I Am Here Now

She was in the sitting room.

She'd have moved there when she heard the car on the drive — out of the entrance hall, away from the command post and the officers and the equipment that had colonised my ground floor, into the one room on this level where the door still shuts and they hadn't yet put down their markers. South-facing, the formal gardens through the tall windows, the winter light coming in at the angle that makes the room feel smaller than it is. Contained. The kind of room where the conversations happen that aren't meant to get past the walls.

She was standing when I came through the door. Not sitting, not on the arm of a chair, nothing that would have suggested she'd been waiting for me. Standing at the window with her arms crossed, and when I came in she turned and I saw what eighteen hours had done to her.

I shut the door behind me. The latch caught, and the corridor — the footsteps, the radio chatter, the muffled sound of people doing things to my house — dropped away to a murmur.

"You called a solicitor."

I heard myself start there. I knew as it left me that it was the wrong opening and I said it anyway, because it was the only part of the last eighteen hours that was still inside my control.

"I called you first." Her voice was flat and level. Not calm — past calm, into whatever it is people run on when the emotional reserves are gone. "Three times. You didn't answer."

"I was on a plane."

"I didn't know that. I didn't know where you were or whether you were coming back or whether you'd even heard what had happened. I made a decision."

"You made the wrong decision." I moved into the room. Not towards her — to the centre, which is where I go when a conversation is about to become a negotiation. I stood with my back to the fireplace, the mantel and the portrait above it doing what conference tables and boardroom chairs do for me, and kept most of it behind my teeth. "Call them off."

"Tom—"

"Call them off. Tell your solicitor his services are not required. That the family will handle this internally."

She stared at me. "Handle this internally? Tom, there are forensic teams on the lawn. There is a detective sergeant in our entrance hall with a warrant signed by a magistrate. Our son is missing. My brother is missing. A detective walked onto this property yesterday afternoon and disappeared. This is not a board meeting. You cannot handle this internally."

"I can handle it considerably better than a solicitor from—" I stopped. Reset. "Who did you call?"

"Andrew Fenton."

It cost me something to keep my face still and I don't think I entirely managed it. Fenton is competent. Fenton is connected. Fenton is also exactly the sort of man who inserts himself into a situation and leaves a paper trail behind him that I would rather did not exist.

"Call him," I said. "Tell him it was premature. Tell him the family appreciates his willingness to assist but the matter is being resolved directly."

"The matter is not being resolved, Tom. The matter is escalating. That man out there — Stout — he's not going away because you tell him to. I've watched him all morning. I've watched how his officers respond to him and how he responded to Louise Jeffries née Greyson standing in her own entrance hall telling him this is her home. He doesn't care. He doesn't care about the house, he doesn't care about the name, and he is not going to care about phone calls from your contacts."

"You don't know what my contacts can do."

"I know what a detective with a dead colleague can do."

The word came down in the middle of the room. Dead. I don't think she meant to say it, or if she did she'd stopped policing what she said to me somewhere in the eighteen hours I spent unreachable in Melbourne. Neither of us picked it up.

My jaw was going. I turned away from her and looked out at the garden, where two officers were working the southern border with bags and cameras, photographing the ground at intervals, stopped at the sundial beside a yellow marker.

"Karl Jenkins is not dead," I said, and I put it in the register I use for statements I intend to become true by being said with sufficient conviction. "He is missing. There is a difference. And the response to a missing person — even a missing detective — does not require the conversion of my property into an evidence repository."

"They've found things, Tom."

I kept my eyes on the garden. I didn't turn round, and I knew as I didn't that she'd have read the shoulders anyway. Twenty-three years.

"What things?"

"Structural anomalies. Walls that don't match the plans. Floors that don't sit right. The wainscoting in the rear corridor is mounted on different backing timber than the panels either side of it. The corridor between the kitchen and the study drops three centimetres and rises again over something underneath." A pause. "Seven on the ground floor alone. They haven't been upstairs yet."

I stood very still. The garden and the officers and the markers all carried on beyond the glass and I stopped seeing any of it.

"And the study," she said, quieter now, more careful — a woman delivering something whose weight she can feel without knowing what's in it. "The fireplace. The hearth has been modified. Different stonework, different tooling marks. And the floor in front of it is hollow."

I turned round.

"What about the shed?"

"Nothing." She was watching my face. "No biological material, no trace evidence, no prints. Nothing consistent with any person entering or exiting in the last forty-eight hours. The analysis was run twice."

And there she stopped, and waited, because she was expecting something from me. The surprise. The moment of not understanding. A man walked towards that shed yesterday afternoon in full view of another officer, and forensic science has come back and said nobody was ever inside it, and any husband hearing that for the first time gives his wife something.

I gave her nothing. I stood in my own sitting room with my face shut and let her look at it, and I watched her arrive where she always arrives — at the understanding that there is a thing I know that she doesn't, that I have decided she doesn't need, that lives in the gap between the man who runs a company and sits on boards and the man who goes away for four days and comes back without accounting for any of it and keeps rooms in this house she gave up asking about years ago.

"Who else knows about the fireplace?" I asked.

I heard it land. Not what does it mean. Not how is that possible. I heard exactly what I had just handed her, and it was too late by the time I heard it.

"Stout knows. His team is processing it now." Her arms tightened. "Tom. What is under that floor?"

I looked at her for a long moment. The room held both of us in that winter light with the investigation muffled beyond the door and the gardens out the window and their officers and their markers and their careful documentation of things that have been on this land longer than any of them can conceive of.

"Nothing that concerns this investigation," I said.

Something went in her face when I said it. Not the collapse — nothing like the night Kain didn't come home. Something quieter and further in, a thread letting go somewhere I couldn't reach.

"Your son is missing," she said. "My brother is missing. A detective has vanished from our property and there is a man outside with a warrant and a team of forensic analysts and the authority to open every door in this house. And you are telling me that what is under our floor is not their concern."

"I'm telling you that I will handle it."

"The way you handled Melbourne? The way you handled being unreachable while I was here alone with officers on the lawn and a ninety-one-year-old woman upstairs who won't speak to anyone and our son's name on a missing persons report?"

I crossed the room in two strides. Fast enough that I heard her breath catch, and I stopped close, close enough that she could see the flight on me — the stubble, the eyes, the night I hadn't slept.

"I am here now," I said, low. "And I am telling you that I will handle this. I will handle Stout. I will handle the warrant. I will handle whatever these people think they've found in our house. But I cannot do any of that if you have already set your own processes in motion that complicate mine. The solicitor goes. The cooperation ends. From this point forward, nobody in this family says anything to anyone connected to this investigation without speaking to me first."

"They have a warrant, Tom. We can't just—"

"The warrant gives them the right to search. It doesn't give them the right to our words." I held her eyes. "Call Fenton. Dismiss him. And then say nothing. To anyone."

She looked at me. Years ago I married her, and I have never once been able to tell her what it is she actually married into. She was working that out now. I watched her work it out and I let her.

"Wilson wants to interview me," she said. "Detective Wilson. She's been waiting since this morning."

"Tell her you'll cooperate fully once you've had time to consult with your family. Use those words. Cooperate fully. Consult with family. It gives us time without giving them grounds to compel."

"And if Stout pushes?"

"Let him push." I heard how much less certain that sounded than it needed to. "He'll find that pushing against the Jeffries family is a very different experience from pushing against suspects who don't know their rights."

I turned and put my hand on the door and stopped there.

"Has anyone spoken to Gran?"

"She won't talk. They sent an officer this morning and she refused him. She'll only speak to Charlie Claiborne."

"Charlie has been removed from the investigation."

"How do you know that?"

I opened the door and walked out.