The Last Voice You Hear

by Mick Herron

  ‘And it’s not likely to get better by itself.’

  ‘I know that. I know that.’ Deepman held his arm out, so she could admire its tremble. ‘I can’t lift this above my head.’

  ‘Where’s the bulb?’

  ‘Drawer.’

  He gave her a little more help than that, though; showed her the particular drawer. In addition to a single bulb it held a neatly folded, though long discoloured, tea towel.

  Zoë checked the switch was off, changed the bulb, and turned the light on. Its unshaded glare pointed out that it wasn’t only the dishes needed doing: what could be seen of the surfaces was grimed and streaked with grease.

  ‘What about the hallway?’ she said. ‘Do you need a bulb there?’

  ‘I’ve only the one. You’ve used that.’

  ‘You want to get some more. You could fall, break something. There must be someone would change it for you. A neighbour.’

  ‘Wensley used to come round.’

  She said, ‘To help?’ Not keeping the doubt out of her voice.

  ‘He’d kip on the sofa. Whenever Vin kicked him out.’

  ‘Vin?’

  ‘Our Jet’s boyfriend. It was her mother’s idea. It means a stone, not an aeroplane.’

  The light seemed to have activated him.

  Zoë said, ‘Did Vin kick him out often?’

  ‘’Bout as often as he deserved. He was a devil from hell.’

  ‘But you let him sleep here.’

  ‘Couldn’t keep him out. He had a key.’ He sniffed, but there was no sentiment in it. He just lacked a handkerchief. ‘I was forty-eight when his mum was born. How’m I suppose to cope?’

  There was no answer Zoë could usefully supply.

  ‘Vin an’ him were like cat and dog. Funny, really, ’cause Vin’s the spit of Wensley’s dad. Another what-you-call-’em.’ Zoë braced herself for a racist term. ‘St Lucian.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Used to curl up on the sofa, prowl round when he thought I was asleep. I get up one morning, the TV’s gone. He’s back later like butter wouldn’t melt. “Wasn’t me,” he says. “Honest.” Honest! That’s a word in the dictionary, that is.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘And how’m I suppose to watch the cricket with no telly?’

  She followed him into the sitting room, whose sofa and upright chair were aimed at the vacancy in the corner. It would have been cruel but neat if there’d been a dust-free area the shape of a TV set on the table there. Instead there was a plastic spray of wildflowers in a small vase. It was dim in here too, but Zoë didn’t want the light bulb discussion again.

  ‘What will happen now?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘What will happen?’

  ‘To Wensley. To his . . . remains.’

  ‘I expect,’ said Zoë, ‘there’ll be an inquest. I mean, I know there will be. There’ll have to be.’

  ‘To find out why he did it?’

  She looked at him and saw now, clearly despite the grey-stained light, that what she’d taken as a surface slackening, a loosening of the skin that was all that was holding a beaten spirit together, was more immediate than that; was the product, not only of years gone by, but of grief and puzzlement now. And she’d taken at face value his devil from hells, his often as he deserveds . . . It wasn’t that he’d hidden his sorrow well, it was that she’d lacked the emotional talent to read it; a talent she’d once had, but had boarded away in some internal chamber made up of the unused spaces the rest of her life had produced. And he was still looking at her, Joseph Deepman. It was more than just his flat he’d wanted light cast on. ‘Why he did it?’ she repeated, and it came out a whisper.

  ‘It’s what they’re saying.’

  She cleared her throat. ‘Who?’

  ‘Everyone.’

  That was too many people to argue with. She’d already met some of them.

  ‘A policeman,’ he said.

  ‘A policeman told you that?’

  ‘He wasn’t talking to me. But . . . you hear stuff. What gets said.’

  ‘Is that what you think happened?’

  ‘How’m I suppose to know?’

  ‘I’m sure,’ she began, and stopped. She wasn’t sure of anything. ‘Mr Deepman. I’m sorry about what happened. Wensley . . . when we met, it wasn’t great. You weren’t wrong. But nobody wanted this. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I stopped touching him,’ said Deepman. ‘Not since he was a mite. Never touched him after that.’

