The Last Voice You Hear (31 page)

‘Shut up,’ Connor told them.

‘She’s long gone,’ Sarah said. ‘Can you hear anything yet? There’ll be sirens.’

Maddock said, ‘They wouldn’t use sirens. They’ll come quietly.’

Everybody but Connor looked at him.

Connor said, ‘No. She’s not going to leave you. They didn’t see her, but that doesn’t mean she’s gone. It means she’s hiding.’

Sarah forced a laugh. ‘Zoë’s not exactly countryside material. If you can’t see her, she’s not there.’

‘Well, maybe you’re right. And maybe I am. I guess this is one of those occasions time will tell.’ He glanced out of the window. ‘When’s it dark round here?’

‘Two a.m.’

‘Funny. When does it
get
dark?’

Sarah said, ‘Half seven. Round about then.’

He looked at his watch. ‘Twenty minutes? Let’s let her know how things stand, shall we?’ He pulled her from the chair so abruptly, Russell’s head, which had been resting on her arm, hit the table, but she barely had time to register this; she was being pushed out of the door, with Connor on her every step of the way. She’d thought Ross was the brutal one, thought Connor represented a higher order of thuggery, but this is what it came down to every time: a man in a corner hit out. It didn’t matter who he was hitting. Connor pushed her through her hall. Somewhere on the way he produced the gun Burke had given him. And then Sarah was out in the beautiful twilight, in a part of the world she loved, with a fist clamped round the collar of her blouse, and a gun barrel pressed to her temple. Connor held her for a long moment, his body hot against hers; he turned her slowly through 180 degrees, displaying her to the landscape. And then they were on the move; Sarah stumbling every second step as he forced her round the house, halting at each corner to repeat the display. There were no words. Ross would have shouted his intentions to the hillsides. Connor knew words were unnecessary.

Back in the house, back in the kitchen. Russell sitting up now, barely aware she’d been away. Maddock and Burke were so still, they might have been playing grandmother’s footsteps. Greying light splayed the same pattern on it all; the same lazy motes dawdled in its oblongs. Only Ross had broken formation: he’d lit a cigarette. Its smoke grimed the air, like an illustration of the harm he’d brought on the household.

Connor released her, though her arm retained the memory of his grip. What could she do about any of this? She did the only thing she could do; she sat next to Russell, and placed a hand gently on his arm. ‘You okay?’

He nodded. ‘Fuck ’em, right?’

‘Yes.’ The tremor in her voice was barely there.

Connor said, ‘Geoff, switch the burglar lights on.’ He meant Maddock. ‘Then go and watch the front. You two, upstairs. Keep it dark. Try not to be obvious.’

Burke said, ‘Maybe we should just go.’

Connor said, ‘You know what it’s like for a cop in prison? You need a picture?’

‘I just don’t see why she’d hang around.’

‘Boehm’s hanging around because we’ve got these two. And she knows what we’ll do if she goes for help. I’ve just shown her that.’

‘Are you really going to shoot her?’

Yes, thought Sarah. Answer me that.

Connor said again, ‘You know what it’s like for a cop in prison?’ and this time, he didn’t get an answer.

The clock ticked. Upstairs, though it had been going on so long it was almost inaudible, the shower hammered against its empty stall.

Connor said, ‘Okay. Enough. Is that door solid?’ He was looking at the pantry, whose door had a key in it. Maddock opened it, looked in. Shelves of various foodstuffs; no window.

‘Seems okay,’ he said.

‘Put them in it.’

‘Both of them?’

‘You’re worried about their morals?’

‘No, but I’m hungry.’

‘We’re all hungry. I’ll sort something out.’

He said, ‘No offence, but can you cook?’ Connor didn’t reply. ‘Make her do it, I would.’

‘Have you finished?’

Ross said, ‘None of us have eaten all day.’

Watching, Sarah wasn’t sure which way Connor would go; which way she wanted him to. Maybe he was conscious of this, because he didn’t drag it out too long. ‘Okay. Just him.’ He nodded at Russell.

Russell looked at Sarah, clearer suddenly. ‘They’re going to lock me in with the biscuits.’

‘I love you.’

‘I love you too. Everything’s going to be all right.’

‘Yes.’

She couldn’t say anything more just then.

