The Last Voice You Hear

by Mick Herron

  The bedroom showed no outward sign of shared occupancy, but in the drawer of a bedside table, she found an open box of condoms: a packet of twelve, with ten remaining. The discovery gave her pause: she already knew that Alan Talmadge existed – why did she feel as if she’d come across proof of a yeti? The bed was made, and this must have been one of Caroline Daniels’ last domestic actions. The sheets seemed clean, or not noticeably soiled. Forensics again. She did not spend long in the bedroom; being there made her feel exactly what she was: a snoop.

  In the hallway she paused, listening for she didn’t know what. She supposed, on some level, noises continued to pulse through the house (electricity coursed through it; water shifted tidally in its pipes; its battery-powered clocks ticked on), but she felt, nevertheless, dead centre of a large numbing silence. A person’s passing was best measured by the grief they left behind them. But their physical absence – their no longer being in the place they belonged to – was another means of weighing loss. This house waited like a bomb for Caroline Daniels. Without her it lacked point, like a photograph without a subject.

  The spare room held a sturdy, old-fashioned desk, its drawers full of neatly filed accounts, bills and letters. These, Zoë scanned quickly. Most were from the sister, Terry. None were from Talmadge. The bills were marked paid and arranged chronologically, going back twelve months. The desk’s surface was a hymn to neatness and order, the only items disturbing it a pot containing two pens and three pencils – the pencils freshly sharpened, identically lengthed – a tablet of bright yellow Post-its and a Tippex mouse. This last, in the context, an almost crazed outburst of frivolity. Zoë, about to leave, looked under the bed instead. Pushed against the wall was a box, the size of a shoebox. She brought it into the light.

  . . . Horrible, the things you do. The dead must weep. She opened it anyway.

  Inside, swaddled in tissue paper, lay a pale pink vibrator of a size Zoë would class realistic. A tradename on its handle identified it as a LadiesMate. Also in the box was a cellophane packet containing spare batteries. After a moment, she wrapped everything the way she’d found it, and pushed the box out of sight beneath the bed.

  All the retraced steps, she thought; all the opening of cupboards and the looking into drawers. All forgivable – Caroline would understand – but this was trespass, pure and plain.

  Zoë went downstairs. She had already searched the living room, and found nothing especially male. The books were androgynous, Penguin classics leavened with middlebrow blockbusters, and nothing about the alphabetically shelved CDs suggested a merged collection. It was varied and contradictory, but music collections were. Caroline Daniels had liked classical, specifically piano recitals, but had had a weakness for seventies soft rock and some of the spunkier bands of the early eighties. The music she’d listened to in college, Zoë surmised. Record collections were as effective as carbon dating. The player itself was a CD/radio/tape deck, and a glowing red light showed it was still plugged in. When she pressed a button, Radio 3 came softly to life. Zoë turned it off, and after a moment’s thought unplugged it.

  It was time to go. There was nothing to be found.

  It was time to go, but first she passed through the kitchen, and tried the back door. A brief search located the key on the ledge above. Outside it was full-on dark, but light spilling through the window showed that the garden was paved, with a water feature at its centre. Terracotta pots lined the wall. The air was cool, and city-fresh: Zoë tasted traffic and standing water. She breathed it in, then lit a cigarette, of course. Something needlelike spasmed in her heart. She stepped into the dark, and reached the pond.

  Which was four foot square, and easily skirted. By the back fence, a garden bench sheltered in the overhang of next door’s tree. Touching it she felt damp wood, so stood instead, smoking and studying the night sky, a tiny fraction of whose available stars could be seen. Paradise, some thought, was five miles high. Zoë, who believed in heaven no more than she believed in ghosts, didn’t expect Caroline Daniels was looking down.

  She dropped her cigarette and ground it underfoot. Facing the house, she noted how the window’s light fell on the pond, and in that same moment made out, floating on the water’s surface, a pair of bloated rubbery tumours . . . For one disgusting moment, she thought she’d found the two missing condoms. And then realized she was looking at a pair of frogs, limbless, and entirely dead. There was a disease did this to frogs . . . Well, it killed them. But in doing so it caused their legs to drop off, which seemed so venomous and direct – so frog-specific – as to suggest that nature had a psychopathic streak.