  Zoë looked at him.

  ‘Cuddling an’ that,’ said Deepman. ‘You don’t, do you? Not when it’s a boy. You don’t hug them or pet them. Don’t want them turning out soft, do you?’

  ‘You shouldn’t blame yourself.’

  He looked at her, then through her, briefly, as if she’d opened into a window. He didn’t seem to enjoy the view. ‘Not like it comes with a choice, is it? Who you blame.’

  ‘Mr Deepman –’

  ‘I need a lie down, now.’

  She could have done with one herself. He left without further word, stepping back into the hall and through a door the other side of it. She waited a while, but he made no noise. So there she was standing in his dark living room, fourteen levels up, all the furniture concentrated on something that wasn’t there any more. But then, her whole day had been like that: Wensley Deepman, Caroline Daniels . . . There was nothing Zoë could do for the old man, and nothing she was obliged to try. She picked a figurine from a shelf, and studied it for no special reason: a small shepherdess; a reminder of a world that used to exist somewhere else, though never as cleanly or as prettily frocked as this. She put it back. Wensley might have lifted it once himself, she thought; maybe sized up its value, then – evidently – put it back. And this filled her with disgust, not Wensley’s action but her own baseless imagining of it. She left the flat, careful to pull the door to behind her. What could be seen of London still stretched like an electric mat way down below. Zoë had no plans until 6.30 . . . But she’d had days with larger empty spaces in them, and those had passed too.

  iv

  Paddington was grey, damp and tense, with crowds knotted beneath departure monitors, waiting for their platforms to be signalled. Zoë foresaw a serious trample when that happened – she didn’t want to be standing between any part of this horde and the last available seat. Somebody brushed past, and it took half a second to place him as a face from the morning train: a balding, upright man, with a clockwork twitchiness to his movements. On the ground that a regular might have the inside track, Zoë followed him rather than hang round with the masses, and he led her to the far end of a platform, coming to a halt just as a train ploughed into view.

  She had a moment’s horror as it passed. Even slowing down, it was weight, brute force and metal: an exercise in practical physics, juddering with the effort of coming to a halt. This, or something like it, had done for Caroline Daniels: a Tube train was smaller, of course, but that was like weighing the difference between a bus and an articulated lorry when you were underneath one. And she wondered what it would be like, to step out in front of this juggernaut – no, not step, be pushed, even if that push was the involuntary swelling of the crowd behind. There must have been a moment during which Caroline Daniels had known everything. And then it met her: her travelling death. The way it happened for Wensley Deepman, except in his case, he’d been doing the travelling . . . But it did not matter, in the end, whether what you collided with was irresistible force or immovable object. Something had to give, and – in the end – that would be you.

  Hard landings teach us we are flightless things.

  The train halted. Passengers disembarked. Trusting she hadn’t been led astray, she boarded once it was empty: the quiet carriage again, she saw from the sign by the door, so turned her mobile off. Taking a table seat, she leaned back. Days in the city wore you out. She’d have known that anyway, from the people arriving now: nodding at each other, saying good evening, but mostly sitting separat
ely. Tired again, like this morning. But there were different kinds of tired; the kind you haven’t shaken off yet, and the kind you earned in the course of a day. She’d earned tired, she supposed – killing time was as wearying as most other things you did with it – but she’d been waiting for the job to start, not doing it. She closed her eyes. We never sleep. That had been a detective agency slogan, Joe had told her. She forgot which one. It could almost have been her own, though; she slept, of course, but never well, never soundly.

  And now it was time to think about Caroline Daniels.

  Before leaving Pullman’s, she’d spoken to a woman who’d known Caroline: one of the partners’ PAs. ‘I didn’t know her well. But we shared a room, we have this rest room? For breaks?’

  Her name had been Corinne, and she was twenty-four; a natural blonde, with that brittle prettiness you never find in the country-born. While they spoke, she barely left off fingering her engagement ring.

