The Last Voice You Hear (2 page)

When Dig looked through the back window, crying now, at the last he’d ever see of Wez, what Wez was doing was some kind of war dance, there in the oil-patched damp of the car park – hopping from one leg to the other, waving his fists above his head as if summoning massive urban vengeance on the lady, and all the time the words cascaded out of him: damaged words, hurtful words, he never seemed to get to the end of, as if this constant battery of noise were the only means he had of squeezing all the venom out of his poisoned nine-year-old heart.

Chapter One

Kid B

i

When she was bored, which was often, she’d roll little paper balls (silver paper was best) and flick them one after the other, using thumb and second finger, at whatever target caught her attention: the clock on the wall, the door handle, the wastepaper bin. It was a strategy developed over years, one of the things she did instead of smoking, except sooner or later – mostly sooner – it became one of the things she did as well as smoking; another useless talent for her portfolio. Something to fall back on, when she was bored.

They didn’t allow smoking on First Great Western. She didn’t expect they’d take kindly to her flicking paper balls about, either.

The train bucked. 7.56. It picked up speed as it crossed the river. Zoë had bought her ticket with a full fifteen, nearly sixteen, seconds to spare; now she put out a hand to steady herself – she was on her feet; there were no free seats in sight – as a voice in her ear said
and with news of
today’s weather here’s
and another, overhead, announced something about available seating at the rear of the train: Carriage A. She was in D. Adjusting the tiny speaker in her ear –
a grey start with sunny intervals –
she followed the other seatless passengers trooping in that direction, as noise about buffet service began to compete with the headlines. Already, nobody was looking at her. Already, almost every passenger had settled into a morning ritual: newspaper, mobile phone, work-related papers.

. . . Zoë Boehm was at work. She was on her way to London to meet a man named Amory Grayling. Amory Grayling wanted to talk to her about Caroline Daniels. Caroline Daniels was dead.

on a housing estate in east London. The body has been
identified as that of a twelve-year-old

The doors whooshed open automatically, or wished they whooshed – more of a clunk and slide.

This next carriage – she was in B now – was also full; its last free seat just being claimed by a grateful-looking thirty-something man in an aubergine top under a black jacket. For a second their eyes caught, and she wondered if he were going to offer her the seat – neither expected nor hoped; just wondered, with a detachment arising from pure science, whether he’d do that – and he broke contact, reaching to stow his briefcase on the overhead rack before settling down with a rueful grin directed more at himself than at her, Zoë thought. She moved on. If she’d been ten years younger, he’d have offered her the seat. But that too came with detachment, and she didn’t look at him again as she reached the last of the carriage doors.

taken off the field last night after apparently being struck by
a hurled coin. A spokesman for the club said

There were seats here, she saw immediately, and realized just how pissed off she’d have been to have to stand all the way. She took the first available – part of a four-seater round a table – making a small grateful noise as she did so. That was a thing about headphones: they made you over-ready to respond; compensating for the fact that you’d voluntarily cut yourself off from communication. This was merely an observation; not something that bothered Zoë. As she sat, though, communication happened anyway: the man by the window said something, pointing briefly at her headphones. She had to lean closer to hear.

say they have no leads at the present time. Charles Pars

‘I said, this is the quiet carriage.’

He could have fooled Zoë. The train was bucketing along: she could barely hear her radio.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘No mobiles, no personal stereos.’

‘Oh. Right.’

She turned it off. Not naturally an obeyer of orders, she nevertheless had a well-developed sense of when she was on somebody else’s territory. The man had already forgotten her. He sat staring out of the window, or perhaps at the window itself: his eyes lacked that constantly changing focus of somebody watching a world flash by.

The
Today
programme presumably carried on broadcasting. Her mind, too, kept transmitting mixed messages: stuff she needed to remember; things she’d rather forget. Amory Grayling’s address, for instance; she’d written this down, of course, but it would be pretty to think she could manage the trivia without depending on paperwork. Caroline Daniels had been his PA . . . And if the conversation had gone on longer, she thought, her journey now wouldn’t be happening: Zoë didn’t do death. What had happened to Caroline Daniels had taken her out of Zoë’s league. Amory Grayling had finalized arrangements before she’d got round to telling him that . . .

