Beneath the Hearthstone

"This property has more history than anyone's been telling us about." — Detective David O'Neil

The garden wall marked the edge of everything the Jeffries family had chosen to control.

On the cultivated side, order. Geometry imposed on landscape, nature trained into shapes that served human intention. On the other side — O'Neil's side, as of three minutes ago — the bush asserted its own authority with the quiet, total indifference of something that had been here first and would be here last and regarded the intervening centuries of European occupation as a minor administrative detail.

O'Neil felt the change in the air before he'd gone ten metres past the wall. The temperature dropped — not dramatically, not the theatrical cold of a haunted house, but the genuine, measurable difference between an open garden that caught the last of the afternoon light and a canopied woodland that had been in shade since midday. The moisture was different too. Denser. Carrying the particular Tasmanian quality that clung to skin and fabric alike, the air so saturated with eucalyptus oil that breathing felt less like respiration and more like drinking something thin and cold and faintly medicinal.

Rogers moved beside him with the economical stride of someone who'd spent years walking bush. Her torch was already working — not the broad sweep of a casual search but the controlled, systematic movement of an officer applying trained methodology to uncooperative terrain. She'd changed since the gravel. Not visibly — her posture was the same, her professionalism intact — but there was a tightness around her eyes that hadn't been there when they'd arrived at the manor, and O'Neil understood that whatever Sarah had told her during the statement had added weight to an afternoon already carrying more than its structural allowance.

He didn't ask. Rogers would share what was relevant when it became relevant, and pressing her in the field would compromise the focus they both needed.

"Concentric arcs," he said. "Fifty out, then back. Widen by twenty each pass. Visual range at all times, radio check every five minutes."

"Copy."

They moved outward from the wall.

The undergrowth was dense and immediately hostile — cutting grass lined the faint animal track that led away from the garden boundary, its serrated leaves catching torchlight and returning it as a thin, silvered glitter. Beyond the grass, mature blue gums rose in pale columns, their bark shedding in long strips that hung from upper limbs like shed skin. The ground beneath was a continuous carpet of leaf litter and bark debris, and O'Neil crouched at intervals to examine it, sweeping his beam at the oblique angle that threw surface irregularities into relief.

Nothing. The litter was uniformly settled. No compression patterns. No displacement. No sign that anything heavier than rainfall had disturbed this ground in recent days.

"Karl!" O'Neil called. The sound left his mouth with force and was absorbed within twenty metres, the bush swallowing it the way it swallowed everything — completely, without echo, as though the acoustic energy had been received by something that had no intention of returning it.

Silence.

Not true silence — there was the faint creak of timber under thermal stress, the distant murmur of what might have been the Derwent somewhere below the property's eastern boundary. But the silence of living things. No birdsong. No rustle of small animals in undergrowth. No possums settling for the evening in the hollows that should have been visible in every third or fourth mature trunk.

Rogers noticed it too. Her head tilted between sweeps — the involuntary gesture of someone listening for sounds that should have populated this landscape and finding their absence more informative than their presence would have been.

"It's quiet," she said.

"Yeah." O'Neil didn't elaborate. The observation had been made. Its implications would develop on their own schedule.

The first arc produced nothing. The second arc — seventy metres from the wall, pushing into steeper terrain where the hillside began its descent towards the river corridor — produced nothing. The undergrowth thickened as they moved, forcing navigation around stands of horizontal scrub and dogwood that barred direct passage, their torches picking out the bleached skeletons of fallen trees slowly returning to soil.

They began the third arc.

It was Rogers who saw it first.

"O'Neil." Her voice dropped to the register that meant come here, don't rush, look at this. She was fifteen metres to his left, her torch directed at something low and partially obscured by a dense stand of blackwood saplings.

He picked his way across to her position, his boots finding the least resistant path through undergrowth that fought every step. Rogers was standing very still, her torch held steady, its beam illuminating what lay beyond the saplings.

Stone.

Not outcrop. Not the natural sandstone that occasionally surfaced through Tasmania's thin soils. Worked stone. Cut blocks, their surfaces weathered to a colour barely distinguishable from the surrounding earth, but carrying the unmistakable geometry of human shaping — straight edges, flat faces, the regular dimensions that nature didn't produce and masonry did.

A wall. Or what had been a wall. Perhaps eighteen inches high at its tallest point, running roughly east-west for three or four metres before disappearing beneath the accumulated debris of decades — possibly centuries — of leaf fall and soil creep. The bush had grown through and around it, saplings rooted in the gaps between stones, ferns colonising the crevices, the slow vegetative reclamation of a structure that had been abandoned long enough for the landscape to begin absorbing it back into itself.

"That's a foundation," Rogers said. She moved her torch along the wall's visible length, tracking the line of cut stone as it emerged from and submerged into the forest floor. "Old. Really old."

