Witnesses

"For six days I had been the only one who believed me. Then Sharon Pafistis sat down across a table and made it two — and I was so grateful for that, I did not look at her as closely as I might have."

The lunch bell went and my Year Tens left in a tide — Maisie still declaiming her audition monologue to anyone who would hold still for it, Tom and Connor shoving each other through the door — and then the room was empty and very quiet, and I was alone with the part of the day I had not worked out how to survive.

So I marked. It was the only thing I had found that worked: something with a red pen and a right answer, something that used up the front of my mind and gave the rest of it no room to start screaming. I got through four of the Year Nines' Blackrock responses without taking in a single word, writing good — develop this in the margins beside sentences I was not reading, and it did its one job, which was to make the clock move.

Then I ran out of Year Nines, and I made the mistake of tidying, and tidying, it turned out, was how it got me. I was squaring the stack of teaching copies on the corner of the desk — the battered Shakespeares, their spines gone soft from a decade of being crammed into schoolbags — when the Hamlet slid off the top and fell open in my hand at the flyleaf, where the spine had given up years ago.

Nial's writing was inside the cover, in the blue biro he never capped, as square and certain as the day he put it there. To my Ophelia — may our love story have a happier ending.

He had given it to me across the arm of a sofa we had found on a kerb and carried home between us in the rain, laughing, stopping twice to put it down. He had done it with a straight face, holding the book out in both hands like a man presenting a trophy, and I had rolled my eyes exactly as he had known I would and loved it exactly as much as he had known I would. He had never read the play. He knew that Ophelia drowned, and that I cried every single time, and that a paperback was a safe thing to hand a woman who taught the drama, and that had been enough for him — it had been enough for him about most things. That was the whole trouble with Nial. He had been so easy to be married to that I had never once thought to be frightened of losing him, right up until he was gone.

I shut the book. I buried it at the bottom of the pile where the writing could not get at me again, and I put both hands flat on the desk and breathed the way the counsellor at Sammy's daycare had taught me to breathe, in for four and out for six, and waited for the wave to draw back.

Someone knocked at the door.

I did not quite jump. I had a whole second of thinking it would be a girl come back for a forgotten phone, or Rufus from next door with some kindness I would have to hold off, before I called out that it was open and turned round.

The woman in the doorway was nobody I knew.

She was tall, and dressed with the sort of care that takes both money and time — a good wool coat, dark trousers, a scarf knotted properly at the throat — but the thing I noticed was her hair, because it was immaculate. A smooth dark chignon, not a strand of it loose, the hair of a woman who had, somewhere in the middle of the worst days of her life, sat herself down in front of a mirror and made at least one thing on her person perfect. Everything underneath it was coming apart at a rate the hair was working hard to deny. I knew the look. I had it on in the car park most mornings. It was the look of a person holding herself in the shape of a person by main force.

"I'm so sorry," she said. "I'm sorry to just — are you Jenny? Jenny Triffett?" Her voice was English, the vowels round and soft and a long way from home. "I couldn't stay in the house another minute. I've been driving round since eleven. I know we said this afternoon, I know it isn't — I asked at the office and a lovely girl said you'd be up here, and I just couldn't —" She stopped, and pressed her lips together, and took hold of herself with a visible effort. "Sharon. I'm Sharon Pafistis."

Pafistis. The name sounded a note somewhere at the back of my mind, too quick for me to place, and I stood a half-second too long with my hand on the doorframe before the manners my mother had drilled into me took the wheel. "Yes — Jenny. Come in, please, come in. You're not interrupting a thing. There's no one up here at lunch."

She came in the way everyone came into my room now — carefully, at a slight angle, as though grief might be catching and I might be where it lived. I lifted the pile of scripts off the spare chair and she sat on the very edge of it, knees together, handbag held on her lap in both hands. Under the immaculate hair, her hands were not immaculate at all. The cuticles were bitten, and there was a raw place worried into the side of one thumb, past pink, nearly to blood. A woman who worked with her hands, I thought, and had spent the week eating them instead.

I was about to suggest we go somewhere that was not the scene of my own daily unravelling — the staffroom, tea, the mercy of other people's noise — when she stood up again, too wound to sit, and moved along the back wall, looking at the display without seeing any of it — the restless drift of a woman holding off tears. Then she saw it. She stopped.

