The Last Voice You Hear

by Mick Herron

  Ross came to a halt two yards off.

  She said, ‘I’ve done this before.’

  ‘You fucking idiot,’ he said, but he wasn’t talking to Sarah.

  Russell was on his feet. He looked dazed, and the welt on his head had grown no smaller. For a second, she wanted to lash out: give Ross a matching bruise. Watch him collapse like a broken mast. This is how wars start.

  ‘Back off,’ she said, then stepped back herself so Burke was in front of her. He might have regrets about relinquishing the weapon. He looked, in fact, like he was having regrets about everything, but was in no state to rectify any of it. She kept the gun trained on Ross while telling Burke, ‘Just move over there, would you?’ Please, she remembered not to add. Polite was a form of weak, to some.

  Reading her mind, Ross said, ‘You’re not going to use that.’

  ‘I was very fond of that ostrich,’ she told him, and saw a shadow cross his face, and was glad.

  This happened when you wielded a gun. It dragged out demons you didn’t know hid inside you.

  She said, ‘I want the three of you over there. Not moving.’ Then called, ‘Russell? Are you okay?’

  He said something she didn’t catch.

  ‘Russell?’

  ‘I think so.’ But he didn’t sound it. He was patting himself down as if checking he was in working order. Burke, meanwhile, heaved himself next to Ross; Maddock was near enough that she could keep an eye on all three at once. She wondered where Zoë was. Either she’d gone for help, or she’d be showing any moment.

  Russell said, ‘He wasn’t ready for that, I guess,’ and gave a cackling sort of laugh.

  Ross muttered something under his breath.

  A gust of wind lifted her hair. Incredibly, Sarah suppressed a yawn. Her jaw ached. Something that was probably a car hummed in the distance, and it was as if the phone had rung while she was watching TV, and for a moment it was unclear which reality it belonged to. And while she was shuffling between the two, Ross took a step forward, as if he were about to jump – she couldn’t have done it on a dare, but she did it: brought the gun up to shoulder height and levelled it at his head. He stopped dead; or to be precise, dead was what he didn’t stop. He stopped a moment before he might have been dead. Even if she’d had her hands free, Sarah couldn’t have put either on her heart and sworn she wouldn’t have squeezed the trigger.

  ‘I said don’t move,’ she told him, and even to herself, her voice sounded as if it were relayed through somebody else.

  The humming grew louder, and was definitely a car.

  Russell approached, unsteadily; a bruise red and wide on his forehead. He was making words, but she still couldn’t hear him. Swallowing panic, she said, ‘Russell? Come over here now. But be careful of these guys.’

  The humming was an engine, all right: attached to wheels rolling down the lane. She didn’t look, but her first thought was Zoë. Zoë had run to the road; had flagged down a car, which was full of . . . Sarah’s imagination let her down for a second. Traffic wardens. No: off-duty firemen, or passing farm labourers. A carload of either would make short work of these stooges.

  Russell reached her side, and had sense enough not to touch her. ‘I wasn’t sure it would do that,’ he said, reasonably clearly.

  The shed was a wreck: a bright orange heart pumping away, feeding nothing. It looked like a dismantled bonfire. Small clumps of flame littered the area. The blue tractor sat scorched but entire behind it.

  ‘He shot Gwyneth,’ he said then, and fell over.

  The car came to a halt on the gravel.

  ‘Russell?’ she said.

  He didn’t answer.

  Behind her, a car door opened, then shut.

  ‘Russell?’

  Ross said, ‘Why don’t you put that down? See to the man.’

  ‘Fuck off.’ She risked a glance at Russell. ‘Sweetheart? You okay?’

  ‘. . . Head hurts . . .’

  Somebody was coming. She didn’t want them getting closer when she didn’t know who they were. ‘Just hold it right there,’ she called.

  Whoever it was kept coming.

  ‘I’ve got a gun,’ she said.

  ‘You’re not going to shoot me.’

  It wasn’t a voice she recognized.

