The Voices (27 page)

‘Laura,’ he pleaded, ‘I don’t understand.’

She was breathing heavily. Hunched over the faders, she did not make eye contact and when she spoke her voice contained a note of wonder. ‘You recorded this
after
she was taken.’

He turned the tape off and summoned the strength to say, ‘Yes.’

There was a beat of silence before she yelled, ‘You stupid bastard, you
fucking
stupid bastard!’ She picked up a handful of his cassettes and threw them at the wall. They shattered and the parts skittered across the floor. Rounding on him, she screamed, ‘You stupid, stupid bastard!’ He felt the force of her anger like a punch in the stomach. ‘Oh my God,’ she growled, throwing her head back. ‘What have you done? What
have
you done?’ She kicked the VCS3 stand and it toppled over. Then, ripping a curtain of tape loops off their hooks, she cast them into the air like party streamers. ‘What did I tell you?’ she demanded.

‘Laura, please . . .’

‘What did I tell you?’ She jabbed a finger at him.

The force of her verbal assault rendered him speechless.

Laura dashed out of the room and slammed the door. He listened to her running down the stairs and for a few moments he could not move. His mind became blank. Gradually, his senses reconnected with the world and he snapped out of his malaise; he pushed his palms down on the arms of the chair and launched himself at the door.

He found Laura on the first-floor landing. She was leaning
over the banisters, not crying, but making odd moaning noises. Approaching her warily, he said, ‘Laura, listen. Please.’ She turned to look at him. ‘You were right,’ he nodded, encouraging her to acknowledge his admission. ‘I shouldn’t have made those recordings. I didn’t know what I was doing . . . and I don’t know what any of it means.’

Laura’s grief was so intense it manifested as a kind of rapture. A peculiar half-smile flickered into being. ‘You invited something unspeakable into this house and—’

‘No, Laura,’ he interrupted, ‘we don’t know that. Not for sure.’

It was Faye.’

‘It sounded like Faye.’

The back of Laura’s hand hit the side of his face hard. He took a step backwards.

‘You
selfish
bastard!’

She raised her hand again, and, anticipating the next slap, he twisted awkwardly. He was standing at the top of the stairs and he tried to grab the banister rail to prevent himself from falling, but he missed, and the world began to revolve rapidly.

Laura watched him bounce down the steps and she was reminded of a marionette being jerked this way and that by an incompetent puppeteer. His arms wheeled
around and his legs were suddenly up in the air. He tumbled, head over heels, and when he reached the bottom, at the point where he might reasonably have been expected to come to rest, he seemed to gain extra momentum. Like a gymnast ending an acrobatic display with a final flourish, he somersaulted and travelled an extra yard. Even though she was delirious with rage, Laura registered the oddity.

The house was still and very silent.

Laura used the banister rail to aid her cautious descent. She staggered forward and came to a halt beside her husband. His head and neck were askew, projecting from his torso at an acute angle. She didn’t need to check his pulse. He was clearly dead.

The interview room had bare grey walls and contained only essential furniture: a laminated table and three plastic chairs. A fluorescent strip on the ceiling emitted a flickering light. Inspector Barnes and his assistant sat on one side of the table, Laura on the other. Damp patches had begun to appear on the inspector’s blue nylon shirt and the smell of his body odour was overpowering. The air was hazy with smoke. Barnes lit another cigarette and leaned back in his chair. ‘So you were arguing . . .’

‘Yes,’
Laura replied.

The unsteady illumination made the inspector and his pale, bony companion look sinister. It made their movements appear discontinuous.

‘What about?’

‘It’s difficult to say exactly.’

‘Try.’

She wanted to tell him the truth, but how could she? ‘Chris could be very selfish. I suppose that’s always the case with creative people. They get so caught up in their work . . . you know?’

‘I can’t say that I do, to be honest.’

‘He locked himself away in his studio and never came out.’

‘Were you angry with him?’

‘Yes, I suppose so. He’d been in the studio all day. We started talking, and – I don’t know – things escalated, I got upset.’

‘But what were you arguing about, specifically?’

‘He’d stopped listening to me. It was like talking to a brick wall.’

‘Oh?’

‘I wanted to move house, but he didn’t take any notice. He didn’t take what I said seriously.’

‘Why did you want to move house?’

