The Last Voice You Hear (10 page)

A couple of months later she was meeting Poland, and law college was a bunch of prospectuses gathering dust on a shelf.

What he’d said first, after taking the top off his lager, was: ‘Joe talked about you. A lot.’

‘Did he really.’

‘He reckoned you were ace. He reckoned there was nobody you couldn’t find or turn inside out without leaving your desk.’

‘Did you know Joe well?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Then you know he was full of shit.’

‘My point is, Mrs Silvermann –’

‘Boehm.
Ms
Boehm.’

‘My point is, Zoë, if you plan to carry on without him . . .’ He put his glass down and repeated himself. ‘You’re going to need someone like me.’

She still remembered that moment. They were sitting in a pub garden; the sun was shining; a loose piece of guttering hung from the roof – details. Somewhere nearby a TV showcased a Mexican soap. It was 3.45 p.m. Joe was dead, as was the man who’d killed him. And Zoë had encountered a borderline case who’d announced his intention of shooting her, mistakenly confident she wouldn’t shoot first. After that, somehow, law school was out of the question. But it was only listening to Bob Poland that she knew she was stuck in Joe’s dream.

‘And why’s that?’ she said.

‘You’re wondering what use a friendly policeman could be?’

‘I’m wondering how expensive he gets.’

‘Joe always got his money’s worth.’

‘Joe bought batteries from street traders. He wasn’t the best judge of value.’

‘He ever get a speeding ticket while he knew me?’

‘You know what I heard? I heard the system’s so up-stuffed they let eighty per cent of the fines go hang, because they can’t process them before the deadline.’

‘You’re a cynical woman.’

‘Thank you.’

He laughed. ‘You’re one of those people, you’ve got like a tortoise mentality, don’t you? I don’t mean slow. I mean like totally armoured. You’re one of those people carries your defences wherever you go.’

And he was one of those people who said ‘one of those people’ a lot, as if he’d already sorted everybody into neat categories.

‘I do a lot of liaison work,’ he told her. ‘I’ve contacts in every force south of the border. See how handy that might be?’

‘And what does it cost?’

‘Whatever works.’

‘I think we’re finished here.’

He put his hands up. ‘Can’t blame me for trying.’

She could if she wanted. They batted sums of money about, then Zoë made the mistake of asking what happened, she paid him upfront and he didn’t deliver? He grinned a tooth-heavy grin, and separated a coin from the change in front of him. When he tossed it her way she snapped it from the air like a lizard catching lunch, but the grin didn’t waver, and the line came out pat: ‘Call your lawyer.’

Zoë remembered Joe saying Poland did this. She didn’t suppose Joe caught many coins.

Flipping it back, she promised: ‘You’ll do that once too often.’

‘You’re saying we’ve got a future?’

‘We’ll see how it goes.’

And as things go, so had this. Occasionally, Poland had been of use; often, he’d taken her money. And frequently she’d wondered if he weren’t a mistake, because there was an underlying ugliness to their exchanges. It came down to sex, like most things were supposed to – he was pissed off she’d never responded to his advances. That was something else about men (the list headed ‘Men’ was very long): rejection wasn’t a thing they forgave easily. And definitely something practice made them worse at.

But now they were miles distant, and getting further apart by the second. She told him: ‘I’ve a couple of names for you,’ and gave him Caroline Daniels’ details, including that she was dead. Then Alan Talmadge, though with no accompanying colour.

‘Some kind of spook, huh?’

‘Some kind.’ Then she realized he meant
spook –
a spy. ‘That hadn’t occurred to me.’

‘Sounds pretty fucking likely though, don’t it? James Bond porking some old lady from the typing pool.’

‘This particular old lady was younger than me.’

‘Yeah, well, that was bound to happen, wasn’t it? Sooner or later.’

Instead of replying she swung abruptly into the fast lane to overtake something redder and sportier than her.

‘I’ll do what I can,’ said Poland. ‘But if he’s a spook, you’re screwed. And it’s the same rates for failure.’

‘If we didn’t have those, you’d starve to death.’

‘And I didn’t have a sore head, I’d laugh.’

‘That’s nature’s way of saying Too Much Beer.’

