The Constable's Notebook

"There is a particular cruelty in being asked questions to which you know the answers but cannot speak them. Each silence costs something. By the end, I was not certain what remained."

Victoria guided me toward the morning room, her hand still at my elbow, and I let her. The drawing room would have been my choice — the Talisker was there, Thomas had seen to that — but Victoria was already steering us through the door before I could suggest otherwise, and perhaps she was right. The morning room was smaller, quieter, removed from the main thoroughfare of the house. Whatever was about to happen would happen away from the servants' ears.

The room looked different. I had not been here since — when? Yesterday? The day before? The native flowers I had arranged on the writing desk had begun to wilt, their petals curling inward, golden wattle shedding onto the polished wood like flakes of old paint. Nobody had thought to tend them. Nobody had thought to tend anything today that wasn't directly connected to William's absence. The small signs of neglect were everywhere if you knew where to look: a cushion out of place on the settee, the curtains drawn unevenly, a smudge on the bay window that the morning's cleaning had never reached.

I sat on the settee. Victoria did not sit. She positioned herself to my left, standing, one hand resting on the settee's back — close enough to touch my shoulder if she chose, far enough to observe the entire room. I understood what she was doing. I had watched her do it at dinner parties: choosing the vantage point, the angle that gave her the widest view. She wanted to see the constable's face whilst he questioned me, and she wanted him to know she was watching.

Thomas appeared in the doorway. "Constable Broadmoor, madam," he said, and stepped aside.

The man who entered was not what I had expected, though I could not have said what I had expected. He was tall — taller than Thomas, which was unusual — and broad through the shoulders in a way that made the morning room feel smaller simply by his being in it. His uniform sat on him as though it had been part of his body for so long it had ceased to be clothing and become a second skin. Dark hair, cut short. A face that had weathered more than colonial winters — there were lines around the eyes and mouth that spoke of years spent squinting into wind and sun and things less pleasant than either.

And those eyes. I had caught them on the staircase — blue, direct — but up close they were something else. They moved. Not restlessly, not with the nervous darting of an uncertain man, but with the steady, deliberate sweep of someone cataloguing a room the way a stocktaker catalogues inventory. They touched the wilting flowers, the smudged window, Victoria's position behind me, my creased dress, my face — and in the half-second they held mine, I felt something I had not felt from anyone else today. Not sympathy. Not suspicion. Assessment. The cool, unhurried evaluation of someone whose profession was to determine what was true and what was not.

He removed his hat and tucked it beneath his arm. "Mrs Jeffries, you have my word that I will pursue every avenue in our search for Mr Jeffries. Perhaps we might speak somewhere more private?"

"This is quite private, Constable," Victoria said from behind me, her tone carrying the warmth of a hostess and the firmness of a gatekeeper. "The morning room is the quietest room in the house. We shan't be disturbed."

Broadmoor's gaze moved to Victoria. Held there for a moment. Then returned to me.

"Of course," he said. He drew out a chair and sat opposite the settee, producing a leather notebook from his breast pocket with the ease of long habit. The cover was worn smooth, the pages thick with previous cases, previous questions, previous lies detected and truths extracted. He opened it to a fresh page, and the small sound of paper turning felt like the opening of something that could not easily be closed again.

Behind me, I felt Victoria's fingers brush the settee back. I did not turn. Thomas had withdrawn, pulling the door to but not quite closing it — leaving the narrowest gap through which the house's sounds could reach us and ours could reach him. I caught the edge of his dark coat in the corridor, lingering, before he moved silently away.

The constable looked at me across the morning room, pencil poised, and waited.

"Mrs Jeffries," he began, his voice calm but carrying the weight of something official and irreversible, "can you tell me when you last saw your husband?"

The question was simple. The answer should have been simple. And yet I felt my throat close around it, the words requiring effort to extract, as though they had roots.

"We retired to bed together last night, as usual," I said. My voice came out barely above a whisper, and I hated it — hated the tremor, hated the thinness, hated that I could not control the way my body betrayed the morning's toll even when my mind was working perfectly well. "When I awoke this morning, William was gone. His side of the bed was cold, as if he had been absent for hours."

Broadmoor's pencil moved across the page. His handwriting was small and neat — I could see it from where I sat, the letters formed with the compact efficiency of someone who had written thousands of such notes.

"What time did you retire?"

"Just after ten, I believe." My hands had found the fabric of my dress again, fingers working at the wool the way they had all morning. I stilled them deliberately, pressing my palms flat against my thighs. "William had been in his study most of the evening, working on some business matters. He seemed..." I hesitated. My eyes moved to Victoria without my permission — a quick, involuntary glance that Broadmoor's gaze tracked like a hawk following a sparrow. I looked back. "He seemed preoccupied."

"Preoccupied?" Broadmoor kept his tone level, the single word an open door I could walk through or close. "In what way?"

Before I could answer, Victoria spoke from behind me. "He was distracted during dinner. Barely touched his food, as I understand it. Most unlike him."

Broadmoor's eyes lifted from his notebook to Victoria. The pencil paused. "You were here last night, Miss Ashford?"

"No," Victoria said, without hesitation or apology. "But I dine here regularly. William's appetite was always robust. Any change in his eating habits would be... noteworthy."

I watched Broadmoor register this — the woman who had not been present inserting herself into the account with the ease of someone accustomed to shaping conversations. His pencil resumed its movement. He did not comment.

"Did your husband give any indication that he planned to leave?" he asked, his attention returning to me. "Any mention of business that required his attention, or concerns that were troubling him?"