We’ll have to fix you up with an appointment
.

She shook her head free of the unwelcome memory.

Anyway, she thought, she’d get paid. Look on it as a day out; a trip into the city. Her mornings were nothing special. Maybe life would be stranger on a train.

April was still new, still unsure of itself. The sky was grim, but a thick shaft of sunlight hammered down on some blessed event to the east. Through the window, in a field, by an electricity pylon, Zoë saw a tumble-dryer. It was in her past a moment later, but that’s what it had been – a tumble-dryer. How could anything get to be so out of place? And as soon as the question occurred, its answer arrived: somebody had dumped it; had loaded it into the back of a car or whatever, driven it out to that middle of nowhere, and left it for the weather to corrode. There was no real mystery why things ended up where they shouldn’t. A better question would be: How come anything ever turned out to be in the right place? Which was as well for Zoë, probably. She found people – it was one of the things she did. She was a private detective. She found people who’d ended up where they shouldn’t.

She caught the eye of the woman sitting opposite, who smiled briefly, then bent her head to her book, a history of the labour movement. She had arranged herself, it seemed to Zoë, for maximum comfort within the space allowed; a position in which she was not directly facing anyone – so probably wasn’t too keen on repeated eye contact . . .

Walking to the station by the towpath, Zoë had encountered one of the city invisibles: a homeless man burdened with candy-striped laundry bags and a bashed-about hold-all – a man of about forty, in a too-big suit; intensely shy of human contact. When she’d rounded the corner on to the path, he’d been making the sign of the cross, his luggage forming a Calvary at his feet. But at Zoë’s approach he’d stopped abruptly, gathered his stuff, moved on. He’d spent the night, probably, under an open sky, but couldn’t carve a private zone out of all that space. And now Zoë Boehm sat in a crowded railway carriage, and all around her travellers had claimed territory for themselves and their morning tasks; areas the size of an unfolded newspaper, a laptop, a book, or a pad and pen. It was the unconscious reflex of the property owner, she decided; this unquestioning settlement of available space. Those with salaried functions took what they needed, while those without could barely cross themselves in the open air.

But she wouldn’t get snotty about commuters. She owed her existence to one.

Zoë closed her eyes. The rhythm went on around her. Repetition was how you’d survive a daily journey like this; it was both what you endured and what got you through. It was there in the noise the wheels made; it was there in the landscape outside, patiently painting the calendar day by day. It was probably there in the thoughts running through the journeyers’ heads.

She was on her way to London to meet a man named Amory Grayling. He wanted to talk to her about Caroline Daniels. Caroline Daniels was dead.

We’ll have to fix you up with an appointment
.

After a while the train slowed and stopped; people got off, people got on. When the man next to her departed he left his newspaper; snaffling it, she resettled by the window. A new woman claimed her old seat and produced from a briefcase an apple and a sheaf of e-mail printouts larded with acronyms. As the train pulled away, Zoë unfolded the paper to a report of a football match in which a defender had been struck by a coin flung from the crowd: a ten-pence piece had hit him above the left eye, and the resulting wound required stitching. What might have happened had he been hit an inch lower barely bore thinking about. She refolded the paper, and on the adjoining page found a photograph of Charles Parsley Sturrock, who remained as dead as he had been three days previously, when the same picture had been front-page news. A professional hit remained the popular scenario, though a police spokesman admitted no obvious leads. Which was likely, in Zoë’s opinion. Policemen generally were too busy celebrating Sturrock’s death to have done much in the way of investigating it.

A mobile phone went off, and harsh words ensued. The guilty party fled the carriage to enjoy his conversation in the vestibule. The woman opposite, Zoë noticed, had abandoned her history book for a paperback detective novel, and was looking happier.

And I wonder what she’d say, thought Zoë, if I told her what I did for a living.

There was a thought. The woman would probably not have believed her, but there were days when Zoë didn’t believe it herself. She had recently read – in a novel review – that private detectives were unconvincing, and couldn’t help feeling that the critic had a point. Not that she felt unreal, exactly; was, in fact, more aware of her physical self than she’d been in years – of her heart performing its extraordinary work. Of a tingling at her fingertips, here, now. But the job – the critic had a point. The job was part anachronism, part absurdity, and called to mind, when stated baldly, the usual suspect images: trench coat, bottle of rye, wisecracks out of the side of the mouth. Fact was, like everybody else, she spent most of her working life in front of a monitor.

