The Last Voice You Hear Read Online Free PDF Page B

to project upon, and whether the air was full of the ghosts of things that had almost happened, but lacked foundation. But this was whimsy, and she had no time for that. One of the smokers opposite sketched her half a wave as she tucked the lighter into her pocket, but she pretended not to notice, and moved on round the corner.
    There was now a job to do. It wouldn’t necessarily prove difficult.
    What potentially made the difference was whether Talmadge had meant to vanish.
    It was Zoë’s experience that finding people was harder when they didn’t know they were missing. There was a whole category of people liable to fall off the edge of the world; whose grip on contemporary reality, never marvellous to begin with, was weakened further by what, to others, might appear no more than the average slights – and then they were gone. They didn’t know where they were going, so wouldn’t recognize it when they got there, and left no clues as to where it was. Often, theirs wasn’t a journey so much as an act of divestment; a shedding of all that had anchored them in the first place: mortgages and bank accounts, mobile phones and credit cards, enmities and friendships – something snapped, or something else got stronger. It was hard to know whether it was pull or repulsion acting on them, because these were the ones who were never found, so never answered the questions. And she thought again of the man by the canal whose prayers she’d interrupted; who carried his history in a collection of laundry bags. Impossible to tell if he was lost on purpose, or missing by accident; or whether, after enough time had passed, it made the slightest difference.
    . . . Because things happened, she told herself. Volition, intention, desire, regret – sometimes these took a back seat, and events just got on with it. Not everything had somebody responsible.
    It was important to remember this, as she crossed the road at the traffic lights. That there was no conceivable pattern of belief, for example, under which anything that had happened to Wensley Deepman in the years since she’d encountered him – all the missing parts of the story which it hardly took genius to fill in – could be laid at Zoë’s feet. She had had a job to do and had done it. Wensley, either way, was background colour; an extra in a story about how Zoë had gone to London to bring back Andrew Kite; or perhaps one in which Andrew Kite had gone to London and somebody had brought him back. Wherever you stood, nobody was giving Kid B top billing. Piss the fuck off she’d told him, but she hadn’t meant him to die.
    This wasn’t guilt she was feeling. It was an awareness of an absence of guilt that she might once have felt, when things were different.
    She needed coffee. From an obscure need to punish herself, Zoë walked past the branded outlets to an extreme-looking dive on a corner with road-spatter scaling its outside walls, whose misted windows made it clear what lay within: stained formica tables, plastic chairs, and scuffed lino. It also contained the biggest spider plant she’d ever seen. She sat in what was nearly its shade, while her coffee, which was too hot and too weak, cooled. Against the wall opposite an old man with indescribable eyebrows and a throat raggy as a tortoise’s chewed on a roll-up. In front of her eyes, its mouse-turd of ash dropped into his mug of tea, and her hands, which had automatically gone seeking her cigarettes already, quit their hunt.
    It ought, she thought, to have been raining outside, but it wasn’t.
    Caroline Daniels, though, was the job in hand. She tried to clear her mind of the unwanted image of a nine-year-old kid making his pass for her valuables – that brilliant pair of bricks she’d secreted – leaning into her so clumsily she’d had to drop her shoulder to let the bag fall into his hand, then push against his foot to achieve her stumble . . . This wasn’t what she was supposed to be thinking about. When