Russell stood, still shaky on his feet, and walked into the pantry. Before Maddock locked the door on him, he said, ‘What’s funny is, I’m the cook.’

Tom Connor said, ‘Get where you’re going.’

Maddock put the key in his pocket and left the kitchen. Ross went too. Burke followed a moment later. Sarah heard their tread on the stairs.

She said, ‘Are you happy with everything so far?’

The gun was back in the left-hand pocket of his raincoat, which he hadn’t taken off. It gave him a lopsided appearance; its weight tugging the fabric down, throwing the buttons askew.

He said, ‘Sturrock deserved to die. And there are other victims here. Les Burke? He’s a good copper. Hell,
I’m
a good copper. You think this has left us undamaged?’

She said, ‘I try to be broad-minded. But fuck you, okay?’

‘Suit yourself. Now, food. A plate of sandwiches will do. You’ll understand if I cut the bread. It’s not that I don’t trust you.’

‘You probably brush up real smart, don’t you?’ she said. ‘You’ve probably done the PR courses, and all the rest of the human-face crap. But you boil down to the same fucking thug in a uniform in the end.’

‘Like I said. Sandwiches will be fine.’

Sarah was getting to her feet. ‘It’s going to have to be a bit more complicated than that,’ she said. ‘You’ve just locked the bread in the pantry.’

iii

The light had left. Zoë’s touchstone for this was Gwyneth’s corpse, behind the mesh fence. Over the last ten minutes it had grown hazier, and lost whatever it retained of shape and identity. But maybe this always happened with death; that whatever had made a life unique slowly dissolved, until what was left was newly smooth and ridgeless, as if it had been sandblasted in the process.

Some short while ago, Tom Connor had walked Sarah round the house with a gun riveted to her temple. Maybe an ounce of pressure had kept Sarah this side of that smooth and ridgeless existence, and Connor had wanted Zoë to notice that. To think about that ounce, and how easily he could put his hand on it.

. . . He wanted her to think there was a way all this could be resolved, and Sarah and Russell left in peace. But also, of course, to know that this was endgame. Zoë could light out now and bring help, but if she did, there’d be more than ostrich blood spilt.

The chimney had stopped smoking. Whatever was happening inside now, they were no longer playing house.

And the burglar lights would be activated, Zoë supposed. There was a set facing each direction, attached to the roof at the level of the guttering. There was no chance she’d get to the house undetected.

All of this, every strand of it, running through her head simultaneously. While down below, what had been Gwyneth dissolved in the dark.

Sarah took an apron from the back of the kitchen door, and put it on.

‘If you had any ideas about boiling oil,’ Connor said, ‘forget them.’

‘Do you want food or not?’

‘Sharp knives either,’ he said. ‘We don’t want any accidents.’

She tied the apron. ‘If you want a hot meal, that’s going to include a certain amount of activity.’

‘Just don’t get ambitious.’

‘Don’t worry. Cordon bleu, this isn’t.’ She opened the freezer compartment of the fridge, and removed a plastic tub that had once held ice cream. ‘Bolognese sauce,’ she said. Then she lifted a pan down from the overhead metal rod. ‘Pan,’ she added. She set this on the stove top, on the ring directly in front of the Le Creuset, then opened the plastic tub and held it upside down over the pan. After a moment or two, its contents dropped out in a solid block. ‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t that look good?’

‘Shouldn’t you let it defrost?’

‘I’m so glad you brought that up. I plan to apply heat now. Is that going to be a problem?’

He said, ‘Just so we both know where we stand. If this results in an attempt to boil, scald or otherwise pain me, I’ll hurt him first.’ He nodded towards the pantry door.

Since walking her round the house, she thought, his gun pressed to her head, Connor had given up any pretence of being the civilized one. They were here to cover up the crimes they’d committed, and the longer they stayed, the more there was only one way of doing that. Hurting Russell first sounded like a threat, spoken out loud, but Sarah could see beyond the words to the other side. First or last, he’d be hurting Russell eventually, unless something happened to stop him.

What she said was, ‘I’m not a fool.’

‘Let’s hope so. You intend opening any of those drawers, you ask me first. What tools do you need, anyway?’

