Smoke and Whispers

by Mick Herron

  ‘Will I be needed at the inquest?’

  ‘Probably not. It won’t be for a week or so anyway.’

  An unbidden image arrived: of a logjam of freshly dead corpses; too many for a coroner to deal with inside a week.

  ‘Then I suppose I’ll go home,’ she said.

  5

  At her request, they dropped her in the city centre. She wanted, she said, to do some shopping, and they saw nothing odd in this. Identify your friend’s body; then a little retail therapy. But maybe – in a job entailing regular trips to a morgue – you developed a certain insight into the reactions of the bereaved, and learned there was no template to rely on. Shopping was as useful, or useless, as any other response to death. As for Sarah, she wanted to be on her own, preferably in a crowd. It didn’t matter what they thought she wanted.

  The air was cold, but still; the skies grey as an anvil. Sarah’s mental weather, though, was storms and shattered crockery; in her mind, it rained hammers. She’d just come from a morgue, where she’d identified a body as Zoë Boehm. Her reasons for doing so didn’t alter this: that a woman lay dead on a slab, her body sluiced like a disconnected drainpipe.

  And Zoë’s possessions had weighed her down in the water.

  If Sarah tried to break down how she felt, the list would run to pages: grief for Zoë, fear of her own death, the nagging sense of tasks left unfinished, along with all the usual physical niggles: that sudden tremor in the calf; an unexpected churn in the stomach. And underlying everything, the accumulation of all she’d ever been or felt: the memories, even forgotten ones; the emotions, even those wasted. Listing them would be like trying to score a symphony by cataloguing the orchestra, instrument by instrument. And everyone was like this. Everyone carried around their own symphony of the self, with only the faintest snatch of it audible to those around them; whispered music all we hear of their real life. This was what had been snuffed out of that figure on the slab: all the music no one had ever heard.

  She walked through the shoppers’ streets, not paying attention. She was heading riverside.

  The road sloped steeply down to the quay. Sarah passed an arts cinema and several bars that looked new, though traded on traditional names. An overhead bridge cast a damp shadow, and a building leaned over the pavement at a ridiculous angle, like an accident lawyer’s daydream. The whole city was like this: the new jammed next to the old in a transplant so recent, you could see the join healing. When she crossed the road, she found herself on a paved area overlooking the Tyne. There were benches, but she didn’t sit. She leaned on a rail, and gazed at the river instead.

  This was the water that the body had come out of. If birth had a canal, death had its river.

  The more you pondered death, she thought – if you were an intelligent, educated, well-read woman – the more you expected yourself to come up with something deep; something that, if unlikely never to have been thought before, would at least crystallize your own opinion. But Sarah had nothing to think. Death happened; would happen to her. Had happened to the woman she’d just viewed on that slab. But Sarah had nothing profound to reply to it. It was a bugger, that was all. Which was unlikely to make it into a book of quotations.

  What did come, though, was the realization that it shouldn’t have come as a surprise, the difficulty she’d had identifying Zoë. Alive, Zoë had never been easy to pin down. What had made Sarah think the task would be easier, Zoë dead? In a world where identity theft was rife, Zoë had kept hers close and secure; had a deliberate policy of putting anything which might have betrayed her through a shredder. Her slash-and-burn approach to friendship confirmed this.

  And one of its effects was that their friendship was hard to reconstruct. In a film, flashbacks come with background detail: clothing, wallpaper; the quality of light as it slices through windows. The self-assembly kind has less coherence; comprises fragments pulled from a contextless soup, with no guarantee that they represent faithful reconstruction. Thinking of Zoë, Sarah saw no linear structure to their friendship. There were phrases, and moments of remembered action that always seemed to be recalled from above. Not that she had trouble recalling Zoë’s face. It was just that, once you had someone’s face firmly in mind, memory could put any words it wanted in their mouth. The self-assembly flashback could lie, which no self-respecting movie version could. Even Hitchcock got burned trying that.

  Some words she was sure she recalled correctly, though. She remembered, for instance, Zoë telling her about her jacket.