  Zoë had said, ‘Did she ever talk to you about Alan?’

  ‘About who?’

  ‘Alan Talmadge. Her boyfriend.’

  ‘She had a boyfriend?’

  Which answered that.

  Corinne said, ‘She never told me she had a boyfriend. I always thought she was, you know. Single?’

  It was a word on a sliding scale, or so it fell on Zoë’s ears. There was ‘single’ and there were other words, and you could grade the gravity of your situation by the level of pity in Corinne’s voice; the amount of sympathy withheld calibrating the precise degree to which the condition was self-inflicted. From ‘single’ right the way up to ‘cancer’.

  ‘He must have been quite old.’

  ‘What makes you think so?’

  ‘Well, she was in her forties, wasn’t she?’

  Zoë said, ‘I believe he was some years younger.’

  Corinne stroked her engagement ring. ‘Well,’ she said at last. ‘That makes it even sadder, doesn’t it?’

  ‘That she’s dead?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Corinne. ‘Just as she was starting to have a life.’

  A man took the seat opposite Zoë; in his fifties, by the look of him, and wearing a nice dark overcoat which he removed, folded carefully, and laid on the rack overhead. He was narrow-faced, and seemed frayed – well turned out, but with stress levels visible. He carried a copy of the Evening Standard, which had found something new to say about Charles Parsley Sturrock, whose dead features Zoë glimpsed below the fold.

  He was looking at her – the man opposite, not Sturrock – and she realized she’d been staring. ‘Was somebody sitting here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, then.’

  Well indeed. Somebody cycled past the window, an odd thing to do on a railway platform, but he turned out to be loading his bike into the guard’s van. People bustled – all over, people bustled. It wasn’t everywhere you saw the verb in action.

  She turned back to her fellow passenger. ‘I take it you do this journey daily.’

  He nodded, then raised an eyebrow, as if granting her permission to continue.

  ‘I was wondering,’ she said, ‘did you know Caroline Daniels?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Caroline Daniels. She used to catch this train.’

  ‘A great many people catch this train.’

  He used the tone the English middle classes use when they want you to know you’re an imbecile without their having to say it.

  ‘She caught it for twenty-two years. Every day.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Oxford to Paddington.’

  ‘I go on to Charlbury, myself.’

  ‘Still . . .’

  ‘Still. Yes. I must have known her, if only by sight. Most people pick up habits, of course. Same carriage, same seat, where possible. I always sit here myself. But twenty-two years, I must have seen her.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘I’m not sure, though, why we’re discussing her.’

  ‘She had an accident.’

  ‘I see. On the train?’

  ‘Not this train, no.’

  ‘And you’re, what? Some kind of insurance person?’

  ‘Something like that,’ said Zoë.

  ‘Well, then. I hope you do your best for her.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Zoë.

  He nodded to himself. Caroline Daniels: total stranger. But a stranger who’d fought in the same war, sort of. He looked like he wanted to say more, but wasn’t sure what it might be. Instead he nodded again, as if in response to some significant intelligence, and returned to his newspaper.

  The train emitted a high-pitched beeping Zoë assumed announced the locking of the doors, and began to move. Most seats were taken now, but not all. Paddington began sliding away behind them, and a no-man’s sprawl of workers’ huts, prefabs and cars parked at awkward angles on cratered bombsites shunted past. All available wall-space was cartooned over in primary spraypaint. Above everything hovered the Westway, its concrete ugliness a match for the sky above. Zoë stood, prepared to make her way the length of the train if necessary. She had no photograph, which was a pain, but then, how many bosses kept pictures of their PAs? Married bosses, of their unmarried PAs.

  ‘Eighteen years,’ said the man suddenly.

  She looked him full in the eye.

  ‘I’ve been doing this eighteen years,’ he said. ‘Seems quite long enough to me.’

  She nodded, and moved a few seats further down.

  None of the others she asked in that carriage knew the name Caroline Daniels. One woman thought she remembered a familiar face not being round any more, but that happened. Sometimes, they came back.

