Accomplice

"Fear made me trust the calmer one. It did not once occur to me to ask why Sharon was so much calmer than I was."

"Shit! Where the hell are you, Sharon?"

The words came out of me in a whisper, to nobody, to the empty house at my back. I had not moved from the front window. I stood with one hand holding the blind an inch off the glass, watching the bend at the top of the road the way I had been watching it since I put my coat on, and the road stayed empty, and the light went on draining out of the sky a shade at a time.

She had said twenty minutes. It had been closer to an hour, and every one of those minutes had gone into me like the turn of a screw, until I was taking the small shallow breaths that were all my chest would allow.

I checked the phone again. Nothing. My last message — Nearly here? — sat there unanswered, and somehow the sight of it was worse than a reply would have been, because a reply, even a bad one, would have been a fact, and this was only silence, and I had got very good that week at filling silence with the worst things I could reach. Was she hurt somewhere? Had whoever took our husbands decided she was asking too many questions? Had she simply come to her senses about the whole mad business and left me to it? I had always had too much imagination — it was half of what made me any good at my job — and at that window it ran me through every horror it could lay hands on.

I had put a single lamp on and left the rest of the house dark. I could not have said exactly what I was afraid of — that whoever I kept half-believing had been through my rooms, moving Nial's things, might be out there somewhere watching to see if I was home — but the dark felt safer than the light, and I had stopped arguing with the part of me that decided such things now.

The mirror over the mantel caught me as I turned, and I did not much care for what it had to show me: a grey, scraped-out version of my own face, all shadow and too-big eyes, a woman who looked hunted. I looked away from her.

I typed another message. Sharon? Please respond. Getting worried. Sent it. The three dots came up at once — she was typing — and something in my chest lifted so hard it hurt.

Then the dots stopped. Nothing came.

"Christ," I said to the empty room, and very nearly threw the phone across it.

A horn went off outside, flat and sudden, and I was back at the window with the blind shoved aside before I had decided to move. Sharon's car sat in the driveway, engine running, headlights pushing two cones of light into the dusk. Finally.

I already had my coat. I picked my keys up off the side table — beside the photograph of the two of us at the vineyard, Nial's arms round me from behind, both of us squinting into a sun from another life — and I stood there with them in my hand a second longer than I needed to.

Once I went out that door and got into that car, there would be no more waiting, no more sitting in the dark hoping the phone might ring. There would only be whatever we were about to do, which was very likely illegal and might well be dangerous. The sensible thing was to stay. Ring Detective Jenkins again, leave another message no one would return, trust the system that had done nothing but fail us.

But I was finished being sensible.

I took the keys, and I let myself out into the cold.

The cold came up off the mountain with a bite of frost already in it, and the last of the light was nearly gone from behind the hills. I pulled my coat close and went down the path, the gravel loud under my boots.

Sharon leaned on the horn again, impatient, and through the windscreen I could make out the shape of her, upright and still, both hands on the wheel. I put my hand on the passenger door — and stopped.

Something was wrong. It took me a second to place it: she was not looking at me. Her face was turned to the rear-view mirror, and she was watching the street behind the car, her head moving in small careful degrees, reading it.

I turned and looked where she was looking, down my own ordinary street. Nothing. Parked cars, lit windows, the Kinghorns' curtains drawn, Mr Pyke's shears put away — the whole street settling itself in for the night, exactly as it should have been. Nothing out there at all. So why was she watching it as though something might come out of the shadows?

The horn went a third time and I flinched and pulled the door open and got in beside her, and the warmth of the car closed over me, shocking after the cold.

"Everything all right?" I asked as I pulled the door shut, fastening my seatbelt with fingers that would not stop trembling.

"Yeah." Her voice was clipped, somewhere else. She still had not looked at me; her eyes went mirror to mirror to windscreen and back. "We need to move."

"You're an hour late. I was starting to think—"

"I got held up." She put the car into reverse and backed out faster than the driveway wanted. "Does it matter? I'm here now."