  And the jacket was a giveaway. It wasn’t that Zoë had ever voiced any particular attachment to it; it was just that she’d constantly worn it – her signature look. Bought in Italy. Zoë’s husband Joe had picked up something similar at a street market at the same time, for a tenth of the price. Its sleeves had fallen off within six months. But Zoë had still been wearing hers years later; long after Joe died; long after Sarah had met her; right up until the time it had fallen into the possession of the killer, Alan Talmadge.

  Zoë, to the best of Sarah’s knowledge, hadn’t worn it since.

  She wasn’t sure how long she stood, her thoughts clenched round her like a fist. After a while, though, it became clear that no conclusions were available yet, except for the obvious: that the body must indeed be Zoë’s, and that the insubstantial Alan Talmadge had entered her life again, shortly before its end. Which cleared this much up: Zoë hadn’t entered the river of her own accord. This knowledge made Sarah no warmer. When she realized that her shivering was as much due to cold as to sorrow, she began making her way back to the Bolbec.

  Trusting to a sense of geography that some, Russ especially, would have doubted existed, she headed upriver towards a hotel whose tubular neon swirl of a logo was familiar, and before reaching it turned up a flight of steps between two apartment blocks still offering empty flats. At the top, she turned and looked down. On the river’s far bank stood a whitewashed building, the words Ovoline Lubricants painted on its side. More of the old city, not fading away.

  The Bolbec was up ahead of her, so geography had done its work. The other buildings in its square were abandoned. Renovation was happening from the quayside up, she supposed. A placard announced major developments: watch this space. Slouched against the wall of the building opposite the hotel – a former electrical works – was a figure which straightened at Sarah’s approach. He wore dirty blue jeans, and a variety of shirts and sweaters, layered one on top of the other so their sleeves blossomed like cauliflowers at his wrists’ bony junction. Topmost was a worn sheepskin jacket some sizes too small. His hair was dead straw, and his face grey from huddling in corners.

  ‘Big Issue, lady?’

  She didn’t always, but sometimes she did. If their eyes caught hers, she was theirs. She’d fumbled a coin out before it struck her. ‘You don’t have any.’

  ‘I can get you one.’

  He grinned cheekily as he spoke, and she found herself surrendering the coin anyway. ‘Maybe next time.’

  ‘Know where to find me.’

  In the hotel lobby was Gerard, who probably wasn’t waiting for her, but didn’t appear to be doing much else. ‘Exploring the boondocks?’

  ‘Doesn’t that mean swampland?’

  ‘How the hell should I know?’ He looked genuinely surprised to be asked. ‘See anything interesting?’

  She closed her eyes briefly: a chiaroscuro nightmare unreeling on her eyelids. White flesh; black dead hair. A leather jacket with a familiar scar. ‘Not especially,’ she said. ‘Just stretching my legs.’

  ‘Some holiday you’re having.’

  ‘Not all holidays are about being there,’ she said. ‘Some are about not being anywhere else.’

  ‘That’s probably deeply clever,’ said Gerard. ‘Well done. What are you doing for lunch?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought about it.’

  ‘That was rather the point of asking, wasn’t it? To put the subject at the forefront of your mind.’

  It occurred
to Sarah, not for the first time, that conversation with many men would be a lot simpler conducted on their terms: Yes, No, Fuck off. It would limit the agenda, but a lot of them seemed to prefer that.

  ‘Gerard –’

  ‘You look like you could do with feeding.’ Then, presumably worried there might be a compliment in there, added, ‘I don’t mean you’re skin and bone or anything. You didn’t stint yourself last night that I noticed. I just mean you look a little down. Lunch helps with that, I find.’

  ‘Why are you here, Gerard?’

  ‘I was just on my way out.’

  ‘No, I mean, why are you here?’

  ‘I already told you. Looking at investment opportunities.’

  ‘Why Newcastle?’

  ‘Hadn’t you heard? This city’s one of the fastest-growing IT centres in the country. Software development, communications technologies. Thought it was about time I came and checked it out.’

  Sarah hadn’t known, but it didn’t surprise her. Everything happened somewhere. ‘Doesn’t make it any closer to London, does it? What was it you could manage in three hours? Roast a swan, orphan a trade unionist, and still have time to fire the help?’

