by Mick Herron
She showed him the palms of her hands. ‘You sure about that?’
He nodded, then strode down the alley, girls and boy behind him. The boy cast a puzzled glance back at Zoë – unsure what she thought she’d been doing, trying to bridge this chasm of age and beauty – then did a catch-up lollop after Andrew, who was being audibly badgered by the females. Zoë couldn’t make out words, but had no trouble imagining them. Really and awful and woman.
Whatever did she want, Andy? She let them turn into the square before following.
The square was milling: students and shoppers and others with no obvious excuse. Andrew and Co breezed through to colonize a table outside a coffee bar on the far side. Zoë lit a cigarette. After a while a waitress came and took their order. After another while she came back with drinks.
Watching, it seemed to Zoë that Andrew Kite sat in a shaft of sunlight, as if weather had singled him out for treatment: he was young, strong, healthy; worth caressing. He had fucked up once, but everybody got a second chance, except Kid B. He was drinking coffee-coloured froth from a tall glass. As she watched, he ran a slow hand through his rich hair. Zoë dumped her cigarette, and went to join them.
Andrew was saying something about a monster DJ, or a DJ monster. He broke off at her approach. ‘You’re back.’
‘I’m back,’ she agreed.
The others stared as if she were an unexpected natural disaster: a typhoon in the English countryside, or a broken TV anywhere at all.
‘I’ve already explained, you’ve got the wrong person.’
Zoë shook her head as she pulled out a vacant chair. ‘The wrong person was the other boy, Andrew. You going by Dig still? Didn’t think so.’ She sat.
‘We don’t want you here,’ one of the female children said. Zoë ignored her.
‘The wrong boy was Wensley, Andrew. Wensley Deepman, remember? The wrong boy in the wrong place leading the wrong fucking life. I just thought you should know, Andrew. He’s dead.’
It took an expert, but something shimmered beneath Andrew Kite’s surface.
‘They found him under a tower block. He’d just taken a shortcut nowhere. He was twelve years old. Am I ringing bells?’
He licked his lips. Then said, ‘I just think you should piss off, that’s all. I think you should just leave us alone.’
‘I will. But you should know this first, Andrew. Call it a lesson in responsibility.’ She turned to the others. ‘Your friend here, he’s got a bit of a past.’
‘We don’t need you telling us anything.’
‘Maybe I need to tell it.’ Zoë felt a tremor trap her right hand, as if a nerve had spasmed. ‘Last time, well, he ran away to London. Did a little thieving, a little smash-and-grab. Real jack-the-lad, weren’t you, Andrew?’
He said, ‘These people are my friends. We’re not interested in your opinions.’
‘And you found a friend there too, didn’t you? Wensley Deepman. A little thug. Took you under his wing. He was nine years old.’
The boy looked from Zoë back to Andrew. The girls didn’t waver.
Zoë said, ‘So I found you and brought you home. Mummy and Daddy paid for that. And now you’ve grown up a bit, and you’re studying, and you’ve got nice-looking friends, and here you all are drinking latte in the sunshine. But Wensley had nobody to take him home. He was already home. And now he’s dead.’
‘That’s not my fault,’ Andrew said.
‘No. But he’s still dead.’ She stood. ‘I wish you luck, Andrew. You look like you’ve sorted some stuff out. But these things cost. You should be aware of that.’
She stuffed her hand in her pocket before it could spasm again. The kids would think her drunk. There was probably something else she should say, but she couldn’t for her life think what; and nor did she look back as she walked away.
The encounter left her feeling stupid minutes later – what was the point of that, Zoë? Joe’s voice, she thought, then: No, not Joe’s, Sarah’s. Which was a laugh, because if there was anybody you didn’t need as the voice of your conscience, it was Sarah Tucker. You’d enjoyed your last moment’s peace if you had Sarah Tucker telling you right from wrong. Which didn’t mean Zoë didn’t love her, she supposed, but there was tricky history involved. Since getting Joe killed, which was part of the tricky history, Sarah had gone to live up north, where she’d met someone she said was a nice man. Zoë hadn’t seen her in some years, nor ever laid eyes on her ‘boy and two girls’.
