The Last Voice You Hear (13 page)

On walls hung posters of the great and good: Aretha, Otis, Sam. Framed behind glass was a concert-ticket montage, complete with ink scrawls suggesting autographs.

‘Help you at all?’

Zoë didn’t do this often: she gave him her card. She managed this without spilling music. ‘I’m looking for a missing person.’

‘Enquiry agent? Is that like Spenser or someone?’

‘There’s less shooting involved, but basically, yes.’

‘Cool.’

His surprisingly soft voice was surprisingly free, too, of irony. Like he really thought that’s what she was doing: cool things. This made enlisting his help easier, of course.

So she described Alan Talmadge – described him? Said that such a man existed. Late thirties, forty. A Motown fan.

With slightly shaggy fairish hair he had a habit of running his fingers through.

‘That’s all?’

She wasn’t positive about the habit.

‘It’s not a description, is it? More like a template.’

‘He might be a regular.’

‘I can think of a couple blond guys. But younger than yours, most likely.’ He swiped at one of his lenses with a forefinger. ‘One’s a Pete. Probably not him, then. Don’t know the other.’

‘It’s a young crowd you get, is it?’

‘Crowd’d be nice. But young, yeah. On the whole. Though we get a few second-time-rounders, soundtrack-ing their mid-life crises.’

This with the air of one who’d been there, done that.

‘Mostly men?’

‘I’d have to say ninety per cent.’

She nodded. She could have written these answers herself. ‘This man might have been here with a woman. A woman about my age, does that ring bells?’

‘What did he do?’

‘He’s missing, that’s all.’

‘I wonder, if I went missing, would anybody come looking?’

Zoë didn’t answer.

After a while, he said, ‘We don’t get many women. Your age, I mean. No offence.’

‘So she’d have looked out of place.’

‘That’s why I remember her,’ he said.

She’d been glancing back at that montage – did he really have Wilson Pickett’s autograph? – and for a moment didn’t register what he said; that he remembered someone: remembered who? The possibility that this was Caroline Daniels sent something like pleasure pulsing through her, though it was gone too quickly to be sure. And was dashed for good a second later:

‘She works in the shoe shop down the road.’

‘Oh.’

‘Name’s Engalls, or Ingalls. Victoria. I don’t know her. But she had one of those name badges they wear in shops, you know?’

Zoë knew.

‘She’d not been in before. Or since.’

Because she was a detective, and because you always kept the witness talking, she said, ‘So was she on her own?’

‘She was talking to a guy. I don’t know if she was with him or not, they might have just met on the stairs. Hey.’

Zoë waited.

‘He was, you know, fortyish. Late thirties.’

‘Was he blond?’

‘Kind of mouse brown, I think.’ He squinted back inside his memory. ‘I can’t say for sure. I might think blond just because that’s what you said. You reckon he’s who you’re after?’

She didn’t rightly see how he could be. ‘The woman I had in mind,’ she said slowly, ‘was somebody else.’

‘Oh. Still, no pain, no gain, right?’ He paused. ‘I don’t know why I said that, actually.’

‘When was this?’

‘Ages ago. Six months?’ He waited a beat, then added apologetically, ‘There’s not a lot of traffic. Lady from the shoe shop comes in, it’s hold the front page.’

‘But you didn’t recognize him?’

‘No. I wouldn’t now, to be honest. I mean, he walked in this minute, I wouldn’t know him from Elvis. Some guys fade, you know?’

She thanked him, and made to go. He called to her as she was leaving.

‘Hey. You ever get to shoot anyone?’

‘Only once.’

‘A bad guy, huh?’ he said, not believing her.

‘Real bad,’ Zoë said. ‘But mostly, he just pissed me off.’

ii

Some days, people couldn’t get more helpful.

‘Do you need assistance?’

‘I was looking for somebody,’ Zoë said.

This woman was in her teens, and her nametag claimed her another Zoe, but without the diaeresis. She tilted her head now, processing Zoë’s reply, and her mode shifted from professional – or possibly vocational: this
was
a shoe shop – to the personal: ‘Someone who works here?’

‘Her name’s Victoria, or Vicky. Ingalls, I think. I might have that bit wrong.’

‘Oh.’