Fact also was, she had once killed a man.

The fields outside gave way to industrial estates. The train passed a brick tower with a broken clock, its hands hanging at 6.30, or almost at 6.30; in fact at a dead version of 6.30, where the minute hand hid the hour at the parallax point; an inverted midnight. She wondered whether the mechanism had just snapped of a sudden, or whether this was the result of a slow surrender to gravity, observable only by those with the time and the inclination to watch. With most faulty clocks, you could tell when they’d stopped working. This one had ceased to function so completely, it had disguised the moment of failure.

The man she had killed (she had shot him dead) would have killed her, given the chance; a chance which would have arisen, if she hadn’t shot him first. If it mattered, her job hadn’t come into it. She’d been there, that was all; in his sights, and a gun in her hand. Him or her, the way it might have happened in a private detective novel. Nothing about her frequent rehearsing of the memory made any of it more convincing. There was no possibility of relating any of this to the woman opposite, and in any case, the information would only have frightened or depressed her.

It was time not to think about this any more. Zoë turned the page, an irritating business involving spreading paper everywhere, and when she was done, words anyway swam into nonsense; became a cacophony of newsprint containing too many adjectives. She had shot a man, and felt nothing about it, and this, in retrospect, was the problem. She felt nothing about it, but it had broken her heart. It was just that she had not known what a broken heart encompassed, imagining – or remembering previous occasions, when she’d thought she’d suffered one – that it involved hurt; an unfamiliar clenching of an overused muscle. But it meant, she’d learned, what it sounded like: a broken heart was one that no longer worked. It managed its daily labours all right – that extraordinary effort she was so aware of right now; the ceaseless pumping with its whoosh and splash of constantly propelled liquids – but the other stuff, the
heart
stuff, it just didn’t do any more. She felt almost nothing. She was rarely happy. She was rarely sad. She got by, that was all. She felt almost nothing. And she had not noticed the moment at which this had started happening. Her feelings had ceased to function so completely, they had disguised the moment of failure.

She was staring at the woman opposite, she realized. It was as if everything had coalesced into one obvious point of blame, and this poor woman was it. Zoë closed her eyes. It wasn’t entirely true that she felt almost nothing. There were times when she remembered how capable she’d once been of hatred.

The rhythm of the rails bore into her mind, singing
We’ll
have to fix you up with an appointment
. She rustled her paper. Tried to concentrate. The story blurred in front of her, then reassembled itself: letters, words, paras. A photograph. An echo of a headline from the radio news . . .

The body of a twelve-year-old had been found at the foot of a tower block on an estate in east London. The accompanying picture, a school photograph, showed a boy significantly younger than twelve, and it was not hard to draw the conclusion that this was the last available picture of him smiling – maybe the last time a lens had been aimed at him other than in anger. In the picture, the boy – Wensley Deepman, his name had been – was seven, maybe eight, and gap-toothed; and the teeth either side of the missing shone whitely out of a light-brown face in which glowed all the potential traditionally associated with children’s beaming features; features in which a doting parent might discern a future doctor or lawyer, and the child himself in later years might rediscover the astronaut or engine driver he’d always meant to be. A broken twelve-year-old body was not generally included in such forecasts. And anyway, Zoë knew, most of whatever potential had existed in this seven- or eight-year-old had been squandered long before he’d taken flight from his grim tower: the last and only time Zoë had seen him, he’d been hurling abuse as she dragged his erstwhile sidekick back to his parents.
You
, she’d told him.
Piss the fuck off
. Three years later, it appeared, that’s more or less what he’d done.

She laid the newspaper aside, her taste for knowing what was happening in the world quite undone. Beyond the window the North Pole appeared, where the jawbones of electric trains sat abandoned, like the remnants of a future civilization, and just for a moment it appeared as if a dull grey rain were falling on everything, but that turned out to be dirt on the windows. Zoë closed her eyes. She didn’t sleep. Everything stopped for a few minutes, nevertheless.