  ‘Mmm, not much escapes you, does it?’

  ‘Consistency was never your strong point.’

  ‘Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.’

  ‘Sounds like Wilde.’

  ‘Everything sounds like Wilde if you declaim it rotundly enough,’ Gerard said. ‘Though in this case, I’ll grant you, it’s one of Oscar’s. Anyway, I never claimed I was planning on living here. I’m happy to let other people do that for me.’

  ‘Big of you.’

  ‘Now now. Don’t do the new North down. It’s got lots of things talented young professionals want, like big glassy buildings full of rubbish modern art, and whacking great angels on the motorway.’

  She really didn’t want this conversation. ‘It’s too early for lunch.’ Where this knowledge came from, she wasn’t sure, but the clock in the lobby confirmed it: it wasn’t long past eleven. It was surprising how quickly big things happened.

  ‘Well, I didn’t mean now, did I? I’ve a meeting first, which is why I’m waiting for a taxi, which seems to be operating on a different timescale to the one I’m used to. And –’

  ‘Gerard, taxis everywhere are always –’

  ‘– and afterwards I’ll be going for lunch. What’s your mobile?’

  Giving him her number seemed the fastest way of removing herself from this situation. A taxi pulled up outside as she did so. He was still tapping her into his Sony as he went to meet it.

  There was nobody on reception. Gerard’s key lay on the desk as she passed. There was something almost quaint in that: a key, not a passcard. But it was of a piece with the setting.

  In her room, she lay on the bed. Her hangover had disappeared, or gone into remission, but all she’d seen since waking had filled the space it left, and her head was roaring. Lying down didn’t help. She had to do something.

  She should have talked to those policemen about Alan Talmadge. But Sarah knew nothing about him beyond the little Zoë had told her, which amounted, in effect, to these few facts: Talmadge killed women, Zoë had said; enjoyed Motown music, Zoë had said; wasn’t really called Talmadge, Zoë had said; and some years back had walked away with the jacket Sarah had just seen in the morgue. Zoë had said. This would have involved admitting that she’d identified Zoë’s jacket rather than her body, which would have made waves. Besides, Sarah had had unhappy experiences with policemen. A part of her, quite a large part, preferred their absence.

  But there were things that could be done, and having so decided, she did one of them. She made a call. ‘Vicky? Sarah Tucker.’

  Vicky was Zoë’s teen webhead, or that’s what she’d used to be – Sarah was pretty sure she was still in her teens, but didn’t know whether ‘webhead’ remained current. Zoë had relied on her for years. No techno-slouch herself, Zoë knew her limitations, and any time she hit a firewall hotter than she could handle, turned to Vicky. Sarah had once sent her a hard drive which had crunched three weeks’ work on the same day an ostrich had eaten her back-up memory stick: Vicky had returned it inside twenty-four hours, all its data unstuck. So Sarah had her listed on her mobile.

  ‘Have you heard from Zoë lately?’ she asked.

  (This was cowardice. She didn’t want to be breaking bad news to a teenager, over the phone.)

  ‘I heard they pulled her out a river,’ Vicky said.

  So much for the soft approach.

  ‘Oh. Oh, Vicky –’

  ‘Well, you don’t think I believe it, do you? Zoë? In a river? Like that’s gunna happen.’

  ‘There’s a body,’ Sarah said.

  ‘There’s always bodies. People die all the time.’ But not Zoë, apparently. ‘Anyway, you don’t believe it any more’n me. Else you wouldn’t be asking if I’d heard from her.’

  It was no time to start deconstructing how much she’d been prepared to divulge. Besides, the kid probably had a polygraph wired to her phone. ‘Either way, she hasn’t been in touch,’ Sarah said. ‘Don’t you think, if she was able to, she’d have let us know she was okay?’

  Teenagers have a gift: they can shrug audibly, over a mobile. ‘I said she wasn’t dead, that’s all. I dunno what’s happened to her.’

  ‘You want to help me find out?’

  Vicky said, ‘Like for a job?’

  ‘Like for a friend.’

  To give her her due, Vicky didn’t think about it long. ‘Okay.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yeah. I’ll just bump up the fee next time she needs me, that’s all.’