  Revolted, she shuddered. The frogs bobbed on the water, dead as yesterday. Zoë went inside.

  Where she locked up, and took a last look round. She was past the stage of expecting discovery; there was nothing of Alan Talmadge to find here – he had been and gone; had left such a perfect absence, he must have been the ideal guest. The only thing keeping him from being a ghost was Zoë’s belief in him.

  So she’d go. But first she stooped and replugged the CD player. It would have niggled her otherwise: leaving an unnecessary difference in her wake. If Alan Talmadge hadn’t, neither would she. The player’s red light blinked into life, and on impulse Zoë turned it on. Before the radio could clear its throat, she changed mode, pressing play, and the CD display lit, counting upwards from minus three. Whatever Caroline Daniels had last listened to was still loaded, though whatever it had been at the time, it was requiem now. Zoë held her breath. There was a fine change in the quality of the surrounding silence.

  Whatever she’d expected wasn’t this.

  A drum roll, then a swooping bass. And hard after both, a brass section, punching a hole through everything in its way: a riff so deeply familiar it hadn’t been written but discovered – it hurled Zoë back twenty years or more:

  This old heart of mine, been broke a thousand times Each time you break away I feel you’re gone to stay

  The Isley Brothers. Strange how the mind retained stuff that barely mattered, though listening now, it was hard to pretend this didn’t matter:

  You got me never knowin’ if I’m comin’ or goin’ ’cause –

  I love you-ou-ou, yes I do This old heart . . .

  So Zoë stayed while the song played; stood in Caroline Daniels’ home, listening to words and music Caroline Daniels had listened to, and wondered, at first, what the dead woman’s feelings had been, hearing this – whether it had been the soundtrack to her mood, or just the first thing to catch her attention – and then stopped wondering anything, to do, in fact, what Caroline Daniels had done – which was close her eyes and sway to the music, moving her lips to words she hadn’t known she still knew, after all these years, after all these years:

  But if you leave me a hundred times A thousand times I’ll take you back I’m yours whenever you want I’m not too proud to shout it, tell the world about it ’cause –

  I love you-ou-ou, yes I do This old heart . . .

  When the song had faded, her eyes were dry. She turned off the player before the next song broke in, then locked up and pushed the key through Alma Chapman’s letterbox. As she did so, a familiar noise disturbed her and she turned, to hear its echo – it had been a car door opening, then closing, that was all: no ghost, no urban nightmare awakening. There was something wrong with this picture, but whatever it was wouldn’t come to her yet. She waited but nothing happened, and at last she shrugged it away like an unwanted attention, and walked home in the dark.

  It was after three when she woke, and pitch black.

  Lately, Zoë had been dreaming about childhood – its physical specifics, its smallness. The being at both centre and periphery at once. But unlike the dreams of youth remembered from her thirties, from which she’d woken wet-eyed, confused by loss, these were funny. In what way, she could never quite recall, but coming awake she carried the sense of having just left a comedy, the best comedy ever, though exactly what made it so escaped her. It wa
s possibly to do with childhood’s potential. Everything was funnier then, because no one was wholly fucked up yet.

  Except that wasn’t so any more, was it? Being fucked up was no longer the prerogative of age. It wasn’t only Wensley Deepman who’d found childhood foul and complex; open any newspaper and once a month there’d be a pre-adolescent suicide staring back. There were few prisons, thought Zoë, without an available exit: you just had to not mind about the exit not leading anywhere.

  Sometimes escape mattered more than anything; it was easy to forget that, in all the tales, when you found your deepest desire it brought you grief. When the Tin Man’s wish was granted, the first thing his new heart did was break. And now Zoë wasn’t thinking about Wensley Deepman, but about Caroline Daniels, and possibly about herself. And she put a hand to her breast and closed her eyes, and wished – one heart’s wish that couldn’t turn sour – for one good night’s sleep; eight hours’ dreamless sleep. That was all she asked.

