The Last Voice You Hear

by Mick Herron

  It was no stretch to imagine Victoria Ingalls feeling the same. I always thought Victoria was unhappy . . . She had that look, as if life had done her down. She was a disappointed woman: that was the nub of it. Once, Zoë had overheard a man say there was no domestic hell like living with a disappointed woman, and had found herself agreeing: none at all, save being the disappointed woman yourself. Victoria Ingalls had been an opera lover who worked in a shoe shop, and it was hard not to see the gulf dividing reality and desire. Opera was thunderstorms and grand device, with passions that rattled the scenery. Shoe shops were shoe shops. No wonder she’d hemmed her life with routine and private matters. So what did a woman like this do, finding herself with a lover? – she subsumed him into her life; made him part of those routines. Steered clear of public demonstration. Because opera would have taught her this much: that love was not safe harbour, whatever the paperbacks said. It was a condition that left you subject to the ministrations of others, your safety and survival depending on their talents, their concern for your well-being. They had to be gentle or very very sharp, with a touch like a feather or a scalpel. You had to trust them completely, or failing that, hope they made it quick.

  She was holding a hand to her breast, she realized, and let it drop.

  Down the road, the green cardigan was locking the animal sanctuary place. The shop kept charity hours – everywhere else would remain open another hour.

  After sitting ten minutes, Zoë went for a walk.

  It was dark blue afternoon when she joined the footpath, and breezy enough that she was glad of her leather jacket. There were others around, dogwalkers mostly, and a young couple strolling arm in arm; an older pair who looked happy together. It wasn’t difficult to trace Victoria’s route, because her route followed the path.

  By the time she reached the drainage ditch, Zoë was alone. She stood at the lip, gazing into it at the point where the footpath right-angled. There was no telling exactly where Victoria Ingalls had slipped and fallen: they’d have slung accident tape at the time, no doubt, and scraps of it might still linger, bright yellow edges snagged on knots of bark. But to the woman who’d died, the precise geography would have been an irrelevance: neither here nor there. What would have mattered was that this was the last place she’d ever notice; whose banks, slick with mud, must have oozed to liquid at the touch. This with a broken leg. So after a while she’d have retreated inside her body, trying to coax resilience from it as the rain came down and everything grew darker. The walk was part of her routine, but this was not. It happened anyway.

  Alone and in the dark; in pain, with water falling. If you were lucky, Zoë thought, the last voice you’d hear would be your child’s or a friend’s or a sensible stranger’s, telling you you were loved. Otherwise it would be your own, asking ‘Why me?’

  She stood in the near-dark herself now, wondering what there’d been of evidence – what the police might have found after a night of rain. Or how hard they’d have looked. Because why would they look? Victoria Ingalls took her walk alone each evening. This was her routine. There’d have been no reason to ask hard questions, because Victoria’s life was one easy answer after another: her flat, her job, her opera. On Saturday mornings, the supermarket; Sunday afternoons, the front windows. On the first of October, she’d switch to her winter coat. It didn’t matter what the weather was. Did she have a lover? Why would they ask, with the answer staring them in the face? Lovers didn’t die in ditches. Not in the usual stories.

  Lost in this, she forgot herself so much, she didn’t even smoke. What she did remember, at last, was that she had nothing – no evidence, no clue, no firm ground at all. Firm ground, standing here by an unfirm edge. If she wanted that, she needed to act. Zoë turned, and walked back the way she’d come.

  Back at the car, she still had time to kill. There were people around, though the shops were now shut: people heading out to eat and drink; to remind themselves why they spent the rest of their week at work. As long as she was sitting, she might as well be useful. She called Bob Poland again, who wasn’t happy about it – Saturday evening, what was she expecting: miracles? She told him that would do for a start, and hung up before he could whinge further.

  Waiting again, she found a scrunched-up note in the glovebox – Chris. She hadn’t got round to his surname. She considered calling him, for no better reason than not liking loose ends, but in the end didn’t, in case Poland tried to get through.

  When he got back, he said, ‘Tom Connor.’

  ‘Got a number?’

  He read it – quickly, but she was good with numbers – and finished by reminding her it was Saturday evening.