  ‘That would be my approach.’ Sarah shifted the phone from one hand to the other. ‘Can you access her computer?’

  ‘Nothing easier. You got her door key?’

  ‘Door key?’

  Theatrical sigh. ‘Zoë wouldn’t go anywhere, least of all a river, and leave her computer live. You want to know what’s on it, you need to go and plug it in.’

  ‘Maybe she –’

  ‘Trust me.’

  ‘Okay. So short of breaking into her flat, what can you tell me?’

  ‘Anything that’s out there. Anything in the air. I can fetch you her e-mails. I can tell you anything she’s ordered online, and I can tell you her bank account details. Actually, I can do that quite quickly, because she’s always trying to plead poverty when she wants a job done. So I keep her records handy so I know when she’s fibbing.’

  Sarah reminded herself never to piss Vicky off.

  ‘But anything on her desktop, forget it. And you want to know what I think, I don’t think Zoë’s gunna leave anything lying around for others to read. And when I say lying around, I mean out there in the air. She knows about this stuff, you get?’

  ‘I get.’

  ‘But I’ll do what I can.’

  ‘That would be great.’

  For a moment they shared a silence. Silence is louder over a phone.

  ‘. . . Sarah?’

  ‘Still here.’

  ‘You don’t believe it either, do you? About Zoë, I mean?’

  She closed her eyes briefly: saw a white body on an overused slab; a black leather jacket on a wire coat hanger. The river at night lapped darkly beneath any number of dangerous bridges. ‘No, Vicky. Not for a moment.’

  ‘Good. ’Cause I don’t, either.’

  ‘That’s why I want to find her, actually. To ask her who she thinks she’s kidding.’

  ‘Yeah. And tell her what I said, won’t you? That I’m like, that’s gunna happen.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll tell her.’

  They promised to talk later, then Sarah put her phone away.

  The roaring in her head had subsided, as if action had reduced the pressure. That Vicky could do what she’d said, Sarah had no doubt. That her efforts would reveal what Zoë had been up to was less certain. On the other hand, Sarah already had a pre
tty clear picture of what that had been – Zoë had been looking for Alan Talmadge. Though even as the thought occurred, Sarah picked it up, turned it round, and set it down again. Perhaps Alan Talmadge had been looking for Zoë. Perhaps Zoë hadn’t known he was here until it had been too late.

  After a while, Sarah dozed. The body was capable of making its own decisions whatever the mind was up to. It wasn’t a refreshing nap, more a bumpy ride through the outer borders of sleep, and when she came fully awake twenty minutes later she was in desperate need of coffee, but also in possession of an idea.

  Coffee could wait. The idea needed to be acted on immediately.

  In the lobby, Barry was back on reception, door keys hanging neatly on the board behind him.

  ‘Good morning, Ms Tucker. Afternoon, I should say.’

  ‘Hi, Barry. Barry, is that man still outside?’

  ‘Man?’

  ‘Some homeless guy. Selling Big Issues, except he didn’t have any to sell.’

  ‘Was he bothering you?’

  ‘He wanted change. Was pretty insistent.’

  She felt dreadful, saying this. Made a mental note to make amends.

  ‘I’ll take a look, shall I?’

  The time it took him to cross the lobby and look outside was all she needed. Gerard’s key was in her pocket before he’d turned.

  ‘Over the road?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s still there. I’ll move him on.’

  ‘Oh – no. No, don’t do that.’

  ‘No worries. If he’s been upsetting you –’

  ‘Not really. Just startled me. No, leave him be. I’ll avoid him, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure.’

  ‘Thanks, Barry.’

  ‘And I’d put a coat on, I was you. If you’re going out, I mean.’

  ‘I am. In a bit. And I will. Thanks, Barry.’

  On the landing she paused, before getting paranoid about being caught on camera, pausing. Except the hotel didn’t have CCTV, did it? Though there were mirrors everywhere – one on this landing, even – and it was possible they were placed to allow whoever was on reception a reflected view of every staircase, every corridor; a Wizard-of-Oz perspective of every floor at once. But Get real, she told herself, resuming her ascent. That wouldn’t be a security system, it would be an art installation.