The Last Voice You Hear by Mick Herron

piece of soft classical or easy jazz. Mostly on vinyl, of course.
    . . . Alan Talmadge had belonged to no record club, no book club. Alan Talmadge had not possessed a TV licence.
    The TV was also in here. Occasionally she’d wheel it out, usually when it was late and she needed numbing, but that happened less and less . . . Either she was developing a puritanical streak, or very slowly she was ceasing to exist.
    ‘Fuck this,’ she said, under her breath. She had no idea who she was addressing, or where her sudden anger came from.
    . . . Alan Talmadge existed: that was a given. But he was either a throwback, or he wasn’t called Alan Talmadge . . . It was possible Grayling had got the name wrong, of course. Larger matters had foundered on smaller details. But if he had, fuck him too: Zoë had better things to waste time on than clients’ misinformation. Given a moment, she’d come up with some.
    She had never noticed before how dumbly vacant a TV set looked, like a mistreated puppy. If she had any sense, she’d junk the damn thing.
    . . . And there was Sarah’s voice again, telling her right from wrong. It wasn’t just the TV needed junking, Zoë told herself twenty minutes later, loading the bastard into her car. It was her whole damn history, beginning with everybody she’d ever met. Maybe that way she’d get some rest eventually. She glanced in her mirror; pulled out. She wasn’t so paranoid as to check whether anyone was following, but it wouldn’t have made a difference if she had.
    * * *
    On the way, she rang Bob Poland. It was his day off, but if she was disturbing him, she was disturbing him. Theirs wasn’t a relationship based on kind regard.
    ‘So what are you doing anyway?’
    ‘Oh, you know. Sitting down. Drinking a beer.’
    ‘And they say men can’t multi-task.’
    ‘Funny woman. You ring just to piss me off, or what?’
    Because that’s the only time she ever called him: when she had a problem.
    The first time she saw Bob Poland, she thought: here’s a man who’s been given the wrong head. It was a moonish addendum to a frame otherwise angles, straight planes, edges. She didn’t know how he kept lean – every time she saw him he had a drink in one hand and another behind the bar – but it worked, except there wasn’t much he could do about the head. ‘Like a stick of rock with a tomato on,’ Joe had said. Then added: ‘Never tell him I said so.’
    – No, Joe.
    Bob Poland, anyway – a six-foot jawless stringbean – was a cop. Joe had known him first, of course; Joe had bought him, to start with, drinks and smokes, and finally just bought him, or that was how Joe told it. In his mind, Joe had always walked tightropes. In the real world, Zoë suspected, he’d had the same experience she’d enjoyed: shovelled a bundle of money Poland’s way to keep him on-message, and in return got whatever he felt like giving, which was mostly nothing. Though she didn’t expect he’d wasted so much effort trying to get Joe into bed.
    He’d contacted her a couple of months after Joe was in the ground.
    ‘If you’re thinking of carrying on, you’ll need someone like me. Maybe you’d like to buy me a drink.’
    And after all, whatever else he might have been, he was verifiably a cop. There was bound to be a time when one of those would come in handy.
    . . . None of this was what she’d intended. The day Joe died Zoë had been in Paris, armed with a man and a plan. The man hadn’t lasted – had never been meant to last – but the plan was built and sorted: she would cut her last ties with Joe (their marriage, by now, was one of those linguistic anomalies anyway: a word that covered its own opposite meaning, like ‘ cleave ’) and go back to college, convert her law degree. It was a getaway stratagem; a running from, not a moving towards. But at least it would work.
    It was not entirely Joe’s fault. (This was a revision of her earlier stance, which had been that it was entirely Joe’s