The sharpness of it landed on me like a slap, and I looked at her properly for the first time since she had arrived — really looked, the way I had been too frightened all evening to look at anything. What I could not get past was how together she was. Her hair was immaculate, that dark chignon without a strand loose in it, exactly as it had been at lunch and exactly as, I was fairly sure, mine had not been in days. Her face was calm, composed, done. She had changed since the staffroom — a heavier coat, a dark high-necked jumper where the blouse had been — and my mind, running along its own sick little rail with nobody at the front of it, went straight to the thought that a dark jumper like that would not show a stain.

Why had I thought that? Of everything to think — why had my mind gone straight to stains?

"Where were you?" It was out before I could stop it.

"I told you." Her jaw tightened. "I went home to get Adrian's files, to find Luke Smith's details."

"That shouldn't have taken an hour."

"I had to search, Jenny." Her hands flexed on the wheel and went white at the knuckle again. "Adrian kept meticulous records, but they weren't exactly filed under 'mysterious disappearance.' I had to go through three years of project files before I found the right documentation."

It made sense. Every word of it made sense. So why did some animal part of me sit there certain she was lying?

We drove without talking, the engine and the odd passing car the only sound, and Sharon's attention stayed split the whole time — half on the road, half on that mirror. I caught myself doing it too, twisting to see behind us, trying to catch whatever she kept catching, and there was never anything there. After a while the silence became more than I could sit inside, and I wound my window down a hand's width and let the cold come screaming in against my face, because the sting of it was real and something to hold to when nothing else was.

"Are you going to tell me the plan?" I asked, over the noise of the wind. "What exactly we're going to do when we get there?"

"We're going to get answers." It came out flat and immediate, almost by rote.

"Yes, but how? Are we just going to knock on the door and—what? Demand Luke Smith tell us what he's done with our husbands?"

"If necessary."

"And if he's dangerous? If he's the reason they're missing, do you really think he'll just invite us in for a chat?"

"Then we'll call the police." She glanced at me, half a second, no more. "Once we have proof. Once we have something concrete they can't dismiss."

"Sharon." I kept it level, aiming for reasonable, aiming to sound like a woman who was not coming apart at the seams. "We don't know anything about this man. We don't know if he's even home. We're driving across Hobart to confront someone who might be completely innocent, or might be—"

"Might be what?" The sharpness cut clean across me. "Might be guilty? Might have hurt them? Yes, Jenny. That's exactly why we're doing this. Because the police won't, and someone has to."

I shut my eyes a moment and tried to get my thoughts into some kind of order. She was right — we had to do something; the doing nothing was its own slow way of dying. But it was starting to feel less like a plan than like two frightened women mistaking speed for a direction.

When I opened my eyes she was watching the mirror again. That endless checking, as though something back there might be gaining on us. I turned right round in my seat and looked out the rear window at the road behind.

"Sharon. Is someone following us?"

"What? No. Of course not."

"Then why do you keep looking?"

"I'm just being careful." She touched the mirror a fraction straighter, every movement small and exact. "After everything that's happened, we can't be too cautious."

Careful. That was one word for it. What I kept snagging on was how neat she was, how controlled, every gesture set down in its place, while I sat beside her with my hands shaking and my breath going wrong and could not for the life of me understand how she was holding herself together this well when I was in pieces. Where did that come from, at a time like this? What did a person have to know, or have already made their peace with, to be so calm?

I settled back and pulled my coat tighter, though the heater was going full blast and the cold I was feeling had nothing to do with the car. We had left my part of the mountain behind and joined the thin flow of the evening traffic, heading north, out towards the outer suburbs.

"How did you know how to find Luke?" The question had been going round in me since her phone call. "You said Adrian did work for him years ago. But that must mean you have an address, contact details. How did you know it was the same Luke Smith the detective mentioned?"

Her hesitation was barely there, a fraction of a second before the words came. "The paperwork had his full details. Address, phone number, ABN. It's him."

"You're sure?"

"Yes."

There was something in the way she said it — too fast, too hard, a brittle little edge — that pushed my unease up another notch. How could she be so sure? Luke Smith was not a rare name; there must have been dozens of them in the state. Unless she had known who he was before any of this. Unless she had already been looking.

