The Last Voice You Hear (9 page)

She thought: Caroline Daniels, now – would someone who’d kept a tidy desk for twenty-two years really have welcomed love’s turbulence in her forties? Wouldn’t she have been better off without it? Because there was this possibility tugging at Zoë: if Caroline hadn’t fallen in love, would she have fallen off that platform? They say the ground drops away beneath your feet: yes. But they say it like that was a good thing to happen, and they never tell you what comes after.

It was gone eight. She spent an hour signing into sites she generally used one at a time, feeding
Alan Talmadge
over and over into hungry boxes. Deep down, she already knew this wasn’t the way to find him. It was just the quickest way of proving that.

Once she’d run out of sites, she showered and dressed. She’d check for answers later. Meanwhile an itch needed scratching; clean and caffeined – wired like hell – she went off to scratch it.

An alley ran from what had been the old market square and was now the new one – and remained the same, only with cappuccino bars – and a college lived on it, though not a real one; one of the city’s crammers, offering force-fed GCSEs to the offspring of the middle classes, and jobs to otherwise unemployable graduates. This was where Andrew Kite studied; Andrew Kite, once and briefly ‘Dig’, whom she’d hauled kicking and swearing from London, when his parents paid her to bring him back.

For reasons a profound mystery to Zoë.

Except there was no mystery really; it had been the same old/same old story. Andrew had been a troubled, confused,
conflicted
kid – a spoilt little bastard. The first Zoë had heard of him had been from his anguished mother, a tall ash-blonde strung like a pro-tennis racket. ‘He’s fourteen,’ she’d said. ‘He could be anywhere.’

Her focus kept shifting, as if there were events flitting about that needed keeping an eye on. Her distress seemed both real and faked to Zoë, but there was nothing unusual about that. Charlotte Kite was too intelligent not to know that if her son was screwed up, it was partly her fault. But Zoë wasn’t in the business of judging others. Not until she’d invoiced them. ‘I’ll find him,’ she said.

And she would, because he couldn’t be ‘anywhere’, not really. He wasn’t at his expensive day school, from which he’d disappeared before, and he wasn’t upstairs in his bedroom-cum-video-arcade; a Santa’s grotto of the dying millennium, where the only things not plugged in were the still-unwrapped Christmas presents. Which left London or Ibiza. It was sad, the narrow horizons of the adolescent male.

So she found him; followed the trail of plastic he’d slung like a clew through a labyrinth, and even when it dead-ended in an off-licence, where a tired intelligent woman had retained his mother’s credit card, he wasn’t hard to find. He’d been tall even then, and privileged-looking, and would have been meat if he’d not hooked up with Kid B. Since when he’d been on the rob, a detail he shared on the trip back to Oxford. ‘On the rob.’ This, too, was depressingly ordinary; not the downward spiral into crime, but the laboured appropriation of street-lingo that went with it.

Zoë hadn’t asked him about Kid B. Kid B had ceased to matter.

And now she waited by an estate agent’s, resisting the impulse to smoke. Colleges like this ran on hourly timetables; he’d be there or wouldn’t; she’d find him or not; either way, this would happen by ten. It barely mattered. It was as if the absence of that envelope had left her in limbo; somehow, this was where she’d always been: waiting for a brown envelope that never came. She realized she had one hand pressed to her breast. She must look like a heartbreak just recently happened . . .

Shortly after ten, Andrew Kite came through the glass door of the college with a QUIKSILVER backpack over one shoulder and two pretty females in his wake. A moment later a fourth student followed: a boy with either a shaving wound or more likely a running boil on his neck. Zoë stepped forward just as Andrew noticed her.

‘Hello, Andrew.’

He blinked. He was no taller than three and a half years ago, but he’d filled out; looked like a CK poster boy. His hair flopped in a passable Hugh Grant. Acne happened to other people. ‘Do I know you?’

‘We ran into each other once.’ He didn’t react. ‘In London.’

‘Do you know this woman, Andy?’

The girl thinking: it was so just barely likely
that
could happen.

Andrew looked directly at Zoë. ‘I think you’ve got the wrong person,’ he said politely. ‘I’m not in London much.’

She showed him the palms of her hands. ‘You sure about that?’

He nodded, then strode down the alley, girls and boy behind him. The boy cast a puzzled glance back at Zoë – unsure what she thought she’d been doing, trying to bridge this chasm of age and beauty – then did a catch-up lollop after Andrew, who was being audibly badgered by the females. Zoë couldn’t make out words, but had no trouble imagining them.
Really
and
awful
and
woman
.

Whatever did she
want
, Andy? She let them turn into the square before following.

