Smoke & Whispers (5 page)

‘This won’t take long.’

She nodded.

The leaflets were on grief counselling and death registration procedures. Sarah tried to ignore them.

It was impossible, she discovered, to shake off a feeling of impending diagnosis. As if whatever was about to happen had graver implications for her own future than for anyone else’s, even if its effect on the latter was a line drawn through it. Her legs felt shaky again, so she sat, but could do nothing to prevent a tremor convulsing her body. In twenty minutes she’d know if Zoë were dead. Sarah couldn’t be sure what kind of hole that would leave in her own life. It was like trying to predict the injuries you’d suffer if the floor beneath you gave way.

The door opened. DS King appeared.

‘If you’d like to come through, please.’

The air smelled of ethanol; a still-damp aroma, as if the walls had just been hosed down, but it seemed to Sarah that it masked something earthier, something rotten, the way a teenage boy might spray on deodorant in lieu of showering. She had been wrong about there being no windows, but the windows had white plastic blinds over them, and the light was all electric. She was in a viewing area; part of a larger room, the rest of which hid behind a curtain. The curtain made it worse. It indicated that there was nothing behind it you’d be comfortable seeing.

And there was a slab in the centre of this area, with something laid dead flat upon it, covered by a sheet.

DS King and DI Fairfax stood behind her, close enough for her to feel their heat. A young man who looked vaguely Latin was present too, wearing a white coat with ID clipped to the pocket. He didn’t speak, but nodded in a way that seemed kind. Sarah’s lip trembled with tension as she nodded back. He withdrew the covering sheet, and stepped aside.

Sarah saw a woman, lying on a slab. She was white – so white she was faintly blue – and had black hair, and was dead. It was Zoë. Why would Sarah be here, if it wasn’t Zoë?

All the air had been sucked out of the room, but leaked slowly back. Breathing was a luxury granted to visitors.

She heard Fairfax, unless it was King, clear his throat, and took a step forward to forestall words.

It felt important to be quiet, though there was nobody here to disturb.

Sarah closed her eyes, and opened them again. The body on the slab hadn’t moved. It was Zoë. But it was not Zoë. It was like looking at a lamp from which the bulb had been removed, and trying to gauge how much light it once shed. The last time Sarah had seen Zoë Boehm, they’d shared a meal in an Italian place near the bus station in Oxford. There’d been photos of the owner’s infant daughter plastered across the walls, and the tablecloths had been the usual red-and-white check. Almost two years ago, because Zoë had never been one for keeping in touch, but at least she’d been alive; the light she’d cast being that dark glow Sarah had grown used to: laughing and joking but holding something back – not a secret, necessarily (though Zoë kept plenty of those); more a state of mind she held at bay so as not to spoil the occasion. And now she was here, an unchecked tablecloth laid across her; more years than anyone could count waiting to be piled on top. Except it wasn’t her. And then it was. And then it wasn’t.

Truth was, Sarah couldn’t tell. It was like Zoë, that was certain. The features were arranged the way Zoë’s had been. But this woman looked both older and younger at once; this woman – this body – had been some time in the water. There was bloat to contend with, and the recol-oration of death. Zoë, always pale, had never looked rinsed this way. The blue-white of the skin shaded black in the hollows of eyes and nose. The hair, a dark cap of curls, looked – well – lifeless.
Any visible marks?
was the usual question, but Sarah didn’t know that either. For certain Zoë had scars, but Sarah hadn’t borne witness to them. Besides, two years of living would have changed her in ways Sarah could hardly be expected to catalogue; two years of living plus one week of death would have pushed her a whole new distance away. It might be her. It looked like her. But Sarah couldn’t be sure. Corpses sink, she’d been told. Then rise to the surface three, four, five days later, when gases in the body are released. Was that how long this woman had been in the water? What would Sarah look like if this had happened to her? Would she recognize herself? Would Russ?

Again, she felt that someone was about to talk, and tensed. It was all she could do not to put her fingers in her ears.