  It wouldn’t come. She rose and padded to the kitchen barefoot, where she poured a glass of water and thought about the young woman, Corinne, who had twisted her engagement ring while delivering crass opinion. Just as she was starting to have a life, she’d said, as if everything Caroline Daniels had done, public or intangible, counted for nothing against the absence of a man – not a good man or a worthy man; just a man, an absent man. Nor was this an age thing. Zoë knew women in their forties who felt the same; maybe without that degree of blind certainty, maybe with an awareness they’d be trading an absence for subtraction, but still, it persisted, this sense of incompletion. Zoë didn’t feel it herself, but felt it in the attitudes of others towards her, which sometimes came coupled with resentment that she didn’t appreciate what she was lacking.

  But this was what she’d chosen. There was only one heartbeat under her roof. And who was anyone to say whether a life had ‘started’ or not? How could you weigh what was still trapped inside you, scampering through your body like a thing apart? Zoë stood by the window and tried to listen to the sounds life was making deep inside her, and wondered if this happened everywhere, to everyone; that there came a day when you woke to find something had altered, had broken, and there was no telling what it was. So you ended up alone at night and sleepless, drinking tapwater and staring out of windows, trying to ignore the evidence that suggested you hadn’t made much of life. Remembering that you weren’t measured, anyway, by the possessions you’d leave behind, so maybe you needed another you could have an effect upon . . .

  And maybe that was when you went looking for Alan Talmadge.

  Because everybody needed a friendly ear; a voice that would say only Yes. Candidates in Zoë’s life were few and far right now, but there was always the telephone. She could just about see herself picking it up, and calling the only person she wouldn’t freak out by doing so this time of night. Sarah? she’d say. It’s me. It’s Zoë.

  It was three o’clock in the morning, but all Sarah would say would be Talk to me.

  And Zoë would say, There’s a lump . . .

  But she could do without this right now. There’d be no calls. If she needed a friendly voice, she had Radio 4. Tomorrow, she’d go looking for Alan Talmadge herself. She put the glass down and returned to bed, and as she killed the bedside light, it occurred to her what had seemed odd leaving Caroline’s house – the moment she’d heard the car door open, then close. There had been no courtesy light showing, that’s what was strange. When a car door opened, the courtesy light went on: this was the usual arrangement. Whoever had been out there had disconnected his – or hers – perhaps so as not to be seen. And this was just another incident in a crowded day, but coming on top of everything else, it proved enough to foil her heart’s desire until grey light smudged the corners of her bedroom window.

  ii

  Even so, she rose early. She’d heard the thump of the letterbox, but there was no brown envelope on the door- mat; no neatly sealed time bomb with her examination date enclosed. We’ll have to fix you up with an appointment, the doctor had said. It’s quite likely nothing to worry about. But when you were outnumbered, it was always something to worry about. When there was only one of him and he still outnumbered you, panic wasn’t out of the question.

  That, though, was an ordeal for another day. Coffee mug in hand, she went online and began searching for Alan Talmadge. It didn’t surprise her when she got no hits on any of the obvious sites. She’d have been pressed to explain why. She just felt she’d started on something big.

  Radio 4 burbled in the background. Today, these past weeks, had been delivering regular bulletins from a professor of psychology who was investigating love. A partner had been chosen for him, at something very like random. Now various encounters were being engineered; sessions edging towards romance, though focused for the moment on communication – you listened, you spoke. The coup de foudre across a dance floor remained the teenage daydream, but love was programmable, apparently. In the end, the professor said, an enduring relationship – a caring, loving bond, indistinguishable from the real thing – would be built. It was difficult not to picture him Baron Frankenstein. And it was all very interesting, but Zoë wasn’t sure what they’d do with the knowledge once they’d acquired it. Though possibly they hoped to find a cure.