‘I worry about you,’ she’d said, last time she’d called.
‘You don’t need to. I’m fine.’
‘You’d say that tied to a railway track,’ Sarah diagnosed. ‘You’d say, “Go away. I’m perfectly all right.”’
It was good to have friends, but it was also good when they lived miles away, and you never saw them.
Home again, she checked her e-mails. Nothing had come through on Alan Talmadge, or nothing that wasn’t negative. He did not hold a driver’s licence; was not registered to vote. He had no credit card, no mortgage, no – slightly off the wall, but it had borne fruit before – season ticket to any Premiership club. He did not belong to a major political party, subscribe to a national newspaper, or shop at Amazon – he’d never bought anything online at all. Which might have had something to do with his not having a credit card, of course. After a while, you were searching in the same places twice; if he’d not been there the first time, he was unlikely to turn up the second.
. . . Alan Talmadge had no telephone, no mobile, no email address.
Zoë rose abruptly; paced the small room. Aside from her computer and a foldaway bed, it held a lot of books: she’d been a reader once, though that was a habit she’d shucked without noticing. Also the music she’d once needed: the usual rock and roll; the odd piece of soft classical or easy jazz. Mostly on vinyl, of course.
. . . Alan Talmadge had belonged to no record club, no book club. Alan Talmadge had not possessed a TV licence.
The TV was also in here. Occasionally she’d wheel it out, usually when it was late and she needed numbing, but that happened less and less . . . Either she was developing a puritanical streak, or very slowly she was ceasing to exist.
‘Fuck this,’ she said, under her breath. She had no idea who she was addressing, or where her sudden anger came from.
. . . Alan Talmadge existed: that was a given. But he was either a throwback, or he wasn’t called Alan Talmadge . . . It was possible Grayling had got the name wrong, of course. Larger matters had foundered on smaller details. But if he had, fuck him too: Zoë had better things to waste time on than clients’ misinformation. Given a moment, she’d come up with some.
She had never noticed before how dumbly vacant a TV set looked, like a mistreated puppy. If she had any sense, she’d junk the damn thing.
. . . And there was Sarah’s voice again, telling her right from wrong. It wasn’t just the TV needed junking, Zoë told herself twenty minutes later, loading the bastard into her car. It was her whole damn history, beginning with everybody she’d ever met. Maybe that way she’d get some rest eventually. She glanced in her mirror; pulled out. She wasn’t so paranoid as to check whether anyone was following, but it wouldn’t have made a difference if she had.
* * *
On the way, she rang Bob Poland. It was his day off, but if she was disturbing him, she was disturbing him. Theirs wasn’t a relationship based on kind regard.
‘So what are you doing anyway?’
‘Oh, you know. Sitting down. Drinking a beer.’
‘And they say men can’t multi-task.’
‘Funny woman. You ring just to piss me off, or what?’
Because that’s the only time she ever called him: when she had a problem.
The first time she saw Bob Poland, she thought: here’s a man who’s been given the wrong head. It was a moonish addendum to a frame otherwise angles, straight planes, edges. She didn’t know how he kept lean – every time she saw him he had a drink in one hand and
another behind the bar – but it worked, except there wasn’t much he could do about the head. ‘Like a stick of rock with a tomato on,’ Joe had said. Then added: ‘Never tell him I said so.’
– No, Joe.
Bob Poland, anyway – a six-foot jawless stringbean – was a cop. Joe had known him first, of course; Joe had bought him, to start with, drinks and smokes, and finally just bought him, or that was how Joe told it. In his mind, Joe had always walked tightropes. In the real world, Zoë suspected, he’d had the same experience she’d enjoyed: shovelled a bundle of money Poland’s way to keep him on-message, and in return got whatever he felt like giving, which was mostly nothing. Though she didn’t expect he’d wasted so much effort trying to get Joe into bed.
He’d contacted her a couple of months after Joe was in the ground.
