The Last Voice You Hear Read Online Free PDF Page A

coffee cup, and leaned across to place it on the desk. ‘Did she have a partner? Boyfriend, girlfriend?’
    He might have flinched a little at ‘girlfriend’. ‘That’s what I want to talk to you about.’
    There had been a boyfriend. It had been a recent development. Amory Grayling held on to his cup, though it too was empty, while he told her. There had been a boyfriend since about the previous November, and maybe a little earlier. He had certainly been on the scene by Christmas. Prior to that was speculation, but it was difficult for a man not to notice such things: an increased lightness about her; a new softness. Something in the way she moved, Grayling turned out not to be too embarrassed to say. Caroline developed a tendency to hum under her breath, and to move her lips slightly, but in a happy way, when she thought herself unobserved, as if rehearsing lines for later. Zoë, listening to this, wondered if Amory Grayling had been in love with Caroline Daniels himself, or was simply, as seemed more likely, a touch miffed that she’d found someone.
    ‘Did you ask about him?’
    ‘Not at first. I didn’t think it was my business.’
    ‘But she offered the information.’
    ‘After Christmas, yes, I suppose so. I asked her how her break had been, and she kept saying “we” – we did this, we did that. It would have been churlish not to ask.’
    ‘What was his name?’
    ‘Alan. Alan Talmadge.’
    He was assuming the spelling, but Zoë made a note of it anyway. No obvious variation occurred.
    ‘But you never met him.’
    ‘No.’
    She wasn’t sure where this was going. It seemed he wasn’t either, for he veered away suddenly; began talking about the day of Caroline Daniels’ death – her unusual lateness: it was true the trains delayed her at times, but she always called in when that happened. It seemed to him now that he’d had the sensation there had been phones ringing, unanswered, all that morning. Two police officers had turned up shortly before lunch. Grayling had arranged cover by then: there was another woman in Caroline Daniels’ office, pulling away at the loose threads of Caroline Daniels’ job. Of the officers, the male had been sympathetic. The female, he recalled, had found it worthwhile to emphasize the disarrangements caused on the City line.
    ‘Disarrangements,’ he said. ‘I remember thinking at the time what an ugly word to use.’
    ‘This was at Paddington?’
    ‘That’s right. She must have used that platform hundreds of times. Quite possibly thousands. And one day there’s a crush, and . . .’ He didn’t finish the thought. Didn’t have to. After a moment, he said, ‘Every so often it happens, and you read about it, and nobody ever thinks it’ll happen to them. But that’s who all the people are it’s ever happened to. They’re people who read about it happening to somebody else once, and never thought it would happen to them.’ He became silent. Zoë said nothing. She was remembering reading in a newspaper about a couple whose tiny child had drowned in their ornamental pond. And even at the time of reading, she’d been remembering another report, maybe two weeks previously, of exactly the same thing happening somewhere else, to somebody else. And she’d wondered if that second couple had read the report of the first drowning, and thanked God it hadn’t happened to them.
    At length he said, ‘There’s a sister, and I’d met her occasionally. I offered to help with . . . arrangements, and she let me do so. It was the least I could do.’
    Zoë said nothing.
    ‘There was a cremation, in Oxford. She wasn’t religious, and those were the instructions she’d left. She was . . . organized, I suppose you could say.’
    She said, ‘And Talmadge wasn’t there.’
    He looked at her sharply. ‘How did you know that?’
    ‘You said you’d never met him.’
    ‘Oh. So I did.’
    ‘Had they broken up?’
    ‘No. Not that I know of. And I think I’d have known. I