Return to Jeffries Manor

The M5 had been sitting in long-term parking since Wednesday. I collected it from Bay C-14 at nine-fifty-two, paid at the automated kiosk rather than the manned booth where an attendant might remember my face or note the time, and it started on the first turn. Six hundred horsepower answering the key with that low sustained growl the Germans build into a car to remind you what you paid for.

I pulled out onto the highway and turned north.

By midnight I knew more about what had happened at my own house than my wife had managed to tell the officers standing in it. By one I'd worked through every implication. By two I'd decided. By four I'd packed, by half four I'd booked, by five I was in a taxi to Tullamarine with the apartment left the way I'd found it — clean, neutral, nothing in it to say who had stayed there or how long or why.

The road north of Hobart opened up ahead of me, mid-morning traffic light, climbing through the suburbs towards the Brooker and the Granton turn-off. The sun was fully up and the sky was that hard scoured blue Hobart gets in August, the colour of a place the Antarctic has been through and taken everything loose away with it.

I drove at the limit. Not over it, not under. Control of small things is what people read as control of everything else, and the appearance of discipline and discipline itself are the same object viewed from different sides.

My phone sat in the centre console, still on flight mode from Melbourne. There would be messages. Louise's — I could write them myself without reading them, that blend of controlled panic and operational reporting she produces under pressure. My secretary's — the calls that had come through to the office, associates who'd caught a fragment of something, and somewhere in there the first approach from a journalist testing whether a rumour had a body attached to it.

I didn't reach for it. Everything in that phone was already behind me. Louise's missed calls could tell me nothing I hadn't had by midnight. My secretary's messages would contain less detail than I'd already been given, and given more precisely. I do not leave Jeffries Manor unattended. Not physically, and not in terms of what I know about it.

The people I maintain — not employees, not associates, something less defined and more reliable than either — have been in place for years. Police stations. Courts. Government offices. The places information passes through before it becomes official. The network isn't large. It doesn't need to be. Tasmania is a small island and information moves through it the way water moves through limestone: finding the cracks, following the paths of least resistance, arriving wherever it's directed by whoever understands the geology.

I understand the geology.

I built it the way my father built his, and his father before him — not through conspiracy and not through threat, but through the patient accumulation of obligation. A favour here. A donation there. A quiet word at the right moment that saved a career or protected a reputation or made a problem disappear before it had a chance to become public. The people who owe my family don't think of themselves as compromised. They think of themselves as connected. Part of something larger than the position they hold. And when I need to know what has happened inside an institution before the institution has finished working it out for itself, those people answer their phones.

The Granton turn-off came up on the left. I took it without indicating, the car's weight settling into the curve, the engine dropping as the road narrowed to the two-lane that runs the last few kilometres to the estate.

The houses thinned. The paddocks widened. The eucalypt closed over the road in places and broke again, and then the stone pillars of the gate came up on the right.

The gates were open. They're always open in daylight — my grandmother's rule, kept since the fifties, one of the few things I've never overridden in ten years of putting in security that Thelma thinks is excessive and Louise thinks is oppressive. The gates stay open. The manor is not a fortress. It has been a home for two hundred and one years, and closing those gates would say something I am not prepared to say.

I turned in.

Six hundred metres of drive, elm-lined, two curves before the house. I know every metre of it. The slight camber where the drainage was corrected in '87. The thin patch of gravel near the second bend where the delivery trucks cut in too tight. The point about four hundred metres from the gate where the canopy breaks and the house shows itself for the first time, framed between the bare winter branches of elms my great-great-grandfather put in the ground in 1860.

The house appeared.

My hands closed on the wheel until the leather creaked.

Police vehicles. Three, four — five. Marked cars along the drive, an unmarked sedan near the entrance steps, and beside the fountain my grandmother brought back from Florence in 1975, a white van with Forensic Science Service Tasmania down the side of it. Rear doors open. White-suited figures walking between the van and the forecourt with equipment cases and evidence bags, along paths marked out with blue and white tape strung between metal stakes driven into the lawn.

My lawn. Stakes driven into turf the groundskeeper cuts on a fortnightly schedule and that nothing more invasive than a garden fork has been through in the forty-seven years since I was born in the upstairs bedroom of the east wing.

Yellow markers all over the grass. Little plastic triangles, numbered, set out across the forecourt and running into the formal gardens. Officers moving between them — uniforms, plain clothes, white coveralls — crossing my grounds at the unhurried pace of people who have been given a space and intend to use every square metre of it.

I'd known it was coming. I'd been told about the warrant application, told the likely scope of it, given the name of the magistrate who'd sign it. But knowing and seeing are different currencies. On the phone it had been words at midnight, facts to be assessed and answered. This was my house. These were my grounds. And every one of those people was walking on them carrying a document that reduced two hundred years of my family's stewardship to a boundary the state had decided it was allowed to cross.

I stopped behind the unmarked sedan. I didn't take my usual space beside the steps. My usual space had a folding table in it — laptop, radio set, document folders. Somebody had set up a command post in the entrance to my home.

I sat there. Engine off. Hands on the wheel.

Ten thirty-seven on the dash. Through the windscreen I watched a technician come out of the shed — that small green corrugated thing at the edge of the forecourt that I have spent my adult life regarding with a very particular and very disciplined attention, knowing exactly what it is and exactly why it is not discussed. She had a case in one hand and a radio at her mouth, and behind her the door stood open, the inside of it lit by daylight and open to the scrutiny of people with no idea what they were looking at.

I'd been told a detective was missing. I'd been told about the warrant, the teams being pulled together, the forensic protocols requested, the scale of the response a missing officer sets off inside the Tasmanian police.

I had not been told what they would find. Because the man who told me the rest of it doesn't know. And sitting there on the gravel of my own forecourt watching strangers in white suits go in and out of a building my family has maintained and guarded and deliberately left unquestioned for seven generations, neither did I.

That was what had kept me awake. Not the warrant. Not the police. Not the political fallout or the media or the institutional pressure that was going to follow all of it. Those are problems with solutions and I have spent my life solving problems. What kept me staring at the ceiling of a serviced apartment in Southbank was the possibility that they might find something that has no solution. Something that can't be managed or contained or made to go away through the application of influence and obligation.

Something my family has spent two centuries making certain would never be found.

I opened the door and stepped out onto the gravel and shut it behind me hard enough that the sound cracked across the forecourt and three officers turned to look.

I straightened my jacket. Adjusted the cuffs. Small things, automatic, the physical vocabulary of twenty years of walking into rooms where everything depends on the first thirty seconds. I have closed deals in thirty seconds. I have ended partnerships. I have walked into boardrooms where every man at the table believed he held the stronger position and walked out with their signatures on documents they had not intended to sign.

I looked at the house. My home. My family's home. Built out of local sandstone by my ancestor in 1817, seven generations of us sheltered inside it, holding in its walls and its foundations and its grounds things that no search warrant comprehends and no forensic technician is equipped to interpret.

It looked back at me through its rows of Georgian windows, the morning sun turning every pane to flat gold, the glass giving nothing away.

I walked across the forecourt towards the man standing at the base of my entrance steps, waiting for me.