I turned and looked at her again — the rigid set of her shoulders, the flat mechanical calm of the way she drove, the constant watching — and the thought arrived before I could stop it, that this did not look like a woman chasing down a lead she had turned up an hour ago. It looked like a woman who knew exactly where she was going. I did not know what to do with the thought, so I did what I had been doing all evening with the worst of them: I held it, and I said nothing, and I could not have said whether I was seeing clearly or seeing ghosts.

"Sharon." I kept my voice as steady as it would go, though my heart had begun to race. "When did you first hear Luke Smith's name?"

"I told you. Adrian mentioned it on the phone, before he disappeared."

"And when you spoke to Detective Jenkins, he recognised the name immediately."

"Yes."

"So you've been thinking about Luke Smith for days. Before we even met. Before you knew about Nial."

"What's your point?" Her tone had gone flat, defended.

"My point is that you've been ahead of me this entire time. You already suspected a connection before we talked. You already had theories, ideas. And now, miraculously, you've found exactly where Luke Smith lives within a few hours of looking."

She said nothing to that. Just drove, jaw set in a hard line.

"How long have you known where he lives?" I could not stop now. "Because it's starting to feel like you knew before today. Like you've been planning this."

"Does it matter?" Barely above a whisper now. "Does it matter how I found him, or when? He's our only lead, Jenny. Our only chance of finding out what happened."

"It matters if you've been lying to me."

"I haven't lied." She shot me a look, fierce and defended. "I've just... I've been one step ahead. That's all. Is that so terrible? Would you rather I'd sat at home waiting for the police to solve this?"

I wanted to make her pull over. To make her stop the car and tell me all of it, every last thing she was keeping back. But what would it get me? We were already halfway across the city, already moving too fast to stop, and turning back meant walking away from the one thread either of us had. She was right, too, about the thing that mattered: someone had to do something. Even if that someone was me, in a stranger's car, making one bad decision after another; even if the woman driving me there was holding on to secrets I could not begin to name.

We came onto the Brooker Highway, the big road that runs the spine of the city, and Sharon slid into the traffic sure and smooth for all the tension coming off her, and we ran north, towards Berriedale and the edge of things. I knew the area, a little. I had been out this way years ago, to see a friend who lived somewhere near the top of Berriedale Road — back when my life still had dinner parties in it and the largest thing I had to fret about was whether the wine I'd brought was nice enough. That woman felt like somebody I had once read about.

We turned off the highway onto Berriedale Road, and I watched Sharon take the turns without once glancing at a phone, without slowing to read a street sign or hunt for a number, and something in me went cold and certain. She knew exactly where she was going.

"You've been here before," I said quietly.

Her hands tightened on the wheel. She did not answer.

"Sharon. You've been to this house before. Haven't you?"

The silence stretched out and out. Then she let a slow breath go, and her shoulders came down a fraction.

"Yes. I came earlier today. This afternoon, while you were still at school."

It should have been an answer. Instead it split open into a dozen new questions.

"Why?" I managed. "Why would you come here alone before meeting me?"

"Because I needed to know if he was home. If this was even worth pursuing." That defended edge again. "I wasn't going to drag you across Hobart on a wild goose chase."

"And?"

"And nobody was home. The house was dark, no cars in the driveway. So I waited for evening, assuming he might return after work."

It made its own kind of sense. Everything she said made sense, taken one piece at a time — and yet the fact of it, that she had been out here alone while I was standing in front of a Year Twelve class, that she had let me believe we were walking into this together when she had already walked the ground without me, lodged in my chest and would not move.

"You should have told me," I said quietly.

"Would it have changed anything? Would you have stayed home?"

No. She was right, and we both knew it. I would not have stayed home for anything on earth. But that was not the point.

"We're supposed to be in this together," I said. "Partners. That was the whole point of meeting today, of sharing what we knew. But you're still keeping secrets."

"I'm trying to protect you."

"I don't need protecting. I need the truth."