This body had not been laid to rest. It had simply been stretched out. Under its sheet, its arms would be at its sides; its fingers thicker than fingers ought to be. Zoë had been fingerprinted, to Sarah’s certain knowledge. She’d also since received notification, as Sarah had herself, that those prints had been destroyed. This had been in the aftermath of their first encounter. Sarah’s copy of that letter was in a drawer somewhere. Zoë, she suspected, would have stood over its sender and watched the records fed into a shredder. There ought to be other items of equal forensic value, of course, but
we can’t find that Ms Boehm’s registered
with a dentist anywhere
, Fairfax had said.
Would that come as
a surprise to you?

Hell, no.

Anyone might have reasons for flying under the radar. Zoë’s had been better than most. A while back, she had fallen into the path of a man who killed women; murdered them so carefully they looked like unrelated accident victims, or middle-aged suicides. There’d been two Zoë had known of for sure. And these, she’d assured Sarah, had been points on a graph: no man insinuated himself into the lives of two lonely women, and ended those lives, then decided enough was enough. It was just that he’d vanished so cleanly afterwards that Zoë was left feeling she’d been trying to nail a shadow to a wall. She referred to him by the name he’d had when he first came to her attention – Alan Talmadge – but that had been no more genuine than the accent he’d used at the time. On the few occasions Zoë had laid eyes on him, he’d borne little resemblance to the man she’d been hunting. Not that he’d been a master of disguise. He was simply anonymous; so bland that a haircut and an earring could remake him anew. All Zoë had known for sure was that he liked Motown. And even that might not have been true; might have been an overlap between identities.

Zoë had never quite stopped looking for him, and had never been sure he wasn’t looking right back, waiting.

And perhaps he’d stopped waiting. Perhaps that was why Zoë was on this slab now. why Zoë was on If it was Zoë.

Sarah became aware she’d been holding her breath. She let it out now; a long slow sigh, involuntary but weighted. It changed the room’s dynamic. Someone shifted from one foot to another behind her, his shoe scraping on the floor like wet chalk on a blackboard. Any moment now, she thought. Any moment now, she was going to be asked the question she didn’t yet have an answer to.

‘Ms Tucker –’

I’m not sure yet, she intended to say, but the words wouldn’t come.

‘There are a few other things you should look at.’

She took a step back from the body. ‘I’m sorry?’ Her voice belonged to someone else.

King nodded at the white-smocked young man, who turned to what looked like a cross between a wardrobe and a filing cabinet. When he opened it, that was pretty much what it was. On one side hung a jacket; on the other were drawers, the topmost of which he pulled open. Shallow, almost a tray, it held a scatter of objects.

‘Her things,’ DS King explained.

Sarah recalled an ancient comedy riff, about the decline in status of possessions whose owners had died: a falling-off, from ‘stuff’ to ‘rubbish’. In this case, a deterioration hastened by time spent underwater. She stepped towards the drawer, and the objects acquired shape and form. Keys, watch, lipstick, pen: some other things. A tortoiseshell comb. Some jewellery. Here was the wallet she’d been told about; a wallet she didn’t recognize because who would? It was just a black, fold-over wallet with a clasp, somewhat river-damaged. Its contents were splayed next to it: coins, some bedraggled notes; a soggy mass that might have been till receipts. Some of Zoë’s business cards in a frothed-together clump, their lettering faint. And her credit cards, seemingly unaffected by their drenching; their holograms winking in the light, as if all they needed were a little nudge, one tiny pin-prick, and they’d be ready to hit the shops.

Okay, all this belonged to Zoë. But the fact that this was Zoë’s stuff – her rubbish – didn’t mean that the body on the slab was hers too.

‘Also, her clothes,’ King said.

Like a well-trained domestic, the morgue attendant slid the drawer shut, and pulled open a lower, deeper one, holding clothing.

Her first impression was that they’d been laundered, and for a moment she was agog at the idea that this might be standard practice; that the unclaimed dead were valeted, here in this stainless steel palace. She’d already seen how the body was sluiced and rinsed of its muddy build-up. But this impression didn’t last, because the river smell hit her, and no, they hadn’t been cleaned; they’d been lain flat to dry, that was all. If at first glance they looked ironed, that was simply because they’d been vacuumed – not a courtesy; just another step in the forensic process. Any evidence this clothing might have offered had been sucked up into an industrial device, though what further clues might have been needed that their owner had been pulled from a river, Sarah couldn’t have said.