  ‘I’d not forgotten yet. Anyway, don’t you guardians of the peace work 24/7?’

  ‘You fucking wish.’

  Then she was on her own, dabbing out the number he’d given her while it was fresh.

  Miracles: here’s one. Connor was on duty. The switchboard connected her.

  ‘I got your name,’ she told him, ‘from Bob Poland.’

  ‘Bob who?’

  ‘Poland.’

  She waited while somewhere on his side, another phone rang. Tom Connor said, ‘Bob Poland, okay. You a journo?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Name?’

  When she’d given it, he said, ‘Call back in five.’

  She gave him six, but had to wait a couple more before getting through again. First thing he said was, ‘So what’s your interest in Wensley Deepman?’

  She said, ‘I know his grandfather, that’s all. And he’s been left out of the loop.’

  ‘Not much of a loop to be in, Miss Boehm. Kid threw himself off a highrise. Sad thing to happen, but what can you do? Teen suicides, it’s like there’s a rash.’

  ‘And you’re sure he jumped.’

  ‘He was on the roof alone.’

  ‘Drunk? Drugged?’

  ‘Traces of cannabis in his bloodstream, but he wasn’t high at the time. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. Miss Boehm, what can I tell you? The inquest will likely call it an auto. The death isn’t actively under investigation.’

  ‘Wensley Deepman,’ Zoë said, ‘wasn’t exactly a model child.’

  ‘Not news. His nick had a calendar posted, ticking off the days until he passed juvenile. Maybe he took a hard look at his future. Was there anything else?’

  ‘The papers said there was a witness.’

  ‘There was. Ground level, but he saw it happen. Kid stood on the edge, launched himself off.’

  ‘The witness wasn’t named.’

  ‘Not everybody wants to be a celebrity.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’d tell me –’

  ‘Poland’s a contact, not a friend. He got you this conversation, but that’s all.’

  ‘It would mean a lot to Mr Deepman.’

  ‘You give Mr Deepman my condolences. Nice talking to you.’

  Out on the street, there was still activity; mostly boy/girl stuff. Zoë attracted all the attention of an empty crisp packet. She slipped her mobile into her pocket, and recovered last Tuesday’s Independent from the back seat. Front page news then had been Charles Parsley Sturrock.

  . . . Sturrock had been one of those soaps the world transmits on occasion: avidly watched by a sizeable minority; intermittently glimpsed by all. In the end, as with all soap operas, his career highlights boiled down to a few scenes etched on the national consciousness: the equivalent of a fire in a farmhouse, or a shooting by a canal. In 1987, he had stood trial for his part in a bullion robbery netting £8.4 million: the robbery had happened three years earlier, and the trial was an act of desperation, held in the absence of concrete evidence, any of the proceeds. Charles Parsley Sturrock was acquitted, of course, along with his alleged confederates. His next move had been to publish a book – not the My Trial Hell which might have been forgivable, but a novel entitled The Haul, which described in painful detail a successful bullion robbery masterminded by a charming rogue tailormade for the young
Michael Caine. Zoë had read it, and her memories were of gritty, unconvincing dialogue, and a lot of night-scenes involving trucks. But she’d smiled more than once. The joke was in bad taste, but that didn’t stop it being a joke. Caine would have had a field day.

  The force spat nails.

  Over the following years, Sturrock was arrested many times – driving offences; VAT irregularities: he owned a road haulage firm – but rarely reached court. He claimed harassment, and obviously had a point. Zoë knew policemen who used his name as an obscenity, though the nation at large still viewed him on Michael Caine lines. Then, one hot August night in the early nineties, Charles Parsley Sturrock stabbed a policeman to death, and the nation changed its mind.

  The policeman, Daniel Boyd, had been twenty-five years old: black-clad, balaclavaed, armed; part of a Serious Crimes raid on Sturrock’s Surrey manor house – a ‘controlled and appropriate’ response to information received, a force spokesman claimed. The exact nature of this information remained vague. Sturrock, on the other hand, argued terrorist outrage: he had been attacked in his home by a man dressed in black with a gun, and reacted accordingly. The outcome was tragic, but hardly his doing. He didn’t go so far as to say he was holding a knife and Boyd jumped on to it, but his lawyer inked the dots and handed out pencils. The jury joined them. When Sturrock walked, one of its members was snapped giving him the thumbs up; rumour had him cruising the Med two weeks later. As for Sturrock, he returned to Surrey and redecorated. ‘Tragic,’ he was quoted as saying. ‘But life goes on.’ In his case for ten years, which was when his body turned up in an underground car park.