Victoria's hand found mine where it rested on the settee cushion. She squeezed — gently, briefly. Reassurance or warning. Both, perhaps.

"It's not like William to leave without a word, Constable," I said. My voice caught slightly on the words, and I let it catch. Let the emotion show, because it was real — whatever else was performance, this much was true. "Something must have happened to him. He would never... never voluntarily abandon us like this."

Broadmoor wrote. The scratch of pencil against paper was the only sound in the room. Then he looked up.

"Mrs Jeffries, I understand this is difficult, but I must ask — had there been any tension between you and your husband recently? Any disagreements or concerns?"

The temperature in the room changed. I felt it in my skin before I registered it in my thoughts — a tightening, a contraction, as though the walls had drawn fractionally closer. Behind me, Victoria stiffened.

"Every marriage has its moments of discord, Constable," Victoria said, her tone carrying an edge I recognised — the warning voice, the one that said you are approaching a boundary. "Surely you're not suggesting—"

"I'm not suggesting anything, Miss Ashford." Broadmoor's voice remained even, professional, utterly unmoved by Victoria's intervention. "I'm simply trying to build a complete picture of the circumstances surrounding Mr Jeffries's disappearance. Any detail, however small, might prove significant."

He turned back to me. Victoria's interjection had bought me three seconds — enough to smooth whatever had shown on my face, to press down whatever had risen.

"Has anything unusual occurred recently?" he asked. "Unexpected visitors, strange letters, changes in your husband's behaviour or routine?"

My hand went to my pocket.

It moved before I could stop it — the same unconscious reach I had been making all day, that compulsive need to confirm the letter was still there, still secret, still mine. My fingers brushed the fabric over the folded paper and the iron key, and then I caught myself. Pulled my hand back to my lap. Placed it flat upon my thigh alongside the other, both hands visible, both hands still.

The motion had lasted less than a heartbeat. But Broadmoor's eyes had followed it. I saw them track the movement — down to my pocket, back to my face — with the same unhurried attention he had brought to everything else in the room. He did not remark upon it. Did not write it down. Simply noted it and waited.

Behind me, Victoria had seen it too. I could feel the quality of her attention shift — a sharpening, a new alertness directed not at Broadmoor but at me.

"Nothing of consequence," I said. "William has been... busy with his business affairs, as always."

The lie sat between us. Broadmoor let the silence stretch — five seconds, ten, a small eternity in which I held his gaze and he held mine and the morning room's wilting flowers dropped another petal onto the writing desk.

He closed his notebook.

"I'll need to examine Mr Jeffries's study," he said, rising from the chair and tucking the notebook into his breast pocket with the same unhurried motion he had used to produce it. "And speak with the staff who saw him last night. The house staff, the servants who attended dinner, anyone who might have observed his movements."

"Of course." The words left me on an exhale of something I was ashamed to recognise as relief. The questions had stopped. The notebook was closed. Whatever he had seen in my face, my hands, my hesitations — it was recorded now, but the recording had paused. "Thomas will show you anything you need to see."

As though summoned by his name — though more likely he had been listening from the corridor, as I had known he would — Thomas appeared in the doorway. His dark coat, his straight back, his hands clasped before him. He met my eyes for a fraction of a second. The look carried nothing that could be read by anyone else in the room, but I felt it land — a confirmation, an assurance, a steadying.

"The search party has assembled outside, Constable," Thomas said. "And I have arranged for the senior staff to be available for interviews at your convenience."

Broadmoor nodded. "Thank you." He turned back to me, and something in his expression shifted — not softening, exactly, but acknowledging that the formal interrogation had ended and what remained was simply two people in a room where something terrible had happened.

"Mrs Jeffries, I'll begin with the grounds, but I'll need to return later to conduct more thorough interviews with everyone in the household."

I stood. My legs held. The Talisker, the sleep, the alliance with Thomas — something had given me a foundation that the morning's terror had stripped away.

"Please," I said. My voice dropped to barely a whisper, and the words that followed came from a place I had not planned to access — raw and unguarded and true, even as everything else I had said in this room had been measured and weighed. "Find him. Whatever has happened, whatever... whatever you might discover... please find him."

Broadmoor regarded me. Those blue eyes, steady and assessing, searching for the performance beneath the plea. I let him look. Because this was not performance. Whatever else I had concealed — the letter, the Blue Room, the confession, the blood on the floorboards — the wanting of William found was real. The not knowing was its own kind of agony, and no amount of strategy could counterfeit the crack in my voice when I spoke his name.

"I will do everything in my power, Mrs Jeffries," he said. And then he turned, collected his hat from the chair, and followed Thomas into the corridor.

His footsteps receded. Thomas's voice, low and professional, guided him toward the front of the house. A door opened somewhere below — the entrance hall, the outside air, the assembled search party. The sounds of the house rearranged themselves around the constable's departure, filling the space he had occupied with something that was not quite silence and not quite relief.

Victoria's hand found my shoulder. She leaned close, her breath warm against my ear.

"He noticed your hand, Madelyn," she whispered. "When you reached for your pocket. He noticed."

I closed my eyes.

"I know," I said.

Victoria's fingers tightened on my shoulder. Then released. She stepped back, and when I opened my eyes she was watching me with an expression I had never seen on her face before — not the sharp curiosity, not the protective concern, not the calculating intelligence I knew so well. Something quieter. Something that looked, if I was not mistaken, like fear.

Not fear of what had happened to William.

Fear of what I was becoming.