Across Bass Strait

The morning in Broken Hill arrived under an August sun that had no business being so harsh in the middle of winter. The old gas heater in the front office of the police station went on humming its winter song into the warmth without any awareness of the contradiction, and Argent Street outside ran its slow ordinary motion past the window with the patient indifference of a place that had outlived several mining booms and several attempts by the wider world to remember it existed.

Detective Jeremy Harding had been carrying a hunch in his stomach since breakfast. The hunch had a quiet provenance — a careful word from a careful colleague, a young man from the town missing for eight days, a flight manifest that did not lie, an older brother whose helpfulness had begun to feel like architecture. Jeremy's father had taught him long ago that elegance was the sign of a true solution. Jeremy had learned in the years since that the elegance of a forced fit was the sign of a wrong pattern. The pattern in front of him fit too neatly.

The morning in Hobart was a different morning altogether. The bullpen had drawn its quiet around Karl Jenkins out of the long courtesy that bullpens granted to men in the process of being broken inside them. His sidearm and his badge were on a sergeant's desk in another room. A body lay in a cupboard in a house in Berriedale that no one had yet found. The man at the desk in the corner of the bullpen was not waiting for anything in particular when his desk phone lit up with an inter-state badge number from a station he had only ever heard of the way city detectives heard of country ones, which was barely.

The call between the two desks took four minutes.

The four minutes did not look, from outside either office, like very much. A cordial first exchange. A brief account of a country case. A name. By the end of the four minutes, the country detective with the hunch in his stomach was holding a number he had not been prepared to hold — five other people, on a case board on a wall in a city he had never worked — and the city detective in the bullpen was holding the slow horrible understanding that the man whose house he had broken into in the dark of the night before sat at the centre of something that reached across a continent and had been reaching, all this time, without anyone noticing it had begun.

The receivers went back into their cradles in two stations on opposite sides of Bass Strait at almost the same moment.

The same name sat in two chests that, four minutes earlier, had not known they were carrying the same weight.