‘If you’re thinking of carrying on, you’ll need someone like me. Maybe you’d like to buy me a drink.’
And after all, whatever else he might have been, he was verifiably a cop. There was bound to be a time when one of those would come in handy.
. . . None of this was what she’d intended. The day Joe died Zoë had been in Paris, armed with a man and a plan. The man hadn’t lasted – had never been meant to last – but the plan was built and sorted: she would cut her last ties with Joe (their marriage, by now, was one of those linguistic anomalies anyway: a word that covered its own opposite meaning, like ‘cleave’) and go back to college, convert her law degree. It was a getaway stratagem; a running from, not a moving towards. But at least it would work.
It was not entirely Joe’s fault. (This was a revision of her earlier stance, which had been that it was entirely Joe’s fault.) For as long as she’d known him, he’d harboured a dream of being a private eye, and there had been in him this quality that over the years she’d defined in turn as steadfastness, whimsy, pigheadedness and bullshit that had kept the dream alive even when the reality demonstrably sucked. Process serving. Credit checks. It was work, if you didn’t know it was glamorous, you could mistake for the daily drudge: work done over the phone or in front of a monitor; work done murdering countless hours outside strangers’ houses, hoping they’d not turn violent when you served them. Work that called for patience and shorthand, neither of which Joe had in great supply. So he’d kept his dream alive by hiding it where reality couldn’t touch it; Zoë, meanwhile, kept the office alive with credit checks and process serving, and kept her sanity by blowing off to Paris once in a while. They were still man and wife when she made that last trip, but were no longer cleaving to each other – were doing, in fact, the exact opposite. She would cut her last ties with Joe; go back to college, convert her law degree. But before she could do that, somebody cut Joe’s throat instead.
A couple of months later she was meeting Poland, and law college was a bunch of prospectuses gathering dust on a shelf.
What he’d said first, after taking the top off his lager, was: ‘Joe talked about you. A lot.’
‘Did he really.’
‘He reckoned you were ace. He reckoned there was nobody you couldn’t find or turn inside out without leaving your desk.’
‘Did you know Joe well?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Then you know he was full of shit.’
‘My point is, Mrs Silvermann –’
‘Boehm. Ms Boehm.’
‘My point is, Zoë, if you plan to carry on without him . . .’ He put his glass down and repeated himself. ‘You’re going to need someone like me.’
She still remembered that moment. They were sitting in a pub garden; the sun was shining; a loose piece of guttering hung from the roof – details. Somewhere nearby a TV showcased a Mexican soap. It was 3.45 p.m. Joe was dead, as was the man who’d killed him. And Zoë had encountered a borderline case who’d announced his intention of shooting her, mistakenly confident she wouldn’t shoot first. After that, somehow, law school was out of the question. But it was only listening to Bob Poland that she knew she was stuck in Joe’s dream.
‘And why’s that?’ she said.
‘You’re wondering what use a friendly policeman could be?’
‘I’m wondering how expensive he gets.’
‘Joe always got his money’s worth.’
‘Joe bought batteries from street traders. He wasn’t the best judge of value.’
‘He ever get a speeding ticket while he knew me?’
‘You know what I heard? I heard the system’s so up-stuffed they let eighty per cent of the fines go hang, because they can’t process them before the deadline.’
‘You’re a cynical woman.’
‘Thank you.’
He laughed. ‘You’re one of those people, you’ve got like a tortoise mentality, don’t you? I don’t mean slow. I mean like totally armoured. You’re one of those people carries your defences wherever you go.’
And he was one of those people who said ‘one of those people’ a lot, as if he’d already sorted everybody into neat categories.
‘I do a lot of liaison work,’ he told her. ‘I’ve contacts in every force south of the border. See how handy that might be?’
‘And what does it cost?’
‘Whatever works.’
‘I think we’re finished here.’
He put his hands up. ‘Can’t blame me for trying.’
