The Last Voice You Hear

by Mick Herron

  . . . And she’s some kind of woman. Turn your back on her five minutes and she starts her own casualty franchise. The men are in their car now. Choosing the designated driver has to be some kind of uphill struggle, but that’s their problem, and now they’re gone. And what’s left is the blank space after the jigsaw puzzle’s been tidied away unfinished: the splash of broken glass by the kerb; the echo of a one-eyed man’s pain . . . A black leather jacket on the pavement. Whatever happened here was serious, and possibly Zoë’s hurting. Though it’s clear she got away.

  He could go to her flat. Ring the bell. She won’t answer. But it would be a gesture of solidarity; the keeping of a promise, even if she remains unaware of the pact they’ve made:

  I’ll reach out my hand to you

  I’ll have faith in all you do . . .

  Because this is where responsibility lies. You do not turn away when things become difficult. Such never happened with Caroline or Victoria. They had been needy not needful, hungry for love in their lives, and the simple fact of his presence had supplied what they’d lacked. Nothing more had been asked or given. And perhaps – painful as it is to admit, even to himself, even in the dark – perhaps that helped, when it grew time to let them go. Perhaps the knowledge that their love had reached its natural conclusion triggered a kind of . . . He hates to call it boredom. Boredom has nothing to do with love. But completion was achieved, sooner than might have been expected. And push came to shove. But that’s behind him now.

  He waits a while longer, enjoying the moment’s melancholy: the lover in the rain. It might look like he’s planning his next move, but that was settled back when he first cast eyes on her, and knew she was the one.

  Where there is love

  I’ll be there

  Because what kind of man would let her drift now, with these strangers on her case? Finding her might be a problem – the tracking device on her car has a limited range – but not a grave one; not knowing her like he does. Superficially, theirs is a passing acquaintance, but they connect on a deeper level, and he knows what makes her tick . . .

  A sudden draught sprays water from a gutter overhead, and he shivers at the contact. It will be another long night. But in the end you do what you do, and if your motives are pure, you reap the reward. Love is the storybook ending, but it has to be earned. He already knows this.

  One last look at a scene that is over, then he turns and walks away. But first, he retrieves her leather jacket. Near the main road, he passes a homeless man, a wanderer whose life packs into three stuffed laundry bags, but he barely notices; doesn’t give him a thought. He’s too busy listening to words that spin and tango round his head. Words to live by. The old songs are the best.

  Just look over your shoulder

  I’ll be there

  iii

  Light hung solid in the air where it sabred through chinks and flaws in the shed, which held the usual shed paraphernalia – a reasonably well-organized display of tools and feedbags; of gardening stuff (rakes, hoes, shears) hung on walls; of cans of white spirit and paint ranged on shelves – and also a metal-framed camp-bed on which Zoë lay, the pain in her elbow pulsing with every heartbeat, while those light sabres pierced her mind with brittle stabs. To recover control, she focused on her surroundings. There was shelving above her head, but she couldn’t see what it held. Beside the bed was an old and child-sized wooden chair, which had been painted white at some stage of its existence, and had some of this paint removed at another. The patches that remained had the stained and yellow unpleasantness of old snow.

  The man on the chair said, ‘They’re flightless, but that doesn’t mean they’re slow. They can hit forty miles an hour, where they’ve space to reach full throttle. Ratites, that’s the family they belong to. Ratites are running birds. Ostriches are not defined by their inability to fly. They’re defined by their ability to run.’

  Zoë closed her eyes, and decided to keep them this way for some time.

  He said, ‘Mr O, he’s the male, is a shade under nine foot. That sounds pretty big, but when you get right next to him, you realize it’s actually bloody huge. And he weighs God knows how much, because trust me, I’ve never tried to lift him. Your adult male ostrich is like a large smelly piece of furniture. It’s not surprising they can’t fly. I mean, gorillas can’t fly either, and they don’t get a lot of bad press on the issue.’

  The more he talked, the more Zoë’s head throbbed. Every third word, she grew nearer busting. She’d already learned more about ratites than she needed. But stopping him meant speaking, and she wasn’t ready for that.