The square was milling: students and shoppers and others with no obvious excuse. Andrew and Co breezed through to colonize a table outside a coffee bar on the far side. Zoë lit a cigarette. After a while a waitress came and took their order. After another while she came back with drinks.

Watching, it seemed to Zoë that Andrew Kite sat in a shaft of sunlight, as if weather had singled him out for treatment: he was young, strong, healthy; worth caressing. He had fucked up once, but everybody got a second chance, except Kid B. He was drinking coffee-coloured froth from a tall glass. As she watched, he ran a slow hand through his rich hair. Zoë dumped her cigarette, and went to join them.

Andrew was saying something about a monster DJ, or a DJ monster. He broke off at her approach. ‘You’re back.’

‘I’m back,’ she agreed.

The others stared as if she were an unexpected natural disaster: a typhoon in the English countryside, or a broken TV anywhere at all.

‘I’ve already explained, you’ve got the wrong person.’

Zoë shook her head as she pulled out a vacant chair. ‘The wrong person was the other boy, Andrew. You going by Dig still? Didn’t think so.’ She sat.

‘We don’t want you here,’ one of the female children said. Zoë ignored her.

‘The wrong boy was Wensley, Andrew. Wensley Deepman, remember? The wrong boy in the wrong place leading the wrong fucking life. I just thought you should know, Andrew. He’s dead.’

It took an expert, but something shimmered beneath Andrew Kite’s surface.

‘They found him under a tower block. He’d just taken a shortcut nowhere. He was twelve years old. Am I ringing bells?’

He licked his lips. Then said, ‘I just think you should piss off, that’s all. I think you should just leave us alone.’

‘I will. But you should know this first, Andrew. Call it a lesson in responsibility.’ She turned to the others. ‘Your friend here, he’s got a bit of a past.’

‘We don’t need you telling us anything.’

‘Maybe I need to tell it.’ Zoë felt a tremor trap her right hand, as if a nerve had spasmed. ‘Last time, well, he ran away to London. Did a little thieving, a little smash-and-grab. Real jack-the-lad, weren’t you, Andrew?’

He said, ‘These people are my friends. We’re not interested in your opinions.’

‘And you found a friend there too, didn’t you? Wensley Deepman. A little thug. Took you under his wing. He was nine years old.’

The boy looked from Zoë back to Andrew. The girls didn’t waver.

Zoë said, ‘So I found you and brought you home. Mummy and Daddy paid for that. And now you’ve grown up a bit, and you’re studying, and you’ve got nice-looking friends, and here you all are drinking latte in the sunshine. But Wensley had nobody to take him home. He was already home. And now he’s dead.’

‘That’s not my fault,’ Andrew said.

‘No. But he’s still dead.’ She stood. ‘I wish you luck, Andrew. You look like you’ve sorted some stuff out. But these things cost. You should be aware of that.’

She stuffed her hand in her pocket before it could spasm again. The kids would think her drunk. There was probably something else she should say, but she couldn’t for her life think what; and nor did she look back as she walked away.

The encounter left her feeling stupid minutes later –
what
was the point of that, Zoë?
Joe’s voice, she thought, then: No, not Joe’s, Sarah’s. Which was a laugh, because if there was anybody you didn’t need as the voice of your conscience, it was Sarah Tucker. You’d enjoyed your last moment’s peace if you had Sarah Tucker telling you right from wrong. Which didn’t mean Zoë didn’t love her, she supposed, but there was tricky history involved. Since getting Joe killed, which was part of the tricky history, Sarah had gone to live up north, where she’d met someone she said was a nice man. Zoë hadn’t seen her in some years, nor ever laid eyes on her ‘boy and two girls’.

‘I worry about you,’ she’d said, last time she’d called.

‘You don’t need to. I’m fine.’

‘You’d say that tied to a railway track,’ Sarah diagnosed. ‘You’d say, “Go away. I’m perfectly all right.”’

It was good to have friends, but it was also good when they lived miles away, and you never saw them.

Home again, she checked her e-mails. Nothing had come through on Alan Talmadge, or nothing that wasn’t negative. He did not hold a driver’s licence; was not registered to vote. He had no credit card, no mortgage, no – slightly off the wall, but it had borne fruit before – season ticket to any Premiership club. He did not belong to a major political party, subscribe to a national newspaper, or shop at Amazon – he’d never bought anything online at all. Which might have had something to do with his not having a credit card, of course. After a while, you were searching in the same places twice; if he’d not been there the first time, he was unlikely to turn up the second.

. . . Alan Talmadge had no telephone, no mobile, no email address.