  She took a step back, which was wrong: she held the balance of power, but a gun was only useful if you were prepared to use it . . . Russell at her feet, Sarah turned to see who was coming: a tall lean man wearing glasses and a raincoat, still a dozen yards off. She spared him half a beat, and turned back. ‘Don’t move.’

  Ross, almost comically, had put his hands halfway up. ‘Oh, we’re not going nowhere.’

  She turned again, and brought the shotgun muzzle round this time too. The man didn’t falter.

  ‘We both know you’re not going to shoot me,’ he said. ‘So it would be best all round if you just gave me the gun.’

  He held one hand outstretched; the other was in the pocket of his raincoat. Here was a man who had no doubt that she wasn’t going to shoot him. He was right, of course. She could hardly kill him. They hadn’t been introduced. Movement behind her: Ross had shuffled forward. You could hold all the cards, but lack the edge needed to win. All she had to do was pull the trigger, but she didn’t want to hurt anybody. And firing into ground or air would shout that loud and clear.

  The man kept coming. He lacked the physical presence of Ross or Maddock, but there was an authority to him they wouldn’t even pretend to. They were knock-down-door types. This one would rap on it loudly; a demand you couldn’t ignore.

  Russell moaned at her feet. She had maybe a second to decide what to do: to fire the gun or give it up.

  In the end, Sarah did neither. Instead, she flung it over the heads of the three cops in front of her, so it swam once again through the smoky air, before dropping, as neatly as if pulled on a string, into the glowing heart of the murdered shed.

  ii

  Back among the trees, looking down on the ruined shed beyond the ostrich pen, Zoë saw nobody. The grass was pockmarked with burnt patches where scraps of fire flickered, and at the centre of what had once been the shed itself, something throbbed like a toothache.

  She’d come back because she’d heard no cars since Tom Connor’s, and had no idea how close the nearest house was. Time had become crucial; everything had become different. Tom Connor had brains, and brains were dangerous. This was what she’d thought even before she’d heard the gunshot.

  It was dulled by distance – came from Sarah’s place – and while it didn’t stop her heart this time, her heart sank all the same. Gunshots were never good. These were very bad. Sarah, or Russell, had tricked those thugs into thinking she was in the other shed; now they were stuck with the aftermath. Men like Ross excelled in aftermath, throwing their weight around in exact proportion to whatever displacement they’d suffered. The gun had been lost when the shed exploded; who’d recovered it, Zoë couldn’t know. But when she tried to picture Sarah pulling its trigger, imagination failed.

  From the farmhouse chimney, smoke still whispered; genteel, compared to the rough beast the shed had produced. They’d gone back inside, Zoë decided; unable to banish a vision of Sarah, Russell, being lugged like coal-filled sacks out of the daylight.

  Just inside the pen’s fence, Gwyneth’s remains lay like a slaughtered mattress. Of the surviving pair, there was no sign.

  She thought: I have to draw the men out. That or get inside. Precisely what she did after that would become apparent in due course.

  If Zoë stopped to think about it, she would remember this urgency from long ago; the emergency the heart suffered when others, who mattered, were at risk. She’d been ambushed often enough lately: she ought to recognize the symptoms. But she was too busy waiting for dark, without which she could do nothing.

  That, and wondering what was happening inside the house.

  They were back in the kitchen, as if this were some mad merry-go-round Sarah had return
ed to, starting to whirl again. Soon she’d be excusing herself to take a shower, and then she’d get to crawl along the outside of her house once more . . . ‘Are you okay?’ she asked Russell. Because he wasn’t; he looked drained and vampire-stricken, and had stumbled twice on the way to the house. This was after the gun, cooking in the shed’s embers, had exploded. Sarah had had the sense of something whistling brutally into the air; a stray bullet freed by heat, and pounding blindly anywhere. Maybe it would turn up, if she lived through this evening. Maybe she’d find it years hence, buried in a tree, and know its target had been nominated an instant after detonation. For the moment, though, it felt an open issue.

  Russell nodded, numbly. He was leaning heavily on the table, and she wondered if he were about to be sick.

  Connor told the others: ‘You screwed this up, didn’t you?’