She had stopped at the Wall of Fame. At the poems.

"That's —" she said, and her voice came apart on it. "That's my Sarah's."

The note at the back of my mind landed, and the floor of the whole afternoon tilted under me.

Sarah Pafistis. Year Ten. Second row from the window, since February. Small neat handwriting, quiet, careful, unfailingly polite; a girl who handed the work in on time and never once made me look at her twice. Three weeks ago she had given me four rhyming lines about family being the anchor that holds you steady in a storm, and I had pinned them to the wall and told the class they were lovely, and I had not known. All that term she had been sitting in my second row being good, and her father had walked out of an ordinary morning and not come home, and I had not known a single thing about it.

"She wrote that this term," I said. My voice had gone very careful. "It's a lovely poem. She's — Sharon, she's a lovely girl. I teach her. I teach Sarah."

Sharon put two fingers to the glass over the poem, not quite touching the writing, and for a moment neither of us said anything at all. Out in the corridor a locker slammed and a knot of girls went by shrieking with laughter about something that did not matter, and the ordinary world went on being ordinary a metre away through the door, and the two of us stood in front of a child's poem about family holding you steady, and did not hold steady, either of us.

"I've never read it," Sharon said. "Isn't that — she'll have brought it home, she brings everything home. Adrian's the one who reads them out at the table, he makes a whole performance of it, does the voices, and I was always going to sit down and read it properly and I never quite —" She stopped herself. Took her fingers off the glass. "I'm sorry. You don't need a stranger falling apart against your wall. Adrian would be mortified. He's the calm one. He'd be doing all of this so much better than I am."

She was talking about him in the present tense. Adrian's the one. He makes a performance of it. He's the calm one. I did it too — I had done it to the constable at the counter on the Saturday, Nial takes the bins out on a Tuesday, he never forgets — the present tense, as though the grammar could hold open a door that everything else in the world was leaning on to shut. I did not correct her. It was not a thing one woman did to another. It was the last door either of us had, and we both knew to leave it be.

"Come and have a cup of tea," I said. "Not in here. There's a staffroom down the corridor — it's ugly, and the biscuits are a disgrace, but there'll be people about, and —" I stopped, because I did not know how to say the rest of it to a stranger, and found that I did not have to.

"People," Sharon said. "Yes." Something in her had heard the whole of the unsaid half. "I'd rather be where there are people, too. After everything, I — " she almost smiled, and it was awful, the almost-smile. "Listen to the pair of us. Two grown women who want a witness to a cup of tea."

Witnesses. She had reached for the very word I had been reaching for and not quite letting myself say, and it hung there in the classroom air between us, and neither of us laughed at it.

We went down the corridor together, past the lockers and the noticeboards and the long window over the quad, and I watched Sharon take the building in as we walked, and she did not look at it like a woman being shown round a school. Her eyes went to the ends of things — the fire door at the top of the stairs, the second stairwell, the propped exit by the science labs, the little domed camera over the front office — touching each one and moving on, cataloguing. I knew the habit because I had caught it myself since Nial went: in car parks, at the supermarket, in my own dark hallway at two in the morning, some new animal in me counting the ways out. Two frightened women teaching themselves where the exits were, I thought. That was all it was. I had become very good, that week, at telling myself what things were.

The staffroom did what it had done every day that week when I came into it: the talk dipped, half a beat, and started up again a shade too brightly. Since Nial's face had gone onto ten thousand screens I had become the school's own tragedy, the thing murmured about by the urn and loudly dropped the instant I appeared, and I had taught myself to walk into it with my chin level and my eyes on the far wall. Bill Hollis raised a hand to me from the armchairs. Yvonne discovered something absorbing in her marking. Mike Doherty, over by the window, gave me the small grave nod he had taken to giving me, the loud PE master gone quiet and cautious around me, as though I were made of something that might go off if it were jostled.

I made two teas that neither of us would drink — the good mugs, because she was a guest — and took Sharon to the table in the far corner by the cold window, the one nobody ever sat at because the heater did not reach it, where we could put our backs to the wall and the whole room in front of us and say things no one else would hear.

For a moment we only sat, the two of us, the tea steaming untouched between us and our hands wrapped round the mugs for the warmth and not the drink. She looked at me and I looked at her, and there was a strange, terrible comfort in it that I had not had from another living soul all week — the comfort of not having to explain the very first thing.