‘Isn’t
that obvious?’

It was past midnight and Laura was exhausted. The strain of thinking up plausible answers to Inspector Barnes’s questions was beginning to show. She clasped her hands together in order to conceal a tremble and attempted to remain focused; however, she was only partially present. A part of her had been unable to escape from the studio; a lesser self, like a photographic negative, was trapped in the past, listening, in perpetuity, to Faye’s cries and the
clink-clink-clink
of swaying chains.

Inspector Barnes tapped his cigarette over a cheap metal ashtray and said, ‘I thought you were happily married. You didn’t say any of this before.’

‘Well, no,’ Laura replied. ‘I didn’t think it was relevant to your investigation.’

A wry smile invited her to reconsider what she’d just said. Inspector Barnes took another drag from his cigarette. ‘What happened next?’

‘I lost my temper. I broke some of my husband’s tapes, pushed an instrument over, then I ran downstairs and he followed me. Things got a bit . . . physical.’

‘What? He hit you?’

‘No, no. I’m afraid I hit him.’

‘Why?’

‘I was just . . .’ She shook her head. ‘Really upset.’

‘How did your husband react?’

‘He turned away . . .’ She found it difficult to speak coherently. ‘It was an accident. I suppose he tripped. I don’t know . . . it all happened so fast. And then he fell.’

‘Down the stairs,’ Barnes added, as if her final words required clarification. Then he surprised her by being even more precise: ‘The
first
flight of stairs, the stairs that you see when you enter through the front door.’

‘Yes,’ she said, confused by his pedantry.

The big man glanced at his assistant and then returned his attention to Laura. ‘Did you move your husband after his fall?’

‘He wasn’t breathing. There was no point. I dialled 999 right away.’

‘You’re quite sure?’

‘Yes.’

The detective lifted the cigarette to his mouth and the tip became bright as he inhaled. His lips parted and he allowed the smoke to float out slowly. ‘That’s odd.’

‘What’s odd?’

Barnes took his time answering. ‘Where we found your husband’s body would suggest that he fell from the landing.’

Laura shook her head. ‘Well, he didn’t. He fell down the stairs.’

‘Then why wasn’t he at the bottom of the stairs? Why was he off to the side?’

‘He fell in a peculiar way. I saw it happen. You’re quite wrong – he didn’t fall from the landing. He couldn’t have fallen from the landing, not by accident, because he’d have had to go over the banisters.’ She said this confidently. Nevertheless, the detective’s response was unexpected. He appeared to be quietly amused.

‘No,’ he said, ‘not by accident.’ His massive head rocked backwards and forwards. ‘That’s right.’ It took a few seconds for Laura to grasp what he was implying, and when she did her heart seemed to balloon in her chest. She wanted to protest, but her lungs were unable to supply her voice box with sufficient air to accomplish speech. Before she had quite recovered, the inspector said, ‘There was an Akai 4000DS tape recorder in your husband’s studio. Do you know the model?’ Laura shook her head. ‘Your husband owned many tape recorders, but it was one of the smaller ones. He kept it on a stack of equipment on the right side of the main . . . consul.’ The inspector created an imaginary floor plan in the air with his hands. ‘One of my officers has one just like it at home. It was all set up and he managed to get it going. I have to say, what we heard was quite disturbing. Your husband seems to have recorded a child screaming, a child who
must have been about the same age as your daughter. Can you tell us anything about it?’

When Laura had discovered Chris listening to Faye’s cries and screams, he had been seated in front of a tape machine positioned above the mixing desk. Moreover, it was big, not small. Clearly, the inspector was referring to a different recording. How many recordings of Faye were there? She raised both hands to her head and massaged her temples. And what would the police conclude when they worked out how to operate the big machine above the mixing desk? What then?

She thought of the chains again, the chilling
clink-clink-clink
of their collision.

‘Mrs Norton?’ The assistant spoke in a hoarse whisper. ‘It
was
your daughter we heard on the tape, wasn’t it?’

The silence that followed was long and unforgiving. Suddenly, the task of concealing the truth felt impossibly arduous. Her distress was so profound, so prodigious in its extremity, that she was only dimly conscious of her surroundings. Why not tell them everything? If she told them the truth, they might release her and then she could book herself into a hotel and sleep. The prospect of oblivion seemed enormously attractive.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the inspector, ‘but I really must press you for an answer.’

