Nathan Trentham — Missing Husband

 Nathan Trentham — Missing Husband

The wife came to Trentham’s rooms above the print shop on a Tuesday that smelled of wet coal. She did not cry. She set a photograph on the blotter, a man in a good coat standing too straight beside a canal, and said her husband had left for the office on Thursday and had not come back.

“He took the brown case,” she said. “Not the black one. He only takes the brown one when he means to be home for supper.”

Trentham did not ask whether the marriage was happy. He asked what the husband ate when he was late, which pub kept his tab, and whether the brown case had a broken clasp. It did. The clasp had been mended with black cotton, the wife’s stitching, done on a Sunday because he would not pay a cobbler for a hinge.

By Thursday Trentham had the office, the station, and the man’s club. None of them had seen the brown case. On Friday he walked the canal in the photograph and found the case in a boathouse the rowing men no longer used, clasp still tied with that black cotton, papers inside dry. Train tickets to Dover. A receipt from a lodging house under a name that was not the husband’s. A letter in the husband’s hand that began, “If she asks, tell her the train was late,” and never said to whom.

Trentham took the case back to the rooms above the print shop. He did not open the door with a theory. He set the case on the table, clasp toward her, and waited while she touched the cotton she had sewn.

“He is not in the river,” Trentham said. “He bought two tickets. Only one was used.”

She looked at the second ticket a long time. Then she asked, very quietly, whether the lodging-house name was a woman’s. Trentham said it was a man’s, a clerk from the same firm, already on a boat. The husband had followed a debt, not a lover, and had written the letter so she would not go to the police and spoil the crossing.

“You can have him stopped at Calais,” Trentham said. “Or you can let the second ticket stay unused. That part is not my work.”

She folded the letter once, the way she folded his shirts, and put it back in the case. “Find out if the debt was real,” she said. Trentham put on his coat. The clasp clicked, badly, under her thumb, and held.