Smoke & Whispers (4 page)

Maybe she wasn’t dead. That was a possibility Sarah could hang on to until the morning, at any rate.

At some point, hanging on, she let go. Her last thought was one she’d had earlier that evening.

If time was the means by which the universe prevented everything
from happening at once, coincidence was the excuse it used
when things occasionally did.

But as an excuse, it quickly wore thin.

4

She woke with a start from a dream in which she’d piloted a bus over a cliff, still groggy enough to hope her passengers had woken too. There was a loud hissing somewhere, though luckily this turned out to be the radiator and not a snake under the bed. It wasn’t light – what crawled past the blind was a grimy grey; a slight reminder of daylight – but the winking TV clock said 6.59, and flipped on to 7.00 as she watched. And as soon as she moved, she recalled she’d been drinking. This wasn’t a hard, hammering reminder. It was more of a suggestion of pain to come, like a grief recalled, or one about to happen.

She’d had the sense to acquire water before hitting the bed; not quite enough to have drunk more than a swallow or two. Arranging herself into a sitting position, she poured a glassful now and drank it gratefully, ignoring the memories that threatened to intrude. Payback was the worst part of any hangover – reality’s payback, when the evening’s wit and glamour were revealed as alcohol’s illusions. All over this strange city, she thought, grown men were waking up thinking
what
was that woman like? But this, too, was part of the payback: the mind magnifying self-inflicted embarrassments, and pretending anyone else cared.

There’d been a call from Russ logged on her mobile when she got back to her room. Her phone had been on silent; she hadn’t heard it ring. And it had been too late to call him then and was too early now. She sent a quick text instead, using short but sincere words, then dragged herself into the shower where she washed away last night.

There wasn’t water enough, though, to drown the hours ahead.

‘Ms Tucker?’

‘Yes?’

‘The inspector’s on the phone. He’ll be free in a moment. Would you come with me, please?’

‘You’re . . .?’

‘King. Detective Sergeant King.’

DS King was wide in the shoulders, but his jacket looked a comfortable fit: not off-the-peg then, she thought irrelevantly. He was West Indian, and wore his hair clipped to a soft buzz, with a tidy moustache-and-goatee set completing the look. A gold stud winked in one ear. Strangely, he was wearing trainers; a worn beaten pair which in no way matched his suit.

He noticed her noticing. ‘It’s a long story,’ he said. ‘I won’t bore you with it.’ He was holding the door open. ‘This way?’

It had just gone quarter past nine. She’d been on time for the appointment, but had been asked to wait anyway: here in the police station lobby, which had a shiny tiled floor and some heavily used noticeboards.
Is there an addict in your
life?
one poster asked, with small print that went on to explain how to find the answer. Another warned about alcohol abuse; a pretty raw subject where Sarah was concerned. But as her hangover’s symptoms receded, she recognized them for what they were: her body’s way of distracting her mind’s attention from what lay ahead.
Did your
best friend drown last week?
That wasn’t a poster, just a noise in her head, but it was loud and getting louder.
Is Zoë dead?
She hadn’t minded being kept waiting for the answer.

But now she was being dragged towards it, by a combination of time ticking past and a policeman in trainers. Down a corridor with scuff-marked walls they went, then up a flight of stairs, through whose smeary landing windows a dismal light swam. The inspector – his name was Fairfax – was kept in an office on the next floor up. His accent was not as broad as his sergeant’s. He was putting the phone down as they came though his door.

‘Ms Tucker?’

‘That’s right.’

When they’d spoken the other day she’d formed a picture of what he looked like, but had clean forgotten it now, so couldn’t compare the reality. Which was pretty ordinary: tall, with thin, rather elongated features. The hint of a developing paunch spoiled this effect. Like his sergeant he wore a dark suit over a white shirt; Fairfax’s, though, most definitely came off a peg. ‘Please. Take a seat,’ he said.

‘Thanks.’

Afterwards, she couldn’t remember a single thing about his office. At the time, all she noticed was the whiteboard behind him, which hadn’t been wiped effectively: the ghosts of erased messages hovered tantalizingly below its surface. It was like being whispered to by a billboard.

‘I understand you were a friend of Zoë Boehm’s.’

‘Were?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You said “were”. That’s what we’re here to find out, isn’t it? Not our friendship, I mean. Just what tense it’s in.’