And some days it only takes a syllable; just that brief release of air – some punctures you know about, soon as they happen. Zoë watched the other Zoe struggle for the right face, the right tone, and should have saved her the effort:
I know
, she could have said.
I don’t need to hear you
say it. Just tell me the where, when and how
. . . Victoria Ingalls was dead, and this was the story of Zoë’s life. There were living women everywhere, and she never got to know any of them.

‘I’m sorry –’

‘But she died,’ said Zoë, and it came out harsher than she’d intended. ‘How did it happen?’ she added, more gently. Thinking:
cancer
.

‘She fell. It was one of those . . . Last year, last August, you remember we had that rain? She fell, out walking. She fell and broke her leg. I’m sorry. Was she a friend?’

‘No. No, I didn’t know her. How did she come to die of a broken leg?’

‘She lay all night in a drainage ditch. And it was one of those rainy nights, so she just lay in the cold and wet . . .’

Zoë asked, ‘How old was she?’

‘About fifty.’ This other Zoe paused; made a quick scan for customers. ‘I didn’t know her either. I’d only been here a couple of weeks.’

‘Who were her friends?’

No one really.

But her name had been Victoria Ingalls, and she’d been single, and lived nearby. Never in great demand while alive, she’d achieved popularity by the manner of her death, which had been stark and Learlike. She’d been on her evening walk (and everybody knew this about Victoria Ingalls: she liked her evening walk), and from nowhere it had come on raining; one of those sudden semi-tropical downpours last summer had made famous. She’d started to run, but the ground was slick and treacherous, and next thing she’d been in the drainage ditch, her leg broken, and the rain coming down like God never promised a thing. And that was it. Exposure. It was hard to credit, but you could die the most natural death within five minutes of the nearest streetlamp. Somebody had found her the following afternoon, when Victoria was beyond all help.

It seemed to Zoë that the girl’s eye held an unshed tear, finishing this.

‘Where was her flat?’ Zoë asked.

‘I don’t know. I could find out.’

‘Would you?’

So she did, by the simplest means available: she looked in the phone book, which still listed Victoria Ingalls among the living. Zoë watched while the girl traced a finger down the relevant page. She was thinking of recording angels; of a girl like this with a thick black pen, picking names at random and scoring them through. She was so lost in it, just for a second, that this other Zoe had to read the address out twice.

Victoria Ingalls had lived in a large and shabby townhouse that had been converted some decades earlier into flats. Its façade formed an arch giving on to a yard that once sheltered carriages but now seemed barely big enough for two cars and a dustbin. The building didn’t look like it was going to fall down soon. It looked like it was going to crumble slowly. Zoë wrote a quick mental history of tenants hard to dislodge; of a filthy landlord resorting to lack of maintenance. Victoria’s flat sat empty, of course. Of the remaining three, the first was inhabited by a young couple; the others by single men: one in his thirties, the second older. Saturday afternoon, and all were home. She showed each her business card. And these were some of the impressions she gathered, in the course of sixty minutes:

‘She wasn’t friendly. Not
un
friendly, exactly, but she didn’t go out of her way.’

‘I always thought Victoria was unhappy. She had that look, as if life had done her down. That it wasn’t what she meant it to be.’

‘She loved the opera. There was always opera coming out of her flat. I’m not saying she was loud.’

‘Didn’t go out much. Fridays, Saturday evenings, nothing like that. She was usually in.’

‘She had a man friend, though.’

And this was said suddenly, by the female half of the young couple; a blonde girl, pretty in the way that comes with admiration – like a flower that only blooms when looked at. Her husband, who was tall and bony, and wore glasses the wrong shape for his face, said, ‘We don’t know that for a fact.’

‘I saw him leaving her flat. It was early one morning.’

‘He could have been . . .’

His wife, and Zoë, waited.

‘. . . reading the meter.’

Zoë said, ‘Do you remember when this was?’

‘Last summer, sometime. During one of the good patches. The weather, I mean.’

‘What did he look like? Was that the only time you saw him?’

But she’d seen him from the back, and yes, it had been.

The husband said, thoughtfully, ‘You know, she seemed happier last summer. Less . . . uptight.’

And the young woman hugged herself, as if she were storing a secret he really should have known about.