O'Neil crouched beside the nearest section. The stonework was crude compared to the manor's Georgian precision — roughly shaped blocks laid without visible mortar, their surfaces hand-cut with tools that had left chisel marks still faintly readable beneath the lichen and the weathering. Colonial era, he thought. Maybe earlier. The kind of construction that the first settlers had produced before the colony's infrastructure had developed enough to support proper masonry.

He looked up, reassessing the space around the wall. Now that he knew what to look for, other details resolved themselves from the general chaos of the bush. A second line of stone, parallel to the first, perhaps three metres away — the opposite wall. Between them, a depression in the ground that might have been a floor, its surface lower than the surrounding terrain and covered with a particularly dense layer of leaf litter. And at the far end, a tumble of larger stones that could have been a collapsed fireplace or chimney stack, their arrangement too concentrated to be natural scatter.

A building. A small building — a cottage or outbuilding — that had stood in this bush and been abandoned long enough for the forest to consume it almost entirely.

"This isn't on any of the property maps I saw in the briefing," O'Neil said. He was thinking of the aerial photograph on Charlie's trestle table, its clean lines and measured distances presenting a version of Jeffries Manor that apparently excluded whatever this structure had been. "The manor records outbuildings — the caretaker's cottage, the stables, the garage, the conservatory. Nothing about a ruin in the bush."

"Could be pre-Jeffries," Rogers offered. "Early colonial. There were settlers through this valley before the manor was built."

"Maybe." O'Neil stood and moved carefully into the space between the walls — what would have been the building's interior. The ground here was different from the surrounding bush floor. Softer. More disturbed. Not recently — not in a way that suggested human activity in the last days or weeks — but in the deeper, slower way that tree roots produced when they grew through foundations and lifted stones over decades, creating voids and depressions that the surface concealed.

His torch found something.

Near the collapsed stonework at the far end — the fireplace, he was increasingly certain — the root system of a mature blackwood had grown through the foundation and, in doing so, had displaced a section of the floor. The roots had lifted and cracked what appeared to be a flat stone, perhaps a hearthstone, and in the gap between the lifted sections, the torchlight caught something that wasn't stone, wasn't soil, wasn't root.

A shape. Partially exposed. Dark with age and earth but carrying, even at this distance and in this light, a quality of surface that was neither organic nor geological.

O'Neil didn't move closer. He held his position and directed his beam at the gap, letting the light do the work that his hands should not. The shape was perhaps fifteen centimetres long, its contours smoothed by whatever process had created it — too regular for natural formation, too curved for cut stone. Something made. Something placed beneath this floor deliberately and exposed accidentally by the slow, mindless industry of tree roots doing what tree roots did.

"I see it," Rogers said. She'd moved to a position that gave her a different angle on the gap, her torch beam intersecting his. The cross-illumination resolved additional detail — the surface of the object carried marks. Not damage. Not weathering. Marks that had been put there intentionally, carved or incised, their patterns too regular to be accidental.

"Don't touch it," O'Neil said. "Don't touch anything."

"Wasn't planning to."

They stood in the ruins of a building that nobody had recorded and nobody remembered, looking at an object that somebody had hidden beneath its floor and that the bush had spent decades or centuries slowly revealing, and O'Neil felt the investigation shift beneath him the way the ground shifted when you stepped on root-hollowed soil — a subtle, structural displacement that changed nothing visible but altered everything about what the surface could be trusted to support.

This was not connected to Karl Jenkins. He was almost certain of that. The age of the stonework, the depth of the vegetation's reclamation, the way the object sat in its earthy cradle with the settled permanence of something that had been there since before anyone currently alive had been born — all of it spoke of a different timescale entirely.

But it was on the same property. Within the same boundary. Part of whatever history this land carried, and that history — Thelma's cryptic promise, the shed's impossibility, the silence of a landscape that should have been alive — was asserting itself with increasing insistence as the afternoon failed and the darkness gathered.

O'Neil stepped carefully back out of the ruin's footprint. He pulled marker flags from his kit and began establishing a perimeter — not the tight three-metre cordon of a crime scene but a broader boundary, ten metres on each side, encompassing the full extent of the visible foundations and whatever the bush was concealing beyond them.

Rogers photographed everything. Wide shots from four compass points, establishing the ruin's position relative to identifiable features — the angle of the slope, the mature blackwood with its invasive roots, a distinctive dead stag visible against the sky to the north. Close-ups of the stonework. Close-ups of the exposed object in its cradle of displaced earth. The photographs were methodical, thorough, and would give tomorrow's team a complete visual record of the site as they'd found it.

"This needs a proper team," Rogers said, lowering her phone. "Daylight. Forensics. Possibly an archaeologist, depending on how old this turns out to be."

