第17章 Emrys Rellick

The invitation came as a card, and the card arrived under her door in the black hour before dawn, and it was written in Sylvie Ostry's hand. Coralie found it when she went out for the milk. A single index card, an old one, from Sylvie's box, with Sylvie's capital heading at the top and Sylvie's tidy pressure in the pen, and in the middle, in ink that was not Sylvie's at all, a sentence in the same style, learned and copied, close enough to fool anyone who had not spent two years learning the woman's exact grain. Come to the room where I keep her. Come alone. Tonight, at nine. You will want to hear the second bar. She stood in the hallway and read it twice and took it down to Harewood, and together, in the station on Morley Street, they built the thing they had been building toward since the first night. "No wire," Coralie said. "He'll hear it. He'll hear the battery in it. He hears everything I hear. Put your men in the room next door and leave my door ajar a finger's width, and he will know they are there, and that is fine. He wants an audience. He has always wanted an audience. All I need is the three minutes before he notices, and in three minutes I can make him show me his seams." "You know he'll have planned for this." "He has planned for the parade," said Coralie. "He has planned for a court and a judge and a room of six voices reading one passage, and he has planned a way to be innocent in all of it. He has never once planned for me to sit down with him and simply listen. Men like him are never afraid of being seen. They are afraid of being heard." She went at nine. The Dunkery Rooms at night were a different animal, all its foam and dead air gone hollow, the hallway lit by one strip of emergency light, the booths along the wall dark as mouths. Harewood's men were already in the neighbouring room, and she heard them, because she heard everything, and she knew they could not hear her at all, because the walls of a voice house are built to make sure of it. He was waiting in the little room at the end of the corridor, the one with the microphone and the chair, and he had set the room the way a man sets a table. Two chairs. A jug of water. And behind the desk, on the little speaker, Sylvie, on her loop, a face is a rumor a voice is a fact, over and over, soft as a tide. "Mrs. Tunstall," said Emrys Rellick, and he said her name in his own voice now, the pleasant one, the soft regional rise, the real one or the one he had chosen to call real, and she could not tell, and she had finally stopped needing to. "Sit. Thank you for coming. I would offer you tea but I remember you make it better." "You were in my kitchen." "I was in your kitchen. I was also at your door. I was also at the house on Fenwick Row, and I was also the voice that followed you home, and I have been, in the last month, more people to you than your husband has been in six years." He was moving as he spoke, not pacing, setting things, the small tidy movements of a man at home among his equipment, and under his words Coralie heard the room and took it apart, and she noted what she noted and let it pass. "You want to know why I asked you here. So ask me directly. You are the only person alive I would answer." "Why did you kill Sylvie Ostry." He did not flinch. That was the first honest thing about him, that he did not perform the flinch. "Because she heard something she should not have been able to hear," he said. "Because I have spent my whole life being good at one thing, and it is the one thing no one can see. I can be anyone. I was raised in a home where nobody looked at me twice, and I learned there that a face is only a costume, and the voice underneath it is the only real money in the world. For years I did small jobs. I answered phones as a dead man's assistant. I passed a medical exam as a cousin who did not exist. I recorded an old woman's last wishes in her son's voice so that the son could be left out of a will he did not deserve, which is smaller than it sounds, and which paid me for two years. Nobody ever caught me, because nobody believes a voice. Sylvie Ostry believed a voice." "She was going to tell someone." "She was going to tell everyone." He sat at last, and the chair told on him, and the shift of his weight was clean, both feet even, and Coralie filed it and understood that he had known she would listen for the drag and had left it at the door like a coat. "She heard the seam the first day. She told me I had a man under a man. And she was right. And she got curious, because she was a teacher and a good one, and she went looking for whose voice I wear, and she found him, and she would have told the family he never met, and my whole life is that family, Mrs. Tunstall. My whole life is other people. If one of them learns my name, I stop existing. She was going to make me stop existing. So I made her stop first, and I am not sorry, and I will not pretend to be, because you would hear the pretending. I can lie to the whole world. I cannot lie to you." Coralie sat in the chair across from a man she could not see and held her hands very still in her lap. She had known, walking in, that she was walking into the one room in the city built to hide him, and she had chosen to walk into it anyway, because she had understood something on the stairwell of her own building that no sighted detective could have taught her. A man who can wear any face is a man who can be caught only by what he cannot take off. She had spent weeks looking for the drag in his step and the ring on his hand and the endings he swallowed, and every one of them had been a coat. What he could not take off was the room he made with his own throat when he thought no one was measuring, and she had come here to measure it, and everything he said before the measuring began was only a way of passing the time. "You were the nephew," she said. "You were the man with three voices. You were the session that booked my husband on the night she died." "I booked your husband on the night she died," he said, "because I needed a reason for his name to be near hers, in case anyone looked. And then you arrived, and you were better than the reason. You were the gift I had not ordered. A witness who cannot point. A woman whose whole life is a method, standing in the one room where a method is a mask. Do you understand what you are to me? You are the only person in the world who knows how I live, because you live the same way. We build people out of pieces. We listen for the seam. The difference between us is only that you keep the people you build, and I become them." He leaned forward. She heard the leather of the chair, the small breath he took, the room holding its foam and its dark around them both. "Now I will show you," he said. "Close your eyes. You always close them anyway. I am going to be three people for you, and when I am done you will tell me which one is me. That is the only game I have ever wanted to play, and I have never had anyone to play it with." And then, in the little room, in the dead air, he said her name in her husband's voice. And then in the dead woman's. And then, in a voice she had never heard from any mouth but her own, he said it again. ---