  ‘They take a sabbatical, if they’re academics or medical. Or the job sends them abroad for a bit.’

  ‘Or they have a nervous breakdown,’ a man put in.

  But Caroline Daniels: No.

  To the south, in the sky, planes were leaving Heathrow, at the rate of what must have been one a minute. So many people, getting out of this place. She’d seen them in the morning too, when relative directions of travel had made them appear stationary in the sky. Like everything else, it fell to points of view. One person’s speed of flight was another’s standing still.

  Zoë moved on. In the next carriage down, she stopped a woman on her way back from the buffet car holding a bottle of water and a plastic cup; asked her if she’d known Caroline Daniels, and received a confused, slightly frightened negative in reply . . . It was pointless, this random interrogation. She knew that already. She might as well have stood in Paddington throwing sticks, hoping to hit Alan Talmadge . . . But it had caught hold of her, the urge to ask questions of strangers. There were connections to be made. Caroline Daniels couldn’t have made this journey daily, with the same collection of people, without forming bonds, even invisible, silent bonds. If Zoë had kept routines – which she didn’t. But if Zoë had kept routines, she’d have noticed when elements went missing; she liked to think she’d have questioned the difference, if only for her peace of mind.

  Outside dusk was falling, though it wasn’t so dark yet she couldn’t see. They were into fields now; in one, a bunch of rabbits – ‘bunch’ was not the proper term, she knew – sat by the track eating something; all except the chief rabbit, which was fixed bolt upright, ears tuned for maximum reception, attention focused on the carriages walloping past. There’s a trainspotter in every crowd. Maybe she should be questioning him instead. She spoke to three more people, two of whom had never been on this train before in their lives. This was how they put it: ‘in their lives’, as if an alternative opportunity existed. Such random thoughts were born of tiredness, but the suggestion was enough to stir the possibility that Caroline Daniels was here yet, using the train again not in her life but after it, like that Dutchman doomed to be eternally on the move. His sin, if Zoë remembered, was selling his soul to the devil. Caroline’s problem had been falling in love. The cynical might find a parallel, she supposed.

  In the next carriage, by an empty window seat, s
at a youngish blond man in an aubergine top, who recognized her, she could tell, from the morning’s journey. He had not, then, offered her his seat. He stood now as she approached, looking like he intended to block her way, though in fact he was gesturing towards the space next to him.

  ‘I saved you this,’ he said.

  ‘That was kind.’

  ‘Least I could do. I was rude this morning. I hope you were okay. Didn’t have to stand, I mean.’

  ‘You couldn’t let me past, could you?’

  His face fell; an exaggerated collapse. ‘You’re sitting somewhere else?’

  ‘It wasn’t difficult. It’s not a full train.’

  She could have asked him about Caroline Daniels, she supposed, but he would have taken it as invitation. It was better to wait while he delivered a rueful smile, made a boyish pass at a lock of hair that had dropped across his forehead, and stepped aside. ‘Nice almost meeting you,’ he said.

  She reached the buffet car; began questioning the woman working there, but gave up when told she’d only been doing the job three days. Then Zoë sat with a cup of coffee, having brilliantly resisted the temptation of a miniature vodka; sat opposite half a face looking back at her from behind a newspaper; an attractive man, or so he seemed until he lowered the paper, but whatever it was that seemed handsome in isolation was rendered null by symmetry. She looked away.

  . . . The train pounded on. It stopped once, somewhere it shouldn’t, and pulled into Oxford as a light scatter of rain was departing. Zoë stood on the platform while the crowd, a good third of the train’s passengers, dispersed; most of it over the bridge across the line, thence to cars, buses, taxis, bikes. A dozen or so took the exit west. This was the exit Caroline Daniels would have used; it was the one Zoë used once she’d lit a cigarette; once the train had pulled out of the station, abandoning her along with a few stragglers waiting for another train . . . An air of fatigue hung over the evening, as if everybody involved in it had had enough; as if nobody, the weather included, could be bothered to finish what they’d started.