Her jaw worked for a moment before she spoke, and when she did the composure cracked, just a little, and something raw came up through the gap in it.

"The truth is that I don't know what we're walking into. The truth is that this could be dangerous, and I've been trying to assess the risk before involving you fully. The truth is that I'm terrified, Jenny. Absolutely fucking terrified. But I'm more terrified of doing nothing and losing Adrian forever."

It went through my anger and took the legs clean out from under it, because that I understood, that I could not argue with. We were both terrified. We were both very probably about to do something monstrous and stupid. The only difference between us was that she had decided to do it with steady hands, and mine would not stop shaking. We were in it together now, at least. Whether that was a comfort or the single most frightening thing about the whole night, I could not have said.

A few hundred metres past the roundabout she indicated and turned us into a small parking area across from a residential street, took us down to the far end, and swung the car round so that we faced back towards the road. The headlights lit a stretch of empty tarmac and a bin spilling takeaway containers, and then she cut the engine and left the keys hanging in the ignition, and the quiet came down heavy over everything unsaid.

"That's the house," she said, with a small nod across the road.

I leaned forward, peering through the windscreen. "Which one?"

"The two-storey on the corner." She pointed straight at it. "Brick construction, large windows. See it?"

I did. An ordinary house, bigger than its neighbours, set on the corner, a tired timber fence round it with the palings gone crooked here and there. Nothing about it looked like danger. It looked like a thousand other houses — ordinary, shut, forgettable — with a light or two behind the curtains and the last of the day draining off its roof.

"How do you know that's the right house?" My voice sounded wrong in the shut car, too loud even at a near-whisper.

She did not answer at once. The silence went on long enough that I turned to look at her, and she was staring at the house with a fixed, inward intensity, her face half in shadow.

"Sharon. How do you know that's Luke Smith's house?"

"I came by earlier," she repeated. "I already told you that."

"Yes, but how did you identify it? If nobody was home, if you didn't speak to anyone, how can you be certain?"

"The address matches the one in Adrian's files."

But it came out too smooth, too ready, and I had spent a working lifetime watching teenagers lie to me about missing homework — I knew the shape of a rehearsed answer when I heard one, and every alarm I owned was going off at once.

"You're lying," I said flatly.

"I'm not—"

"Yes, you are. I can hear it in your voice. You didn't just check the address against paperwork. You did something else. What?"

Her hands stayed on the wheel though the engine was dead, knuckles white with the pressure. When she finally spoke it was barely audible.

"I looked through the windows."

It sat there between us. I waited for the rest of it and none came; she only kept staring at the house.

"You what?"

"The property has a corner block location. Good sight lines from multiple angles. I walked the perimeter, looked through the windows where I could. Making sure."

The words landed oddly — sight lines, perimeter — too clean, too practised, not the vocabulary of a frightened wife who had crept round a stranger's house of an afternoon. But I filed it away with everything else I could do nothing about, and pressed on.

"Making sure of what?"

"That it was worth pursuing. That there was... evidence."

"Evidence of what, Sharon?"

She turned to look at me then, her face unreadable in the low light. "That something happened there. Something bad."

Something dropped through me, cold and sickening. "What did you see?"

"I'm not certain. That's why we need to get closer. To confirm."

"Sharon, if you saw something that suggests a crime, we need to call the police right now. Not investigate ourselves."

"And tell them what? That I trespassed and looked through someone's windows? They'll arrest me for stalking or harassment, and this entire lead will be shut down before we get any answers."

She had a point. It did not make me feel one bit better — we were well past sensible now, out in the grey country between desperate and criminal — but she had a point.

"What exactly did you see?" I pressed.

Her gaze went back to the house. "Signs of disturbance. Furniture overturned in one room. What might have been blood on a wall, though the light was poor. It could have been nothing. Could have been paint or... I don't know. But something happened in that house. Something violent."

The words settled on me and would not shake off. If she was right — if there had been blood, and violence, behind that shut and ordinary front door — then we were not driving towards a conversation any more. We were driving towards a crime scene.

Or into a trap.

