The Last Voice You Hear (3 page)

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 worked 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.’

‘Caroline’s death was an accident.’

‘. . . I see.’

‘She fell from a crowded platform. In the underground, I mean. It happens, Ms Boehm. They tell you to mind the gap and hold the handrail, but every so often the system comes unstuck. Most systems do. Especially those involving crowds.’

She wasn’t sure what response that expected, and merely nodded, so he’d know she was paying attention.

There was a knock and the young Asian woman returned carrying a tray with coffee, milk, biscuits. Amory Grayling thanked her in a tone suggesting he usually remembered this courtesy. Meanwhile Zoë, for no reason, felt her mind leave the building. She was standing by her car, loading one cuffed boy into the back, while Kid B hawked and swore in infant venom at her wheels.
Piss the
fuck off
, she’d told him. He must have been all of nine years old: a pre-adolescent wreck trying to make his voice heard over the feedback of his own short life.
Piss the fuck off
.

She came back to the kind of space in a conversation which indicates something’s been missed. ‘Just milk. Thanks.’ It was a good guess. Then she said, ‘Tell me about her.’

‘Caroline Daniels worked for me for twenty years. Twenty-two years.’ The Asian woman had gone, either on silent runners or Zoë’s mental absences were disturbingly thorough. ‘Not always here, I can tell you.’

‘This building, you mean.’

‘Nothing like. When I started, that is, when Caroline started working for me, I was with another firm. It was a good, steady job – hers, I mean. She was my secretary, but she wasn’t employed by me, she was the firm’s. When I left, she came with me. That’s the sort of person she was. She was loyal, Ms Boehm. She was a very loyal woman.’

Zoë thought: maybe the original firm would have had a different slant on that. But she said nothing.

And now this newer business – Pullman Grayling Kirk – was a going concern, and had been for eighteen years. Zoë had checked them out; their website was one of those just-barely informative areas, keener on graphics and mission statements than fact, but she’d found enough references to be satisfied of the important details: Pullman’s existed, made money, and was successful enough that Grayling was unlikely to stiff her on the bill.
Providing
management services
was what their scrolling text promised: essentially they troubleshot ailing businesses, specializing in the light industrial end of the spectrum, and happy to boast they could turn a £10 million deficit round inside half a year and save jobs while they were about it, though Zoë guessed this was probably at the expense of other jobs, which would turn out expendable. But maybe she was wrong about that. Maybe Pullman’s people wore white hats, and circled their wagons round small businesses, defending them from evil asset-strippers. It didn’t seem to especially matter right at the moment, though went on long enough for her to finish her coffee.

What mattered more was what she learned about Caroline Daniels, who had been with Pullman’s all those eighteen years; who had been forty-three when she died – a shade younger than Zoë – and had lived in Oxford.

‘She commuted, then.’

‘Uncomplainingly. She liked Oxford. Always said she’d rather live there and have the journey.’

‘That must have been tough on her family.’

‘She never married.’

As epitaphs go, this bordered on obituary.

Zoë became conscious of her empty coffee cup, and leaned across to place it on the desk. ‘Did she have a partner? Boyfriend, girlfriend?’

He might have flinched a little at ‘girlfriend’. ‘That’s what I want to talk to you about.’

There had been a boyfriend. It had been a recent development. Amory Grayling held on to his cup, though it too was empty, while he told her. There had been a boyfriend since about the previous November, and maybe a little earlier. He had certainly been on the scene by Christmas. Prior to that was speculation, but it was difficult for a man not to notice such things: an increased lightness about her; a new softness. Something in the way she moved, Grayling turned out not to be too embarrassed to say. Caroline developed a tendency to hum under her breath, and to move her lips slightly, but in a happy way, when she thought herself unobserved, as if rehearsing lines for later. Zoë, listening to this, wondered if Amory Grayling had been in love with Caroline Daniels himself, or was simply, as seemed more likely, a touch miffed that she’d found someone.

‘Did you ask about him?’

‘Not at first. I didn’t think it was my business.’

‘But she offered the information.’

‘After Christmas, yes, I suppose so. I asked her how her break had been, and she kept saying “we” – we did this, we did that. It would have been churlish not to ask.’

‘What was his name?’

‘Alan. Alan Talmadge.’

He was assuming the spelling, but Zoë made a note of it anyway. No obvious variation occurred.

‘But you never met him.’

‘No.’

She wasn’t sure where this was going. It seemed he wasn’t either, for he veered away suddenly; began talking about the day of Caroline Daniels’ death – her unusual lateness: it was true the trains delayed her at times, but she always called in when that happened. It seemed to him now that he’d had the sensation there had been phones ringing, unanswered, all that morning. Two police officers had turned up shortly before lunch. Grayling had arranged cover by then: there was another woman in Caroline Daniels’ office, pulling away at the loose threads of Caroline Daniels’ job. Of the officers, the male had been sympathetic. The female, he recalled, had found it worthwhile to emphasize the disarrangements caused on the City line.

‘Disarrangements,’ he said. ‘I remember thinking at the time what an ugly word to use.’

‘This was at Paddington?’

‘That’s right. She must have used that platform hundreds of times. Quite possibly thousands. And one day there’s a crush, and . . .’ He didn’t finish the thought. Didn’t have to. After a moment, he said, ‘Every so often it happens, and you read about it, and nobody ever thinks it’ll happen to them. But that’s who all the people are it’s ever happened to. They’re people who read about it happening to somebody else once, and never thought it would happen to them.’ He became silent. Zoë said nothing. She was remembering reading in a newspaper about a couple whose tiny child had drowned in their ornamental pond. And even at the time of reading, she’d been remembering another report, maybe two weeks previously, of exactly the same thing happening somewhere else, to somebody else. And she’d wondered if that second couple had read the report of the first drowning, and thanked God it hadn’t happened to them.

At length he said, ‘There’s a sister, and I’d met her occasionally. I offered to help with . . . arrangements, and she let me do so. It was the least I could do.’

Zoë said nothing.

‘There was a cremation, in Oxford. She wasn’t religious, and those were the instructions she’d left. She was . . . organized, I suppose you could say.’

She said, ‘And Talmadge wasn’t there.’

He looked at her sharply. ‘How did you know that?’

‘You said you’d never met him.’

‘Oh. So I did.’

‘Had they broken up?’

‘No. Not that I know of. And I think I’d have known. I think Caroline would have . . . I think I’d have been able to tell.’

‘She’d have been upset.’

He sighed. ‘Ms Boehm. In all the years I’d known her, in all the years she’d worked for me, I was never aware of Caroline having a boyfriend. And while she was never an unhappy person, I don’t remember her humming around the office before. So yes, she’d have been upset. And I’d have noticed.’

Zoë was thinking of all the ways upset people might find of making their feelings known, and coming up with few more extreme than landing in front of a Tube train.

‘And I can tell what you’re thinking. And no, she wouldn’t have done that either. She wasn’t religious. But she had firm principles, and suicide would have offended them. She thought it was . . . She thought it an insult, somehow. I know what she meant by that. But please don’t ask me to explain.’