"Agreed." O'Neil keyed his radio. "O'Neil to base."

Charlie's voice came back within seconds. Waiting. Alert. The voice of a man standing over a trestle table in a foyer, receiving reports from the field and assembling them into a picture that was refusing to become coherent.

"Go ahead."

"We've located a structure in the bush, approximately eighty metres east of the garden boundary, downslope towards the river corridor. Stone foundations, heavily overgrown, appears to be a cottage or outbuilding of considerable age. Not marked on any current property maps that I'm aware of." He paused, choosing his next words with the care that field reports demanded — precise enough to convey what they'd found, restrained enough to avoid premature interpretation. "There's an object partially exposed in the displaced foundations. Appears to be an artefact of some kind. We haven't touched it. Site needs specialist attention — forensics at minimum, possibly heritage assessment given the apparent age. Requesting it be added to tomorrow's scope."

The radio held its silence for a long moment. O'Neil could picture Charlie in the foyer, processing this alongside the shed's perfect emptiness, alongside Thelma's promise and Louise's testimony and the three witnesses who couldn't describe the same sound.

"Understood. Secure the perimeter and return to the manor. I'll add it to the morning brief. Claiborne out."

O'Neil clipped the radio to his belt. The bush had darkened significantly during their time at the ruin — the grey of late afternoon giving way to the deeper grey that preceded true darkness, the canopy above them now a black lattice against a sky that offered nothing in the way of remaining light.

Rogers was standing at the perimeter's edge, her torch directed not at the ruin but outward, into the bush beyond. She held the beam steady for a moment, then swept it in a slow arc, the light penetrating perhaps fifteen metres before the undergrowth absorbed it entirely.

"There's more out here," she said. Not dramatically. Not with the inflection of someone making a claim they couldn't support. With the measured tone of an officer reading terrain and recognising that what they'd found was the visible portion of something larger. "The foundation continues under that bank. And there —" She adjusted her beam. "That depression. It could be a path. Or a drainage line. Or another structure."

O'Neil looked where she was pointing. In the torchlight, the ground showed a shallow linear depression running roughly north, away from the ruin and deeper into the bush. It could have been natural — a seasonal watercourse, the kind of shallow channel that formed on hillsides during heavy rain. But its alignment with the ruin's long axis was suggestive, and the slight regularity of its edges hinted at something more deliberate.

"Tomorrow," he said.

Rogers nodded. She took one more photograph — the depression, the direction it led, the darkness beyond — and then turned away from whatever the bush was holding further down the slope.

O'Neil's radio crackled.

"Thompson to base. Garden search complete, all four sections covered. Negative result, with one exception—"

He listened to Thompson's report — the partial footprint at the sundial, the single impression going nowhere — and felt the same cold recognition he'd been carrying since the shed. Another trace that defied continuation. Another piece of evidence that existed in isolation, connected to nothing, leading nowhere.

Charlie's response came back level and unsurprised, and O'Neil filed that tone alongside everything else he'd been cataloguing about his sergeant's behaviour this afternoon — the intensity of the shed cordon, the way he'd stood in front of the briefing table, the look in his eyes when he'd emerged from the outbuilding and said seal it.

They walked back towards the garden wall in silence. The marker flags stood at their posts around the ruin, bright orange points in the gathering darkness, marking a site that nobody had known existed an hour ago and that tomorrow's team would spend the day trying to understand.

The wall emerged from the gloom ahead of them — the boundary between wild and cultivated, between the bush's ancient authority and the Jeffries family's two-century attempt to impose order on the landscape. O'Neil placed both hands on the cap stone and vaulted over, his body grateful for the return to even ground.

Rogers followed. They stood for a moment on the garden side, in the last of the failing light, and looked back at the bush they'd come from. It was invisible now — consumed by the darkness, its ruins and its exposed artefacts and its silence hidden behind the dusk that had settled over the property with the patient totality of something that had been settling over this land every evening for a very long time.

"What do you think that place was?" Rogers asked.

O'Neil considered the question. The honest answer was I don't know. The professional answer was it's too early to speculate. The answer that sat in his gut, formed not from evidence but from the accumulated instinct of twelve years of detective work and an afternoon spent in a landscape that was withholding more than it was revealing, was something else entirely.

"I think this property has more history than anyone's been telling us about," he said.

Rogers looked at him. In the last grey light her face was unreadable, but the quality of her silence — the way it received his statement without challenge or agreement, simply absorbed it the way the bush absorbed everything — told him she'd arrived at a similar place through her own route.

They turned and walked back through the darkening gardens towards the manor, where the portable lighting in the foyer spilled through the windows like a signal fire, and where Charlie Claiborne was standing over a trestle table adding their discovery to a picture that was building itself, piece by impossible piece, from the things this property was willing to show them and the much larger catalogue of things it wasn't.