The Last Voice You Hear (29 page)

Gwyneth fluttered at his voice: she was getting beyond a joke – Ross said, ‘Somebody is going to die unless I get an answer in the next five seconds.’

She looked at Russell, who looked right back. There should have been more of an exchange in that glance; they should have been communicating something deeper than just the gap between them. A gap which one or other of them, usually her, had always been able to bridge with one of the simple formulae:
I’m sorry/I didn’t mean that/I love
you.
But here and now the few yards between them were too far to travel, because Ross had said
Somebody is going to
die
and all of a sudden she believed him.

Russell said, ‘Sarah –’

Sarah. Because, she thought, it was always going to be her task: to forgive him, or to betray her friend. It didn’t much matter in which order these things happened.

‘It’s okay,’ she said.

He looked at Ross. ‘She isn’t here. She left,’ he said, and that wasn’t what Sarah had been expecting.

‘Yeah, right, fine,’ said Ross. Then he thrust the muzzle of the shotgun through the mesh of the fence and pulled the trigger.

The noise echoed inexpressibly down the rest of Sarah’s life. It never stopped. Something screamed briefly, but whether it was herself or Russell or Gwyneth couldn’t be told: she saw feathers, blood, meat; something that once lived and recognized humans. Then saw nothing for a second or two. Then saw it all again, and none of it had changed. Ross pulled the gun back through the fence. He looked at Sarah, looked at Russell. ‘That didn’t have to happen.’

Maddock had let go of her, she realized.

Burke said, ‘Oh, fuck . . .’

Russell stared at what used to be Gwyneth, and his lips moved but no sound came out. He licked them. Something gathered at the corners of his eyes, and if it wasn’t tears it was blood. He said, ‘You cunt.’

‘Yeah, right, fine,’ said Ross again. There was metal in his voice.

‘I’ll hurt you for that –’

‘Sure. You’ve got two left. You want to tell me where she is?’

They had two left, but they were gone away into their coop. Would be sticking their heads in the sand if there were sand for them to hide in.

Ross did something to the gun that made a noise. He didn’t need to use the words this meant.

Russell cast a look at Sarah. There was nothing in it she recognized as his, though she caught its colours: hurt, loss, anger.

Maybe she nodded her head. She couldn’t afterwards remember.

Russell pointed. ‘She’s in the shed,’ he said.

Zoë had left it too late, because they were out of the house now, all of them – she’d pulled the door shut, but even at this distance, she could tell it was all of them, from the different weights and shapes she heard rearranging gravel. Three of them, plus Sarah and Russell.

She squashed into the corner, in the gap where the shelving didn’t reach. Fumes from an unsealed tin of paint stung her nose; she had to breathe through her mouth. Various aches and pains woke, stretched and grizzled, but adrenalin responded. There was nothing like immediate danger to put yesterday’s frights to sleep. There were words, but she couldn’t make out what they were. There were voices, and one was Sarah’s. There was a hollow thunk, like somebody walking into a tree. Then Sarah screamed.

And Zoë stayed wrapped tight in her corner. If she walked out now, hands held high, it would be a betrayal of what Sarah and Russell were going through. It was not up to Zoë to take that from their hands. That was what she told herself, wrapped tight in her corner, while minutes crawled by.

Her hand, she noticed, was resting on her breast. She removed it, and stared at it strangely for a moment. Its concerns seemed to belong to another period of her life.

Then a gunshot, and dust rose around her, and danced in the spears of light that lanced through the fissures in the walls.

Her heart stopped. For half a second, that was all she was conscious of; her brief suspension, as if that muscle governed not only her own continuance, but the survival of
everything
: this shed, the country surrounding, the world it was part of. Everything stopped when her heart stopped: that was what happened. And that would be death: the conclusion of everything, all of it dependent on the beating of her heart. When she stopped, everything stopped. It was that simple. But this time, she started again.

There came more screaming; one brief fraction of it barely human. Blood pounded in Zoë’s ears. She imagined Sarah cut in two; Russell puddled on the ground; the pair of them reduced to their constituent elements. Numbness spread through her, and dissolved immediately in a new wash of adrenalin. She did not know what was happening, but this much was clear: it was time to run. Memories of things left undone jostled in her mind – bills unpaid; letters unburnt – then faded to a fresh white vision of the here and now. Sinking to her knees, she prised the door open. The treeline had grown no nearer. She’d count to three, she decided, while her breathing adjusted:
one two –
And then an instinct from nowhere fell on her, convincing her that this was not the moment, so she pushed the door to again, blanking out the light from the world. Still on her knees, she rested her face in her hands. It was rare that the consequences of a decision were immediate, but these would be. If there was any comfort nearby, that’s where it lay: that whatever happened would happen soon. And although they caused her heart to stop once more, she was hardly surprised by the gunshots, when they came.