From behind her, DS King said, ‘We don’t mean to jump the gun.’ That ‘we’ was taking collective responsibility a little far, she thought. ‘We do, though, have a dead woman. For your sake, we hope it’s not Ms Boehm. But it’s somebody.’

‘Yes. I didn’t mean . . .‘

What she didn’t mean trailed away; joined the erased deductions on the whiteboard.

Fairfax said, ‘The woman had a wallet in her pocket. It contained various bits and pieces – credit cards, some business cards. All belonging to one Zoë Boehm.’

‘But that’s not enough, is it?’

‘No. Not for a firm identification.’

‘What else do you have?’

He had leaned his elbow on his desk after sitting, and brought his palms together in prayer. Now he drew them apart, as if releasing something invisible. ‘That’s it, really. Your friend, she – she’s a little hard to pin down.' Your friend, she – Sarah nodded.

‘Her teeth seem in good order. The dead woman’s teeth, I mean. Or so the pathologist said, but we can’t find that Ms Boehm’s registered with a dentist anywhere. Would that come as a surprise to you?’

‘Little that Zoë does or doesn’t do would surprise me,’ Sarah said honestly. ‘She’s too sensible not to have a dentist. But she’s just – just paranoid enough to make sure nobody could trace her records.’

‘She’s a private detective.’

‘Yes.’

‘She had reason to be paranoid?’

He was having trouble with his tenses again, but she was past picking him up on it. ‘I’m sure she’s made enemies.’

‘Why might she be in Newcastle?’

‘Working. That’s what I assume.’

‘And you were aware that she was here?’

She nodded. ‘There was a postcard. She sent me a postcard.’

‘Saying?’

Sarah furrowed her brow, but was pretty sure she remembered the words. ‘“I’m staying in this mausoleum of a place.” The picture was of the Millennium Bridge. “I swear at night you can hear the mice making plans.”’

DS King said, ‘Making plans?’

‘I don’t think she meant anything by it. It was just a kind of joke.’

‘And you’re sure the postcard was from her?’ Fairfax asked.

‘It hadn’t occurred to me it wasn’t. It looked like her writing.’

Now Fairfax said, ‘When was the last time you saw her?’

‘More than a year ago.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘I thought you were close.’

‘That’s as close as she lets people get.’ She hated this: having to explain Zoë to a stranger. Their friendship was their business. ‘She’d call. It’s not as if we live in the same neighbourhood.’

‘When was the last time you heard from her?’ King asked.

‘That would be the postcard,’ she said, without turning round.

‘And the last time she called?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘But when she did, what did you talk about?’

She said, ‘Nothing to suggest she might head to a different city to jump in a river.’

Neither man replied to that.

‘That’s what you’re assuming, isn’t it? That she’s a suicide.’

Fairfax said, ‘We’re not assuming anything yet. Not until we get a firm ID.’

‘Well then,’ Sarah said. ‘Perhaps we’d better get on with that part.’

Making her way from hotel to police station – a straightforward journey, if one that took her through what felt like three different cities, so various were the aspects it presented – Sarah hadn’t been able to rid herself of the feeling of being watched: a sense not so much of eyes burning into her back as one of logged movement, as if she were leaving a trail. But then, she was in a city. Back home, her days were largely spent alone in her study; her too-frequent trips to the kitchen mitigated by a two-mile hike after lunch, during most of which she’d see nobody, unless Russ accompanied her. Human contact came at a remove: e-mail, fax, phone. So the sense of being crowded took getting used to, and didn’t mean that the observation was any more than the casual once-over every citizen suffered: from passers-by, from reflecting surfaces, from the cameras fixed at junctions, which swivelled at pre-determined intervals. And they reminded her, just for a moment, of the ostriches – Mr O and Nicole – whose heads would likewise track her when she passed their pen. They were just as detached, just as unblinking. And what they did with the information was just as unknowable.

It was a cold day, and the buildings looked moist to the touch, as if the river’s breath had soaked into their stone. Sarah had first been in Newcastle years ago, and had been struck then by its anonymity. She’d expected – well, she didn’t know what she’d expected, but something more than she’d found, which was exhaustion wrought in concrete and scaffolding; a palpable sense of relegation that was mitigated, but just barely, by the in-the-teeth-of-it humour of the locals, like the
Maggie was here
scrawled on the whitewashed window of a bankrupt business. At that time, a huge tract of the centre had recently been torn down, and a shopping precinct driven like a stake through the heart of the city. Wandering into it, Sarah had been struck by its lack of natural light, and the cheap glitz its shops afforded. It brought to mind a vision of a five-year-old in her mum’s high heels and moth-chewed feather boa.