  ‘Slowest fucking bullet in the world,’ Bob Poland reckoned. ‘But at least it had his name on it.’

  Thus, she passed twenty minutes.

  Along the lane stood a row of wheelie-bins. The properties here had back yards: a pyramid of wooden crates crested the wall of one, while ‘No Parking At Any Time’ peeled from its padlocked gate – ‘Access In Constant Use’. If she’d counted right, the door she wanted was midway along.

  Zoë never went anywhere, except aeroplanes of course, without her multi-purpose penknife.

  If she wanted evidence she had to act, even if the act was pointless: what would she find of Victoria Ingalls in a charity shop, eight months after the event? It was more to do with being sick of inertia. The back lane was empty. She stooped to jam a bin’s wheels with a chunk of brick, then hoisted herself on to it and over the wall, landing on tiptoe, instinctively dropping into a crouch. The air smelled damp here. Mildew thrived round an overflow pipe. But no dogs barked.

  The back door looked only mildly locked. Zoë saw no alarm box; no obvious wiring. What were the chances that an animal charity shop was hi-tech secure? A pile of broken-up cardboard boxes and deconstructed packaging was stacked to one side; she rearranged it against the back wall, in case she needed a quick boost on her way out, then turned to the door, whose upper half was chopped into panes of frosted glass. No light shone. Its lock was tarnished and familiar. Zoë fished her penknife from a pocket.

  . . . Years ago, Joe had decided he should learn to finesse locks, and had been genuinely surprised to find few available texts on the subject. So he’d taught himself, up to a point, that point occurring fairly soon: a large and mostly gentle man, he’d had a tendency to become cross with fiddly objects. Some doors, you just kicked down. Zoë, it proved, had more patience with inanimate objects than with people, and patience, in this field, was the key. But here was a fifteen-year-old lock and a handle that rattled. The door didn’t meet the jamb properly. Even Joe could have schlepped it without resorting to violence.

  Inside, she paused. There was a qualitative difference to air you weren’t authorized to breathe – it had a tart, forbidden edge, like fruit on the turn. And dust; the rough leathery dust of old books, and of clothes left hanging too long in one place. She was in a passageway leading directly to the front of the shop. To one side was a toilet; to the other, a cabin-sized kitchen, where an upside-down mug dried quietly next to a kettle. The kettle ticked softly, recalling its last boiling.

  Every noise, now, was a warning. Zoë had stepped through more than a poorly locked door; she’d jumped the invisible ditch that bordered the straight and narrow. And for what? – the outside chance of a clue to she wasn’t sure what. She had more chance of finding a jacket that fitted her, or a nice hat.

  Things being what they were – her job being what it was – she’d met burglars, some of whom were charming. Zoë remembered an evening in a wine bar, a progressively drunken raunch with a well-dressed, immaculately presented burglar whose cut-glass vowels matched a filthy sense of humour. Her name was Alison, and at thirty-seven, she’d been twenty-five years into a criminal career without ever enjoying an inside view of a prison.

  ‘Rules, darling,’ she’d told Zoë – drawling, two bottles in. ‘There are rules for everything – dating, fucking, breaking up. These are the rules for burglary.’

  One. Ensure the premises are empty.

  Once, Alison had been doing a flat on a winter’s evening: the place in darkness, quiet as night, and in the bedroom she’d found a middle-aged man, trussed like a Christmas parcel. PVC had featured largely. Seeing her, his eyes grew round as planets. ‘I think he’d been expecting Cruella de Ville.’ She’d left before his playmate returned.

  Zoë didn’t expect, an animal sanctuary shop, there’d be bondage in train on the premises, but still. She held her breath and waited. The only sounds were external: traffic minding its business; the average evening hum.