‘You kidding? Charles Parsley Sturrock’s underground.’ He belched loudly. ‘Every blue in the country’s tied one on on the strength of that.’

‘Real nice, Bob. I can tell you’re in touch with your feminine side.’

‘I tried that once. My phone bill went through the roof.’

‘Boom boom.’

‘You know what your problem is, Zoë?’

‘Mostly it’s hating being told what my problem is.’

‘Also, you smoke too much. But your real problem, you’re one of those people with a case of the not-to-be-fucked-withs. Makes you kind of bitter, know what I mean?’

‘Tell me when you’ve run those names.’

‘Business, business. Maybe I’m not the one needs to get in touch with his feminine side.’ He broke the connection.

Zoë realized her foot was approaching horizontal, and eased up.

The red sporty number cruised past. There was a kind of insulted arrogance in this – like it was pointing out, she wanted to race with the grown-ups, she’d have to concentrate every step of the way.

And she remembered something else Bob had once charmingly told her, picking up on what he’d called her tortoise mentality:

The big thing about a tortoise isn’t that it carries its armour
round with it. The big thing about a tortoise is, it winds up on
its back, it’s fucked.

iii

She hit an easy run into the city. Even getting lost didn’t take as long as it usually did. When the two highrises broached the skyline, she steered by them as if they were hills seen from the sea.

And the lift worked, which showed that the universe was sometimes benevolent.

Remembering her moment of near-vertigo, Zoë did not look down from the fourteenth balcony; she was anyway struggling to keep her grip on the television, which was gaining weight by the minute. When Joseph Deepman opened the door, he seemed not to recognize her; the look on his face suggesting that one or the other of them was seriously out of place.

But when he spoke, he said, ‘You’re back.’

‘I’m back,’ she agreed. ‘Can I put this down?’

He stood aside, and she carted the TV into the sitting room; set it carefully in the space where the lost one had sat. Deepman gazed on this as if the whole process were something he had arranged and paid for, and was already bored by. Zoë had to remind herself this wasn’t the biggest thing happening in his life right now.

She stepped back, as if admiring a complicated piece of handiwork. ‘You’ll be able to watch the cricket, anyway.’

‘It’s April.’

‘I know.’

‘Cricket’s not for ages.’

There was this to be said for kindness to strangers: it didn’t take long for the strangers to put you off. You could be cured immediately, and never have to bother again.

She plugged it in. Deepman pointed out the cable for the aerial: she connected that too. When she turned it on, an American chat show brawled into life; one of those horrors featuring overweight crackers who’d slept with their siblings, or eaten their neighbours’ dog. Like other acts of global terrorism, this had an hypnotic quality; she switched it off before it sucked the life force from her.

‘Did you speak to them, then?’ he asked her.

‘Speak to who?’

‘The police. You said you’d speak to them.’

Zoë tried racking her brain for a memory of saying that, then realized there was no point. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t, or even that he didn’t really think she had. What mattered was, he was telling her now that’s what she’d said. It had become established fact, and denying it wouldn’t get her anywhere.

Not for the first time, she reflected there were advantages to age.

‘What did I say I’d speak to them about?’

‘Why they reckon he did it.’

‘You mean, why they think that? Or why he did it?’

Deepman looked at her with scorn. ‘You speak English? Why they reckon he did it.’

He turned his back on her and disappeared into the bathroom. A moment later, Zoë was on her way, reflexively flipping the light switch as she passed, which made nothing happen. He had yet to resolve the light bulb problem. The front door was hanging open; she closed it as she left.

Behind the wheel of her car, she sat resolutely ignoring the fact that she’d just wasted two hours dispossessing herself of a working television set; concentrated, instead, on the idea that she might be hungry. It was a little off the track for salad bars and soup parlours, so she started the car and cruised. Telling herself as she did that she definitely had no memory of promising Deepman she’d speak to the police. Inasmuch as she owed him anything, which she didn’t, she’d paid in full.