  She thought: Caroline Daniels, now – would someone who’d kept a tidy desk for twenty-two years really have welcomed love’s turbulence in her forties? Wouldn’t she have been better off without it? Because there was this possibility tugging at Zoë: if Caroline hadn’t fallen in love, would she have fallen off that platform? They say the ground drops away beneath your feet: yes. But they say it like that was a good thing to happen, and they never tell you what comes after.

  It was gone eight. She spent an hour signing into sites she generally used one at a time, feeding Alan Talmadge over and over into hungry boxes. Deep down, she already knew this wasn’t the way to find him. It was just the quickest way of proving that.

  Once she’d run out of sites, she showered and dressed. She’d check for answers later. Meanwhile an itch needed scratching; clean and caffeined – wired like hell – she went off to scratch it.

  An alley ran from what had been the old market square and was now the new one – and remained the same, only with cappuccino bars – and a college lived on it, though not a real one; one of the city’s crammers, offering force-fed GCSEs to the offspring of the middle classes, and jobs to otherwise unemployable graduates. This was where Andrew Kite studied; Andrew Kite, once and briefly ‘Dig’, whom she’d hauled kicking and swearing from London, when his parents paid her to bring him back.

  For reasons a profound mystery to Zoë.

  Except there was no mystery really; it had been the same old/same old story. Andrew had been a troubled, confused, conflicted kid – a spoilt little bastard. The first Zoë had heard of him had been from his anguished mother, a tall ash-blonde strung like a pro-tennis racket. ‘He’s fourteen,’ she’d said. ‘He could be anywhere.’

  Her focus kept shifting, as if there were events flitting about that needed keeping an eye on. Her distress seemed both real and faked to Zoë, but there was nothing unusual about that. Charlotte Kite was too intelligent not to know that if her son was screwed up, it was partly her fault. But Zoë wasn’t in the business of judging others. Not until she’d invoiced them. ‘I’ll find him,’ she said.

  And she would, because he couldn’t be ‘anywhere’, not really. He wasn’t at his expensive day school, from which he’d disappeared before, and he wasn’t upstairs in his bedroom-cum-video-arcade; a Santa’s grotto of the dying millennium, where the only things not plugged in were the still-unwrapped Christmas presents. Which left London or Ibiza. It was sad, the narrow horizons of the adolescent male.

  So she found him; followed the trail of plastic he’d slung like a clew through a labyrinth, and even when it dead-ended in an off-licence, where a tired intelligent woman had retained his mother’s credit card, he wasn’t ha
rd to find. He’d been tall even then, and privileged-looking, and would have been meat if he’d not hooked up with Kid B. Since when he’d been on the rob, a detail he shared on the trip back to Oxford. ‘On the rob.’ This, too, was depressingly ordinary; not the downward spiral into crime, but the laboured appropriation of street-lingo that went with it.

  Zoë hadn’t asked him about Kid B. Kid B had ceased to matter.

  And now she waited by an estate agent’s, resisting the impulse to smoke. Colleges like this ran on hourly timetables; he’d be there or wouldn’t; she’d find him or not; either way, this would happen by ten. It barely mattered. It was as if the absence of that envelope had left her in limbo; somehow, this was where she’d always been: waiting for a brown envelope that never came. She realized she had one hand pressed to her breast. She must look like a heartbreak just recently happened . . .

  Shortly after ten, Andrew Kite came through the glass door of the college with a QUIKSILVER backpack over one shoulder and two pretty females in his wake. A moment later a fourth student followed: a boy with either a shaving wound or more likely a running boil on his neck. Zoë stepped forward just as Andrew noticed her.

  ‘Hello, Andrew.’

  He blinked. He was no taller than three and a half years ago, but he’d filled out; looked like a CK poster boy. His hair flopped in a passable Hugh Grant. Acne happened to other people. ‘Do I know you?’

  ‘We ran into each other once.’ He didn’t react. ‘In London.’

  ‘Do you know this woman, Andy?’

  The girl thinking: it was so just barely likely that could happen.

  Andrew looked directly at Zoë. ‘I think you’ve got the wrong person,’ he said politely. ‘I’m not in London much.’