The Last Voice You Hear (15 page)

‘Rules, darling,’ she’d told Zoë – drawling, two bottles in. ‘There are rules for everything – dating, fucking, breaking up. These are the rules for burglary.’

One. Ensure the premises are empty.

Once, Alison had been doing a flat on a winter’s evening: the place in darkness, quiet as night, and in the bedroom she’d found a middle-aged man, trussed like a Christmas parcel. PVC had featured largely. Seeing her, his eyes grew round as planets. ‘I think he’d been expecting Cruella de Ville.’ She’d left before his playmate returned.

Zoë didn’t expect, an animal sanctuary shop, there’d be bondage in train on the premises, but still. She held her breath and waited. The only sounds were external: traffic minding its business; the average evening hum.

Two. Turn a light on.
‘Nothing more suspicious than a torchbeam in an unlit house.’ Not that Zoë had a torch.

The light took a moment to respond – one of those low-wattage powersavers that burn dimly for a long long time. The passage grew narrower; smells crowded in: a tang of bleach through the toilet’s open door, instant coffee from the kitchen. She could see into the front of the shop: a trove of knick-knackery on shelving. Eighties fashions dangled from a coat-rail. Somebody passed outside. The newly lit light drew no attention.

Know what to ignore. Too much choice is like wearing divers’
boots.

She stepped into the shop and found the stairs behind the cash register. Ignoring a sign reading ‘Private Staff Only’ she took the stairs swiftly, ears piercingly alert. When something clicked or sighed, a vacant-house noise, her heart’s tempo quickened. She was embroiled in illegality here; had broken into a shop which sold nothing worth stealing. She wasn’t sure if it was criminality or stupidity speeding her heart. Punishment for either would boil down to the same.

Zoë left the upstairs light off.
Ensure the premises are
empty
was still tattooed on her mind. There were two rooms up here, and a bathroom; she checked for humans first, and found none. In the bathroom a tap dripped steadily, painting a green oval on the porcelain. She closed the door behind her, dampening its beat.

. . . Downstairs would be the usual castoffs: clothes hats toys jewellery. No telling where anything came from. But a flat clearance needed administration. In one of the rooms, a space had been cleared for a desk and an ancient computer – any older, it would have been an abacus. Quickly as she dared (
Four. Move deliberately. Your body bloats with
tension; you’re bigger than you were. You knock things over
) she turned it on and rummaged for a program disk: it really was that old. The screen groaned into green life. The necessary disk sat on the monitor, ‘Use this’ stickered to its case. Probably the closest Zoë’d ever come to a useful clue.

She’d owned one of these herself once. Inserting the disk, she recalled wasted hours – hell, months – spent watching it boot, so made quick inventory of the room while she waited. People who liked animals no longer liked, it seemed: the novels of Wilbur Smith, lampshades decorated with stars, wooden figurines, PlasterMaster kits, wax fruit, and much else Zoë sincerely hoped she’d not have found room for in the first place. Everybody thought that in charity shops, though. Nothing had
Property of
Victoria Ingalls
stencilled on it, and it wasn’t clear how helpful it would have been if it had.

When the computer was ready, it took her a moment to remember what to do next. There were more disks neatly stored in a plastic box, and she studied their labels now: Contacts. Accounts. Merchandise. Rota. Merchandise contained thirty files, and the machine took an actual two minutes to open the first, which was a pricing guide. Scrolling through – Zoë had learned to drive in less time than it took this program to run a search – she found no names. The computer’s electric hiccuping reminded her of the damn Star Wars robot: the pedal bin. Her famous patience with objects was wearing thin.

A car pulled up outside, and she froze.

There came voices, laughter, a car door slamming. Then a novelty hornblast, which hung in her ears while the car drove away. She had stopped breathing meanwhile, and again her heart pounded. The consequences of being found here, her inner Zoë remarked, far outweighed any possible benefit she might derive from it. Remind me of the purpose of this?

Five. Keep your eye on the ball, darling.