Black jeans, belted; a black blouse and a red top. If she’d been asked to describe what Zoë might be wearing at a given moment, that would be it: black jeans, black blouse, red top. And here they were.

Underwear too, of course: white, functional, knickers and bra. That, too, was of a piece with how she pictured Zoë.

And, on the hanger, a black leather jacket she’d seen Zoë wearing a dozen times.

Jeans, blouses, tops, underwear: you could put them on more or less anyone, and it wouldn’t make much difference. Black jeans and red top wasn’t an ensemble to stop you in your tracks. A leather jacket, too, was an everyday sight.

But this jacket: this was different.

‘Does anything seem familiar?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘The jacket?’

‘It’s hers. It’s Zoë’s.’

She had no doubt about this. Zoë had bought the jacket in Italy, years before Sarah met her. There was a slight tear on one sleeve, just above the cuff: Sarah had noticed it more than once; had suggested somewhere Zoë might take it for repair.

‘I don’t need it repaired.’

‘It’ll just get worse.’

‘It’s part of what the jacket is.’ Zoë had stroked the rip as she’d said the words. ‘Like keeping a diary. You know? I’m fond of this tear. But then, I remember how it got there.’

Zoë, being Zoë, hadn’t revealed how this was.

‘You’re sure?’

That was DS King again, breaking into memory.

‘I’m sure.’

He shared a glance with his boss.
Job done
were the words neither said.

‘Ms Tucker?’

She had reached out and taken the cuff in her hand. Was stroking the tear, just half an inch long, the same way Zoë had done when they’d shared that moment: she couldn’t now put even an approximate date to it.

‘Ms Tucker?’

‘Yes?’

‘Is this the body of your friend, Zoë Boehm?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. It is.’

‘Thank you.’

A discreet nod and the sheet was replaced, the drawer pushed back, the locker closed, and the jacket sealed out of sight, along with the jeans, the blouse, the top, the underwear.

It felt as if the lights should be switched off too, but that didn’t happen.

They spent a further ten minutes in a different room, at the end of which Sarah signed something, she wasn’t sure what. It didn’t matter. A signature, anyway, was just a prearranged squiggle; not proof of identity. All it meant was that you were aware of the shape of the squiggle required.

If Sarah had been asked what she was feeling during this period, she wouldn’t have been able to say.

The men, Fairfax and King, stepped gently round her. They seemed decent enough, as far as that went. A little too much like a double act, sure, but if any job excused a shoulder-to-shoulder outlook, she supposed police work fitted the bill.

As they left the building, Fairfax said, ‘Thank you for your help, Ms Tucker. I’m sorry for your loss.’

The cold air cleared her head. ‘You think she killed herself, don’t you?’

‘We’ll continue tracing her movements in the days leading up to her death.’

‘She’d checked out of her hotel.’

‘I know.’

‘Really? The staff haven’t heard the news. That she’s dead, I mean.’

(
She’s dead
. The words struck a flat metallic note, as if someone were tolling a cracked bell.)

He said, ‘So you’re staying there too? The Bolbec?’

‘Yes.’

‘I hope you’re not . . .’

‘You hope I’m not what?’

He said, ‘I hope you’re not causing yourself unnecessary grief.’

For a moment it interested her, this apparent distinction between unnecessary grief and the other kind. She had to blink the distraction away, like a tear. ‘As I say, the staff aren’t aware of what’s happened.’

‘It wasn’t necessary to inform them that we’d found a body to establish that Ms Boehm had checked out,’ Fairfax said, as if delivering a prepared statement. ‘What will you do now, Ms Tucker?’

‘Will I be needed at the inquest?’

‘Probably not. It won’t be for a week or so anyway.’

An unbidden image arrived: of a logjam of freshly dead corpses; too many for a coroner to deal with inside a week.

‘Then I suppose I’ll go home,’ she said.