There was a small parade of shops not far distant; among them a café, where she chose a sandwich from a list on a blackboard. An alarming – if approximate – twenty per cent of everybody Zoë had ever heard say ‘espresso’ said ‘expresso’ instead, and here it was, up on this blackboard: ‘expresso coffee’. But now she discovered that maybe she’d been wrong all this time, because whatever they gave her, it wasn’t espresso. When she’d finished, she wandered the length of the mini-drag, whose shops were a clutter of grocers, video outlets, betting shops. And a hardware store. She went into the hardware store.

Back at the highrise, the lift still worked. This time Zoë paused on the balcony, reminding herself of height and danger. It occurred to her that she did not know from which building Wensley had pitched to his death. For no reason she could pin down, she was sure this was not the one.

The door to Joseph Deepman’s flat was ajar. She knew she’d closed it on leaving.

Her grip tightening on the paper bag she held, Zoë called his name. There was no reply. She stepped into the flat, wondering if she was imagining the icy touch on the back of her neck. In the hallway, she heard nothing, not even the ticking of a clock: time’s heartbeat. She called his name again. Putting the bag down, she moved into the sitting room. Nobody there. In the kitchen, she found a bottle on the table. Whisky, not a great brand, an inch or two from full.

Somewhere in the larger world of the highrise, something slammed.

‘Mr Deepman?’

The bathroom door swung open at her fingertouch. His body lay piled in the bathtub: a complicated mess lacking arms, legs, a head; in the fraction of a second before she recognized this for what it was – his dirty laundry, dumped here for convenience – it struck her what a hell of a job it must have been, to accomplish this in the space of a lunch hour. To remove his extremities, and rinse away his blood. Then she was turning away, moving towards his bedroom, because that was where the body must be: the only room in the flat unaccounted for.

It lay on the bed, so stiff it might have been its own sarcophagus.

Then it farted, loudly.

Zoë, backing out, backed smack into the man behind her:

‘
Fuck
ing hell –’

He moved aside just quickly enough to avoid her kick, and was covering his face, visibly frightened, by the time she was ready to hit him. So she waited, instead, until he’d lowered his hands, and his fear turned to outrage; she shifted from attacked to attacker in the time it took him to say ‘What the
hell
–’

‘It’s okay. I’m a friend.’

‘What’s that mean? I’ve never seen you in my
life
.’

He was younger than Zoë; somewhere in that vague arena of the late thirties: medium height, hair buzz-cut to suede; light, but it might have been mouse-brown, given the chance. He had pale eyes, pale skin; eyebrows so much an afterthought, they looked plucked. His top was light blue, with rolled-up sleeves. And his mood was finely balanced; things could get ugly, or he might be laughing about this soon.

‘Of him, I mean. Of Deepman.’ She lowered her hands. ‘The door was open. I thought – I thought something had happened.’

‘Like what?’

Like somebody had chopped him into sections and decorated the bathroom with him didn’t seem a good answer. ‘Who can tell?’

‘You services?’

‘No.’

‘So what, then? You’re not really a friend.’

She said, ‘I’m doing an old man a favour, that’s all.’

‘Right.’

‘That’s hard to believe?’

‘You’re not from round here, are you?’

She didn’t like being interrogated, but he had a point. Not for the first time she regretted getting involved; wished she could wind back the days, and do it differently.
Mr Deepman? I scammed your grandson once; gave him a really
foul instruction. Probably not the only adult to do that, but
every little helps, right?
She could have walked away if she’d said that. He could have sorted out his own bloody TV, his sodding light bulbs.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

‘Why?’

‘Because it saves me making one up.’

‘It’s Chris.’

‘I’m Zoë. Were you here all this time?’

‘I’d just popped next door. I didn’t mean to startle you.

Not if you’re what you say you are. Doing him a good turn, I mean.’

‘He was short a TV.’

‘There’s a lot of it about. Theft. Burglary.’

‘Has he been drinking?’

Chris said, ‘He’s had a couple, he’s lying down. Asleep is the only place he’ll fall,’ and Zoë wondered if she were that transparent, or if he was just good at between-the-lines.

She said, ‘Have you known him long?’

‘Not really.’

‘And you’re, what? Are
you
services?’

He said, ‘I’m not religious, if that’s worrying you.’

‘It crossed my mind.’

‘There’s people round here, they’ve enough problems. They don’t need someone trying to buy their soul in return for a little grocery shopping.’