It was easy to drift under pressure; to forget, while burgling, what burglary meant. Alison had once tried a dress on mid-job. ‘I could have just put it in my bag. What was I going to do if it didn’t fit, take it back?’ But she had forgotten, momentarily, that she was a burglar, not a real person. Zoë pulled open drawers; found a pack of unused disks. They were of a size and shape no longer familiar, and she had to close her eyes and let her fingers remember the copying procedure. One instruction to store the information to memory; another to write it to the clean disk. The process could take ten minutes.

She began anyway, picking Merchandise, as it was handiest. While the machine growled she foraged the room, but found nothing significant among the tat. The window looked down on the back lane; the cardboard boxes she’d stacked for an emergency exit were just visible. And so was she – she’d broken rule whatever: she had no torch, but the monitor’s glow would be framing her in the window . . . She moved aside quickly. There’d been nobody visible outside. This didn’t mean there was nobody outside.

But Zoë felt alive. Felt more vital than in months, performing this illegal – this stupid – invasion.

The machine fell silent, half its job done. She inserted the clean disk, started it copying, then took herself to the other room; beginning to get used to this; beginning to move like a professional – on the balls of her feet, making next to no noise. And so busy congratulating herself she hit the light switch without thinking, and the sudden harsh brilliance of a naked bulb split her vision in two.

It sounded like sirens going off in her head.

She froze, making sure they really were in her head, not out in the world. On the street below, life continued: people going about their evening; none of them remotely bothered by a light above a closed charity shop. Get a fucking grip, Zoë instructed herself, very nearly aloud. There was a painful dragging sound somewhere close; it took her a moment to register it as her own breathing. She let it calm before turning to the room’s contents.

Like next door, there were boxes here; unlike next door, most had labels attached – dog/cat food; jigsaws; paperbacks; misc. items. Sometimes, you had to trust the paperwork. Ignoring food, games and ornaments, she opened the first book box and checked the topmost paperback’s flyleaf for a signature: somebody called Debbie Squiggle had owned it, once upon a time. The box held maybe forty similar; there were three boxes labelled ‘books’, and Zoë asked herself how useful examining each and every one would be, and found an answer quite quickly.

Clothes on the floor in a corner managed to be both neatly folded and piled in a heap at the same time. No knowing if any had been Victoria’s. An unmarked box held nothing but blank sheets of paper. Wild geese suggested themselves, but alongside other qualities, Zoë could be seriously pigheaded. There were other boxes; there were more corners. If she found nothing, she was at least going to know there’d been nothing to find. But
Six. Set a time
limit.
Five minutes more, tops. Enough to copy a second disk; to check the rest of this room. But she forgot about the second disk immediately she found the auction boxes.

This was how they were labelled: ‘For auction’. The same careful hand that had printed the rest. They sat below the window; neither hidden nor prominent – they were, after all, just four more boxes; whose contents, the records (heavy boxed sets of thick black vinyl), were all of operas; their names at once familiar and incomprehensible to Zoë, to whom the form was a locked room. The boxed sets made an impressive, heavy-looking mass comprising God knew how many hours’ music. If she started at one end and listened right through to the other, she might emerge significantly less ignorant, she supposed. But perhaps significantly less inclined to carry on living, also. It occurred to her that you could cram all this on to few enough CDs to snugly fit a shoebox, but the expense had presumably been beyond Victoria Ingalls – or perhaps she’d preferred the old-fashioned way. The CD boom gave everyone a chance to purge their musical history, though most went on to make the same mistakes again. But Victoria must have been happy with her choices.

There was never doubt in Zoë’s mind that these were Victoria’s records.

It made every kind of sense: how often did a shop like this – not the high-end of the charity market – wind up with treasure trove? A collection this size must be worth thousands. Too valuable to sell piecemeal downstairs. So it had been kept for auction; meanwhile, here it rested, arranged according to principles Zoë didn’t have the first clue about: Puccini next to Jan´a˘cek next to Mozart. Chronology or theme or taste: light and heavy: whatever. Now that she’d found them, what did they tell her? The answer remained an obstinate zero.

