The Last Voice You Hear by Mick Herron Page B

was in her forties, wasn’t she?’
    Zoë said, ‘I believe he was some years younger.’
    Corinne stroked her engagement ring. ‘Well,’ she said at last. ‘That makes it even sadder, doesn’t it?’
    ‘That she’s dead?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Corinne. ‘Just as she was starting to have a life.’
    A man took the seat opposite Zoë; in his fifties, by the look of him, and wearing a nice dark overcoat which he removed, folded carefully, and laid on the rack overhead. He was narrow-faced, and seemed frayed – well turned out, but with stress levels visible. He carried a copy of the Evening Standard , which had found something new to say about Charles Parsley Sturrock, whose dead features Zoë glimpsed below the fold.
    He was looking at her – the man opposite, not Sturrock – and she realized she’d been staring. ‘Was somebody sitting here?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Well, then.’
    Well indeed. Somebody cycled past the window, an odd thing to do on a railway platform, but he turned out to be loading his bike into the guard’s van. People bustled – all over, people bustled. It wasn’t everywhere you saw the verb in action.
    She turned back to her fellow passenger. ‘I take it you do this journey daily.’
    He nodded, then raised an eyebrow, as if granting her permission to continue.
    ‘I was wondering,’ she said, ‘did you know Caroline Daniels?’
    ‘I’m sorry?’
    ‘Caroline Daniels. She used to catch this train.’
    ‘A great many people catch this train.’
    He used the tone the English middle classes use when they want you to know you’re an imbecile without their having to say it.
    ‘She caught it for twenty-two years. Every day.’
    ‘Ah.’
    ‘Oxford to Paddington.’
    ‘I go on to Charlbury, myself.’
    ‘Still . . .’
    ‘Still. Yes. I must have known her, if only by sight. Most people pick up habits, of course. Same carriage, same seat, where possible. I always sit here myself. But twenty-two years, I must have seen her.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘I’m not sure, though, why we’re discussing her.’
    ‘She had an accident.’
    ‘I see. On the train?’
    ‘Not this train, no.’
    ‘And you’re, what? Some kind of insurance person?’
    ‘Something like that,’ said Zoë.
    ‘Well, then. I hope you do your best for her.’
    ‘So do I,’ said Zoë.
    He nodded to himself. Caroline Daniels: total stranger. But a stranger who’d fought in the same war, sort of. He looked like he wanted to say more, but wasn’t sure what it might be. Instead he nodded again, as if in response to some significant intelligence, and returned to his newspaper.
    The train emitted a high-pitched beeping Zoë assumed announced the locking of the doors, and began to move. Most seats were taken now, but not all. Paddington began sliding away behind them, and a no-man’s sprawl of workers’ huts, prefabs and cars parked at awkward angles on cratered bombsites shunted past. All available wall-space was cartooned over in primary spraypaint. Above everything hovered the Westway, its concrete ugliness a match for the sky above. Zoë stood, prepared to make her way the length of the train if necessary. She had no photograph, which was a pain, but then, how many bosses kept pictures of their PAs? Married bosses, of their unmarried PAs.
    ‘Eighteen years,’ said the man suddenly.
    She looked him full in the eye.
    ‘I’ve been doing this eighteen years,’ he said. ‘Seems quite long enough to me.’
    She nodded, and moved a few seats further down.
    None of the others she asked in that carriage knew the name Caroline Daniels. One woman thought she remembered a familiar face not being round any more, but that happened. Sometimes, they came back.
    ‘They take a sabbatical, if they’re academics or medical. Or the job sends them abroad for a bit.’
    ‘Or they have a nervous breakdown,’ a man put in.
    But Caroline Daniels: No.
    To the south, in the sky, planes were leaving Heathrow, at the rate of what must have