5

At her request, they dropped her in the city centre. She wanted, she said, to do some shopping, and they saw nothing odd in this. Identify your friend’s body; then a little retail therapy. But maybe – in a job entailing regular trips to a morgue – you developed a certain insight into the reactions of the bereaved, and learned there was no template to rely on. Shopping was as useful, or useless, as any other response to death. As for Sarah, she wanted to be on her own, preferably in a crowd. It didn’t matter what they thought she wanted.

The air was cold, but still; the skies grey as an anvil. Sarah’s mental weather, though, was storms and shattered crockery; in her mind, it rained hammers. She’d just come from a morgue, where she’d identified a body as Zoë Boehm. Her reasons for doing so didn’t alter this: that a woman lay dead on a slab, her body sluiced like a disconnected drainpipe.

And Zoë’s possessions had weighed her down in the water.

If Sarah tried to break down how she felt, the list would run to pages: grief for Zoë, fear of her own death, the nagging sense of tasks left unfinished, along with all the usual physical niggles: that sudden tremor in the calf; an unexpected churn in the stomach. And underlying everything, the accumulation of all she’d ever been or felt: the memories, even forgotten ones; the emotions, even those wasted. Listing them would be like trying to score a symphony by cataloguing the orchestra, instrument by instrument. And everyone was like this. Everyone carried around their own symphony of the self, with only the faintest snatch of it audible to those around them; whispered music all we hear of their real life. This was what had been snuffed out of that figure on the slab: all the music no one had ever heard.

She walked through the shoppers’ streets, not paying attention. She was heading riverside.

The road sloped steeply down to the quay. Sarah passed an arts cinema and several bars that looked new, though traded on traditional names. An overhead bridge cast a damp shadow, and a building leaned over the pavement at a ridiculous angle, like an accident lawyer’s daydream. The whole city was like this: the new jammed next to the old in a transplant so recent, you could see the join healing. When she crossed the road, she found herself on a paved area overlooking the Tyne. There were benches, but she didn’t sit. She leaned on a rail, and gazed at the river instead.

This was the water that the body had come out of. If birth had a canal, death had its river.

The more you pondered death, she thought – if you were an intelligent, educated, well-read woman – the more you expected yourself to come up with something deep; something that, if unlikely never to have been thought before, would at least crystallize your own opinion. But Sarah had nothing to think. Death happened; would happen to her. Had happened to the woman she’d just viewed on that slab. But Sarah had nothing profound to reply to it. It was a bugger, that was all. Which was unlikely to make it into a book of quotations.

What did come, though, was the realization that it shouldn’t have come as a surprise, the difficulty she’d had identifying Zoë. Alive, Zoë had never been easy to pin down. What had made Sarah think the task would be easier, Zoë dead? In a world where identity theft was rife, Zoë had kept hers close and secure; had a deliberate policy of putting anything which might have betrayed her through a shredder. Her slash-and-burn approach to friendship confirmed this.

And one of its effects was that their friendship was hard to reconstruct. In a film, flashbacks come with background detail: clothing, wallpaper; the quality of light as it slices through windows. The self-assembly kind has less coherence; comprises fragments pulled from a contextless soup, with no guarantee that they represent faithful reconstruction. Thinking of Zoë, Sarah saw no linear structure to their friendship. There were phrases, and moments of remembered action that always seemed to be recalled from above. Not that she had trouble recalling Zoë’s face. It was just that, once you had someone’s face firmly in mind, memory could put any words it wanted in their mouth. The self-assembly flashback could lie, which no self-respecting movie version could. Even Hitchcock got burned trying that.

Some words she was sure she recalled correctly, though. She remembered, for instance, Zoë telling her about her jacket.

And the jacket was a giveaway. It wasn’t that Zoë had ever voiced any particular attachment to it; it was just that she’d constantly worn it – her signature look. Bought in Italy. Zoë’s husband Joe had picked up something similar at a street market at the same time, for a tenth of the price. Its sleeves had fallen off within six months. But Zoë had still been wearing hers years later; long after Joe died; long after Sarah had met her; right up until the time it had fallen into the possession of the killer, Alan Talmadge.

Zoë, to the best of Sarah’s knowledge, hadn’t worn it since.