  ‘I’ve been telling them that,’ Sarah said.

  He looked to her, his lips pursed. He was a different proposition; more a cop who ran investigations than kicked down doors. Who appeared on TV, explaining why things had gone right or wrong. He was tall, lean, with thinning sandy hair. He wore spectacles that were as much fashion statement as functional. And he’d walked straight at her while she held a gun, not believing for a second she was capable of pulling the trigger.

  Now he said, ‘This is a mess. I’m sorry. You didn’t ask for any of it.’

  ‘So how do you undo it? Walk away?’

  Ross opened his mouth to say something, but Connor silenced him with a look. ‘We need to speak to Ms Boehm. We can still sort this out, we can . . . reach some kind of conclusion. Something we can all live with.’

  He was careful not to place special emphasis on this choice of words.

  Sarah said, ‘She’s long gone.’

  ‘I expect she’s coming back.’

  ‘Then you don’t know Zoë.’

  ‘No. But you do. And you’d not be trying to convince me she was gone if you didn’t think otherwise.’

  There was no point countering this. He’d made his mind up.

  He said to Ross and Burke, ‘Go and have a look. One of you check the road.’

  Burke said, ‘Shall we take the, er . . .’

  ‘Christ,’ said Ross.

  Connor looked lasers at the pair of them. ‘Don’t hurt her. Bring her back here.’

  Sarah sat next to Russell and put her arms round him. He barely reacted.

  Now there were four: themselves, Connor, Maddock. That last non-conversation had been about guns, Sarah knew. This was the most dangerous room, but out there in the landscape, that pair were hunting Zoë with guns.

  Connor said, ‘Did she tell you what she knows?’

  Sarah was beyond lying. The only person she’d be fooling was herself. ‘She didn’t know anything. Not until those goons attacked her. Then she pieced things together. That the bunch of you executed Charles Parsley Sturrock, and were stupid enough to let a small boy witness it. So you killed him too.’

  Russell made a small noise: it wasn’t clear that this was voluntary. Maddock, by the door, was chewing something; possibly the inside of his cheek.

  Connor said, ‘Oh, she knew.’

  ‘The closest she came to Sturrock’s case was reading about it in the paper.’

  ‘She was at the inquest.’

  ‘She’d spoken to the boy’s grandfather. He asked her to be there.’

  ‘There was more to it. She asked about Sturrock. Said how odd it was, him dying near where the Deepman boy was killed. I told her coincidences happened.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And she said, Like dates? Then said she was thinking about birthdays. That it wasn’t important.’

  Sarah said, ‘Listen. She knew nothing until last night, in Oxford. When these guys jumped her.’ It had become important that she convince him of Zoë’s retrospective innocence, as if this changed anything. As if they might travel back to the land of the honest mistake, and write this off to experience: shake hands and promise to exchange birthday cards . . . Oh shit. Birthday cards.

  She couldn’t remember his name. Burke had used it earlier. It didn’t matter. Connor knew who she meant. ‘It was his birthday. Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Danny Boyd’s.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. Something else was nagging at her now, and her mind pushed it away; refused to let it into the light. ‘His birthday,’ she said again slowly. ‘The day you killed Sturrock.’

  ‘He’d have been thirty-five,’ said Connor. He was staring at her, or through her, intently, but the words came out abstracted, as if the same thought she was fending off had just occurred to him. ‘Thirty-five years old. Ten years he never got to have. Ten years Sturrock owed him.’

  Sarah was watching how the last of the day’s light fell into the kitchen; slanting across the room, laying a platform for motes of dust to dance upon. This was always happening: it didn’t matter how grown up you got – there always came a moment when you wanted to reel in the last five minutes, and unspeak the words you’d spoken. There was always a moment you saw the light, and it was always five minutes late.

  He said, ‘She didn’t know, did she? She wasn’t playing games. It was just words she used I thought meant something else.’

  Sarah said nothing.

  He looked at Maddock. ‘There’s no signal here. Is that right?’

  ‘Not a peep.’

