The Last Voice You Hear

by Mick Herron

  ‘I don’t give a fuck what reports do. He was armed.’

  Along the pavement, the news crews were packing up. Maybe Jet Deepman had stopped crying. Chris was watching Zoë, his expression unreadable. This might have been the most shocking thing ever. It might have been an update on the weather.

  She noticed, as if it were happening to somebody else, that she was trembling. Zoë is trembling.

  And said, ‘My history has nothing to do with this.’

  ‘Not everything you’re involved in has to be newsworthy.’

  ‘That’s not what this is about.’

  ‘No?’

  Her mouth dried. Behind his glasses, Connor’s eyes narrowed. She’d lost the ability to read: maybe there was sympathy there; maybe contempt.

  He said, ‘Either way, perhaps he was asking to be shot. That happens sometimes.’

  Her voice returned. ‘You’re saying Wensley –’

  ‘I’m saying, don’t make something out of nothing. People can get the wrong impression. Reports vary. The truth doesn’t.’

  Chris said, as if it remained the important thing, ‘He was just a kid.’

  ‘Nobody’s forgotten that. It’s a sad event. But don’t –’ He turned from Chris to Zoë to continue. ‘Don’t go taking minor details and building fantasies on them. Coincidences happen. They mean nothing.’

  ‘Like dates.’

  ‘Like what?’

  She said, ‘I was thinking about birthdays. It wasn’t important.’

  Everyone leaks history. Stray remarks draw blood, sometimes. Tom Connor stared and she saw she’d hit a chord, the way it can happen with strangers.

  He said, ‘It would have been nice to have met differently. After what Bob Poland said about you.’

  This alarmed her. ‘He spoke highly?’

  ‘No. But he’s always struck me as a prick. Goodbye, Ms Boehm.’ He nodded at Chris, and left.

  So then there were two, standing on the pavement, watching the policeman walking away.

  After a while, Chris said, ‘That was like arriving right in the middle of the show. I have no idea what’s going on.’

  ‘Welcome to my world.’

  ‘You’re some kind of detective, aren’t you?’

  ‘Some kind.’

  ‘What did he mean, about you shooting somebody?’

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ said Zoë. ‘I don’t make a habit of it.’

  The last of the journalists was looking their way, wondering whether they’d amount to a paragraph. Evidently not. He held up his hand and a black cab appeared and pulled a U-turn to reach him. Zoë had never seen this done before. Everyone else – Jet Deepman, her man; the kind and the curious – had left.

  ‘So,’ said Chris. ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Tell the old man I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘You won’t be seeing him again?’

  ‘No.’ What would be the point? But because she was, after all, some kind of detective, she asked, ‘Did you ring him, Chris? A short while ago?’

  He paused before answering, as if assessing her right to know. ‘I did, actually. Why?’

  ‘No reason.’ It was a mystery solved, that was all, and it was good to clear up even the small ones.

  He was armed, she wanted to tell him. But why did she need him to believe that?

  She told him goodbye instead. He seemed an all-right man, but there was no serious need to prolong their conversation. She didn’t look back as she headed up the road, and reasoned that, even if she had done, he’d be gone anyway.

  Zoë needed to get west, to pick up her bus. The rain had subsided, but would return before long; the skies were scribbled over grey, and the pavements had a dirty, half-washed look, as if the shower had simply smeared their grime, releasing sealed-in odours. It was the smell of rained-on overcoats. Something to look forward to on the Tube.

  The best she could figure, walking to King’s Cross was simplest. The walk would do her good. Orienting herself by a street map on a corner – trusting that its stylized angles, its shading away of complicated junctions, wouldn’t leave her lost in minutes – she cut through a park to a thriving little street with a delicatessen, where she bought everything she hadn’t bought that morning. It was late before she moved on; offices were closing, and the streets becoming crowded. Beyond the pedestrian area lay a main road, which she crossed at a set of lights. Halfway over, she knew she was being followed . . .

