The Last Voice You Hear (4 page)

She didn’t need him to. Which did not mean she was in agreement, quite.

She said, ‘Did the sister know about Talmadge?’

‘Terry? Yes. Caroline had mentioned him. But they hadn’t met.’

‘Were they living together?’

‘I don’t think so. But they were lovers, there’s no doubt about that. Caroline told Terry as much.’ He paused. ‘He was younger than her. That’s something else she told Terry.’

‘Did she say how old he was?’

‘No. She was forty-three. He could have been younger than her and still been forty himself.’ Grayling noticed he was holding his cup, and put it down as suddenly as if it had grown hot. ‘I can’t . . . I don’t really think he could have been terribly younger than her. Late thirties at most, probably.’

‘Why do you say that?’ asked Zoë, though she suspected she probably knew.

Amory Grayling said, ‘She was a fine woman and I both liked and respected her very much indeed. I trusted her absolutely. We might have begun as employer-employee, but we became friends years ago.’

‘But,’ said Zoë.

‘She was not what you’d call the world’s most . . . She was not physically an attractive woman, Ms Boehm. Not by the standards we’re encouraged to adopt.’

‘I see.’

‘I’ve long thought physical beauty overrated.’

‘So have I.’

This apparent accord, which both knew for a lie, silenced them a moment.

Then Zoë said, ‘So. They met, they were lovers. Caroline dies in an accident. And Talmadge doesn’t show up at the funeral.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Was he notified?’

‘I had no means of doing so. No number, no address. But he couldn’t not have known what happened. I mean, thinking about it, there is no way he could have remained unaware of her death.’

This was true. He would have had to have really not wanted to know to successfully maintain such ignorance.

She said, ‘What is it you want me to do, Mr Grayling?’

‘I want you to find him.’

‘All right.’

‘It’s a matter of . . . I suppose it’s a matter of unfinished business. You could even call it a debt, of sorts.’

She didn’t reply.

He said, ‘Caroline never left an untidy desk. Not in twenty-two years.’

And Zoë, who’d messed a few in her time, nodded, as if she’d just had a glimpse of what truly pained him.

iii

On the pavement, she lit a cigarette. A group of shirt-sleeved men and jacketed women were doing likewise on the steps of the building opposite: there was probably a new word, or a recent one at any rate, to describe this group behaviour. ‘Smoking’ would do for now. And this was something she was now starting to think about promising herself she was going to stop soon: or so, at any rate, she reminded herself.

When she glanced up, she saw that the pictograms lately reflected there had risen; the column was only two reflections tall now, as the upper pair had escaped into the sky: a trick of light and angles, she supposed; to do with the way the earth moves, but buildings mostly don’t. And she wondered where a reflection went when there was nothing for it to project upon, and whether the air was full of the ghosts of things that had almost happened, but lacked foundation. But this was whimsy, and she had no time for that. One of the smokers opposite sketched her half a wave as she tucked the lighter into her pocket, but she pretended not to notice, and moved on round the corner.

There was now a job to do. It wouldn’t necessarily prove difficult.

What potentially made the difference was whether Talmadge had meant to vanish.

It was Zoë’s experience that finding people was harder when they didn’t know they were missing. There was a whole category of people liable to fall off the edge of the world; whose grip on contemporary reality, never marvellous to begin with, was weakened further by what, to others, might appear no more than the average slights – and then they were gone. They didn’t know where they were going, so wouldn’t recognize it when they got there, and left no clues as to where it was. Often, theirs wasn’t a journey so much as an act of divestment; a shedding of all that had anchored them in the first place: mortgages and bank accounts, mobile phones and credit cards, enmities and friendships – something snapped, or something else got stronger. It was hard to know whether it was pull or repulsion acting on them, because these were the ones who were never found, so never answered the questions. And she thought again of the man by the canal whose prayers she’d interrupted; who carried his history in a collection of laundry bags. Impossible to tell if he was lost on purpose, or missing by accident; or whether, after enough time had passed, it made the slightest difference.

. . . Because things happened, she told herself. Volition, intention, desire, regret – sometimes these took a back seat, and events just got on with it. Not everything had somebody responsible.

It was important to remember this, as she crossed the road at the traffic lights. That there was no conceivable pattern of belief, for example, under which anything that had happened to Wensley Deepman in the years since she’d encountered him – all the missing parts of the story which it hardly took genius to fill in – could be laid at Zoë’s feet. She had had a job to do and had done it. Wensley, either way, was background colour; an extra in a story about how Zoë had gone to London to bring back Andrew Kite; or perhaps one in which Andrew Kite had gone to London and somebody had brought him back. Wherever you stood, nobody was giving Kid B top billing.
Piss the fuck off
she’d told him, but she hadn’t meant him to die.

