Free The Last Voice You Hear by Mick Herron Page B

forensic scientist; she was looking for those larger, more obvious signs of man.
    This is how she searched:
    First, the kitchen. Some men cook. The kitchen is compact, designed for single living, and puts Zoë in mind of a room you might find on a ship. Even the electric kettle is half-sized. There is a fridge-freezer, a cooker, a washing machine. On the window ledge a potted plant is dying. A further door, its top half ruffled glass, leads to a back garden invisible for the moment. Zoë takes the cupboards first, and finds cups, glasses, plates and bowls in one and various tinned goods in another: soups, pulses, fruit in syrup, all with labels facing outwards. The lower cupboards hold pans and electrical appliances; bags of flour and cereals; cleaning materials – bleaches, scourers; a plastic washing-up bowl. In the drawers are cutlery and cooking utensils; also binliners, clothes pegs and vacuum-cleaner bags. In the herb-and-spice rack on the wall, none of the small glass jars is less than half full. The pans she finds are dark blue; a matching set.
    A tea towel hangs from the handle of a drawer. In drying, it has creased into cardboard folds, which retain their shape when Zoë lifts it.
    Nothing about the kitchen reads Alan Talmadge rather than Caroline Daniels .
    And the same with the rest of the house. Zoë moved through it with the growing feeling that there was nothing to find, though without picking up any sense that this was deliberate. There were no dust-free absences in bathroom cabinets, or empty halves of bedroom drawers. It was simply that the house was Caroline’s alone. Presumably Talmadge had grazed its surfaces as he visited, but he’d left no substantial luggage in his wake. Perhaps he too had an obsessively neat apartment somewhere, where no trace of Caroline Daniels survived. And all she had to do was find it.
    It was a bit odd, though. No toothbrush, no spare shirt, no unfinished paperback by the bed. Except, just six months in, reading in bed wouldn’t have been a priority.
    In a mirrored cupboard in the bathroom, she found a healthy collection of face creams and ointments in tubes and jars and bottles. Most related to complexion and anti-ageing; most, too, were designer branded – Christian Dior, L’Oréal – but there were also supermarket labels, as if Caroline Daniels had been prepared to try anything. All were less than half-used, like the spice jars in the kitchen. But whereas there, Zoë had had the impression that Caroline had not been a woman to run out of anything, here, it felt more as if she’d still been searching for something that would work. It was impossible not to draw a connection between Alan Talmadge’s arrival in her life and this interest in reversing time’s damages. Zoë closed the cupboard door.
    From its mirror, she stared back at herself. This both was and was not the face she’d always had. Presumably, below its surface, other, older faces were waiting to make their appearance, and no amount of magic lotion would hold them at bay for ever. Most days, she felt quite strongly that this did not matter at all.
    The bedroom showed no outward sign of shared occupancy, but in the drawer of a bedside table, she found an open box of condoms: a packet of twelve, with ten remaining. The discovery gave her pause: she already knew that Alan Talmadge existed – why did she feel as if she’d come across proof of a yeti? The bed was made, and this must have been one of Caroline Daniels’ last domestic actions. The sheets seemed clean, or not noticeably soiled. Forensics again. She did not spend long in the bedroom; being there made her feel exactly what she was: a snoop.
    In the hallway she paused, listening for she didn’t know what. She supposed, on some level, noises continued to pulse through the house (electricity coursed through it; water shifted tidally in its pipes; its battery-powered clocks ticked on), but she felt, nevertheless, dead centre of a large numbing