But when Zoë brought it up with the other tenants, neither could remember seeing a man about, or having heard noises a man might be expected to make.

‘I’d like to think she’d found somebody,’ the younger said. ‘But I never saw signs of it.’

And the older man said, ‘I’d have less trouble believing she’d snared a unicorn.’

Every evening, Victoria Ingalls had taken a walk after supper. She would make a circuit of a footpath beside the river, which the path followed a short distance before cutting through a patch of woodland. Then it skirted three fields to reach a drainage ditch, which it ran alongside until joining the road again. All of which Zoë gleaned from these fellow tenants – knowledge they’d absorbed without being sure how they’d done so. Certainly, none had ever accompanied her. But all agreed she’d had a routine, and stuck to it religiously. In this, and in much else:

‘Saturday mornings, supermarket. Sunday afternoons, she’d do the front windows.’

‘On the first of October, she’d switch to her winter coat. Didn’t matter what the weather was.’

‘You could set your calendar by her.’

Though her calendar had now stopped.

Routine was bigger than habit. Routine was a bulwark; a dike against messiness. Its obvious enemy was paranoia. Zoë wasn’t paranoid – she’d told herself so many times – but avoided routine, just the same; she spent too much time finding people to want to make it easy for anybody to find her. But she understood the need for routines. Some locked rooms were for keeping people out, not keeping them in.

‘She liked opera?’ Zoë had asked.

‘Yes. It was a big part of her life.’

‘How about pop music? Soul, rock? Motown?’

‘. . . Hardly.’

So what had she been doing in Soul Rider? Not exactly part of her routine.

‘What about family? Friends?’

But Victoria Ingalls had no family her fellow tenants were aware of. Her closest friend had worked in a surgery in town until cuts had done for that; she’d moved to Oxford, and their friendship’s regularity – its comforting weekly rituals – had given way to occasional outings: holiday efforts. Some short while after Victoria died, there’d been a flat clearance, and all her belongings – clothes, art, books, kitchenware – had been roughly tea-boxed and delivered to the local animal sanctuary shop.

‘She was fond of animals?’

‘I don’t know she was, especially.’ It was the young woman who’d known all this: and why, thought Zoë, was that no surprise? ‘Maybe it was just simplest.’

Or maybe she wasn’t over-fond of people.

There was no chance of entering the vacant flat; no point, anyway. The woman’s possessions had gone, and there’d be no clues in empty walls. If clues were available, or mattered: Zoë had to remind herself she wasn’t here to investigate Victoria Ingalls’ death – there was nothing here that withstood examination. She’d followed a trail that might have been Caroline Daniels’, and found instead another dead woman, linked to the first by the frailest of threads: a man who might not have been there, and a sudden, unverified interest in soul music. The only common point was the women themselves, and what kind of story was that? Two unconnected women dying in accidents meant nothing. The same women falling in love – if they had – meant little more.

Unless it was with the same man.

There was a kind of maze whose starting point was a room with many doors, each leading to other rooms with many doors . . . However lost you got, you remained connected to your starting point.

But however tenuous this link, Zoë had at least traced it. And once you allowed the connection, the story took shape: there was no love; there were no accidents. When you’d passed through enough doors, you were back where you started, but seeing it from a new angle . . .

She’d watched a bird once, frozen to a lawn, a cat hooked round it like a tarpaulin – one forepaw blocking its flight; the other stroking it gently, head to tail. If she hadn’t known what she was seeing, she might have taken it for tenderness.

If both men existed – if both were Alan Talmadge – he had murdered them.

She said, ‘Which shop was this?’

It was tucked on to a side street, and was closing when Zoë arrived; she got just enough foot in the door to discuss opening hours with a frosted, brittle woman in a green cardigan and a string of pearls that was surely a joke.

‘Monday morning. Ten o’clock.’

‘It was a particular donation I wanted to talk about. Victoria Ingalls?’

‘I just do the till,’ she said, ushering Zoë out with a forcefulness that suggested pro-wrestling was a missed opportunity. After barely enough time to take in the floor-plan Zoë was on the pavement, watching a cardiganed shape organize the takings through the window. Something about animal charities brought out the worst in humans. She made her way back to the car, and sat and thought.