  It was nothing solid. It wasn’t as if she’d looked back to see the same stranger twice. It was just a pricking between her shoulder blades, like this morning back home – but how likely was it she’d been followed from Oxford without noticing? And you couldn’t second guess a journey that hadn’t been planned.

  When she turned, the crowd was the usual fluid monster, weaving in and out of itself like a box of snakes; never quite knotting, never falling still. There should have been a snarl-up; the follower should have tried to fall back, or veer aside, but whatever happened happened so smoothly, it might not have happened at all. People wove on, breaking round her, reforming; the obstacle she presented no more than half a moment’s interruption, and less thought.

  Either he was very good, or he wasn’t there.

  She stood a little longer, oblivious to the picture she presented. There were instincts she trusted, and the sense of being watched ranked high among them, but what if that too was falling apart? – after all, she had trusted her body; relied on it to carry her through life, and here it was:

  attacking her from the inside, eating itself, until what was left would mulch at the touch like forgotten fruit. Stop it, Zoë. She was bumped, quite fiercely, probably deliberately, from behind, and for a moment lost her direction; she moved, stopped, corrected herself; made sure she was heading for the station . . .

  From the corner of her eye, she caught a hesitation in the crowd.

  It was that tiny. It might have been a man wondering which pocket his keys were in, or a woman hearing her mobile chirp to life. A fractional hiccup almost smothered by the Brownian movement of the homeward-bound. Any other time she’d have shrugged it off, but now it registered loud and clear, and she knew that all the day’s tiny misgivings were proven; that somewhere within this anonymity, a watcher had her in his sights. The knowledge shifted something heavy within her, and for a moment she felt redefined; felt downgraded from Zoë to victim, as if that were all it took: a brief anonymous hostility from deep within a crowd. She had to take an almost physical grip on herself to know where she stood; who she was; why she mattered. It was . . . pug-ugly that this could happen; one creep of a man (it had to be a man), reducing her to a cipher. It was fucking outrageous. It wasn’t going to happen.

  . . . A week ago, days ago, feelings like this were alien. She’d been numb. Closed down. It was the waiting, she knew; the waiting for the envelope . . . The possibility of a lethal diagnosis – or a mutilating one – had rebuilt her connection to the everyday. Had reminded her what vulnerability felt like.

  As if to underline the matter, the skies opened.

  King’s Cross lay ahead, a busy throng cramming its concourse. As she watched, the crowd bloomed sudden mushrooms; dozens of umbrellas opening at once like something in a musical. And the rain heaved down; thick unbroken lines of it, or unbroken until it met umbrellas, cartops, gutters, heads, whereupon it spattered in all directions at once. Zoë had slipped into professional mode; trying to watch everything, without giving the impression of doing so. This crowd was a practised one. People moved quickly, to minimize the rain’s impact, but obeyed an urban choreography that allowed for few outright collisions . . . Reaching the junction, Zoë stepped into the road a second late, and the blast of a horn drove her back. Kerbwater kissed her legs. Turning, she saw nothing she didn’t know about. Buildings, roads and rain; a hustling mass of nameless humanity. Lights changed. She crossed the road without looking back again.

  And then she was in the station, which was dry overhead and wet underfoot,
and she almost missed her footing. Somebody shoved her in passing, but this wasn’t hostile; just how things were. The shover disappeared into the underground. Zoë followed to find tropical warmth; people visibly steaming all around her. A man paused to wipe his glasses on his tie. She fell in step with him and they headed for the turnstiles together; anyone would have thought them a couple. But he peeled off suddenly, as if worried he was being collected, and she was on her own, without a ticket. But if she altered course now – for the machines or the queue at the booth – she’d be losing minutes, and all she had going for her was that her watcher didn’t know she knew he was there . . . She had to make him hurry. She couldn’t hang about.

  Alongside the turnstiles people pressed through a gate, showing tickets to a uniformed man. Zoë squeezed behind a fat guy with a briefcase the size of an ironing board; he thrust a pass at Ticket-Man, who glanced, nodded, turned to Zoë just as that briefcase caught her knee; she’d have hit the floor if not for Ticket-Man’s reflexes . . .