This wasn’t guilt she was feeling. It was an awareness of an absence of guilt that she might once have felt, when things were different.

She needed coffee. From an obscure need to punish herself, Zoë walked past the branded outlets to an extreme-looking dive on a corner with road-spatter scaling its outside walls, whose misted windows made it clear what lay within: stained formica tables, plastic chairs, and scuffed lino. It also contained the biggest spider plant she’d ever seen. She sat in what was nearly its shade, while her coffee, which was too hot and too weak, cooled. Against the wall opposite an old man with indescribable eyebrows and a throat raggy as a tortoise’s chewed on a roll-up. In front of her eyes, its mouse-turd of ash dropped into his mug of tea, and her hands, which had automatically gone seeking her cigarettes already, quit their hunt.

It ought, she thought, to have been raining outside, but it wasn’t.

Caroline Daniels, though, was the job in hand. She tried to clear her mind of the unwanted image of a nine-year-old kid making his pass for her valuables – that brilliant pair of bricks she’d secreted – leaning into her so clumsily she’d had to drop her shoulder to let the bag fall into his hand, then push against his foot to achieve her stumble . . . This wasn’t what she was supposed to be thinking about.
When
starting on a job
, Joe had always said,
first evaluate the client.
He’d been clueless, Joe, most of the time; stealing what he thought he knew from that black-and-white fiction that gave detection a bad name. But it was a mental exercise, if nothing else; something to keep her from that picture of Kid B lifting her bag, then stepping off the edge of a gap three years wide and a lifetime deep . . .

Amory Grayling . . .

– Yes, Joe.

When she’d been younger, she’d have had less trouble with Amory Grayling; would have pegged as good or bad his reasons for wanting to find Talmadge, and filed him accordingly. Life had become more complicated. Now, she couldn’t even be sure that Grayling himself knew what he was about. Amory Grayling had been Caroline Daniels’ employer and her friend, had viewed her with respect and affection, and had taken her for granted for twenty-two years. She’d doubtless been a paragon as a secretary, and doubtless too been a little in love with her boss. And maybe he’d never taken advantage of that, but it was a racing certainty the knowledge had given him ego-comfort over the years . . . And suddenly, she’d found a man. This wasn’t, perhaps, the most astounding development, but Zoë pictured Grayling’s puzzlement anyway . . . Maybe she was being unfair. But over and above the personal – no matter whom these women yearned for from afar – men liked, she suspected, the idea of single women; of single women no longer in first youth. It was less to do with there being an available pool than with simple market economy. To women who lacked, but wanted, men, men were blue-chip stock, valued for their wit, their charm, their opinions. Women no longer in those straits were less likely to overlook their nasal hair, their corpulence, their lack of tact.

She thought: but maybe I’m wrong; maybe Grayling simply cared, and still cares, and worries that Caroline’s lover is distraught, and in need of attention. Nobody should grieve alone, some thought. For Zoë, solitude and grief were necessary partners, but she was aware that some well-meaning people felt otherwise. It would be nice to believe there were good motives for doing things, things like paying Zoë to do her job. But she didn’t need to dwell on that long before deciding that the main thing, after all, was that she was paid to do her job, and since Grayling had written a cheque, perhaps she ought get on with it.

So she left the café, with this idea taking root: that she should trace Caroline Daniels’ steps home, as she’d traced them so far to her office. The woman’s working day had finished at 5.45: it wasn’t difficult to work out which train she’d have caught. Zoë might find someone who’d known her.
We were all shocked by the news. And tell me, how’s Alan?
This wasn’t likely. But it was the nature of the trade to play the odds, and besides, it gave her the rest of the day in London. She’d passed a sign a minute down the road, pointing the way to the local library. Before second thoughts set in, or better judgement, she was headed that way, thinking:
Ten minutes.
It was ten minutes out of her life.
Lay your ghosts while you have the chance
. That wasn’t something she remembered Joe ever saying, but it was his voice that formed the thought in her head, or so she decided, and while it wasn’t true that it was always a joy to remember him, or that she could ever pretend he was anything like a constant presence, it was nice to reflect she’d have him to blame when this turned out a mistake. Which chain of thought occupied her all the way to the library.

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.