"Tell me what happened," I said. "With Adrian. From the start. All of it. I want all of it."

She wrapped both hands around the mug, and told me.

"Monday morning. This Monday just gone." Her voice found a flat, careful track, the track of a woman who had been made to say a thing in order too many times. "Ordinary as anything. He had an early appointment — a new client, a consultation, somewhere down in South Hobart — so he was up before me, and he brought me a coffee in bed, which he does, he always —" the tense snagged her, and she stepped over it. "He kissed me. He put his head round the girls' doors and told Brooke to do her scales and told Sarah he'd test her French when he got home. And he took his keys off the hook and said, shan't be late, love, and he went. That was it. That was the whole of it. The last completely ordinary thing that has happened to me."

"His phone was going to voicemail by two," she went on. "By dark I'd rung every hospital between here and Launceston. The car wasn't at the office, wasn't at the site, wasn't anywhere. No message, no note. Nothing gone from the house — no bag, no clothes, his passport still in the drawer where it lives. And on the Tuesday I stood in a police station and watched a very kind young man decide, about four sentences in, that my husband had walked out on us." She set the mug down, very precisely. "He didn't say it. He had a way of not saying it that was worse than saying it. He told me a lot of grown men need a bit of space. He told me to go home. And then he asked me — this is the part I keep — he asked me to have a think about whether there'd been any trouble between us. Any trouble. As though I wouldn't know. As though I hadn't slept beside the man for twenty years and couldn't tell the difference between a husband who has left and a husband who has been —"

She did not finish it. Her hand had started to shake, and she took it off the mug and put it in her lap, and the sentence she could not finish was the loudest thing anyone had said to me.

I knew every inch of it. I knew the kind young man; mine had been a kind young woman named Linda Powell, who had looked at me across a counter with precisely that expression, the sympathetic one they must be taught, the one that has already closed the file. I knew the go-home-and-wait. I knew the any trouble between you, and how it turned me where I stood from a frightened wife into a suspect in the story of my own marriage. I knew the sentence she could not finish, because I had not been able to finish it either — not out loud, not yet — the sentence that ended in the thing that had been done to him.

"Saturday," I said. "Mine was the Saturday. Two days before yours." I had not meant to lay it against hers like a card going down on a table, but that was what we were doing now, the two of us, turning them over one at a time. "He went out to look at a job. Kissed me, kissed Sammy — that's my little one, he's three — and said he'd be back for lunch. Took the ute. That was the last ordinary thing in my life, too. No note, no bag. His razor still on the bathroom shelf, his good boots still by the door." I heard my own voice slide into the flat recital, the in-order thing, and understood all at once that Sharon and I had been made to learn the same terrible catechism by the same indifferent people. "Linda Powell told me to go home and wait, and asked me, more or less, what I'd done to send him running."

Sharon was nodding before I had finished — a quick, awful, grateful nodding, the nod of a person who had finally found the one other soul who spoke the language. "The weeks before," she said. "Before he went. Was Nial —" she hunted for how to hold it. "Was he himself?"

It was the question underneath all the other questions, and I felt the small hairs lift along my arms.

"No," I said. "No, he wasn't. For about a month. He'd —" and now it was me hunting for it, because I had not said one word of this aloud to a single living person, had kept it back even from Jack, even from the police, and here it was coming out of me across a staffroom table to a woman I had known for a quarter of an hour, easy as breathing. "He'd go quiet. He'd take his calls out in the ute with the engine off, sitting in the dark in the driveway, and come in grey. I'd wake at two and three and he wouldn't be in the bed — he'd be at the window. Just standing there in the dark, looking down at the street. When I asked him what was wrong, he'd say —"

"— everything's fine," Sharon said.

The words came out of her in Adrian's place at the very moment they were coming out of me in Nial's, and we both stopped, and looked at each other, and something cold went the whole length of me, and I watched it go the whole length of her.