From the treeline he watches, and can barely believe what he sees:

the sudden, brutal murder of an ostrich. There one minute, and
the next mince and feathers. Though rationally speaking, it has
no right being present in the first place: here on the edge of the
Peak District, ostriches aren’t what you come looking for.

Zoë is who you come looking for.

The men are the men from the street the other night: who
found Zoë, and mostly wished they hadn’t. The one who has shot
the bird, he’s seen before then – he’s watched him speak, without
believing a word he said. And now this man is turning, pointing
the gun at the one who’s just struggled to his feet; who must be
Sarah’s man. Watching from the treeline, Alan Talmadge – a
name he still calls himself when he needs an
other
to flesh out
the dialogue he embodies – tucks his hands into their opposite
armpits, where the black leather jacket fits tightest. Chiming
through his mind is the lyric that dragged him here. Sometimes
the songs are more than songs: they’re instruction.

I’ll reach out my hand to you

I’ll have faith in all you do

Whenever you need me

I’ll be there

This is why he’s come: to protect. All the other challenges –
loneliness, other people’s pity – fall away to pointlessness. What
he’s thought of as the problems he could do something about; the
everyday dangers revealed in the eyes of women on buses, in the
Tube, in the street. The ones he’s grown up beside. They don’t
amount to much, set beside an angry Cyclops with a weapon.
And violence isn’t his strength. He’s been present at death, has
been there when death started to happen, but that was ordained.
You can only rescue one person at a time. But this is new, and
just for a moment, he wonders whether he’s up to the task.

Be my brave boy, now. Be my white knight.

But he has no choice, really: that’s the nature of the role. That
you do what’s required. Though it’s difficult to know exactly
what’s required now, as Sarah’s man points to the shed as if
giving directions, and the eyepatched man advances on it, gun
level in his grip, exactly as if he means to open fire; exactly as
if there’s a war going on he’s forgotten to tell anybody about. So
Talmadge simply watches, hugging himself ever tighter, as if
some savage transfer is taking place and this black leather
becoming part of his skin. Though even watching it happen, it’s
hard to believe when, five yards from the shed, Eyepatch opens
fire; his first blast shattering the landscape, so trees everywhere
explode in the same moment, as frightened birds escape into the
air and chunks of shed spin free like wooden fireworks. Thick six-inch
splinters embed the ground around like flightless darts. He
fires again, and part of the roof blows free. And in the sudden
shocking silence immediately after – a silence that isn’t silence,
but rather a clearing away of enormous noise, as it bangs off
towards the horizon – it becomes clear to Talmadge that if
Eyepatch fires again his task is over because the shed is too small,
the gun too big; and if Eyepatch fires again, he’ll be tearing a
hole through anything breathing inside the wooden shelter. And
even as the thought occurs, Eyepatch fires again.

Sarah said, ‘No,’ but nobody heard her. She said it again. Russell turned – looked right through her, as if the past few minutes had taken him somewhere remote and indistinct, and he just barely carried her picture in his head – then turned back to watch Ross’s progress towards the shed. Ross carried the gun level in his hands, as if using it were next on his agenda. On Russell’s forehead, a dull red continent of pain was emerging; its shape immediately familiar.

Five yards from the shed, Ross fired the gun.

. . . The noise seemed to whistle past Sarah’s head as if it were heading somewhere else entirely, and never had anything to do with her. She imagined it soaring way over distant hills: crashing into someone else’s life like a fragment of space debris, unintentional and devastating. Then her consciousness righted itself. She was still here. Ross still held the gun. The shed had acquired a hole, and a lunatic crop of spiky wooden mushrooms had sprouted off to its left. Ross shot again, and part of the shed’s roof blew free, throwing up a minor black cloud of tarpaulin wood-chips nails glue: all blasted into irrelevance and deposited out of sight. Russell’s lips were moving, as if he were trying to find a connection between his words,
she’s in the
shed
, and this consequence: the shed’s destruction, along with everything inside it. Maddock’s grip on her arm relaxed. And Burke was swearing under his breath – more litany than straightforward cursing, as if it had become important to purge himself of all the foul words he’d ever heard: right here, right now.