She nodded at the glass jug by the side of the range, in which a collection of wooden spoons lived. He studied it for a moment, without moving closer. ‘Okay.’ As she watched, his hand tapped his coat pocket, and it barely mattered whether this was an unconscious or deliberate reminder of what he had in there. It wasn’t like she’d forgotten yet. She could still feel the O on her temple where he’d held its barrel against her.

She reached for a spoon and then, with her back to him, turned the dials and pressed the ignition switch that lit the flame. Then began shovelling at the frozen block with the wooden spoon.

After a while he said, ‘How long is this going to take?’

‘That depends on how frozen you want it to be.’

‘It was a simple question.’

‘Half an hour. Minimum.’

‘And you’re just going to stand there poking at it, are you?’

‘Unless you want it to burn.’

She was determined not to turn round.

He was moving, and her hand dropped to the dials at the range front, but he wasn’t coming near. He had stopped by the mantelpiece, above where the kitchen fire had been before previous occupants removed it. The mantel had survived, though, and it was where the household odds and ends washed up; the out-of-date hayfever remedies, and gifts from the cereal packets they bought when Russell did the shopping. Stray foreign coins, useless now. Stuff that didn’t get thrown away without serious effort, and in the new life Sarah had made these past few years, housekeeping didn’t rate high priority.

But there was something about this detritus, when she found it in other people’s houses, that always warmed her to them; that gave a glimpse of the messy reality underlying ordinary lives, however tidy they appeared on the surface. There were always fragments of history gathering on untended shelves, to reveal the unsuspected depths friends had. There was a photograph of Russell halfway up a mountain, whose story had revealed an aspect of him she’d never have known about otherwise. And she hoped that Connor was looking at these things, and that she and Russell, in consequence, were becoming that little bit realer to him; that little bit more alive. That little bit harder to kill.

He said, ‘This could all still work out.’

‘Yes.’

But even with her back to him, she could tell what that exchange meant:

This isn’t going to work out.

No.

He lapsed into silence while she stood working with the spoon, reducing the solid frozen block to the thick sauce it had been when she’d made it. A rich smell filled the air, reminding Sarah that she was hungry too; that it had been a long day, with nothing remotely like this in prospect when it had started. And she stirred faster, as if to speed the smell’s diffusion; as if domesticity were a barricade she and Russell could shelter behind. Or failing that, as if it might keep Connor from coming too close.

Crawling back to it had been a twenty-minute journey, and in the darkness the shed felt unfamiliar, for all the hours Zoë had spent here lately. It was a moment before she got a handle on where things were. On the wall hung the tools: rakes hoes shears. It was the shears she needed, and she located a pair by touch, putting her fingers to something sharp first – the tine of a fork – but without drawing blood. She lifted them from their hook. At the door she paused, looking to the house, but saw no movement. It occurred to her that if the men came out of the house themselves, the burglar lights would snap on, unless they had the wit to turn them off first. Connor would have thought of that. Ross would come charging like a bull into the brightness.

Zoë stepped outside, and felt the night’s breeze on her cheeks.

Something rustled in the near distance. She froze, even though her brain was already telling her what she was hearing. The noise came again, no nearer, no further; something like a scrabble in dry earth. Her heart slowed, though not quickly enough. Her breathing burned her throat. What she was hearing was what she’d expected to hear: the noise of an ostrich prowling its pen. But she couldn’t help reminding herself that she only had to be wrong once.

The shears should have made her feel more secure. If anybody jumped her now, all she had to do was hold them out; forward motion would do the rest. A sudden and severe image of precisely this happening sent a shudder down her spine. But there was no time for this. She had to move.

Round the shed again, then; making her way over the slight upward pitch of the ground before it dropped away the far side of the ostrich pen. She walked into, before she saw, the wire mesh of the pen itself and yelped: a thin batsqueak of a noise the air around her swallowed. There was a dull feathery slap to her left, as if a piece of furniture had fallen over. She could see him, in fact – him? Zoë was pretty sure it was the male – standing nine foot high in the darkness, shaped like an inkblot test, but with twin pinhead gleams above the beak. His gaze followed her as she dropped to a crouch. Was it her imagination, or could she hear a buzzing in the night? Even here, working at the task in hand, she could swear it was right in front of her: the mess that had been Russell’s ostrich; flies crawling over it, and the hot stink of spoiled meat making a pharaoh’s feast of the air.