Cards on a Scarred Table

"An interview room strips away the polite fiction that anyone's telling you the whole truth. Including yourself."

The corridor outside Interview Room Three was empty. I stood with my back to the wall, feeling the cold seep through my jacket from the painted concrete—that particular chill of buildings that never quite warm up, no matter how long the heating runs. Louise Jeffries was on the other side of that door, waiting. She'd been waiting eleven minutes now. I wasn't stalling—I was thinking. Or telling myself I was thinking, which isn't always the same thing.

Luke Smith.

The name hadn't left my head since Linda had spoken Jamie Greyson's name and the connection had clicked into place like a round chambering. Hours ago, I'd stood across from Beatrix Cramer in a room that officially didn't exist and offered to help protect Luke. Now his partner's sister was in my interview room, reporting Jamie missing. The universe has a sense of humour like that—the kind that leaves you wondering if someone's writing the script and laughing at the characters.

Coincidence was a word I'd stopped believing in around the same time I stopped believing in clean endings and uncomplicated marriages.

Footsteps in the corridor, the sharp click of regulation shoes on linoleum. I checked my watch—Dad's watch, the scratched face catching the fluorescent light. Six minutes since I'd left Sarah in the corridor with her takeaway coffee and her guarded eyes. She was late.

She rounded the corner at a half-jog, slightly breathless, her composure not quite settled back into place. Whatever had been occupying her this morning—Karl, almost certainly, or the absence of Karl, which amounted to the same thing—she hadn't fully shaken it loose. The case file she'd been carrying was gone, dropped at her desk presumably. The coffee too. Her cheeks had a flush to them that could have been exertion or could have been something else.

"You're late."

"Sorry, Sergeant."

I didn't press it. There wasn't time, and I needed her head in the room we were about to enter, not wherever it had been for the past six minutes. Some conversations you save for later. Some you never have at all.

I opened the door.

Interview Room Three was the smallest of the three—deliberately so. The department's thinking was that smaller rooms created pressure, made people feel contained, encouraged them to fill the silence with words they might otherwise keep swallowed. Whether it actually worked was a matter of ongoing debate among detectives with nothing better to argue about during slow shifts. The room was windowless, low-ceilinged, the fluorescent tube overhead casting that particular shade of greenish pallor that made everyone look like they were recovering from food poisoning. The table was bolted to the floor, its surface scarred with the accumulated anxiety of a thousand difficult conversations—fingernail gouges, pen marks, coffee rings that cleaning had faded but never erased. The air smelled of disinfectant and something older underneath, something human that never quite washed out of rooms designed for extracting truth from people who'd rather keep it buried.

Louise Jeffries sat in the plastic chair on the far side of the table, hands folded in her lap with the deliberate stillness of someone conserving energy for a fight she knew was coming. She looked older than I remembered—not dramatically, but in the small accumulations that a decade of managing affairs at a place like Jeffries Manor leaves behind. The skin beneath her eyes was shadowed, bruised-looking in the bad light, fine lines etched deeper than they'd been when I'd last sat across from her in a room like this. Her hair, still that auburn I remembered from the Charles investigation, showed threads of grey at the temples now—the kind of grey that comes from worry more than age. Her posture was rigid, controlled, the way people hold themselves when they're afraid that relaxing might cause something inside them to collapse.

I'd sat across from her in rooms like this before. After Charles vanished. Months of interviews, careful questions circling the same territory over and over, a woman whose composure had never cracked no matter how hard I'd pushed or how many different angles I'd tried. She'd answered every question with the detachment of a financial analyst presenting quarterly reports to shareholders who didn't really want to hear bad news—nothing offered beyond what was asked, nothing revealed that she didn't choose to reveal. I'd respected her for that, even when it had made my job feel like trying to break into a safe with a butter knife. Even when I'd suspected, known in my gut, that she was holding things back. Things about Charles. Things about the family. Things about the manor and its history and the reasons people kept disappearing from its orbit.

I entered first, Sarah following close enough that I caught the scent of her shampoo—something floral that seemed wrong for the context, too soft for what this room was designed for. Louise's eyes tracked us both, assessing, cataloguing. That sharp intelligence I remembered, undimmed by the years or the grey in her hair or the shadows under her eyes. She registered Sarah with a flicker of appraisal—measuring, the way women sometimes measure other women in professional contexts—then returned her attention to me. Waiting. She'd always been good at waiting.

"Louise," I began, settling into the chair opposite her with that familiar creak of plastic against metal frame, "this is Detective Sarah Lahey. She is one of Hobart's finest young detectives."

The words were formula, and Louise would recognise them as such. The kind of introduction you make when you want to establish credentials without revealing anything useful. Her expression didn't shift, but something in the set of her jaw acknowledged the ritual for what it was—necessary theatre, neither of us fooled.

