The Acoustics of a Marriage

"Tom has his network. I have mine. His makes phone calls. Mine has lived inside these walls for twenty-three years." — Louise Jeffries

Louise heard Tom's footsteps pass the sitting room door without stopping. Down the corridor, through the entrance hall, up the stairs. The particular rhythm of a man moving through his own house with the stride that said he was done talking and would not be interrupted. She knew that walk. She'd been married to it for twenty-three years.

She stayed where she was.

The sitting room window gave her the same view it had given her all morning — the formal gardens, the southern border, the officers working their way methodically along the paths with their cameras and evidence bags. From this angle she could also see the edge of the forecourt, where Harrison's team was processing the gravel in a grid pattern, and beyond that the shed, its door still open, the cordon tape catching the wind in small flutters that were the only movement around a structure that had otherwise been declared, impossibly, empty.

Louise had been watching since seven-fifty.

Not from this room — the sitting room had been her retreat after Tom arrived. Before that, she'd been in the entrance hall. Before that, the kitchen. Before that, the upstairs landing. Each position chosen for what it gave her access to, and each abandoned when the investigation's movements made her presence there conspicuous.

She'd learned the house's acoustics decades ago. Not deliberately — not at first. In the early years of her marriage, she'd simply noticed things. That the heating vent in the upstairs landing carried sound from the foyer with startling clarity. That the kitchen wall adjoining the rear corridor was thin enough to transmit conversation at normal speaking volume. That the study door, which appeared to close flush, left a gap of nearly a centimetre at the hinge side — wide enough for voices to pass through, narrow enough to be invisible from inside the room.

These were the things you learned when you lived in a house where information was currency and your husband dealt in it without including you in the transactions.

She hadn't planned to use them this morning. When the convoy had arrived at seven-fifty and the officers had begun setting up, Louise had been in the kitchen making tea — the automatic response of a woman whose upbringing had conditioned her to offer hospitality even to people who were searching her home. She'd carried the tray to the entrance hall and set it on the side table that the command post hadn't yet displaced, and she'd been there when Stout's officers began their radio checks.

The radios were the first gift.

Police radios weren't encrypted for standard operational channels — the briefing that morning had apparently specified encrypted frequencies, but in practice the officers moved between encrypted and standard depending on what they were communicating. Routine updates — positions, progress, timing — went out on the open channel. And the open channel was audible from anywhere within fifteen metres of an officer carrying a handset.

Louise had spent the morning within fifteen metres of one officer or another.

Not hovering. Not lingering in ways that would draw attention or provoke a request to step back. She moved through her own house the way she always moved through it — checking on Thelma's morning tray, fetching a cardigan from the upstairs bedroom, returning a book to the library shelf, carrying her teacup from room to room the way she did every morning. Ordinary movements. The movements of a woman going about her routine in a house that happened to be full of police.

But her routine had been adjusted. The path from the kitchen to Thelma's room didn't normally pass through the rear corridor where Mackenzie was measuring the wainscoting. The library book didn't normally require returning at the precise moment Thompson was radioing her findings about the west wall to the command post in the foyer. The cardigan from the upstairs bedroom didn't normally take seven minutes to locate — seven minutes during which Matthews was standing outside Thelma's door, his radio transmitting his conversation with Stout on a channel that carried perfectly through the landing's heating vent to the spot where Louise stood in the bedroom with the wardrobe door open and the cardigan already in her hand.

Seven anomalies on the ground floor. She'd heard each one reported. The west wall of the library — forty centimetres too thick. The corridor floor that dropped and rose. The wainscoting on different backing timber. The gap between the kitchen and study measurements. And the fireplace — Thompson's voice, slightly breathless, the careful tone of someone reporting something significant: the floor immediately in front of it sounds hollow.

The shed results she'd heard from Harrison herself — or rather, from Harrison's voice on the radio while Louise stood in the entrance hall refilling her teacup from the pot she'd left there, her back to the command post, her ears open. The shed is clean. No biologicals. No trace evidence. The analysis was run twice.

She'd heard all of it. And she'd carried all of it with her to the sitting room, where she'd assembled it into the picture she'd delivered to Tom — a picture he'd accepted without once asking how she'd obtained it.

That was the shape of their marriage. Tom had his network. His sources, his contacts, his unnamed people in their institutional positions. Louise had hers. Hers were the walls of her own house, the acoustics she'd mapped over twenty-three years, and the particular invisibility that a woman in her own home possessed when the people inside it were focused on their work and considered her, if they considered her at all, an inconvenience to be managed rather than an intelligence to be reckoned with.

She pressed her fingertips against the arm of the chair. Outside, the officers continued their work. Inside, Tom's footsteps had stopped — he was in his study, or in the bedroom, or in one of the rooms on the first floor that he maintained for purposes he'd never explained and she'd stopped asking about.

He'd told her he would handle it. The same words he'd used when Jamie first went missing. The same words when Kain didn't come home. I'll handle it. And she'd let him, because Tom had always handled things. It was the promise at the centre of their marriage.

But Jamie was still missing. And Kain was still missing. And none of the things Tom had handled had brought either of them home.

And ten minutes ago her husband had stood across from her and heard about hollow floors and impossible forensic results and walls that didn't match their own plans, and none of it had surprised him. It shouldn't have surprised her that it didn't surprise him. She knew what he knew. She'd known for years. The difference between them wasn't knowledge — it was what they believed that knowledge could withstand.

Tom believed in control. In phone calls and pressure and the machinery of influence that the Jeffries name had maintained for two centuries. He believed that what the family had protected could continue to be protected because it always had been.

Louise wasn't sure anymore.

The people on their property were not going to stop. She'd watched Stout all morning. She'd watched how his officers responded to him and how he responded to Tom and how his voice never changed regardless of what was said to him. This man was not going to receive a phone call from a deputy commissioner or a minister's adviser and pack up his forensic team and drive away. And if Tom's calls failed — if the influence wasn't enough, if the machinery seized — then the investigation would keep going. Deeper into the house. Deeper into the grounds. Deeper into things that Louise had spent her marriage helping to conceal.

She had her own exposure. Her own choices made in full knowledge. Her own silence, maintained not out of ignorance but out of the understanding that the Jeffries secrets were now her secrets too, and that the wall between complicity and protection had eroded so gradually over twenty-three years that she could no longer identify where one ended and the other began.

If that wall came down, it wouldn't fall on Tom alone.

Wilson was waiting in the library. The formal interview. Tom had told her to delay. Cooperate fully. Consult with family.

Louise closed the sitting room door behind her and walked towards the library.