  ‘And nobody’s used the phone since you got here?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  He looked at Sarah, and they shared the same thought again. Everything was still fucked up. But what she’d told him clarified this: Zoë had told nobody about her suspi- cions – she’d had no suspicions to tell. Nobody knew anything, except those in the immediate area.

  Connor mumbled something; Sarah wasn’t sure what at first. Then understood.

  Containable.

  The situation was containable.

  Russell shifted dopily, and his grip tightened on her wrist.

  Sarah hoped like hell Zoë wasn’t coming back.

  It was getting dark; was probably after seven. Zoë was watching the back of the house when two men came into view from round the front: Ross and the one she’d swiped with her car Monday night. She shrank back into the shadows, without losing her view of Ross heading to their car; opening the boot. He took something out, some things out, and handed one to his companion.

  They had more guns.

  They did: they had guns. Sideswipe held his as if he’d been gifted a turd, while Ross opened his up, checked it was loaded, closed it again. From this distance, he might have been squeezing a lemon. While he did so one of the ostriches appeared from its hut: the male, Zoë thought. His feathers ruffled in the breeze as he scanned the area with poky jerks of the head. When he saw the men he froze, though they paid no attention; Ross finishing whatever he’d been saying, then heading for the lane that led to the road. Mr O beadily watched him leave. The other man trudged past the house, heading towards the rise where the trees hid Zoë, walking like a man with his strings cut. The gun weighed down the hand he held it in. Something did the same for his head.

  She watched as the cop covered maybe half the distance between them, then sat, as suddenly as if he’d not actually intended it, and buried his face, tried to bury his entire self, in his hands. Watching, Zoë’s heart beat cold. Not for him, not for him. She had been somewhere similar, and had never completely returned. He was in that desolate arena everywhere turned to when you’d killed; as if a door had opened inside yourself, and locked behind you once you’d fallen through. But it wasn’t for him her heart beat cold. It was for Sarah, for Russell; for whichever of them had turned victim.

  After a while – she’d lost all sense of time – the cop stood. He remained on the spot a little longer, looking alternately at the gun in his hand and at the surrounding countryside, then shrugged so eloquently Zoë could have sworn she heard him sigh, and put the gun in his pocket. Then he returned to the house, pausing at th
e ostrich pen. Mr O stared back at him; body interrupted mid-stride – one leg in the air – and resumed his nervous stalking only once the man had gone. He was pacing out what was left of his territory, Zoë thought, now blood had claimed its space.

  Looking back along the ridge to where it met the road – a junction obscured by distance and foliage – Zoë saw nothing bar leaf and branch. There was no saying how long it would take Ross to decide she wasn’t on the road, and if he headed back via the tree-lined ridge, he’d walk into her. But if her future was heading from that direction, she couldn’t see much of it. Then again, if it was, there wouldn’t be much of it to see. A sudden blank was all. Diagnosis and fulfilment wrapped in the same envelope; there’d be little time for fretting her long-term prospects. And with that thought came another: that whatever prospects awaited her, whatever We’ll have to fix you up with an appointment led to, these were at least her prospects, and not those imposed by a man with a lump of metal in his hand. She would be there to open the envelope when it came, and then be wherever it directed her to be. Whatever happened after that, happened. Whatever her future, she didn’t want to meet it here, now.

  . . . Ross appeared from nowhere, cleared the pen and disappeared round the front of the building. Zoë could assume he’d gone inside; that all four of them were in the house. Along with Sarah and Russell, if they still lived.

  * * *

  Burke had been so much of a wreck they’d kept him clear of the inquest; sent Ross as a witness in his place. He spread his arms like the Angel of the North, and jumped. From an ex-copper, twenty years behind him, that had worked for the coroner. The fact that Ross had quit half a step ahead of an inquiry was a matter that hadn’t arisen.

  Burke was no witness now, either. ‘Can’t see her,’ he said.

  ‘How hard did you look?’

  ‘Fuck you, Ross. I looked. You think I’m enjoying this?’

  ‘Different when it’s a kid, isn’t it? That’s more your speed, right?’