She wasn’t sure how long she stood, her thoughts clenched round her like a fist. After a while, though, it became clear that no conclusions were available yet, except for the obvious: that the body must indeed be Zoë’s, and that the insubstantial Alan Talmadge had entered her life again, shortly before its end. Which cleared this much up: Zoë hadn’t entered the river of her own accord. This knowledge made Sarah no warmer. When she realized that her shivering was as much due to cold as to sorrow, she began making her way back to the Bolbec.

Trusting to a sense of geography that some, Russ especially, would have doubted existed, she headed upriver towards a hotel whose tubular neon swirl of a logo was familiar, and before reaching it turned up a flight of steps between two apartment blocks still offering empty flats. At the top, she turned and looked down. On the river’s far bank stood a whitewashed building, the words
Ovoline
Lubricants
painted on its side. More of the old city, not fading away.

The Bolbec was up ahead of her, so geography had done its work. The other buildings in its square were abandoned. Renovation was happening from the quayside up, she supposed. A placard announced major developments: watch this space. Slouched against the wall of the building opposite the hotel – a former electrical works – was a figure which straightened at Sarah’s approach. He wore dirty blue jeans, and a variety of shirts and sweaters, layered one on top of the other so their sleeves blossomed like cauliflowers at his wrists’ bony junction. Topmost was a worn sheepskin jacket some sizes too small. His hair was dead straw, and his face grey from huddling in corners.

‘
Big Issue
, lady?’

She didn’t always, but sometimes she did. If their eyes caught hers, she was theirs. She’d fumbled a coin out before it struck her. ‘You don’t have any.’

‘I can get you one.’

He grinned cheekily as he spoke, and she found herself surrendering the coin anyway. ‘Maybe next time.’

‘Know where to find me.’

In the hotel lobby was Gerard, who probably wasn’t waiting for her, but didn’t appear to be doing much else. ‘Exploring the boondocks?’

‘Doesn’t that mean swampland?’

‘How the hell should I know?’ He looked genuinely surprised to be asked. ‘See anything interesting?’

She closed her eyes briefly: a chiaroscuro nightmare unreeling on her eyelids. White flesh; black dead hair. A leather jacket with a familiar scar. ‘Not especially,’ she said. ‘Just stretching my legs.’

‘Some holiday you’re having.’

‘Not all holidays are about being there,’ she said. ‘Some are about not being anywhere else.’

‘That’s probably deeply clever,’ said Gerard. ‘Well done. What are you doing for lunch?’

‘I hadn’t thought about it.’

‘That was rather the point of asking, wasn’t it? To put the subject at the forefront of your mind.’

It occurred to Sarah, not for the first time, that conversation with many men would be a lot simpler conducted on their terms:
Yes, No, Fuck off
. It would limit the agenda, but a lot of them seemed to prefer that.

‘Gerard –’

‘You look like you could do with feeding.’ Then, presumably worried there might be a compliment in there, added, ‘I don’t mean you’re skin and bone or anything. You didn’t stint yourself last night that I noticed. I just mean you look a little down. Lunch helps with that, I find.’

‘Why are you here, Gerard?’

‘I was just on my way out.’

‘No, I mean, why are you
here
?’

‘I already told you. Looking at investment opportunities.’

‘Why Newcastle?’

‘Hadn’t you heard? This city’s one of the fastest-growing IT centres in the country. Software development, communications technologies. Thought it was about time I came and checked it out.’

Sarah hadn’t known, but it didn’t surprise her. Everything happened somewhere. ‘Doesn’t make it any closer to London, does it? What was it you could manage in three hours? Roast a swan, orphan a trade unionist, and still have time to fire the help?’

‘Mmm, not much escapes you, does it?’

‘Consistency was never your strong point.’

‘Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.’

‘Sounds like Wilde.’

‘Everything sounds like Wilde if you declaim it rotundly enough,’ Gerard said. ‘Though in this case, I’ll grant you, it’s one of Oscar’s. Anyway, I never claimed I was planning on living here. I’m happy to let other people do that for me.’

‘Big of you.’

‘Now now. Don’t do the new North down. It’s got lots of things talented young professionals want, like big glassy buildings full of rubbish modern art, and whacking great angels on the motorway.’

