Chapter 10 What the Police Cannot Use

The station on Morley Street had been a post office once, and it still sounded like one, all high ceilings and hard floors, every footstep arriving twice. Harewood met her in a room with a table and two chairs and a window she could hear was painted shut, and he let the last word of his greeting hang, and she did not fill it, and he smiled, she could hear that much, the small dry exhalation of a man who has decided to respect someone. "Two things," he said. "The first is bad. The second is worse." "Begin with the bad." "Emrys Rellick does not exist as family to Sylvie Ostry. You knew that. There is an Emrys Rellick who runs a small dubbing company out of Dunkery Street, and he took it over from a man named Osgood who died four years ago, and before that there is nothing. No school records we can find, no tax history under that name before six years ago, no family. It is a name he put on like a coat." He let the pause sit, and this time the pause was for her and not against her. "He has been in your building. He has been in your flat. And the only thing I can charge him with so far is trespass, which I cannot prove, and impersonation of a relative, which is not a crime if no money changed hands." "And the worse thing?" "The worse thing is you." Harewood sat. The chair told on him the way every chair told on everyone, and she filed the sound the way she filed everything, even now, even here. "A defense will say you are the ideal witness for the wrong reason. You heard something in the dark. You cannot describe the man. You spent a week getting close to the case. You have a documented condition that affects identification. And there is now an anonymous complaint, filed last night, that says you have been telling neighbors you solved the murder, that you have been accusing your husband, and that you have been drinking." She had been expecting the last part, more or less. The first parts she had not. She thought of Emrys in her kitchen, telling her, in his soft borrowed kindness, that the way she knew people was beautiful, that most of us only ever know the mask. She thought of the dead woman's voice on her phone, telling her to sit down, that she could hear her standing. Both of them had been, in their separate ways, the same trick, and she had let the first one warm her and the second one stop her breath, and she had never once, in either moment, felt the trap close, because the trap was built out of her own loneliness, and her own loneliness had been doing the work for years, patiently, before the stranger ever found her. She sat with them and found each one true in the way a trap is true, built entirely out of her own honesty, the way a house can be built out of a person's own hands. "He is building my unreliability," she said. "He has been building it since the lobby. Every kind thing he said to me, every time he called me by name, every letter he invented from a dead woman. It was all so that when I stand up and say I know his walk and I know his lies, there will be a room full of people ready to say I cannot know anything, because I cannot even know my own husband's face." "Yes," said Harewood. "That is exactly what he is doing." "Then let me give you something a room cannot take apart." She had come prepared, and she put it on the table now, eight cards, each in her own neat hand, each with a voice printed on it in the only notation she trusted: a description of a walk, a breath, a set of endings, a scent, a ring. "This is the register. Not my private one. This is the part of it that is about him. Take it. Photograph it. Give it to a linguist if you have one. There is a man somewhere in Dunkery Street whose left foot is heavier than his right, whose ring rings on metal, who swallows the ends of his words, and who wears a coat of borrowed voices over a face I will never see. I cannot give you his face. I can give you his fingerprint, and it is not on his hands." She kept her hands in her lap. She had learned, young, that her hands told on her, that they moved to her register before her mind did, and that a person who cannot look at faces must learn to look at everything else as if the whole world were reading her. So she sat still and let the detective read forty years of listening, and it occurred to her, not for the first time, that the register had never once been written for the police, or the courts, or anyone. It had been written for one person only, the frightened girl in the ward, so that she would never again be in a room full of beds and not know which bed to grieve. Now the whole city was the ward, and every bed was a suspect, and she had been carrying the answer around in a shoebox the whole time. Harewood picked up the cards. She heard him read. He read for a long time. A voice parade, when he explained it, sounded to Coralie like the only honest invention the law had ever made, and also like the last thing on earth she wanted to sit through. Six men reading one passage behind a screen. No faces. Just the thing she had spent her life trusting, put on exhibit under oath. If she got it right, she would have done the one thing she had never been able to do in front of another human being, which was to point, without pointing, at the person who had done it. If she got it wrong, she would have proved, in a room with a lawyer watching her hands, everything the man wanted proved about her. "There is a procedure," he said at last. "A voice identification parade. It is weaker than a visual lineup and no honest prosecutor loves it, but it exists. Six voices, one recorded passage, read by six men, so that they cannot hide behind faces. You sit in a room and you listen, and you tell me which one is the man from your stairwell. If you are right, it corroborates, and a good prosecutor can hold it. If you are wrong, the case dies and so does your credibility, both at once." "When?" "When I can find six men to stand in a booth and read a passage, which in this city means about a week, if I move quickly and call in favors." He stood, and the chair told him good night. "Mrs. Tunstall, one more thing. I have been a policeman for twenty years. I have never once met a witness who could do what you can do, and I have also never once met a man who arranged his whole life around a single witness. He is not just hiding from you. He is courting you. He wants to be found by you, and then he wants you to be the one holding the match when the case burns. Anything you do from here, he will have thought of first." "Then I will do the thing he cannot think of," said Coralie. She did not yet know what that was. She only knew that she had stopped being a witness somewhere in the last hour, and had become, instead, the only instrument in the room, and an instrument, unlike a woman, does not have to see a face to tell the truth. ---