Since then, things had changed. Less of the feather boa; more of the boa constrictor, sloughing one skin to show the fresh glistening surface beneath. Down by the river was where this change was most apparent. You could stand on a bridge after nightfall and think yourself in a European capital: lights dancing on the water, and big glass buildings winking at the stars above. There was music and art and sculpture; there were the new courts buildings, with the promise they carried of justice and order and jobs for professionals, and plenty of cafés and bars and restaurants where those same professionals could satisfy their daily need for latte and Shiraz and pesto. And everywhere, new buildings were under construction: luxury apartments with urban views to rival anywhere in the country, and with immediate access to live jazz venues; to museums of storytelling; to city-farms and organic groceries.

But Sarah knew, too, that the older city remained, and you didn’t have to look hard to find it. Behind the new and newly refurbished blocks on the quayside were the same small streets that had always been there; the same railway arches and lock-up garages; and hanging around them were the same people, pursuing the same lifelong objective of satisfaction bordering on happiness. There’d be untouched pubs on those old streets – untouched meaning unthemed – and in their snugs and saloons, Newcastle survived unaltered. You could doll a city up in new glad rags, but you couldn’t actually change its identity. It would be like trying to forge DNA. And this was a good thing, because otherwise you could always be anywhere; the name hanging over the streets irrelevant.

As she walked, she had wondered what Zoë had made of the place. It was an oddity of their relationship that she could rarely predict what Zoë’s opinion might be. That too had been a good thing. And as she contemplated this, she regretted the slippage of tenses, and recognized that all morning, she’d been preparing herself for what was almost upon her now, as the car driven by Detective Sergeant King came to a halt round the back of a large complex of buildings she guessed must be part of a hospital. Here were industrial-sized waste bins, and heating vents billowing out steamy clouds, and a pair of double doors with a horizontal Day-Glo strip painted across them; a strip which split as the doors swung to allow two boilersuited men to emerge, pushing a huge trolley laden with what looked like dirty laundry.

She’d done well, she thought, at the station.
Perhaps we’d
better get on with that part
, she’d said, as if the chore ahead was just another in a long list. But now she felt her legs jellying, and had to take a grip on the door handle to assure herself she had strength in her body. That she wasn’t about to collapse getting out of the car; to choke like a Brit at Wimbledon at the enormity of the upcoming task.

‘Are you all right, Ms Tucker?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘We’ll get you a cup of tea. You’ll have to wait a few minutes anyway. There’s hoops need jumping through first. Nothing you’ll be involved in.’

This was Fairfax, who managed the avuncular tone quite well. But she wasn’t in the mood for being cosseted. She needed a scratching post. ‘Well, enjoy your boys’ games. Is there anywhere special you’d like me to wait?’

Her legs worked well enough, it turned out, and slamming the car door helped. She’d folded her arms before she knew what she was doing; probably looked the archetypal angry woman, though the men hadn’t emerged yet, so didn’t notice. They’d be whispering a quick joke. When she unfolded her arms, her hands shook. No one had made her come here – it was the end result of her own decision – but that initial phone call felt a long way back; felt as if it had been the first step taken on to scree, to launch a tumbling she couldn’t halt. Too late now. DS King emerged from the car. Fairfax too.

‘This is hard for you. We realize that.’

‘Yes. It is.’

‘The DI came on like a patronizing tosser.’ This was said clearly enough for Fairfax to hear. ‘It’s just his way. He doesn’t mean anything by it.’

She had nothing to say. Words were sharp-edged objects, to be issued carefully, in case they caused damage. ‘Shall we. Get on with it?’

‘This way.’

Through those double doors, then, and up a stairwell: this surprised her. She’d imagined heading down; had expected a cellar, a lack of windows. King led the way. Fairfax walked beside her. Neither said anything until they reached a small room containing a glass-topped table on which a few leaflets had been scattered. There were also two plastic chairs, on one of which she was expected to sit.