She looked at Russell, who tensed, as if whatever happened next would be louder, fiercer, and make more mess. And just before it happened Sarah understood why that was, and dropped to the ground even as he motioned to her to do so.

Ross fired again, and the shed exploded.

Chapter Seven

Flightless things

i

The first shot stopped her heart. That was how close it felt: this noise made of metal and splintering wood, that punched everything out of its way, and flailed so wildly in its passage it stopped Zoë’s heart even at this safe distance. The second was muffled, as if its target were more inclined to flap than stand firm to be torn apart. Before the third she’d opened the door, dared a look, then stepped into daylight grown old and bruised. The day had walked smack into the utterly unexpected; the utterly never seen here before – this quiet place between hills, with its treeline and moody ostriches. Where a man with an eyepatch blasted away at a shed she’d never been in.

The neighbours keep it here
, Russell had said of the small blue tractor behind it.
And its fuel and gear in the shed.

She tried to picture fuel for tractors, and imagined plastic bins or big tin cans, lined on shelves like ducks at a fair. While a man with an eyepatch blasted away, under the impression she used them for shelter . . .

It was not, all things considered, a huge explosion; hardly Hollywood choreography. Zoë, in motion now, had her back to it, but ever afterwards was able to remember it in acute detail nevertheless. Ross had been quite near the shed when he fired a third time and hit the ducks dead centre, so their hearts burst in unison, scattering liquid fire everywhere. Whatever Ross had been expecting, it wasn’t this. He fell back – flew back, in Zoë’s created memory – and hit the ground with a bone-rattling thump, and the gun was airborne suddenly; curving through space like an ill-planned boomerang. Zoë actually
saw
the spirograph pattern it carved on the air, circles inside a circle, before the ground reached up and interrupted its trajectory. And then she was among trees, her vision obscured even in memory. A branch lashed her face. Behind her, smoke stained the darkening sky; a black comma the wind would shred and toss.

If she followed the treeline, she’d reach the road; somewhere on the road would be a car. In the car, a phone. This was how the future broke down, into one plain fact after another, though when you looked back afterwards, it seemed a smooth unfractured process.

It was getting to be second nature: fleeing over uncomfortable ground. Grey light speckled through the trees like rain. The noises that reached her now were suspiciously ordinary: her own breathing, of course, and the pumping of her heart. But beyond that, just the sounds trees made while the wind scraped past them, and the usual distant grumblings of nature. Nothing resembling a car. Zoë reached a sudden ditch, on the far side of which lay the road.

To a more athletic version of herself, the ditch was an obstacle leaped without thinking, but that Zoë was ten years younger. She stepped down carefully, grimacing as mud squelched into her shoe, then scrambled up the far side, smearing her hands in the process . . . Was it just this afternoon she’d bathed? But here was the road: she stood a moment, hands on hips, breathing hard. The road twisted out of sight a hundred yards ahead; behind her, it climbed a hill then dropped into nowhere beyond the lane leading to the farmhouse. Urgency gripped her again. Sarah and Russell were still back there.

Zoë started to jog. There was mud in her shoes and tar on her lungs, but she had this straightforward task to accomplish: find help; rescue Sarah. And Russell. Round the corner the road kept twisting, and as she ran she became aware of a thudding undercurrent, a soft padding echoing the slap of her feet hitting tarmac, but when she turned there was nobody: only the wind scratching round in the trees. It was just her imagination, running along with her. She was remembering her lost jacket, and how comforting it would be to have it now.

There came the sound of a car, heading towards her.

When the shotgun hit the ground, nothing happened, which was a relief. Watching it lazily plane through the air, Sarah had been expecting a random discharge on impact: something lethal and indiscriminate.
It’s not the bullet with
my name on it that worries me
, a wise man once said.
It’s the
one addressed ‘To whom it may concern’.
She was on her hands and knees; Ross was down too, his hands covering his head. And Burke looked like a man who’d walked into the wrong room, the wrong entire life, while Maddock had been plain erased: his face a blank white sheet.

