could be seen of London still stretched like an electric mat way down below. Zoë had no plans until 6.30 . . . But she’d had days with larger empty spaces in them, and those had passed too.
iv
Paddington was grey, damp and tense, with crowds knotted beneath departure monitors, waiting for their platforms to be signalled. Zoë foresaw a serious trample when that happened – she didn’t want to be standing between any part of this horde and the last available seat. Somebody brushed past, and it took half a second to place him as a face from the morning train: a balding, upright man, with a clockwork twitchiness to his movements. On the ground that a regular might have the inside track, Zoë followed him rather than hang round with the masses, and he led her to the far end of a platform, coming to a halt just as a train ploughed into view.
She had a moment’s horror as it passed. Even slowing down, it was weight, brute force and metal: an exercise in practical physics, juddering with the effort of coming to a halt. This, or something like it, had done for Caroline Daniels: a Tube train was smaller, of course, but that was like weighing the difference between a bus and an articulated lorry when you were underneath one. And she wondered what it would be like, to step out in front of this juggernaut – no, not step, be pushed , even if that push was the involuntary swelling of the crowd behind. There must have been a moment during which Caroline Daniels had known everything. And then it met her: her travelling death. The way it happened for Wensley Deepman, except in his case, he’d been doing the travelling . . . But it did not matter, in the end, whether what you collided with was irresistible force or immovable object. Something had to give, and – in the end – that would be you.
Hard landings teach us we are flightless things.
The train halted. Passengers disembarked. Trusting she hadn’t been led astray, she boarded once it was empty: the quiet carriage again, she saw from the sign by the door, so turned her mobile off. Taking a table seat, she leaned back. Days in the city wore you out. She’d have known that anyway, from the people arriving now: nodding at each other, saying good evening, but mostly sitting separately. Tired again, like this morning. But there were different kinds of tired; the kind you haven’t shaken off yet, and the kind you earned in the course of a day. She’d earned tired, she supposed – killing time was as wearying as most other things you did with it – but she’d been waiting for the job to start, not doing it. She closed her eyes. We never sleep. That had been a detective agency slogan, Joe had told her. She forgot which one. It could almost have been her own, though; she slept, of course, but never well, never soundly.
And now it was time to think about Caroline Daniels.
Before leaving Pullman’s, she’d spoken to a woman who’d known Caroline: one of the partners’ PAs. ‘I didn’t know her well. But we shared a room, we have this rest room? For breaks?’
Her name had been Corinne, and she was twenty-four; a natural blonde, with that brittle prettiness you never find in the country-born. While they spoke, she barely left off fingering her engagement ring.
Zoë had said, ‘Did she ever talk to you about Alan?’
‘About who?’
‘Alan Talmadge. Her boyfriend.’
‘She had a boyfriend ?’
Which answered that.
Corinne said, ‘She never told me she had a boyfriend. I always thought she was, you know. Single?’
It was a word on a sliding scale, or so it fell on Zoë’s ears. There was ‘single’ and there were other words, and you could grade the gravity of your situation by the level of pity in Corinne’s voice; the amount of sympathy withheld calibrating the precise degree to which the condition was self-inflicted. From ‘single’ right the way up to ‘cancer’.
‘He must have been quite old.’
‘What makes you think so?’
‘Well, she
iv
Paddington was grey, damp and tense, with crowds knotted beneath departure monitors, waiting for their platforms to be signalled. Zoë foresaw a serious trample when that happened – she didn’t want to be standing between any part of this horde and the last available seat. Somebody brushed past, and it took half a second to place him as a face from the morning train: a balding, upright man, with a clockwork twitchiness to his movements. On the ground that a regular might have the inside track, Zoë followed him rather than hang round with the masses, and he led her to the far end of a platform, coming to a halt just as a train ploughed into view.
She had a moment’s horror as it passed. Even slowing down, it was weight, brute force and metal: an exercise in practical physics, juddering with the effort of coming to a halt. This, or something like it, had done for Caroline Daniels: a Tube train was smaller, of course, but that was like weighing the difference between a bus and an articulated lorry when you were underneath one. And she wondered what it would be like, to step out in front of this juggernaut – no, not step, be pushed , even if that push was the involuntary swelling of the crowd behind. There must have been a moment during which Caroline Daniels had known everything. And then it met her: her travelling death. The way it happened for Wensley Deepman, except in his case, he’d been doing the travelling . . . But it did not matter, in the end, whether what you collided with was irresistible force or immovable object. Something had to give, and – in the end – that would be you.
Hard landings teach us we are flightless things.
The train halted. Passengers disembarked. Trusting she hadn’t been led astray, she boarded once it was empty: the quiet carriage again, she saw from the sign by the door, so turned her mobile off. Taking a table seat, she leaned back. Days in the city wore you out. She’d have known that anyway, from the people arriving now: nodding at each other, saying good evening, but mostly sitting separately. Tired again, like this morning. But there were different kinds of tired; the kind you haven’t shaken off yet, and the kind you earned in the course of a day. She’d earned tired, she supposed – killing time was as wearying as most other things you did with it – but she’d been waiting for the job to start, not doing it. She closed her eyes. We never sleep. That had been a detective agency slogan, Joe had told her. She forgot which one. It could almost have been her own, though; she slept, of course, but never well, never soundly.
And now it was time to think about Caroline Daniels.
Before leaving Pullman’s, she’d spoken to a woman who’d known Caroline: one of the partners’ PAs. ‘I didn’t know her well. But we shared a room, we have this rest room? For breaks?’
Her name had been Corinne, and she was twenty-four; a natural blonde, with that brittle prettiness you never find in the country-born. While they spoke, she barely left off fingering her engagement ring.
Zoë had said, ‘Did she ever talk to you about Alan?’
‘About who?’
‘Alan Talmadge. Her boyfriend.’
‘She had a boyfriend ?’
Which answered that.
Corinne said, ‘She never told me she had a boyfriend. I always thought she was, you know. Single?’
It was a word on a sliding scale, or so it fell on Zoë’s ears. There was ‘single’ and there were other words, and you could grade the gravity of your situation by the level of pity in Corinne’s voice; the amount of sympathy withheld calibrating the precise degree to which the condition was self-inflicted. From ‘single’ right the way up to ‘cancer’.
‘He must have been quite old.’
‘What makes you think so?’
‘Well, she
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