She really didn’t want this conversation. ‘It’s too early for lunch.’ Where this knowledge came from, she wasn’t sure, but the clock in the lobby confirmed it: it wasn’t long past eleven. It was surprising how quickly big things happened.

‘Well, I didn’t mean
now
, did I? I’ve a meeting first, which is why I’m waiting for a taxi, which seems to be operating on a different timescale to the one I’m used to. And –’

‘Gerard, taxis
everywhere
are
always
–’

‘– and afterwards I’ll be going for lunch. What’s your mobile?’

Giving him her number seemed the fastest way of removing herself from this situation. A taxi pulled up outside as she did so. He was still tapping her into his Sony as he went to meet it.

There was nobody on reception. Gerard’s key lay on the desk as she passed. There was something almost quaint in that: a key, not a passcard. But it was of a piece with the setting.

In her room, she lay on the bed. Her hangover had disappeared, or gone into remission, but all she’d seen since waking had filled the space it left, and her head was roaring. Lying down didn’t help. She had to do something.

She should have talked to those policemen about Alan Talmadge. But Sarah knew nothing about him beyond the little Zoë had told her, which amounted, in effect, to these few facts: Talmadge killed women, Zoë had said; enjoyed Motown music, Zoë had said; wasn’t really called Talmadge, Zoë had said; and some years back had walked away with the jacket Sarah had just seen in the morgue. Zoë had said. This would have involved admitting that she’d identified Zoë’s jacket rather than her body, which would have made waves. Besides, Sarah had had unhappy experiences with policemen. A part of her, quite a large part, preferred their absence.

But there were things that could be done, and having so decided, she did one of them. She made a call. ‘Vicky? Sarah Tucker.’

Vicky was Zoë’s teen webhead, or that’s what she’d used to be – Sarah was pretty sure she was still in her teens, but didn’t know whether ‘webhead’ remained current. Zoë had relied on her for years. No techno-slouch herself, Zoë knew her limitations, and any time she hit a firewall hotter than she could handle, turned to Vicky. Sarah had once sent her a hard drive which had crunched three weeks’ work on the same day an ostrich had eaten her back-up memory stick: Vicky had returned it inside twenty-four hours, all its data unstuck. So Sarah had her listed on her mobile.

‘Have you heard from Zoë lately?’ she asked.

(This was cowardice. She didn’t want to be breaking bad news to a teenager, over the phone.)

‘I heard they pulled her out a river,’ Vicky said.

So much for the soft approach.

‘Oh. Oh, Vicky –’

‘Well, you don’t think I be
lieve
it, do you? Zoë? In a river? Like that’s gunna happen.’

‘There’s a body,’ Sarah said.

‘There’s always bodies. People die all the time.’ But not Zoë, apparently. ‘Anyway, you don’t believe it any more’n me. Else you wouldn’t be asking if I’d heard from her.’

It was no time to start deconstructing how much she’d been prepared to divulge. Besides, the kid probably had a polygraph wired to her phone. ‘Either way, she hasn’t been in touch,’ Sarah said. ‘Don’t you think, if she was able to, she’d have let us know she was okay?’

Teenagers have a gift: they can shrug audibly, over a mobile. ‘I said she wasn’t dead, that’s all. I dunno what’s happened to her.’

‘You want to help me find out?’

Vicky said, ‘Like for a job?’

‘Like for a friend.’

To give her her due, Vicky didn’t think about it long. ‘Okay.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yeah. I’ll just bump up the fee next time she needs me, that’s all.’

‘That would be my approach.’ Sarah shifted the phone from one hand to the other. ‘Can you access her computer?’

‘Nothing easier. You got her door key?’

‘Door key?’

Theatrical sigh. ‘Zoë wouldn’t go anywhere, least of all a river, and leave her computer live. You want to know what’s on it, you need to go and plug it in.’

‘Maybe she –’

‘Trust me.’

‘Okay. So short of breaking into her flat, what can you tell me?’

‘Anything that’s out there. Anything in the air. I can fetch you her e-mails. I can tell you anything she’s ordered online, and I can tell you her bank account details. Actually, I can do that quite quickly, because she’s always trying to plead poverty when she wants a job done. So I keep her records handy so I know when she’s fibbing.’