. . . As for Russell, he’d collapsed. Her instinct was to head for him, but sometimes you had to go with your brain. Getting to her feet she felt the world tilt, as if that shed had been its fulcrum. And everything was happening just a touch slowly, with the extra care that comes with pretending not to be drunk. The noise in the distance was probably a car. But it sounded drugged and irritable, and lowed like an upset cow.

The gun, though. The gun was what she was supposed to be focusing on.

At a tilt, then, she made for where it had landed. With a curious absence of alarm she realized Burke was coming to life; dragging his attention from the gutted shed, whose occasional pops and whistles were cans and bottles of . . .
stuff
bursting. Paintstripper, turpentine, weedkiller:
stuff
. There would be noxious fumes, and maybe they were affecting her; were maybe the reason the word
noxious
floated dopily round her brain . . . Enough. With a curious absence of alarm she realized Burke was coming to life, but this was followed swiftly by an entirely reasonable alarm. He too appeared a beat behind reality, but he stood nearer the gun. Sarah’s dash would have carried her straight into him, but some self-preserving impulse slammed her brake on.

Burke didn’t point it at her, exactly. But he was holding it and she wasn’t, and that kind of made a point all by itself.

‘Just stay there.’

She just stayed there.

Then he lost the script. Looked at the gun as if Props had fucked up, and it should have been a spade or a banana; something harmless, and more in keeping with the man he’d been when he’d signed up for law and order. She could almost feel sorry for him, except, of course, she couldn’t.

‘She wasn’t in the shed, was she?’

‘No,’ said Sarah. ‘She wasn’t in the shed.’

He nodded vaguely. ‘I’m glad . . . So where is she?’

She shook her head.

He looked at the gun again, as if it suggested a method of making her tell, and then forgot about it. ‘This wasn’t . . . this wasn’t the plan, exactly.’

‘No kidding.’

It was as if there were just the two of them, and he’d been saving up for the moment: the moment when he’d seek absolution.

‘He deserved to die.’

‘He was twelve years old, Burke.’

‘Not him. Sturrock. Danny was a friend of mine. Every day Sturrock was breathing was a kick in the teeth.’

Sarah guessed Danny was the policeman Sturrock had stabbed to death. ‘And Wensley Deepman just got in the way.’

‘He saw it happen . . . Recognized me from the station.’ A twisted smile creased his face, as if he were remembering something funny that happened to somebody else, some time ago. ‘He was kind of a regular.’

‘And he wanted money.’

‘Of course he did.’

Sarah waited, feeling as if there ought to be a grille separating them; as if she should be prepared, any minute, to mumble Latin words and set him free.

‘I was the one with the eyes. In the car park. I was supposed to make sure there were no witnesses. But he was a sneaky little bugger, that one. Sneaky little bugger.’

His eyes recalled a job undone. Remembered what he’d had to do to make things right.

‘I knew he didn’t like heights. Can’t remember how. You ever get that? Knowing something about somebody without knowing how you know it?’

‘Sometimes,’ said Sarah.

His grip on the shotgun hadn’t faltered yet.

‘So I arranged the meet up top of a tower block. For the edge, see? Like we needed an edge. He was twelve years old.’

Burke was weeping, or his eyes were weeping, even if the rest of him refused to acknowledge it.

‘We wanted to frighten him.’

Well, they’d managed that.

‘Little bastard thought he was indestructible.’

Somewhere behind her, Ross swore. ‘Christ. Fucking
Christ . . .
’

To Burke, Sarah said, ‘Give me the gun.’

This puzzled him. It seemed perhaps not entirely within the rules of the game. He glanced over her shoulder at the approaching Ross, as if hoping for a clue.

‘Burke? Now?’

But there hadn’t been enough time; had not been enough talking. If he had finished his story, Sarah knew, he’d have given her the gun.

She heard Ross cough and spit behind her. ‘Don’t shoot the bitch,’ he called. He wasn’t far off. ‘Give me the gun. I’ll do it.’

Sarah reached out and laid her hand on the shotgun’s barrel, just as Burke’s hold on its stock tightened.

She did not know afterwards why she had done what she’d done: stepped back into the bushes at the roadside and dropped to a crouch before the car appeared. It was best put down to a self-preservation instinct, an awareness – and if Zoë hadn’t known this already, the last few days would have taught her – that you never knew where the next blow was coming from. That the light at the end of the tunnel was probably that of an oncoming train. She had the feeling that something was tracking her; something sleeker and more camouflaged than those hard men with their wounds and aggravation. So she dropped, and let a bush fold itself around her uncomfortably. Once the car was upon her, once she’d seen who it was, she’d step out to flag it down.

