Reilly

"I hired a man to find the truth, and I still kept part of it back from him. That was the kind of woman four days had made of me."

I did not stay in that house another minute.

I went back up to the bedroom and did what I had come to do, and I did it cold — filled the bag with Sammy's things and mine, clean clothes off the folded piles, not looking at the drawer, not looking at the bed, moving through the room like a burglar in my own house because I could not afford to feel any of it just then. Then I went out through the kitchen, past the bin I would not open again, and I locked the back door behind me. Locked it — which was almost funny, locking a house that let people in and out of my drawers as they pleased — and I got into the car.

I did not start it. I sat in the drive with the engine off and the house standing dark and ordinary behind me, in the same spot where Nial used to sit to take the calls he swore he could not get a signal for inside, and I understood, with my hands resting on the wheel, that I was not going to drive down the mountain and ring Karl Jenkins and tell him my husband had been seen alive.

I turned it over, to be fair to myself, because I knew what I was supposed to do with a sighting — take it straight to Karl Jenkins, tell him Nial had been seen alive in the middle of the city, let them do the job they were paid for.

I was not going to do it, and I knew exactly why, and none of the reasons were good ones, and I did not care. They had decided on the first morning that Nial was a grown man who had taken himself off, and Linda Powell had stood at that counter and as good as called me a hysterical wife — and if I rang now and told them he had been spotted with a woman down at the wharf, I could see the look that would pass between them, I could hear the kindness that would come down the line, the terrible patient kindness of people who had just been proved right. There you are, Mrs Triffett. He'll be in touch when he's ready. These things happen. I would sooner have driven off the side of the mountain than give Linda Powell the pleasure of being right about my marriage.

And there was the other thing, the one I did not put into words even to myself, sitting in that cold car. If I gave it to the police, it became theirs. It became a case, a file, a matter for procedure — and I did not want procedure. I wanted him. I wanted to stand in front of my husband and watch his face while I asked him how long, and who, and whether he had carried our son on his shoulders on the Saturday morning and then driven off to her. That was not a thing I could send a detective to do for me. That was mine.

But I could not find him on my own. I had already tried, in the small hours of four nights, everything a wife with a phone and no idea could try — his mates, his sister in Launceston, the last numbers in his call log, the fencing suppliers, ringing his mobile forty times over to hear the same dead voicemail. I had got nowhere. If I was going to stand in front of Nial, somebody was going to have to find him first, and it was not going to be Karl Jenkins, and it was not going to be me.

So I scrolled to a name I had not looked at in a very long time.

Jack Reilly and I had been thick as thieves at university, the best part of ten years and a whole life ago — two of us in a cold share house in Sandy Bay, him doing law and hating every hour of it, me doing theatre and pretending I was not frightened of what came after. He was the one I rang at three in the morning. He held my hair back after parties and talked me through a dozen small catastrophes, and I did the same for him, and then we graduated, and life pulled us apart by degrees — the calls got further apart, then the Christmas texts, then nothing at all — until he was only a name in my phone I never rang. Jack Reilly, saved under a number I had not dialled since before Sammy was born.

I knew, roughly, what he had become, in the vague way old friends kept half a track of one another. He had never practised law in the end. He had drifted, through some years he did not much talk about, into other people's secrets, and he ran a one-man outfit now out of an office above a shop somewhere in North Hobart. Reilly Investigations. Divorces, mostly, I imagined. Insurance. The occasional person who did not want to be found.

I pressed the name before I could think better of it, and put the phone to my ear in the dark, and it rang, and my heart went harder than I wanted it to.

He answered on the third ring, in a voice with a decade more gravel in it than I remembered — but under the gravel, instantly and absurdly, Jack.

"Reilly Investigations."

"Jack. It's Jenny." My voice came out steadier than I was. "Jenny Triffett. From — God, from about a hundred years ago."

There was a pause, and then the gravel opened into something warmer, something I knew. "Jenny." A short, disbelieving laugh. "Jenny bloody Triffett. Well, I never. How the hell are you?"

There it was — the warm ordinary question every reunion opens with, how are you — and I had to take that lovely ordinary thing and pour four days of my life into it, and I felt the warmth go out of the call before I had finished the first sentence.

"Jack, I'm in trouble. I need your help — your professional help. My husband's gone missing."

I told him. Not all of it. I did not tell him all of it — not even then, not even to the one person in the world I had rung precisely because he found things out for a living. I told him Nial had gone out on the Saturday to look at a job and not come home. I told him about the text that first morning, the one the police had decided was proof of a grown man taking himself off. I told him, my voice going flat and hard around it, about the knickers in my drawer and the message from the wharf, and I heard the pen stop on the other end when I got to that part.

What I did not tell him was the notebook. I did not tell him about Luke Smith underlined twice in my husband's own hand, or the photograph left face up on my back step, or the shape that had gone out through my locked door that was not a man and was not a woman. I did not tell him that four days ago I had been certain, all the way to the bottom of me, that Nial had been taken from us — because I had put that down now, I had chosen the other story, the one with the knickers in it, and I was not about to drag the first one back out and muddy the water. I gave Jack a cheating husband to find. It was cleaner. It was the version I could stand upright inside.

Jack let me finish. He was quiet for a moment — I could hear him breathing, and the pen going again, and somewhere behind him a kettle climbing to the boil, the small domestic sounds of a man alone in an office at night — and then he said the thing that told me he was good at his job.

"Right. I'll take it, Jenny. Course I will." A beat. "But you're holding something back."

It was not a question. It went through me like cold water.

"I don't—"

"You are. I've been listening to people leave things out for twenty years, love — it's the whole job — and you're leaving something out." His voice had gone gentle under the gravel, the old Jack. "I'm not going to make you tell me tonight. But it's usually the thing people don't say that turns out to be the thing that matters. So have a think. And when you're ready, you tell me the rest."

I said that I would. I did not mean it, and I think he knew I did not mean it, and he let me have it anyway.

He told me what he needed — everything I had. Nial's full name and date of birth, the ute's registration, his phone number, his sister's address, the names of the blokes he worked with, the client list off the business if I could lay hands on it. Photographs. The lot. He would start first thing. He named a daily rate, and half apologised for it, and I told him I did not care what it cost, and I meant that more than I had meant anything in days.

"I'll find him, Jenny," he said, before he rang off. "Whatever's going on here, I'll find him. Try and get some sleep."

I sat in the dark car after he was gone, in the drive of the house that had done this to me, and I started there and then to gather what he had asked for, because I could not sleep and had no intention of trying. I found the ute's registration in a photo on my phone. I found the address of Nial's sister. Then I took the notebook out of my coat pocket.

I had carried it since the Saturday, that cheap black notebook, ever since I found it down the side of the seat in the ute — carried it through the police station and the school and my mother's spare room, close against me, the one hard piece of the truth I had. Jack had asked for everything. The notebook was everything. It was the most everything I had.

I opened it to the page. Luke Smith, in Nial's blunt pencil, underlined twice, pressed so hard the second time that the paper had furred along the line. The name that was the answer to the exact question every single one of them kept almost asking. The name I had not given Karl Jenkins, or Serena, or the whole of Hobart, or, a minute ago, the man I had just agreed to pay to find the truth.

I sat with my thumb over the phone, ready to photograph the page and send it to him. I looked at Luke Smith underlined twice in the dome light of my husband's car, and I closed the notebook, and I put it back in my coat, and I did not send it.