questioner was a formidable opponent.

  ‘His folks shown their faces yet?’ the woman asked. She had a face like an apple, but a very old apple; one you could probably poke your finger through without trying.

  Zoë told them about the man on the doorstep; about the conference happening soon.

  ‘Vin’ll have sorted that.’

  Admitting she didn’t know who Vin was might have damaged her credentials. She said, ‘Does anybody know how it happened?’

  ‘He’ll have been on the drugs, that’s right.’

  ‘Or drunk.’

  ‘He was twelve, but.’

  ‘It’s a crying shame,’ said the woman. And her eyes agreed, but there was something else there too; something that said yes, but it had happened, and it was getting the TV crews in. Or maybe that was Zoë reading stuff that wasn’t there. She’d long ago accepted she could be wrong about things. She still needed telling twice sometimes, though.

  ‘Know what I heard?’ Abdul said.

  ‘Tell us what you heard, son.’

  ‘I heard he threw himself off.’

  The group on the pavement shared looks. A new ingredient had been chucked into the mix.

  ‘He was twelve, but,’ one of the men said again. ‘Why’d he want to do a thing like that for?’

  Abdul shrugged. ‘It’s what I heard.’

  Zoë was wondering about the speed of information. This had happened yesterday. Time enough for the truth to have got lost; at the same time, what made this so unlikely? Of the six of them there, Abdul was the youngest, and he hadn’t been twelve for a while. Everything was more extreme than it used to be. Everybody knew that. The older four here, they knew the kids drank and drugged. It wasn’t much of a reach that they also despaired.

  ‘Where’d you hear this?’ she asked.

  But the young man didn’t know. It was Word, that was all. There was never any telling how it got on to the streets.

  She was going to go now. That was t
he plan. This was emotional tourism, without even the excuse of an accompanying buzz. Because Zoë didn’t care; not exactly. At least these others had known the drama’s participants. At least they shared the same postal code. For Zoë there was just the splinter of unfinished business; the same insistent irritation she used to get whenever Joe got a bee in his bonnet, and demanded it be followed. Those were the times she’d slam doors, exit premises; find out about it later. It never amounted to anything. That always made it worse when it happened again. Nothing Joe ever thought important amounted to anything, so now he was dead.

  One of the four said, ‘Wonder how Joe’s taking it?’

  It was one of those blips when you have to call reality into question. She had a custard-pie moment: face blank, mouth open, all signs of intelligent life fled.

  ‘His own bloody grandson,’ one of the others reckoned. ‘How’d you think?’

  . . . Joseph Deepman. She’d come across the name in the library; guessed he’d be a relative – how could he not be? Same area, though the address escaped her.

  ‘There’s some’d be glad to see the back of the bastard.’

  It was the woman who said that.

  ‘There, now. Ill of the dead.’

  ‘He eyed my handbag a time or two.’

  ‘Well, he’ll not be round to do that again.’

  ‘Where does Joe live?’ Zoë asked.

  One of the men pointed. It took her a moment to understand what he meant by this, because he seemed to be aiming at heaven, and her first response was the obvious; a fleeting sense of the luck that befell some people. But he meant, if anything, the opposite, because what he was pointing at was the fourteenth floor of one of the tower blocks in whose shadow they were standing, though she hadn’t realized it until that moment. She’d taken it for ordinary shade; the gloom you stood in, obviously, in areas like this. But it was a concrete object casting it upon them, and just for a moment they stood looking, the six of them, as if it had never been visible before; one of a pair of obelisks wished upon the landscape by planners who’d set them there, and moved on. A flat-faced solid structure, not so much characterless as character-negating, and definitely lacking in humour. But the hub of a wheel; a building of unignorable weight, if nothing else. And very like one you might throw yourself from, if you ever intended to die.

  Zoë had long given up constructing theories as to what made people what they were. It was fatuous to imagine you understood a stranger’s motivation when your own felt massively involved, like a complicated piece of legislation. But there was no denying that there were places would dwarf potential, and when every horizon was hidden behind the New Brutal, and uncloseted smells hit you every breath you took, you’d probably reached one. This was what she decided in the stairwell, on landing six. Everything stank, here. Her heart was hammering; her breathing was a mess. Around her, names tagged on walls laid claim to territory nobody sensible would set foot in. Many of these names were ugly, and threatened violence. If you gave a zoo-born gorilla a sketchpad, it would draw the bars of its cage.

  . . . Her own motivation was something she’d lost track of. There were hours to kill before her train; that was part of it. But she didn’t allow herself to fool herself often, and then only when it wasn’t important. She was here because of something she’d said, and everything else she hadn’t done. Piss the fuck off, she’d told Wensley. It all came back to that. He’d been nine years old. Probably past saving already, which anyway wasn’t her job. But while it was possible, and in most cases desirable, to wipe your hands of involvement, if you were an honest woman, you saw that through. Which meant turning up afterwards, to make sure everyone knew you weren’t to blame; to let them know you hadn’t been involved, and hadn’t altered any outcomes. To give them a chance, in fact, to hate you.