"He was frightened," she said. It was not a question. "Not worried. Frightened. Adrian checked the locks twice a night for a fortnight — Adrian, who left the back door open all summer long. I came down one night and found him at the kitchen table at three in the morning in the dark, not doing anything, just sitting with his hands flat on the wood, and when I put the light on he flinched. My Adrian flinched. From me. In his own kitchen." She turned the mug a slow quarter-turn on the table, and another, lining the handle up with something only she could see. "I told myself it was the business. A cash-flow thing, a difficult client, some job gone bad. He let me think it. I think now he let me think it on purpose, to keep it off me and the girls. I've sat with that since Monday — that he was carrying something that frightened the life out of him, right there beside me in our own bed, and he went through it alone to protect us, and I let him, because a cash-flow problem was so much easier to live with than asking my husband what he was so afraid of."

"I heard him on the phone," I said. "A few nights before. His office, door shut, but the walls in our place are paper. He said — I've turned it over so many times I could say it in my sleep — he said, I can't do this any more. This has to stop. When I asked him after, he told me it was a difficult client." I watched it go into her. "Those exact words, Sharon. A difficult client. I believed him, because I wanted to. Because believing him let me keep the ordinary evening we were in the middle of."

She had gone very still. "Adrian said almost the same," she said, quiet now. "On the phone, the same as yours — I only caught the end of it, from the hall. He said, we can't let this go on. And something about irregularities. He said irregularities, which isn't a word Adrian owns, it's a word off a form, and I remember thinking how strange and cold it was to hear it in his voice. He was arguing with someone he was afraid of, and calling it paperwork so I wouldn't fret."

We tried, then, for a few minutes, to make the two of them fit — to find the one seam where Nial Triffett's life could have brushed against Adrian Pafistis's. It would not fit. Adrian ran a building firm with forty men on the books, a boardroom, lawyers; Nial had a ute, two blokes and an apprentice, and did people's back fences. Adrian would not have known the name of a subcontractor three rungs beneath him; Nial had never in his life set foot in a boardroom. I had never heard the name Pafistis spoken in my house. Sharon had never once heard the name Triffett in hers. They had lived four suburbs and a whole world apart, and the only thing they shared, as far as the two of us could find between us, was that they had both been careful, loving, frightened men, and they had both walked out of an ordinary morning the same week and gone into the same nothing.

"There's a thing I keep coming back to," Sharon said. She dropped her voice further, though the nearest soul was three tables off behind a crossword. "The client he went to see. That Monday. The consultation." She pressed the raw thumb hard with the ball of the other. "When I gave the police his diary, there was a name written in for that morning. Nine o'clock, an address down in South Hobart, and a name. A new client. And nobody's heard of him — not Adrian's office, not his managers, there's no file, no email, no quote, nothing. A phantom. And I've been saying his name over to myself for days now like it's got teeth in it." She looked up at me. "Luke Smith."

I kept my face.

Years of teaching teenagers to act, and a whole life before that of being a girl who did the drama, and it all came down to that one small skill in that one moment: I kept my face level, and I did not let her see the floor drop out from under me.

Because I had two of my own already, and here was hers being laid down on the cold table between the tea things to make a third, and I sat there and felt the third one turn the other two from a coincidence into a line.

The first had come from a policeman. In my very first interview, in that grey little room, Karl Jenkins had asked me — gently, tucked in among a dozen other questions, as though it were the most passing thing in the world — whether the name Luke Smith meant anything to me. It hadn't. I'd said no, and he'd moved on, and I had forgotten it before I reached the car park, because I had a thousand more urgent things to break over.

The second I had found myself, three or four days later, going through the ute because I could not stop myself going through the ute. Nial's notebook, jammed down the side of the driver's seat, and inside it, among a dozen other names and half-numbers and nothings, in Nial's own square hand: Luke Smith. Underlined. Twice. The second stroke pressed so hard it had nearly gone through the paper. I had sat in the driver's seat with the thing open on my knee and not known what I was looking at, because a name was only a name — and I had told no one. Not the police, not Jack, not my mother. I had folded it into my coat pocket and carried it about for days like a stone I could neither put down nor throw away.

It was in my coat pocket now. It had been there the whole time I had been sitting in this corner, a hand's reach from a woman saying that same name to me with her thumb worried raw — and I did not take it out, and I did not tell her.

I could have given reasons afterwards, and did. Some of it was that I did not know her — that a stranger who arrived an hour early with a story cut to the exact shape of mine was the precise thing that week had taught me to be wary of. But that was not the true reason, or not the whole of it. The true reason was smaller and worse and had nothing to do with Sharon at all. The notebook was the last thing left in the world that was only Nial's and only mine, the last object with his hand on it and no other eyes, and some animal part of me would not lay it face-up on a table for anybody — not even the one other person alive who might have helped me read it.