  ‘He’s about thirty, best guess. They can live to seventy-five, did you know? It’s surprising how little people know about ostriches, it’s as if they’re not entirely on the agenda. Anyway, we reckon he’s about thirty, and the girls – Nicole and Gwyneth, by the way – they’re probably younger.’

  Some of this, Zoë already knew.

  He paused, as if he’d heard something outside, and for a moment Zoë stopped breathing, and they were just two bodies in the cramped air, straining for what might have been a distant car changing gear. Even her heart stopped, it felt like. A momentary suspension of service. And then their silence was broken, and there was no car anywhere, and nothing to be worried about.

  He said, ‘Personally, I think of them as a potentially major barbecue, but that can stay our secret.’

  Zoë’s bearings were beginning to slide; when she opened her eyes the shed’s walls were swelling out then sucking back in, as if she were trapped inside her own lung. Her power of speech was quite gone.

  ‘Maybe you should get some sleep.’

  That was the first sensible thing in a while. A while which roared suddenly, becoming much much longer and much much darker, and so large, it swallowed her whole.

  * * *

  Next time she reached consciousness, she felt drugged or flu-struck. The air was unpleasantly warm, as if she’d been her own heater, and left herself on too long: par-broiled, her clothing stuck to her damply. The chair was empty. The door shut. Light filtered through those chinks and flaws in the woodwork. Something specific had woken her, but she couldn’t tell what. And despite her strong desire to know whether the door was locked, the effort of finding out was beyond her . . . In this grey nowhere, she was sure of nothing but exhaustion and thirst. Next time she woke she’d find a jug of water by the bed, but for now she lay aching a few minutes longer, her throat beginning to rasp and catch, before mist took hold of her once more, and wrapped her in forgetting.

  When he came back he approached so quietly, he was in the shed before Zoë heard him. She’d been awake fifteen minutes, and had found the water along with a couple of serious-looking painkillers. After some hesitation, she’d taken these. Maybe they’d slowed her reactions. Either way, he was in the shed before she heard him.

  ‘You’re awake.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Her voice sounded as if it belonged to someone older.

  ‘I looked in a while ago. You were still on planet nowhere.’

  His looking in undetected while she slept would have worried her in most moods, but right now she was more concerned about his burden: a tray holding a pot of coffee, and possibly food, but most importantly a pot of coffee. He poured for her as soon as he’d settled on the ridiculously small chair.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Feeling better?’

  Well, not a hundred per cent, but she wasn’t going to die soon . . . The thought brought a twinge, a reminder of mortality in her left breast. But she nodded, and sipped her coffee. ‘What is this place?’

  He looked around, as if just noticing it. ‘It’s a shed. We pretend it’s a barn, but it’s not very big.’

  ‘So why put me in here?’

  ‘Seemed like a good idea.’ When she raised her eyebrows, he added, ‘Sarah’s always reckoned, if you ever needed to run, she’s who you’d run to. And anything bad enough to get you running would call for a hiding pla
ce. Do you want more coffee yet?’

  His name was Russell, and he and Sarah Tucker had lived here a little over two years: Sarah freelance editing, while Russell was ‘mostly retired’ at forty. ‘Wondering what to do next,’ was as much as he’d elaborate. Sarah’s ‘boy and two girls’ – Mr O, Nicole and Gwyneth – they’d rescued, expensively, when a nearby farm found that ostrich-rearing wasn’t the goldmine expected. And Sarah would be back that afternoon. ‘She’s in London, seeing a client. She’s doing well. Turning work away.’

  ‘Did she tell you how we met?’

  ‘Yes. But I don’t scare easy.’

  Zoë didn’t reply.

  ‘Sorry, that was macho. But Sarahs don’t happen often. I’d be an idiot to be frightened off by a little history.’

  ‘Multiple deaths and chemical warfare.’

  He said, ‘We were visited after we moved in together. A couple of men with polite smiles and minimalist ID. I had to sign an official secrets form. Sorry, was asked to sign. I think they’d have insisted, but Sarah made them ask.’