  Two. Turn a light on. ‘Nothing more suspicious than a torchbeam in an unlit house.’ Not that Zoë had a torch.

  The light took a moment to respond – one of those low-wattage powersavers that burn dimly for a long long time. The passage grew narrower; smells crowded in: a tang of bleach through the toilet’s open door, instant coffee from the kitchen. She could see into the front of the shop: a trove of knick-knackery on shelving. Eighties fashions dangled from a coat-rail. Somebody passed outside. The newly lit light drew no attention.

  Know what to ignore. Too much choice is like wearing divers’ boots.

  She stepped into the shop and found the stairs behind the cash register. Ignoring a sign reading ‘Private Staff Only’ she took the stairs swiftly, ears piercingly alert. When something clicked or sighed, a vacant-house noise, her heart’s tempo quickened. She was embroiled in illegality here; had broken into a shop which sold nothing worth stealing. She wasn’t sure if it was criminality or stupidity speeding her heart. Punishment for either would boil down to the same.

  Zoë left the upstairs light off. Ensure the premises are empty was still tattooed on her mind. There were two rooms up here, and a bathroom; she checked for humans first, and found none. In the bathroom a tap dripped steadily, painting a green oval on the porcelain. She closed the door behind her, dampening its beat.

  . . . Downstairs would be the usual castoffs: clothes hats toys jewellery. No telling where anything came from. But a flat clearance needed administration. In one of the rooms, a space had been cleared for a desk and an ancient computer – any older, it would have been an abacus. Quickly as she dared (Four. Move deliberately. Your body bloats with tension; you’re bigger than you were. You knock things over) she turned it on and rummaged for a program disk: it really was that old. The screen groaned into green life. The necessary disk sat on the monitor, ‘Use this’ stickered to its case. Probably the closest Zoë’d ever come to a useful clue.

  She’d owned one of these herself once. Inserting the disk, she recalled wasted hours – hell, months – spent watching it boot, so made quick inventory of the room while she waited. People who liked animals no longer liked, it seemed: the novels of Wilbur Smith, lampshades decorated with stars, wooden figurines, PlasterMaster kits, wax fruit, and much else Zoë sincerely hoped she’d not have found room for in the first place. Everybody thought that in charity shops, though. Nothing had Property of Victoria Ingalls
stencilled on it, and it wasn’t clear how helpful it would have been if it had.

  When the computer was ready, it took her a moment to remember what to do next. There were more disks neatly stored in a plastic box, and she studied their labels now: Contacts. Accounts. Merchandise. Rota. Merchandise contained thirty files, and the machine took an actual two minutes to open the first, which was a pricing guide. Scrolling through – Zoë had learned to drive in less time than it took this program to run a search – she found no names. The computer’s electric hiccuping reminded her of the damn Star Wars robot: the pedal bin. Her famous patience with objects was wearing thin.

  A car pulled up outside, and she froze.

  There came voices, laughter, a car door slamming. Then a novelty hornblast, which hung in her ears while the car drove away. She had stopped breathing meanwhile, and again her heart pounded. The consequences of being found here, her inner Zoë remarked, far outweighed any possible benefit she might derive from it. Remind me of the purpose of this?

  Five. Keep your eye on the ball, darling.

  It was easy to drift under pressure; to forget, while burgling, what burglary meant. Alison had once tried a dress on mid-job. ‘I could have just put it in my bag. What was I going to do if it didn’t fit, take it back?’ But she had forgotten, momentarily, that she was a burglar, not a real person. Zoë pulled open drawers; found a pack of unused disks. They were of a size and shape no longer familiar, and she had to close her eyes and let her fingers remember the copying procedure. One instruction to store the information to memory; another to write it to the clean disk. The process could take ten minutes.

  She began anyway, picking Merchandise, as it was handiest. While the machine growled she foraged the room, but found nothing significant among the tat. The window looked down on the back lane; the cardboard boxes she’d stacked for an emergency exit were just visible. And so was she – she’d broken rule whatever: she had no torch, but the monitor’s glow would be framing her in the window . . . She moved aside quickly. There’d been nobody visible outside. This didn’t mean there was nobody outside.