THE VOICE IN THE WALL

The Marchetti house had one hundred and forty rooms and Lorenzo could not have told you what was behind most of the walls in any of them.

That was the first thing he understood that night, and he understood it while he was still walking.

The corridor ran the whole east length of the house, panelled in oak the colour of strong tea, hung every four metres with a portrait of somebody who had been dead for a century. Brass lamps every second panel. A floor so old it had gone soft under the varnish.

He had walked it perhaps ten thousand times.

The party was in the ballroom at the far end. He could hear it through two sets of doors: the quartet, the glasses, a hundred and some people being pleasant at each other on his money.

He was walking away from it because he had been told his daughter was upstairs asleep and he wanted to look at her.

That was all. That was the entire reason.

He was level with the fourth portrait when he heard her.

"Daddy."

He stopped.

It came from his right, which was a wall.

"Daddy, please let me out."

There is a particular way a sound arrives when it has come through something. It loses the edges. It arrives flat and slightly too low, like a voice on a telephone in another room.

Lorenzo Marchetti stood in his own corridor with his hand still lifting toward a door that was four metres further on, and he listened to his three-year-old daughter's voice come out of a wall that had no door in it.

"Isabella."

Nothing.

He put his palm flat on the panelling. It was cool and completely solid and it told him nothing at all.

"Isabella, say something."

A small sound. Not words. The sound a child makes when it has been crying long enough that crying has stopped being useful.

He turned and shouted down the corridor toward the ballroom, and he did not recognise his own voice when it came out.

"Everyone shut up!"

The extraordinary thing — the thing he thought about for the rest of his life — was that they did.

The quartet stopped mid-phrase. One violin trailed off a beat behind the others, the way an instrument does when the person holding it looks up. A hundred and some conversations went out like a light going off.

And in that silence, very small, very close, from inside the wall:

"Daddy."

He started hitting the panelling.

He did not do it carefully. He went down the corridor with the heel of his right fist, one panel then the next, the signet ring cracking against varnish, and each one came back solid, solid, solid.

Behind him somewhere a woman said *oh* and somebody else told her to be quiet.

On the eleventh panel his fist came down and the sound was wrong.

It was not a sound he could have described to anybody. It was less. It was a knock with nothing on the other side of it to push back.

His hand stopped on the wood and stayed there.

"Isabella. Don't move. Don't move, I'm here."

He got his fingers into the seam at the edge of the panel and pulled, and the whole thing came away from the wall on a hinge nobody had oiled since before he was born.