An Instrument Out of True

A detective's vocation rests on a single proposition: that the instrument doing the perceiving is reliable enough to trust. Eyes that see what is there. Ears that hear what is spoken. A memory that records faithfully and a judgement that interprets accurately. The proposition is rarely examined because it cannot survive examination — every working detective knows that perception is fallible, memory is reconstructive, judgement is shaped by bias — but the work proceeds anyway, on the understanding that the instrument is good enough most of the time, and that the cases where it fails are anomalies rather than evidence of a deeper unreliability.

Karl Jenkins entered his South Hobart flat at the end of the longest night of his career and confronted the possibility that the proposition no longer held.

The flat received him with its usual indifference. Two bedrooms, functional rather than warm, the air carrying the stale residue of takeaway containers he had not taken to the bin and coffee he had not drunk and the specific mustiness of a space inhabited by a man who slept in it but did not live in it. Dust hung in the grey morning light. Nothing in the space welcomed him because nothing in the space had been arranged with welcome in mind.

Jargus appeared in the bedroom doorway with the deep alert of a German Shepherd registering arrival, then shed the alert when the registration completed. Tail down. Ears relaxed. The transformation from guard dog to companion happened in the small interval between recognition and recognition's consequences — and Karl, kneeling to receive the soft press of a nose against his outstretched hand, registered the dog's unconditional welcome with the specific gratitude of a man who had not been welcomed by anything else in twenty-four hours.

Jargus did not know what Karl had done. Did not care. The dog's instruments were calibrated and reliable, his perceptions trustworthy in the way that animal perceptions remained trustworthy because they had not been corrupted by the human capacity to want a particular reality so badly that the apparatus producing reality bent to accommodate the want.

Karl envied him. The envy was uncomplicated. Jargus would never have to ask whether the voice he heard was the voice that existed.

The shower was hot enough to function as punishment. Karl stood beneath it with his head bowed and let the water hammer at the back of his neck where seven hours of immobility had compacted muscle into something closer to stone than tissue. Steam filled the bathroom with the specific tropical density that converted small spaces into climates. The mirror disappeared. The window disappeared. The visual world reduced itself to the patch of tile directly in front of him and the rhythm of water against skin that had spent the night in a freezing car.

The chemistry of hot water and steam was supposed to be cleansing in some symbolic register. It was not. It was just heat applied to a body that had become too cold and could not be persuaded that the cold was the worst thing it had been carrying.

The whisper returned, as it had returned in the car and on the walk and during every interval since the bedroom. Karl tried to subject it to the discipline he would have applied to any other piece of evidence — methodical, patient, working through the sensory inventory.

The voice had been quiet but distinct. Articulated rather than slurred. Positioned behind him and slightly to the left, at approximately head height. Tone confident, pronunciation clear, content deliberate. Two words. His name spoken by someone who knew it. Every detail remained sharp and available for inspection.

That was the problem.

The clarity itself was suspicious. Traumatic memories had a tendency to sharpen rather than fade — the brain marked them as significant and reinforced them with each recall, sometimes adding details that had not been present in the original experience. Each replay was potentially a rewrite. Each examination of the memory was a fresh act of construction rather than retrieval. Karl had built cases on this principle. Had cross-examined witnesses whose vivid recollections turned out to be confabulations assembled retrospectively from the materials of expectation and fear.

And now he was applying the same scepticism to himself, and the scepticism was producing answers he did not want to receive.

If the whisper had been real, where had Luke gone? The room had been sealed. Sarah had entered within seconds of the door opening. There had been no wardrobe, no concealment, no exit route that physics permitted. The only configuration consistent with the physical evidence was one in which no one had been in the room at the moment Karl heard the voice — which meant the voice had originated somewhere other than the room, and the only candidate location for that origin that did not require human teleportation was inside Karl's own head.

The conclusion was logical. It was also intolerable. It dismantled, in a single proposition, the foundation of every professional act Karl had performed for twenty-three years.

If his perceptions could manufacture experiences with sufficient fidelity that he could not distinguish them from external reality, then he was not a detective. He was a man with a badge whose internal instrument had been producing data of unverified reliability for an entire career, and the cases he had solved through instinct were either lucky guesses or coincidences and the cases he had not solved were possibly the ones where the instrument had failed without his knowing it.

Karl Jenkins, the detective who saw what others missed and trusted his gut and followed hunches to successful conclusions, had been a story Karl told himself about Karl. The story might be true. The story might be partially true. The story might be entirely false. He had no way of distinguishing between these possibilities from inside the instrument that had generated all three.

He shut off the water. The silence that replaced the white noise of the shower was sudden and absolute, broken only by the irregular drip of water from his hair and the soft gurgle of the drain processing the last of the runoff. Steam continued to fill the bathroom. The mirror remained obscured. He stood naked and dripping in the white fog and felt the residual warmth of the water beginning to dissipate against air that was already starting to claim him back.