There was shouting out on the street, briefly – pub-bound youth – but it neither startled nor worried her; she was entirely inside her own space. The maze she’d thought about earlier came to mind, the one where you passed through door after door, moving ever further from your starting point, with no idea where you were going. She was hearing from her inner Zoë again, and the tone was unimpressed.
So what, exactly, were you expecting?
That
exactly
irritated. Zoë knelt, and ran a hand across the top edge of the ranked sets of records in the first box; automatically began to count, but stopped when she noticed. There was something here, but it meant nothing to her – one more language she was unversed in. Victoria Ingalls was dead as ever, and all Zoë’d found was something of the life she’d left behind.
So what were you expecting? Exactly?
She felt she’d won an argument she didn’t even believe in herself.

She ran the same hand across the second box, feeling mute music in cardboard packaging.

Next door, the disk had finished copying. She should take it, for what it was worth, and run; she should remember the final rule – the same as it ever was: for dating, fucking, breaking up. For burglary.
Don’t get caught.
Ultimately, Alison hadn’t taught her anything Zoë didn’t know already, and this, too, was the same as it ever was.

She ran a hand across the third box; felt the same rank of unknown pleasures beneath her fingertips, and tried to imagine owning them – their being part of her life’s furnishings; the physical objects the backdrop to her daily events, and the music they held the soundtrack. To collect them – not just the expense, but the actual time involved in choosing them, in learning them, in keeping on collecting – must have been immense; must have demanded commitment and tenacity. Which was what she was thinking when she became aware of an oddity she couldn’t put her finger on.

Putting a finger on, though, was the answer . . . She ran her hand across the tightly jammed boxes once more, and registered what had snagged her attention: something tucked between two records, pushing them apart so a slight gap intervened that her fingers had noticed, but into which they wouldn’t fit. A chime struck in her brain, and she knew her five minutes were up, that she should be out of here – risk increased exponentially, and her chances of walking away were shrinking by the moment – but shrugged these mental warnings off, and eased a record from the box instead, to give her fingers room.
The Cunning
Little Vixen
caught her eye; words unattached to any tune her mind remembered. Laying it aside she pulled another out, then another, until she had enough space to pull the foreign object free. When she’d done so, she barely glanced at it; its existence, right that moment, was enough for her purposes.

Zoë replaced the records in the order she’d removed them, then stood and scanned the room, to check what difference her presence had made. None, as far as she could tell. Another of Alison’s rules swam into mind, but swam out again too quickly for the words to form. It didn’t matter. She was done. She switched off the light and went next door, where the old computer had managed its trick, and was waiting, churning asthmatically, for somebody to make it perform another. Zoë retrieved the copied disk, put the others back where she’d found them, then shut the computer down. Downstairs, she killed the light in the hallway, and stepped into the yard. Way up yonder was a full moon, or a moon so very nearly full it made no difference. By the time she was over the wall and in the lane she wasn’t a burglar at all, but a woman out on her own, mid-evening: pretty respectable-looking on the whole, though her jacket had seen better days.

iii

It had not escaped Zoë’s attention that she was growing older. A dozen reminders nipped her daily, which in time would double then double again . . . But it was only lately, sifting dead women’s relics, that it had struck her how much everything else was ageing too. Her possessions, like theirs, were well embarked on the bleak trajectory from newly desirable to shabby-familiar: one day, everything she owned would be packed in boxes, and junked or sold for charity. Even gifts once cried over. And there wasn’t a lot could be done about this. The physical form – the body you tenanted – could be shored up: there was no shame now in going under the knife; it was an available alternative you’d be a fool to dismiss out of hand. And there were other measures, varyingly drastic – Botox injection, HRT, laser correction, toyboy: whatever worked. But it was all throwing money on top of a weary infrastructure: things looked brighter, gleamier, as if they’d probably work, but irreversible corrosion ate the foundations below. The high-speed trains all stopped when the signals failed. And the things you owned grew worn and faded, and were destined for boxes in the end.

Do I need a drink or what? she asked herself.

Zoë was in the car, heading back to Oxford; smoking, driving too fast; still agitated from her break-in, and alarmed at how alive it had made her feel. Was this what she’d been missing? And was it illegality or triumph boosting her? A triumph that tasted oddly like ash, because what it signified was somebody’s murder. It was the reason Victoria’s possessions had ended in boxes.