  ‘She was a pushover when we met. But she had a steep learning curve. You haven’t asked why I’m here yet.’

  He shrugged. ‘Like I said, Sarah’s told me her story.

  I don’t care who you’re hiding from.’

  ‘It’s not a debt I ever meant to call in.’

  This made him laugh. ‘Sarah won’t help you because she owes you, Zoë. She’ll help you because she loves you. Do you want to eat yet?’

  She thought she’d better. She couldn’t remember last time she’d eaten.

  In her letters, in her phone calls these past few years (which had always been Sarah ringing Zoë), Sarah had talked about Russell. In the flesh he was much as she’d painted: five-eleven, dark, thinning a little on top, with brown eyes Sarah called kind. He didn’t swagger, didn’t roll. He wasn’t especially broad, but wasn’t weedy either. Thickening around the middle, possibly, but that was life: it plumped you up, ready for market. He wore jeans and a dark blue V-neck, and was softly spoken. For what it was worth – Zoë had been wrong about men before – Sarah probably had a point: this Russell was maybe a good one. But Sarah had been wrong about men before, too.

  And he’d made a lot of money, though Sarah hadn’t said how. Advertising, Zoë expected. Architecture, at a pinch.

  Outside, in the proper world, the sun struggled behind grey swaddling.

  The ostrich pen was to the left, and on its far side stood another shed, much like the one she’d emerged from. The ostriches were nearby, looking deeply weird – a trio of giant feathered anomalies: not the first thing you’d expect in an English farm scene. It wasn’t a working farm; the land around belonged to the neighbours. Still, it made an Oxford flat look cramped.

  The biggest, Mr O, stared at Zoë as they passed. Zoë had been scrutinized by bastards lately, but this chilled her nevertheless.

  The farmhouse – if you could still call it that – looked like a bungalow from the rear, but getting nearer Zoë saw that its lower storey, from this approach, was below the level of the land. A kind of dry moat had been dug round it, so the lower windows at the back looked out on a stone wall holding the earth at bay. But the land dipped sharply, and from the front the house was a plain two-storey of old grey stone: broad and squat, with a mildewed patch below a leaking overflow pipe, and windows either a little too wide or a shade not deep enough. Squared-off chimneys at either end looked vaguely military, for no obvious reason.

  It wasn’t an attractive building, and lacked ivy or window-beds to soften its façade. Zoë liked it. Houses built for people who looked after pigs and tilled earth deserved this no-nonsense style. No prizes for guessing Sarah felt the same way.

  There were lights pegged just below the guttering at each corner. Russell saw her notice them. ‘Motion sensitive,’ he said. ‘We’re a bit vulnerable to burglars out here.’

  He pushed open the hefty, weather-beaten front door. ‘Kitchen’s straight ahead,’ he said. She walked through a hallway littered with shoes and upturned wellies, into a kitchen stretching half the length of the house. Not enough daylight spilled through the windows – the moat blocked it – but the internal lighting was recessed, subtle, and the moat-wall had been whitewashed, which counteracted the gloom. Below the windows was a double sink with a huge draining board, and in the middle of the room a table so large and scarred it left no doubt that this used to be a farmhouse kitchen where serious business happened: the plucking of poultry and skinning of lambs. A double-fronted oven dominated one wall, with a large and heavy pan on its back ring. More pans hung on hooks and from an overhead metal rod spanning the room. The chairs around the table were wooden, but didn’t match. There was even space for a bookcase, heavy with cookery tomes all different sizes and shelved at problematic angles, interspersed with paperback novels, phone directories, and, unless Zoë was misreading the spine, a sex manual. There was no sign of dog- or cat-life.

  ‘I’ll assume you’re not a vegetarian.’

  ‘That’s very civil.’

  He began assembling ingredients from the fridge.

  ‘You’re Jewish, right?’

  ‘Is this the bacon question?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  She shrugged. ‘Whatever.’

  Which was the right answer, the smell assured her.