But I gave her the rest of it, because the rest of it she had earned. "Sharon." My voice was not quite level now. "Jenkins asked me about Luke Smith too."

Her head came up.

"In my first interview. Before I knew anything, before there was anything to know, he put that exact name in front of me and asked if it meant something. I said no, because it didn't, and I never thought of it again." I leaned in over the cold tea. "But he asked me — unprompted, right at the start. He asked you, too. And your Adrian went to meet a man called Luke Smith the morning he vanished, and that name was near Nial too, at the very end —" I came to the edge of the notebook and stepped around it, and hoped she could not hear me do it. "It's the same name, Sharon. In both our husbands' last weeks, and in the mouth of the same detective. That is not nothing. That is the opposite of nothing."

"When I said it to them," Sharon said slowly, "to the two detectives — the woman, Lahey, wrote it down like any other name on the list. But Jenkins." She stopped, arranging it precisely. "I do people's faces for a living, Jenny. A lifetime with a pair of scissors, watching people in a mirror who thought I was only looking at their hair. I know the face of a person who has just been handed a thing they already knew. When I said Luke Smith, Jenkins's face went — it was half a second, and then he had it packed away again — but it went through him. He knew the name. He knew it, and it frightened him, and he did not want me to see that it had."

Neither of us spoke for a while. The staffroom rattled on around us — the urn, a bark of laughter from the armchairs, somebody's phone buzzing itself off a table — and the two of us sat in our cold corner with a phantom man's name between us and let the shape of the thing finish arriving.

"They didn't leave us," I said. It was the first time I had let the words out to another person, and they came very quietly. "Sharon. They didn't leave. Something was done to them. The same something."

"I know." She said it simply. "I've known it from the first night, and every person I've said it to has looked at me like a poor deluded woman who can't accept she's been dumped. You're the first one who's said it back." Her jaw set. "You're the first one who hasn't tried to talk me out of my own husband."

"Then we're not two wives sitting by the phone," I said. "We're the only two people in this city who know there's something to be found."

Sharon was already going into her bag. "Right," she said, and the grief in her hardened over into something with edges. "Then I am not sitting here being managed for one more day. I'm ringing them. Now. Both of them, both our husbands, and they can tell the two of us, together, to our faces, what it is they're actually doing." She had the phone out and was dialling before I could say whether it was wise, and I understood, watching her thumb move, that where the week had turned me quiet and secret and still, it had turned Sharon Pafistis into a woman who had decided to start kicking on doors.

I sat and listened to the half of it I could hear, and it was the same half I had heard from the far end of the line the day before — the hold, the transfer, the recorded apology, and then the flat trained voice of a person whose whole job in that moment was to give a frightened woman nothing while sounding sorry to do it. An ongoing investigation. Following every available line of inquiry. Sharon's knuckles whitened around the phone. She put three sharp questions and got three soft nothings back, and I watched her jaw working, and the old helpless fury rose up in me on her behalf, the fury I had been swallowing — and before I had decided to open my mouth I heard my own voice go out low across the table.

"Ask them if they've found any bodies."

It landed in our corner like something dropped. Sharon's eyes came up and held on mine, appalled, and I looked back and did not take it back, because it was the question under everything, the one neither of us had been able to make ourselves shape, and one of us had to.

She asked it. I watched her make herself say the word — "have there — have you recovered any bodies" — in a voice she held almost level, and then she listened, and the whole of the next few seconds played out across her face, and I did not need the phone at all. I watched the answer come. I watched her eyes close. I watched her shoulders drop a fraction, and a whole marriage let go of one held breath.

"No," she said, to me and not to the phone. "No. No bodies."

Then the thing I had been holding up all this time — through the classroom and the poem and the whole careful ceremony of the tea — simply went. It was not relief. That was the cruelty of it: no bodies was not an answer, it was only the absence of the very worst answer, and it left every other horror sitting exactly where it had been, and somehow that was the thing that undid me when the horrors themselves never had. I put both hands over my face at that ugly little table in the corner, in front of Bill Hollis and Yvonne and Mike Doherty and the whole quietly watching staff, and I cried the way I had not let myself cry since Nial went — not prettily, not quietly, the whole of it coming up out of me at once.