She could if she wanted. They batted sums of money about, then Zoë made the mistake of asking what happened, she paid him upfront and he didn’t deliver? He grinned a tooth-heavy grin, and separated a coin from the change in front of him. When he tossed it her way she snapped it from the air like a lizard catching lunch, but the grin didn’t waver, and the line came out pat: ‘Call your lawyer.’
Zoë remembered Joe saying Poland did this. She didn’t suppose Joe caught many coins.
Flipping it back, she promised: ‘You’ll do that once too often.’
‘You’re saying we’ve got a future?’
‘We’ll see how it goes.’
And as things go, so had this. Occasionally, Poland had been of use; often, he’d taken her money. And frequently she’d wondered if he weren’t a mistake, because there was an underlying ugliness to their exchanges. It came down to sex, like most things were supposed to – he was pissed off she’d never responded to his advances. That was something else about men (the list headed ‘Men’ was very long): rejection wasn’t a thing they forgave easily. And definitely something practice made them worse at.
But now they were miles distant, and getting further apart by the second. She told him: ‘I’ve a couple of names for you,’ and gave him Caroline Daniels’ details, including that she was dead. Then Alan Talmadge, though with no accompanying colour.
‘Some kind of spook, huh?’
‘Some kind.’ Then she realized he meant spook – a spy. ‘That hadn’t occurred to me.’
‘Sounds pretty fucking likely though, don’t it? James Bond porking some old lady from the typing pool.’
‘This particular old lady was younger than me.’
‘Yeah, well, that was bound to happen, wasn’t it? Sooner or later.’
Instead of replying she swung abruptly into the fast lane to overtake something redder and sportier than her.
‘I’ll do what I can,’ said Poland. ‘But if he’s a spook, you’re screwed. And it’s the same rates for failure.’
‘If we didn’t have those, you’d starve to death.’
‘And I didn’t have a sore head, I’d laugh.’
‘That’s nature’s way of saying Too Much Beer.’
‘You kidding? Charles Parsley Sturrock’s underground.’ He belched loudly. ‘Every blue in the country’s tied one on on the strength of that.’
‘Real nice, Bob. I can tell you’re in touch with your feminine side.’
‘I tried that once. My phone bill went through the roof.’
‘Boom boom.’
‘You know what your problem is, Zoë?’
‘Mostly it’s hating being told what my probl
em is.’
‘Also, you smoke too much. But your real problem, you’re one of those people with a case of the not-to-be-fucked-withs. Makes you kind of bitter, know what I mean?’
‘Tell me when you’ve run those names.’
‘Business, business. Maybe I’m not the one needs to get in touch with his feminine side.’ He broke the connection.
Zoë realized her foot was approaching horizontal, and eased up.
The red sporty number cruised past. There was a kind of insulted arrogance in this – like it was pointing out, she wanted to race with the grown-ups, she’d have to concentrate every step of the way.
And she remembered something else Bob had once charmingly told her, picking up on what he’d called her tortoise mentality:
The big thing about a tortoise isn’t that it carries its armour round with it. The big thing about a tortoise is, it winds up on its back, it’s fucked.
iii
She hit an easy run into the city. Even getting lost didn’t take as long as it usually did. When the two highrises broached the skyline, she steered by them as if they were hills seen from the sea.
And the lift worked, which showed that the universe was sometimes benevolent.
Remembering her moment of near-vertigo, Zoë did not look down from the fourteenth balcony; she was anyway struggling to keep her grip on the television, which was gaining weight by the minute. When Joseph Deepman opened the door, he seemed not to recognize her; the look on his face suggesting that one or the other of them was seriously out of place.
But when he spoke, he said, ‘You’re back.’
‘I’m back,’ she agreed. ‘Can I put this down?’
He stood aside, and she carted the TV into the sitting room; set it carefully in the space where the lost one had sat. Deepman gazed on this as if the whole process were something he had arranged and paid for, and was already bored by. Zoë had to remind herself this wasn’t the biggest thing happening in his life right now.
She stepped back, as if admiring a complicated piece of handiwork. ‘You’ll be able to watch the cricket, anyway.’