Though once she’d seen who it was, that ceased to be an option.

Sarah reached out and laid her hand on the shotgun’s barrel, just as Burke’s hold on its stock tightened, and for a moment she had a clear picture of what happens next: Burke fastens on the trigger, and Sarah ceases, in any meaningful way, to exist. Like Gwyneth, poor ostrich, who died for love. But instead Burke’s grip failed him, and she was pulling the gun from his hands like a sword from a stone; was turning, pointing, in a single fluid motion, as if it were something she’d practised in a dream.

Ross came to a halt two yards off.

She said, ‘I’ve done this before.’

‘You fucking idiot,’ he said, but he wasn’t talking to Sarah.

Russell was on his feet. He looked dazed, and the welt on his head had grown no smaller. For a second, she wanted to lash out: give Ross a matching bruise. Watch him collapse like a broken mast. This is how wars start.

‘Back off,’ she said, then stepped back herself so Burke was in front of her. He might have regrets about relinquishing the weapon. He looked, in fact, like he was having regrets about everything, but was in no state to rectify any of it. She kept the gun trained on Ross while telling Burke, ‘Just move over there, would you?’
Please
, she remembered not to add. Polite was a form of weak, to some.

Reading her mind, Ross said, ‘You’re not going to use that.’

‘I was very fond of that ostrich,’ she told him, and saw a shadow cross his face, and was glad.

This happened when you wielded a gun. It dragged out demons you didn’t know hid inside you.

She said, ‘I want the three of you over there. Not moving.’ Then called, ‘Russell? Are you okay?’

He said something she didn’t catch.

‘Russell?’

‘I think so.’ But he didn’t sound it. He was patting himself down as if checking he was in working order. Burke, meanwhile, heaved himself next to Ross; Maddock was near enough that she could keep an eye on all three at once. She wondered where Zoë was. Either she’d gone for help, or she’d be showing any moment.

Russell said, ‘He wasn’t ready for that, I guess,’ and gave a cackling sort of laugh.

Ross muttered something under his breath.

A gust of wind lifted her hair. Incredibly, Sarah suppressed a yawn. Her jaw ached. Something that was probably a car hummed in the distance, and it was as if the phone had rung while she was watching TV, and for a moment it was unclear which reality it belonged to. And while she was shuffling between the two, Ross took a step forward, as if he were about to jump – she couldn’t have done it on a dare, but she did it: brought the gun up to shoulder height and levelled it at his head. He stopped dead; or to be precise, dead was what he didn’t stop. He stopped a moment before he might have been dead. Even if she’d had her hands free, Sarah couldn’t have put either on her heart and sworn she wouldn’t have squeezed the trigger.

‘I said don’t move,’ she told him, and even to herself, her voice sounded as if it were relayed through somebody else.

The humming grew louder, and was definitely a car.

Russell approached, unsteadily; a bruise red and wide on his forehead. He was making words, but she still couldn’t hear him. Swallowing panic, she said, ‘Russell? Come over here now. But be careful of these guys.’

The humming was an engine, all right: attached to wheels rolling down the lane. She didn’t look, but her first thought was
Zoë
. Zoë had run to the road; had flagged down a car, which was full of . . . Sarah’s imagination let her down for a second. Traffic wardens. No: off-duty firemen, or passing farm labourers. A carload of either would make short work of these stooges.

Russell reached her side, and had sense enough not to touch her. ‘I wasn’t sure it would do that,’ he said, reasonably clearly.

The shed was a wreck: a bright orange heart pumping away, feeding nothing. It looked like a dismantled bonfire. Small clumps of flame littered the area. The blue tractor sat scorched but entire behind it.

‘He shot Gwyneth,’ he said then, and fell over.

The car came to a halt on the gravel.

‘Russell?’ she said.

He didn’t answer.

Behind her, a car door opened, then shut.

‘
Russell?
’

Ross said, ‘Why don’t you put that down? See to the man.’

‘Fuck off.’ She risked a glance at Russell. ‘Sweetheart? You okay?’

‘. . . Head hurts . . .’

Somebody was coming. She didn’t want them getting closer when she didn’t know who they were. ‘Just hold it right there,’ she called.