  He made more coffee in between making everything else. Zoë could feel life coming back, and everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours started to assume the haunted fuzziness of a late-night movie watched while drunk. It was Tuesday morning. That seemed a strange time for it to be; an odd fact worth repeating. It was Tuesday morning. When he placed a plate in front of her, she cleared it without talking. The loudest noise in the room – crowding out her chewing, their breathing, the ticking of the clock – was the way the handcuffs jangled on her left wrist, like a musical illustration of a promise breached.

  At last he said, ‘You’re wearing handcuffs.’

  ‘I know.’ She finished eating; reached for cigarettes, but evidently wasn’t wearing her smoking clothes, because all her pockets were empty. ‘It wasn’t my idea.’

  ‘Does that indicate police involvement?’

  She said, ‘So it would seem.’

  ‘They didn’t finish arresting you, though.’

  ‘I’m not sure they were real policemen.’ Then she said, ‘No. They were real policemen. But they weren’t doing their job.’

  Something about the way he was looking at her – something, she amended, about his face, those kind eyes – invited her to continue.

  This was not how it worked, though. This was not how Zoë worked. You broke down with the first man prepared to listen, you might as well jack in the game at the start: there were men who understood this trick. Which was why women like Caroline died. So instead of going on she said, ‘You don’t smoke, by any chance?’

  ‘I wish I did,’ he replied with feeling.

  Oh. One of those.

  She made to cover a yawn and almost took her eye out with the cuff.

  He said, ‘Perhaps we should do something about that.’

  While he went to find tools she took in her new surroundings. There was something unreal about visiting for the first time a place you’d been told about. Like seeing the film of a novel you’d enjoyed, it was usually either disappointing or not quite as bad as you’d expected. But this felt like Zoë had been reading a different book altogether. She wondered how much attention she’d been paying while Sarah talked or wrote to her, and decided not enough.

  When Russell returned he was carrying a very man-at-work toolbox, which accordioned open to show compartments full of shiny implements and different-sized nails. From among them he chose a vicious pair of cutters, their seriousness only partly mitigated by their kiddy-orange handles. ‘I don’t think I can get through the cuff itself,’ he said. ‘Not without endangering your hand. Do you want me to endanger your hand?’

  ‘Guess.’
>
  ‘So what I’ll do is take the chain off. That way you won’t be clinking like the bride of Frankenstein.’ He had her lay her arm on the tabletop, and didn’t mess about once she’d done so: using both hands to force the cutters, he sheared the links as close to her wrist as he could, and the second cuff, its silver worm attached, shivered to the table. Zoë felt no freer; actually, it made her realize how much she hated having this thing hooked on her. But she was quieter, at least, and she thanked him.

  ‘I don’t mean to get personal. But could you use a bath?’

  ‘I was going to ask.’

  He showed her the bathroom, laid out some clothes of Sarah’s, and left her to it. Then she ran the bath high as it would go and still leave room for her: it was a deep tub that sat on iron claws, and held a lot of water. While it filled she unclothed and stared into the mirror. You hurt some people, she told herself. You stole a coat and hat from a man who has nothing. The face looking back might have been somebody else’s, for all the grief and guilt it held. The mirror misted, and Zoë was glad. There was something about that face’s determination not to give anything away that made her tired.

  But water was good. Water was hot. She slipped into it with a sense of release; it made her both more conscious of her body – soothing its outline; stroking its bruises – and detached from it at the same time. She looked at herself, basking like a porpoise. This is what was happening: her body either was, or was not, harbouring an unwelcome guest, which right now either was, or was not, eating her healthy cells. There were other possibilities, and while none were pleasant, all were preferable. None would kill her. None would maim. None would harm her body, not for ever, and it was with this thought that something confused until now became clear: that it was not her body doing this to her. It was something happening to her body, something separate and unwelcome. This was worth hanging on to, and it followed her into a cloudy warm nothing where she closed her eyes and forgot, for a while, men who’d forced her to hurt them, who would have hurt her too. And a man who’d allowed her to wrong him, instead of making her work a little harder for what she’d robbed him of.