  ‘A’right, there?’

  He’d caught her by the elbow. She gave him her most grateful smile. It had been a slick fall. It had looked real. ‘Thanks. I’m . . . thanks.’

  ‘Got your ticket, lady?’

  ‘Yes, it’s in my . . .’

  Behind her people surged. It was like the zoo at feeding time: everybody trying to get to the lions’ cage. Somebody stepped on Zoë’s ankle, and this hurt. Somebody else, or possibly the same somebody, pushed past, and Ticket-Man released her to remonstrate – ‘I didn’t see your ticket!’

  Or Zoë’s. She was through; swept like a cork on a current down the escalator. There was a train leaving, and for a moment she wasn’t sure if she wanted to catch it or not . . . She’d be leaving him behind, but didn’t she want to see who he was, what he looked like? She wasn’t scared, was she? Didn’t matter: the doors’ pips sounded; she had a hand to the glass as it pulled away. When she turned her face was fixed into a snarl; a look, if she’d seen it on anyone else, she’d have crossed the road to avoid.

  Somebody said, ‘Jesus. Two minutes, bitch.’

  Which was what the electric overhead said: two minutes. People were flooding the platform: all with homes to go to, and anxious to get there. Every face was a stranger’s, and none was pointed her way.

  Two minutes, her inner Zoë stated flatly. One-thirty. No sweat.

  Move down the platform, a tannoyed voice suggested. She felt calmer; there was nothing like having an option removed to force focus on the here and now. She moved down the platform. The voice said Owing to an event on the District line but detail deconstructed into static. ‘An event’ was code for ‘death’. Along with ‘incident’, ‘passenger action’, and, sometimes, ‘death’. Owing to an event on the District line something was either about to happen or not about to happen. She stepped back against the platform wall; tried to capture the gathering crowd; its constituent elements of faces, hands, gestures. Somewhere in this sinuous mass was a man who was following her. Realistically, it could only be one man. For all her earlier doubts, he existed. Alan Talmadge had tracked her to London.

  You couldn’t argue, in the end, with your instincts. So maybe she was paranoid, a little. The right amount. It wasn’t a bad thing. Paranoia was akin to love: it heightened your senses, peeled a layer away, left you tender to the lightest touch. With this difference: it was intended to protect. You could imagine it deserting you, your ability to recognize danger, but it came back when it mattered.

  And then he stepped clear of the crowd, and she saw him.

  He was looking her way, and he was good, but not good enough: the moment he glimpsed her a little of his tension dissolved, as if he’d been worried he’d lost her. But here she was. And there he was: older than she’d have expected; about six foot, with hair (the hair he liked to drag a hand through) that began way back on his forehead, growing in tight greasy curls like a farmyard pelt. This, too, was not as advertised. But the predatory element was present and correct. The moment he saw her, he knew she’d seen him too, and pegged him for what he was. And he smiled, a smile stripped to the bone of kindness and humour. There was conversation here, over ten yards’ distance; conversation so loud, she was amazed nobody could hear it.

  You can’t run.

  I can run.

  You can’t hide.

  And you can’t touch me. Her eyes left his for half a second, taking in the crowd around them. You think you can touch me here?

  You think they’ll help?

  And she couldn’t answer, because you could never tell. Did she think they’d help?

  Something was coming. She could hear it in the track, and feel it in the draught shifting litter along the rails. And in that moment, she knew exactly how it had been for Caroline Daniels; standing on a platform, with a crowd pressing close. Like a train, Alan Talmadge had been approaching, and causing things to happen before he got there. Causing Caroline’s surroundings to be the last she’d know: this press of people, with their smells and noises; those raucous adverts; that chocolate machine somebody was thumping, because it didn’t work. Unseen, Caroline’s lover had stepped behind her, and ended her life with a well-timed push . . . How would anybody know? A crowd couldn’t tell what was happening in its heart.

  He had pushed her unseen, and walked away. And he was walking towards her now.