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Sarah," she said. Her voice was brittle at the edges, exhaustion wearing through the careful control like water eroding stone. She'd been holding herself together for however long her son and brother had been missing, and the seams were starting to show.

"Likewise, Louise," Sarah replied, shaking her hand.

I watched the exchange—Sarah reading Louise with those sharp eyes of hers, Louise allowing herself to be read, or at least allowing the appearance of it. Two women measuring each other across a scarred table in a room built to make people feel small. Louise wasn't feeling small. She was coiled, spring-loaded, waiting for someone to give her something to push against.

Her hands, I noticed, weren't quite as steady as they'd been in 2008. A fine tremor in the fingers, barely perceptible unless you'd spent as many years as I had learning to read bodies the way other people read faces. Louise Jeffries, who'd held together through months of interrogation about her father-in-law's disappearance without a single visible crack, was fraying at the edges. Whatever had brought her here this morning, it had cost her something to walk through those doors.

"It's been quite a few years, Mrs Jeffries," I said. "What can we do for you this time?"

I heard the edge in my own voice—hadn't quite meant to put it there, but there it was, sharp as broken glass. Louise had a way of bringing out something in me that I didn't particularly like. The Jeffries family and their endless bloody complications. Charles vanishing without a trace, as if the earth had simply swallowed him whole. The questions that had never been answered, the leads that had gone nowhere, the feeling that I'd spent months swimming against a current that was always stronger than I was. The stonewalling I'd endured with professional courtesy whilst knowing, knowing, that there were things being hidden from me, truths locked away in that sandstone manor that I'd never been given the keys to access.

And now here she was again, sitting in my interview room, with more silence to report. More people gone missing from her life. More questions I probably wouldn't get answers to.

Her jaw tightened. She'd caught the edge too. Good. Let her know I remembered.

"My son is missing," she said, each word precise, separate. "And so is Jamie."

Sarah leaned forward slightly, her pen hovering over the notepad she'd pulled from somewhere. Two missing persons changed the weight of the conversation. Changed everything, really. A single missing person could be explained away—miscommunication, deliberate absence, someone who needed space and hadn't thought to mention it, the thousand small reasons people step out of their lives temporarily. Two missing persons from the same family, reported together by a woman who'd already lost her father-in-law to whatever darkness lived in the cracks of her family's history—that suggested something else entirely. Something that made the hairs on my arms stand up beneath my shirtsleeves.

"Who is Jamie?" Sarah asked.

"My brother. The gay one."

The words were flat, deliberate. Not shame—I knew Louise well enough from our previous rounds to recognise that she wasn't the type to be ashamed of who her brother loved. Something else, then. A pre-emptive strike, perhaps. Getting it out before it could be discovered and weaponised, framing it on her own terms before anyone else could frame it for her. Or perhaps just the exhaustion stripping away the diplomatic phrasing she might otherwise have used, leaving nothing but the raw facts underneath.

I watched Sarah process the words, watched the slight tension enter her shoulders as she formulated her next question. Sarah was young enough that she might misread the flatness as hostility, as something to push against. Might try to crack Louise open the wrong way, like forcing a lock when you should be picking it.

"Does that concern you, Mrs Jeffries?"

Louise's composure cracked—just a fissure, but I saw it. The tremor in her hands intensified for a moment, her fingers twitching against each other before she stilled them through visible effort, pressing them flat against her thighs.

"Which bit, Detective? The fact that my brother is gay or the fact that I haven't been able to reach him for several days?"

Sarah flinched—couldn't help it, the words landing like a slap. Louise pressed on, her voice softer now but no less strained, the crack having let something through. Genuine fear. Genuine frustration. The emotions she'd been containing since she'd walked through our doors, maybe since she'd first tried to reach Jamie and found only silence on the other end of the line.

"I've known for years that he was gay. But I have never trusted his partner."

There it was. The thread I'd been waiting for, the one I'd been dreading since Linda had first spoken Jamie Greyson's name. I kept my expression neutral—years of practice, the face you wear in rooms like this when you can't afford to show what's happening underneath—but my pulse had kicked up, my heart suddenly louder in my ears. The room felt smaller, the walls closer, the fluorescent hum louder and more insistent.

"His partner?" Sarah asked. "Can you give us a name?"

"Luke. Luke Smith."

The name landed in my chest like a fist wrapped in velvet—soft delivery, brutal impact. I'd spoken it myself, hours ago, standing in a restricted room at Wrest Point while Beatrix Cramer clutched a device I hadn't seen in years. I can help you protect Luke. Those had been my words, my offer, extended across that table like a hand she could choose to take or leave. And she had looked at me with those calculating eyes, weighed whatever she knew against whatever she feared, and chosen to run anyway. Chosen the portal. Chosen Clivilius. Chosen anything rather than trusting a copper who claimed he could help.

