Chapter 11 Dunkery Street

Dunkery Street was a long gray bone of a road south of the river, lined with old warehouses that had been repainted into studios and offices and the kind of coffee place where the coffee cost more than the tune it was served to. Coralie walked it on the Tuesday with Harewood a half step behind her, and she took the street the way she took everything, in sound: the river behind, the traffic on the bridge, the hollow note of a building whose ground floor had been emptied of machines and never quite refilled. The Dunkery Rooms had a red door and no sign, or a sign so worn the paint had gone smooth. Inside, it was exactly what a voice house is, and Coralie knew it before the door closed behind her, because she had spent her life in rooms shaped for listening. Dead air. Foam on the walls. A low hum from somewhere under the floor, the sound of a building that had once been loud and was now being paid to be quiet. "Can I help you?" said a woman at a desk, and the woman's voice was good, trained, the voice of someone who did the small commercials, the ones that sell you a mattress at midnight. "Police," said Harewood, and the room changed, the way rooms do. A door opened down the hall, and a man came halfway out, and Coralie did the thing she had trained herself to do a hundred times a day. She stopped looking, which was not much of a sacrifice, and she listened. The man halfway out had a gait she did not know, both feet even, a clean walk. The woman at the desk had something under her vowels, a slight smear at the ends of words, and Coralie held it a moment and let it go with a small cold note, because it was the same habit and a different throat. "We're looking for Emrys Rellick," said Harewood. The building went quiet in a specific way, the way a building goes quiet when everyone in it has been told a story about why the police might come. The woman said he was out. The man in the hallway said he was out. A door at the far end closed, and the closing told Coralie something she did not want, which was that whoever had just closed it had been standing there listening for a while. "While we wait," said Harewood, in his dry voice, "I'd like a tour. It's a nice building. I like a building." The building gave her a census as they went. Three people on the phones, two of them smiling, one not. A cleaner in the back office with a radio, singing half a line of something and stopping. A booth where a man was reading a script for the ninth time, and a booth where a woman was reading a different script for the first, and a room with a piano in it that some client kept in the corner for show and no one, in years, had thought to tune. Voices, voices, voices, a whole building full of them, every one of them for hire, every one for sale to whoever was paying, and Coralie walked through the middle of it the way she had once walked through the middle of a hospital ward, listening for the one bed that was the bed, and finding only beds. They walked. Coralie listened. There was a booth with someone inside reading a script, reading it over and over in a flat looping way, and a room with a piano that needed tuning and a couch nobody sat on, and a kitchen that smelled of burned coffee and lemon cleaner, and down at the end a corridor where the foam stopped and the walls were bare plaster, which meant the money stopped before the corridor did. It was Harewood who found the office where the money was kept, and it was Harewood who went through the papers with the flat, unhurried calm of a man who had gone through a thousand desks and had never once been surprised. Coralie stood in the doorway and let him work. She had learned to trust him the way she trusted a good tuner, not for his charm but for his order. He spoke to the room in the same dry voice he used on people. He read the client sheets the way Coralie read cards. And when he went quiet, she knew that he had found the page, the way you know a string has gone the instant before you touch it. At the very end of the corridor, a door stood open onto a small room. It had a microphone and a chair and a soft box for light and a rack of equipment on a table. It was like every other room in the building and it was not, and Coralie stood in the doorway and listened to what the room was doing when it thought no one was in it. The room was playing a recording. Softly, from a speaker behind the desk, low enough that a person with ordinary hearing would have walked right past it. A woman's voice, teaching. A phrase, turned over and over, softened at the ending each time. Sylvie. "A face is a rumor," said the dead woman, on the little speaker, in the little bare room, and then she said it again, a beat different, a breath different, the way she said everything twice while practicing, and Coralie stood in the doorway of a room that belonged to a man who kept her dead friend on a loop, and understood, finally, the exact shape of his patience. There are rooms a person can enter and rooms a person is allowed to stand outside of, and Coralie had spent enough of her life learning the difference. This was a room a person was allowed to look into and not allowed to sit in. It was the room of a man who collected the dead. She could feel the collecting in it the way she could feel bad acoustics, a wrongness in the air of a space that had been shaped by one purpose and used for another. The microphone was on a stand, and the chair was pulled to the microphone, and the speaker was behind the desk turned to the chair, so that whoever sat there would hear only the dead woman, and no one else, ever, in the room. "He keeps the lessons," she said, to Harewood, very quietly. "He keeps them all. He has been keeping her since before she died." Harewood did not answer, because Harewood was reading the client sheet pinned to the wall by the door, and when he spoke his voice had lost its dry edge, which for him was the same as shouting. "There's a name on here," he said, "that I do not want to see on here. A session booked for the Thursday. Two hours. The same night Sylvie Ostry was killed." Coralie crossed the room and did not need to read the sheet. She knew what it said before he told her, the way she knew when a piano was about to go. She thought she would be sick, and then she found, instead, a strange, cold clarity, the kind that comes at four in the morning, when the body gives up on sleep and the mind decides to be useful. If Lorcan's name was on that sheet on purpose, then the man had put it there for her, in the expectation that she would one day stand in this room and find it. Which meant he had known, weeks ago, that she would come to Dunkery Street. Which meant he had been waiting for her. Which meant, most chillingly of all, that the whole building had been arranged into a room shaped to be walked into, and she had just walked into it, exactly, precisely, on time. "Deverell," said Harewood. "Your husband." ---