Zoë rose abruptly; paced the small room. Aside from her computer and a foldaway bed, it held a lot of books: she’d been a reader once, though that was a habit she’d shucked without noticing. Also the music she’d once needed: the usual rock and roll; the odd piece of soft classical or easy jazz. Mostly on vinyl, of course.

. . . Alan Talmadge had belonged to no record club, no book club. Alan Talmadge had not possessed a TV licence.

The TV was also in here. Occasionally she’d wheel it out, usually when it was late and she needed numbing, but that happened less and less . . . Either she was developing a puritanical streak, or very slowly she was ceasing to exist.

‘Fuck this,’ she said, under her breath. She had no idea who she was addressing, or where her sudden anger came from.

. . . Alan Talmadge existed: that was a given. But he was either a throwback, or he wasn’t called Alan Talmadge . . . It was possible Grayling had got the name wrong, of course. Larger matters had foundered on smaller details. But if he had, fuck him too: Zoë had better things to waste time on than clients’ misinformation. Given a moment, she’d come up with some.

She had never noticed before how dumbly vacant a TV set looked, like a mistreated puppy. If she had any sense, she’d junk the damn thing.

. . . And there was Sarah’s voice again, telling her right from wrong. It wasn’t just the TV needed junking, Zoë told herself twenty minutes later, loading the bastard into her car. It was her whole damn history, beginning with everybody she’d ever met. Maybe that way she’d get some rest eventually. She glanced in her mirror; pulled out. She wasn’t so paranoid as to check whether anyone was following, but it wouldn’t have made a difference if she had.

* * *

On the way, she rang Bob Poland. It was his day off, but if she was disturbing him, she was disturbing him. Theirs wasn’t a relationship based on kind regard.

‘So what are you doing anyway?’

‘Oh, you know. Sitting down. Drinking a beer.’

‘And they say men can’t multi-task.’

‘Funny woman. You ring just to piss me off, or what?’

Because that’s the only time she ever called him: when she had a problem.

The first time she saw Bob Poland, she thought: here’s a man who’s been given the wrong head. It was a moonish addendum to a frame otherwise angles, straight planes, edges. She didn’t know how he kept lean – every time she saw him he had a drink in one hand and another behind the bar – but it worked, except there wasn’t much he could do about the head. ‘Like a stick of rock with a tomato on,’ Joe had said. Then added: ‘Never tell him I said so.’

– No, Joe.

Bob Poland, anyway – a six-foot jawless stringbean – was a cop. Joe had known him first, of course; Joe had bought him, to start with, drinks and smokes, and finally just bought him, or that was how Joe told it. In his mind, Joe had always walked tightropes. In the real world, Zoë suspected, he’d had the same experience she’d enjoyed: shovelled a bundle of money Poland’s way to keep him on-message, and in return got whatever he felt like giving, which was mostly nothing. Though she didn’t expect he’d wasted so much effort trying to get Joe into bed.

He’d contacted her a couple of months after Joe was in the ground.

‘If you’re thinking of carrying on, you’ll need someone like me. Maybe you’d like to buy me a drink.’

And after all, whatever else he might have been, he was verifiably a cop. There was bound to be a time when one of those would come in handy.

. . . None of this was what she’d intended. The day Joe died Zoë had been in Paris, armed with a man and a plan. The man hadn’t lasted – had never been meant to last – but the plan was built and sorted: she would cut her last ties with Joe (their marriage, by now, was one of those linguistic anomalies anyway: a word that covered its own opposite meaning, like ‘
cleave
’) and go back to college, convert her law degree. It was a getaway stratagem; a running from, not a moving towards. But at least it would work.

It was not entirely Joe’s fault. (This was a revision of her earlier stance, which had been that it was entirely Joe’s fault.) For as long as she’d known him, he’d harboured a dream of being a private eye, and there had been in him this quality that over the years she’d defined in turn as steadfastness, whimsy, pigheadedness and bullshit that had kept the dream alive even when the reality demonstrably sucked. Process serving. Credit checks. It was work, if you didn’t know it was glamorous, you could mistake for the daily drudge: work done over the phone or in front of a monitor; work done murdering countless hours outside strangers’ houses, hoping they’d not turn violent when you served them. Work that called for patience and shorthand, neither of which Joe had in great supply. So he’d kept his dream alive by hiding it where reality couldn’t touch it; Zoë, meanwhile, kept the office alive with credit checks and process serving, and kept her sanity by blowing off to Paris once in a while. They were still man and wife when she made that last trip, but were no longer cleaving to each other – were doing, in fact, the exact opposite. She would cut her last ties with Joe; go back to college, convert her law degree. But before she could do that, somebody cut Joe’s throat instead.