  The train thundered into the station. There was a surge, as people jockeyed for position. Most of Zoë’s recent life had involved trains and buses. She stood unmoving for a moment, trying to relocate Talmadge, who’d disappeared in the mass. This was his talent: not being there any more . . . People were boarding and Talmadge was still lost, unless that was his arm hanging out of the door, next carriage down – a dark sleeve, an overcoat: did this match what he’d been wearing? She could stay where she was; he’d jump right off. Then they’d still be here, but with fewer people around. She stepped in, forcing room, while those already on board squeezed back, making a Zoë-shaped space for her, or possibly one a little smaller. Facing downtrain, she tried to see into the next carriage. X-ray vision might have helped. Short of that, she was dreaming.

  And her heart was pounding. She was crammed between two males: a young black man in pinstripes and an older white guy wearing binlid earphones – huge, with no sound leaking out, though his head nodded in synch with their noiseless rhythms. It kept brushing Zoë’s hair, but she was too anxious about Talmadge, about where precisely he was now, to dwell on it.

  . . . Unless it wasn’t Talmadge. Did this look like a man sensible women might love? Like a man with music in him? And how, anyway, had he followed her? It was an unpleasant thought, akin to finding spiders in bed. He might have been tracking her since that evening at Caroline’s. All the while she’d been mapping the house, looking for his traces, he’d been outside spinning webs. She shuddered. The young black man opened his eyes . . . For a second they stared at each other, inches apart. Then, embarrassed, he looked away as the train slowed, and a new station rolled past the windows.

  Few people disembarked. A slightly larger number got on. Zoë would have stepped on to the platform, if only to see if Talmadge did the same from the next carriage along, but trapped in the crush, she was subject to its intentions. It didn’t intend that she do any such thing. There was no room for frivolous movement here. She let out an involuntary sigh, which bothered no one. Then closed her eyes, in case that helped. The doors beeped; the train shuddered, and pulled into deeper darkness. When she opened her eyes, she was looking straight at him.

  . . . It might have been worse. She might have gasped or shrieked. As it was, there was a kind of inevitability to the moment, one her body seemed aware of before the rest of her caught up. Of course he’d changed carriages; that’s just what he’d do. And what else had the past days been working towards? You could not hunt somebody without ending up this close: not if you were Zoë Boehm. Even if you’d wondered whether they truly existed. So her body, which had much to atone for, did
right; she neither gasped nor shrieked, but stayed as calm as if she were studying an aquarium, and this man were an entirely expected shark.

  He smiled from a two-foot distance. The only barrier between them was a young Asian woman with a tiny jewel-stud through her nose.

  What were her options? She could point and scream. But madwomen melted down in the Tube all the time. People pretended something else was happening, or watched to kill the time until their stop. What they didn’t do was anything about it. Never wedge yourself between a screamer and her psychosis.

  Besides, she was Zoë Boehm. Never a screamer.

  His teeth were small but sharp in his orcish smile, and was she imagining them flecked with white scum? In his eyes she recognized a look she associated with her own worst mornings. She couldn’t believe these people were indifferent to this; couldn’t sense a soul gone bad in their midst.

  There was a change in the rhythms around them as the train slowed without reaching anywhere. The crowd swore silently. Knowledge hard-wired within it recognized which slowings-down meant stations, and which a ten-minute wait in the dark. The Asian woman sneezed loudly into her open hand. The train heaved to a halt, and lighting flickered.

  It was as if he caused this too: trains to stop, lights to dim. And finding herself imagining so she squeezed the fist that held the carrier bag from the deli. This man will not do this to me. He had the look of a late-night caller, a lurker on corners, and again she half-doubted he could be Tal-madge, because this was not a man to win a woman’s heart. Not a woman with history; one who knew her mind.

  But who else could he be?

  The sudden pull of motion would have had her on the floor, if there’d been room. Relief rippled the carriage like wind through leaves. The train shunted. Talmadge licked his lips, and she had the immediate disgusting thought that he’d like to lick hers. Her natural response – In your fucking dreams – she swallowed. The train picked up speed. The young woman pressed closely against her as another man edged for the door. It helped, if this was your life, to know which side the platforms fell.