Sharon did not tell me to breathe. She did not do a single one of the things people had been doing at me. She reached across the little table and put her hand over both of mine — a warm, dry, steady, working hand, raw thumb and all — and she held on, and she let me do it, and she did not say one word until I was finished. It was the first time in longer than I could measure that anyone had touched me as though I were a person and not a piece of bad news, and I think, sitting there, I would have forgiven that woman almost anything for the plain animal comfort of that hand.

When it had passed, and I had scrubbed my face with a staffroom serviette and made myself into something presentable, Sharon had changed again. The softness of the hand was gone and the edges were back, and she was looking at the middle of the table with a fixed, inward look, working something through.

"His study," she said. "At home. Adrian keeps — kept — everything. Every job, every client, every invoice, all of it, years of it, in that one room, and I have not been able to make myself walk into it since. But if there is a Luke Smith — a real one, an address, a number, a paper trail — it is in that room." She stood, all at once, sweeping up her coat and bag in a single decided movement. "I'm going to go through it. Tonight. Every drawer of it."

"Sharon —" I started, not knowing what I meant to say.

"You do the same," she said. "You told me Nial ran his business out of the house too. Go home and go through it. All of it. We stop waiting for these people to save us — we have both had a good look now at how much saving they intend to do — and we find this Luke Smith ourselves." She was already turning to go, already half into whatever she meant to do next, and there was a beat, half a second, where something moved across that composed and grieving face that I could not read at all — there and gone, like a fish turning over deep down in a dark pond — and then she was Sharon again, a frightened wife in a good coat, and she reached down and pressed my shoulder. "I'll ring you tonight. The minute I find anything. Be ready."

Then she was gone — out through the staffroom, past the armchairs, a tall straight-backed woman with immaculate hair walking very fast, and the door swung shut behind her, and the room let out its held breath and went back to its tea.

I sat on at the cold table a while longer, in the wreck of two undrunk cups, and let the staffroom close over the place where she had been.

Some small, tired, poisoned part of me sat there and did its work — the part these last days had honed to a point. It reminded me that I had known this woman for the length of a lunch hour. That she had come an hour early, to a place we had never agreed, and had read the exits of it like a soldier. That her story had slotted into mine as exactly as a key into a lock, and I had learned, by then, to be afraid of the things that fit too neatly. I sat with all of it. Then I put it down, the way I had been learning to put down things too heavy and too useless to carry — because I knew that voice by now, the cold little vetting voice, and I knew exactly what it had already cost me. It had made me frisk a seventeen-year-old over a forgotten script. It had made me stand in my own mother's kitchen and watch the way she held my son. I was so tired, so bone-tired, of being the woman that voice made of me. But Sharon Pafistis had put a bleeding thumb to her daughter's poem on my wall, and had held my two hands in her one while I came apart in front of the whole school, and I would sooner be a fool who trusted her than go on being that other thing one hour longer.

The bell went for the end of lunch, and the corridor filled in an instant with the roar of five hundred girls who still had their ordinary lives, and in a few minutes I would have to stand up in front of my Year Twelves and be a drama teacher, and I would manage it, because that was the shape the days had taken now: hold the face on, get through the hours, and then, when the last bell finally went, drive home and do the thing that actually mattered.

But tonight the thing that mattered had changed. Tonight I was not driving home to sit in the dark in Nial's chair and watch a phone that would not ring. Tonight I was going to walk into Nial's office — the little room off the laundry that still smelled of him, that I had not been able to make myself enter since the morning he went — and I was going to go through every invoice and every quote and every last scrap of paper in it until I found the place where a man called Luke Smith had reached into my husband's life. Somewhere across the city, in a grand cold house in Battery Point, another woman was going to be down on the floor of her husband's study at the very same hour, after the very same name — and she was going to ring me the moment she found it.

It was not much. It was two frightened women and a phantom name and a promise to telephone. But it was the first thing since the Saturday that had the shape of a way forward instead of a wall, and when I got to my feet to go and teach my girls, I found I was carrying something in my chest that I had almost lost the knack of recognising. It was not hope, quite. But it was the nearest thing to hope I had been let anywhere near in a long time, and I held onto it with both hands.