Laura closed her eyes. ‘There’s a lot I haven’t told you, Inspector.’ Her voice sounded distant and alien. The flickering light penetrated her eyelids and destabilized the darkness.

‘Go on.’

‘I was worried that you’d think me mad. But what you’re thinking now is much, much worse.’ Laura opened her eyes again. The two men – the bulky, misshapen inspector and his death’s-head familiar – were hunched forward, eager to hear more. They reminded her of gargoyles perched on a cathedral.

‘Please continue, Mrs Norton,’ said the inspector, unable to hide his impatience. His expression was almost salacious. She watched as the red, pointed tip of his tongue appeared and travelled slowly from left to right, moistening his upper lip.

‘Faye wasn’t taken by a person, as such.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said the inspector, ‘I don’t understand what you’re suggesting.’

‘She was taken by a spirit – an evil spirit.’

Thirty minutes later the inspector and his assistant rose from their chairs and left the room. In the corridor the assistant asked, ‘What are you going to do now, sir?’

‘I’m
going to call a psychiatrist,’ the inspector replied. The rubber soles of his shoes made a high-pitched squeaking sound as he lumbered to his office. ‘Make sure she doesn’t go wandering off anywhere, will you? I won’t be long.’

Laura guessed what was happening. When the assistant came back she said, ‘I’m
not
mad.’

‘No one’s saying that you are.’

‘But that’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?’ The assistant swallowed and loosened the large tie knot below his prominent Adam’s apple. ‘I know what I just said sounds crazy. I’m perfectly aware of that.’

‘Don’t get agitated, Mrs Norton. There’s no need.’

‘Listen to my husband’s tapes.’

‘We intend to.’

‘All of them. He had become obsessed with making recordings of the dead.’

‘That must have been very upsetting for you.’

‘Please don’t patronize me.’ Laura pulled her hair back with both hands. ‘There’s something bad in that house.’

The assistant bared his teeth in lieu of a smile. ‘I understand.’ He made a cigarette lighter revolve with his spidery fingers.

‘No!’ Laura stood up abruptly, slapped her palms on
the tabletop and shouted, ‘You don’t understand! You don’t understand at all!’

Simon was working on a new piece:
Three Lamentations
for countertenor, strings, and celesta. He had completed the introduction to the second lamentation and was pencilling in the voice part when the telephone rang. He waited for Amanda to answer it, but when she didn’t, he swore and dashed out of the music room and into the hallway, grumbling under his breath. He snatched the receiver up and said, rather brusquely, ‘Yes.’

‘Is that Mr Ogilvy speaking?’ It was a woman’s voice.

‘Yes.’

‘Good evening, Mr Ogilvy. My name is Dr Fiona Castle. I’m a consultant psychiatrist. I’m calling you on behalf of one of the patients in my care, Mrs Laura Norton. Have the police been in touch with you?’

‘The police? No.’

‘I see. Mr Ogilvy, I’m afraid I have some bad news. She’s currently on remand in Holloway prison.’

The psychiatrist explained the circumstances surrounding Laura’s incarceration with professional, telegraphic brevity. Christopher Norton was dead, having supposedly fallen down a flight of stairs; forensic evidence
suggested foul play; Laura was under suspicion of murder and exhibiting first-rank symptoms of schizophrenia. When Dr Castle had finished speaking Simon could only say, ‘Oh my God.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said the psychiatrist, modulating her voice to sound more sympathetic. ‘It’s a terrible,
terrible
tragedy. Particularly following so soon after the . . .’ She paused before adding, ‘disappearance of Faye Norton. Needless to say . . .’ Again she paused, as if unsure whether to proceed. ‘All of these events are very probably connected in some way.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Simon agreed. ‘Very probably, but, with respect, why are you calling me?’

‘Mrs Norton would like to see you.’

‘Didn’t you say she was suffering from schizophrenia?’

‘She admits to hearing voices and has some very odd beliefs about the alleged abduction of her daughter.’
Why alleged?
Simon wondered, but he was too flustered to ask. ‘That said,’ Dr Castle continued, ‘she’s been medicated and her condition is stable.’

‘But is there any point in me coming? I mean, will we be able to have a coherent conversation?’