  Landings eight, nine, ten, were deeply purgatorial. She hit a second wind then; as if her body had accepted this as part of the punishment, and would keep climbing until she told it to stop.

  At fourteen Zoë stepped out on to the walkway running round the outside of the block. She had met nobody coming up the stairs, and there was nobody here either, on this concrete balcony. When the lifts didn’t run, she supposed, you boarded yourself inside until things got better. One of those circumstances you filed away with the weather, as being beyond control. She had been given the flat number by the crew down at the kebab van, and hoped now they’d not misled her, because then she’d have to go back and kill them all. At the first corner she stopped one moment, registering the height. A slight problem with heights, Zoë had, but only a slight one. The door she was after was the next one along; a blue door, like all the others.

  She knocked, and turned her back as she waited, and looked down on London. It appeared more complicated from this perspective. She could trace the way the streets collided, and the odd, ill-fitting shapes of the mismatched buildings. Many flat roofs had extra, small buildings atop them, as if there were a parasite city feeding on the ceiling of the main one. This was not, she supposed, terribly high, but it was unnaturally high all the same. This would foster isolation. Penthouse suites were well known to be desirable, but generally came equipped with working lifts. Towers were where the condemned were banged up, and usually had steep stairs and broken lighting.

  After a while she turned and knocked again.

  The people down there, she thought. They look like ants. Or about the size of ants, she amended, and engaged in what might be ant-activity, inasmuch as, from this distance, it could be mistaken for purposeful, pre-planned industry. And she felt the sudden rush of vertigo: an anxious high that threatened to sweep her off her feet, the way they say love does, leaving you nothing to cling to, and only the certainty of flat-out closure ahead. ‘Deceleration trauma’, Bob Poland called it once. He had not been talking about love. He’d claimed emergency crews used plastic bags, which were rinsed out after, for reuse. And Wensley Deepman had gone this route. For the splittest of seconds, she caught a glimpse of his last view: a freewheeling vision of some miserable backstreets and unkind architecture, and then nothing – then just the only possible end of such misadventure, and with the stark and violent blankness of it came the vertigo pang again, and Zoë felt cut off at the knees. She took a deep breath, steadied herself on the railing. Way down yonder ants milled strategically, scurrying picnicwards. Behind her, the door opened.

  She had almost forgotten where she was, or why. It was so long since she’d knocked, the buzzing at her knuckles had faded away.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Mr Deepman?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘My name’s Zoë Boehm, Mr Deepman. I wondered if I could have a word.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  It occurred to her, brief as a passing moth, that his repetition had purpose; that this old man – and he looked pretty old, pretty decrepit, with sagging skin and rheumy eyes, and nicotined wisps tufting randomly from his scalp; he was white, but only in the broadly used sense of the term, actually being a cross between grey and yellow, as if he’d been finely mulched, then left out in the rain – that this old man, it occurred to her, had seen through her pretence that she was who she thought she was, and intended now to get to the bottom of Zoë Boehm. But this was a wild thought; one of those off-message moments like a popup for the brain, offering a second’s irritated distraction before you close them down. She took a breath. ‘My name’s Zoë Boehm. I wondered if I could talk to you, Mr Deepman.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘About your grandson.’

  ‘Wensley.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wensley’s dead.’

  ‘I know, Mr Deepman. I’m very sorry.’

  He was looking beyond her now, down at the messy city, at its excess of angles and sharp corners. Probably, all he was seeing was blur.

  ‘You press?’

  ‘No. I’m not press.’

  ‘What you want to talk about Wensley for?’

  Frankly
, she didn’t know. ‘I met him once, Mr Deepman.’ I was a link in his chain, she thought of saying. ‘It was . . .

  I met him, that’s all. I wanted to pay my condolences.’

  ‘Tried to rob you, did he?’

  She blinked.

  ‘Not much way Wez was running into your likes. Less he was trying to rob you.’

  She found herself nodding, though he wasn’t looking at her. ‘Something like that happened,’ she said.

  ‘He was a devil from hell,’ the old man said.

  There was a moment, maybe half of one, during which Zoë felt an impulse to contradict him. But what was the point of that? This was the grandfather: he’d known the boy. The indications were, he was right.

  ‘A devil from hell,’ he said again. Then: ‘Do you do bulbs?’

  ‘Do I what?’

  ‘Bulbs. Light bulbs.’ He stepped back inside, leaving the door hanging open. Zoë breathed deep, and followed.

  The door opened on a hallway which seemed narrower than it ought – narrower than the door, almost – and it struck her, entering, that if all the flats matched this, each of them of dimensions just slightly more disappointing than expected, there could be a hidden chamber somewhere in the block, made up of all the left-over spaces. It was dark, too, and she assumed this was where the bulb was needed. But Deepman was already elsewhere: she tracked him through the sitting room – an area focused on an absence, somehow – and into the kitchen, where the guiding principle seemed to be that nothing should be washed up until everything needed to be. That point might easily be reached inside the next two minutes. He indicated the bulb, a foot above his head. It was intact but scorched, as if its burning-out had been wilfully exaggerated. ‘It’s been like that for days,’ he said.