"We should call Detective Jenkins," I said, knowing already what she would say.

"And say what? That I illegally surveilled a property and maybe saw something suspicious? He'd tell us to go home and let the professionals handle it. And then nothing would happen, just like nothing's happened for days whilst our husbands are missing."

"If there's evidence of a crime—"

"If. Maybe. Possibly. I don't know what I saw, Jenny. That's why we need to look properly. Get inside, find proof, then call the police with something concrete they can't ignore."

Get inside. She said it as though breaking into a stranger's home were a reasonable next thing to do, as though our husbands being missing granted us some right to it. The worst of it, the thing I could hardly bear to know about myself, was that I was already turning it over. Already weighing it. Because she was right about the one thing that mattered, the thing that had been true since the very first hour: the police were not coming. If there were answers to be had, we were going to have to go and take them — whatever line that put us on the wrong side of.

"This is insane," I said quietly. "You realise that, don't you? This is completely insane."

"Yes." She finally let go of the wheel, her hands dropping into her lap. "But I'm out of sane options. Are you?"

I thought of Nial. I thought of Sammy on the phone, asking when Daddy was coming home. I thought of the emptied wardrobe and the office stripped barer than I'd left it and the cold certainty I kept picking up and putting back down, that someone was building me a lie and expecting me to live inside it.

"No," I admitted. "I'm not."

She nodded slowly, as though I had only confirmed something she had known before I said it. "Then we do this together. We watch the house, we wait for full dark, and then we get closer. See what's really there. And if we find proof that Luke Smith is involved in our husbands' disappearances, we document it and call the police immediately. Agreed?"

It was not a good plan. It was barely a plan at all. But it was a thing to do, and a thing to do was better than the drowning helplessness of the last days.

"Agreed," I heard myself say.

She reached for her door handle, then paused. "Jenny. Whatever we find in there... whatever we see... we have to be prepared. It might not be good news."

I understood what she was not saying. That our husbands might be dead. That we might find bodies, or the signs of them, or the leavings of something violent enough that no one had walked away from it.

"I know," I said quietly. "But I have to know. Not knowing is killing me by inches. At least this way, I'll know the truth."

She opened her door and the interior light flared, and then she was out, and the cold came in where she had been, carrying wet earth and far-off woodsmoke and something underneath it I could not name and told myself I was imagining.

I sat a moment longer, looking across at the house. Lights had come on in one or two of the places along the road, ordinary people drawing their curtains on an ordinary evening, not one of them knowing that two women sat in a car across the way working themselves up to break into a house on their street.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. For half a second my whole body lit with the old hope — my mother, the school, someone from the life I'd had before all this — and I pulled it out.

It was a reminder I'd set myself days ago. School play rehearsal 4pm Friday.

Friday. Tomorrow. I was meant to be helping run rehearsals — the Year Eights were doing Peter Pan, and heaven knew they needed it, all that flying to block and not one of them able to project past the third row. The ordinariness of it was almost obscene. Somewhere a version of tomorrow still existed in which I stood in that hall calling notes about diction, and I no longer had the faintest idea whether I would be standing in it, or somewhere I could not let myself picture.

I deleted the reminder and opened the door.

The cold took the breath out of me. I climbed out and pushed the door to as softly as I could and looked at Sharon across the roof of the car. She stood at the edge of the light, her face half gone into shadow, and I could feel the weight of her waiting.

"Ready?" she asked.

No. Not remotely. I nodded anyway.

She started across towards the house, and I went after her, my boots soft on the gravel, my breath smoking out ahead of me. Every instinct I had was screaming at me to stop — to turn round, get back in the car, drive home to whatever safety was still left. This was wrong. This was the kind of thing that ended lives.

But home was the empty bed and Nial's absence roaring in the quiet, and I could not go back to that and do nothing for one more night. So I kept walking. I followed the straight, composed back of a woman who had been a stranger to me that morning, towards a dark house with something wrong inside it, not knowing whether she was leading me towards Nial or somewhere far worse — and I kept walking anyway, because the not-doing had become the one thing left that I could not live through.