Now Luke's name was being spoken in Interview Room Three, connected to two missing persons, and I had to sit here and pretend I didn't know exactly what that name meant. Pretend my hands weren't threatening to shake the way Louise's were. Pretend the threads weren't pulling tight around me, drawing connections between cases and people and places that shouldn't connect, that couldn't connect without everything I thought I understood about this investigation coming apart at the seams.

"And why don't you trust this Luke Smith?" I asked, keeping my voice soft, guiding rather than pushing. The voice you use when you want someone to keep talking, to forget you're a detective and think you're just someone who wants to understand.

Louise turned to look at me properly, and something shifted in her expression—history surfacing, old wounds reopening. Her eyes met mine with an intensity that felt like accusation, like she could see right through the professional mask to the man underneath who was barely holding his shit together.

"You of all people should know, Charlie, that Jamie doesn't have the best track record when it comes to deciding who to trust."

I felt the heat rise to my face before I could stop it. Charlie. Not Sergeant. Not Claiborne. Charlie. Like we were old friends, like we had history beyond the formal dance of interviews and evasions. And with it, the weight of everything we'd never said to each other in all those months of careful questioning. The things I'd suspected about the Jeffries family, the shadows I'd glimpsed at the edges of their carefully maintained façade. The things she'd known I suspected. The careful choreography of questions and non-answers that had never led anywhere useful, that had left me with nothing but a cold case file and a collection of hunches I couldn't prove.

But more than that—the Queensland history. Karl and Jamie. Whatever had happened there, serious enough for records to be scrubbed clean, for files to vanish into whatever hole classified things vanished into. Louise knew. She'd always known, probably known more than I did about what connected her brother to my detective. And she was invoking that knowledge now, in this room, in front of Sarah, to remind me that I was not the only one holding cards I hadn't played.

I recovered. Forced my expression back to neutral through sheer bloody-minded will. But Louise had seen the crack, and we both knew it. You can't unring a bell.

"I believe that Luke may have done harm to both of them," she said.

The words were cold. Final. Not a fear she was expressing but a conclusion she'd already reached, a verdict she'd arrived at through whatever calculations ran behind those sharp eyes. Louise Jeffries had done her sums, weighed her evidence, and come to an answer—and she'd come here to make sure someone with a badge acted on it. The tremor in her hands had stilled. Whatever vulnerability had surfaced moments ago was gone now, packed away, replaced by the steel I remembered from a decade of stonewalling. This was Louise in her element. This was Louise with a target.

Sarah's pen had stopped moving. I could feel her attention shifting between us, trying to read the history she could sense humming beneath the surface of this conversation, the currents she couldn't see but knew were there. She was sharp enough to know something was happening that she wasn't privy to. Smart enough not to interrupt it.

"I want to speak with Detective Karl Jenkins."

Of course she did. Karl, who had his own history with Jamie—and by extension, with Louise. Karl, who was probably still face-down in a darkened room somewhere, nursing last night's celebration and whatever regrets trailed in its wake. Karl, who I couldn't reach and couldn't brief and couldn't warn about what was walking toward him with Louise Jeffries' determined stride.

"Are you sure that is wise, Louise?"

The question came out before I could stop it—genuine caution, genuine uncertainty. There were currents here I didn't fully understand, connections between Louise and Karl that predated my involvement and might complicate everything I was trying to manage. If she was asking for Karl specifically, it meant she believed his history with Jamie was relevant. Which meant she knew more about that history than I did. Which meant I was playing cards in a game where someone else had seen the deck before it was shuffled.

"Yes."

One word. No negotiation, no explanation, no room for argument. Her eyes held mine, and I saw something there I couldn't quite name—determination, certainly, hard as granite, but something else underneath. Desperation, perhaps. Or the peculiar clarity of someone who has already looked into the worst-case scenario and found it staring back.

I held her gaze for a moment, reading what I could. Then I turned to Sarah.

"Find Jenkins," I said, barely above a whisper.

"Of course, Sergeant."

She rose, the door closing behind her with a soft click that seemed to hang in the stale air longer than it should have.

And then it was just Louise and me, sitting across the scarred table in the smallest room in the building, the weight of everything unsaid pressing down like a low ceiling getting lower. The fluorescent tube hummed its endless one-note song. The disinfectant smell seemed sharper now, almost burning, like it was trying to cover something it couldn't quite reach.

Jamie Greyson. Kain Jeffries. Luke Smith. Two missing persons and a name that connected to things Louise couldn't possibly understand.

Unless she did understand. Unless Jamie had told her something before he vanished. Unless this whole conversation was a test I hadn't realised I was taking—Louise probing to see how much I knew, how much I'd reveal, whether I was an ally she could use or an obstacle she'd need to work around.

I folded my hands on the table—steady, through effort that cost me more than I'd admit—and waited for whatever came next. The room held its breath. So did I.