A Recovery Only One of Them Felt

The lead was real, which was the part that mattered.

Karen and Chris Owen, conservationists with established reputations in Tasmanian environmental circles, had not been seen at their property in Collinsvale for several days. A neighbour had called the station that morning, then again half an hour before Karl Jenkins reached Sarah Lahey's desk at two o'clock — shaken, reporting recent activity at the property that had since gone quiet. There was a small unmarked truck involved. The same kind of small unmarked truck that had appeared in the margins of Jamie Greyson's case, of Kain Jeffries', of at least two other reports the station had not yet assembled into a recognisable pattern.

The recurrence was not coincidence. Karl and Sarah recognised this simultaneously across the desk between them, in the silent shorthand of good partnerships when the evidence has finally caught up to the instinct. It was the lead Karl had spent seven days too few looking for. It was the proof Sarah had spent the morning hoping he would find.

It was also the only excuse the day was going to provide for putting them in a car together for the first time since the bedroom at Berriedale.

The drive to Collinsvale takes barely half an hour from the Hobart station — north-west out of the city, through the suburbs that thinned into bush, then up into the foothills of Mount Wellington's western slopes where the road narrowed and the houses dropped away. It was not a long enough drive to do real work on a fractured partnership. It was the only drive available.

Karl had brought Sarah's coffee order as an offering — flat white, extra shot, no sugar. Sarah had accepted it without acknowledgement, because acknowledgement would have required engagement with what the offering meant. The coffee sat in the cup holder cooling while she watched the suburbs give way to bush and the bush give way to the kind of Tasmanian landscape that asserted its remoteness within twenty minutes of the state capital.

To the west, the storm was assembling itself with the patient deliberation of weather that intended to arrive. A wall of grey-black cloud advanced across the horizon at a pace neither of them could outrun. Karl noted that they would need to make quick work of the investigation before it hit. Sarah simply nodded. The exchange was less about the weather than about the unspoken understanding that the drive had a boundary, and the boundary was visible from the passenger window.

The chickens were what the drive produced.

They arrived on the road as a flock of brown hens crossing the road with the unhurried indifference of livestock that had never been in a hurry for anything. They refused to move for the horn. Sarah eventually got out of the car to herd them off the road, and the hens then followed her back as she returned to the vehicle, transforming a routine annoyance into the small absurd procession of a city detective being adopted by poultry on a rural road.

The episode lasted less than five minutes. It was, on its surface, a small absurdity. But the surface and the underneath were doing different work for each of the two people in the car.

Karl saw the chickens as grace. He saw Sarah's exasperation as the small return of a Sarah he had not been certain still existed — the partner who could find an absurdity funny, who would tolerate his teasing about her brother and her outback childhood, who could be brought back to him through the low-stakes humiliation of poultry. He laughed, and the laughter was the first laughter he had produced since the bedroom at Berriedale, and it felt to him like proof that the partnership might still be capable of repair.

Sarah saw the chickens differently. They were not grace for her. They were one more thing the day had asked her to manage with a concussed head and six fresh stitches, while the partner whose violence had produced both injuries sat comfortably in the car laughing at her predicament. The disproportion between Karl's amusement and her physical state registered as a small wound rather than a healing one. She gave him a punch on the shoulder that was lighter than she wanted it to be — because her hand still hurt — and the lightness of the punch was the closest thing to honesty she could afford in the available moment.

Both of them mistook the other's response. Karl believed they had recovered something. Sarah believed Karl had not noticed how much it cost her to participate in the recovery. Neither corrected the misunderstanding because the drive had no time for corrections, and the road was already turning onto the track that would deliver them to the property at its end.