Cold Hands

Sarah Lahey was very nearly asleep at her own desk in the Hobart Police Station detective bullpen when the Senior Constable from Devonport arrived. She had been at her grandmother Jane's bedside until close to three in the morning — Jane having been worse than usual the night before, unable to keep food down or settle into anything resembling rest — and her exhausted attempt at concentrating on a witness statement had reached the point where the words on her screen had blurred into a single grey fog and her head was being held above the desk only by the structural support of her own hand. Karl Jenkins sat at his own desk several metres away in deep absorbed contact with whatever was on his own screen, and had not so much as glanced in her direction in the last hour.

The voice that brought her back from the edge of unconsciousness was friendly, and a little too pleased to find her there.

Her head jerked up off her hand with the wide-awake panic of a person caught not resting but properly asleep, and she nearly went face-first into her keyboard. The detectives at the desks nearest hers looked over with the carefully neutral expressions of colleagues who would absolutely be discussing this in the break room within the hour but were declining to register any official opinion in the present moment. Sarah's gaze swept the bullpen for the source of the voice that had woken her — landed first on Karl, who had not moved — and only then travelled the rest of the way around to the figure standing at the corner of her desk.

Senior Constable Duncan Flack of the Devonport station was holding a slim matte-black hard drive case and a weatherproof messenger bag and the painfully sharp awareness, assembling itself in real time across his face, of a man who had set off from the north of the island at half past five that morning with every intention of changing into something more presentable somewhere along the three-hour drive south and had not. The running shorts had been completely defensible at sunrise on a gravel road in Spreyton. They were not defensible now, in a working CIB unit full of people in proper clothing.

Inside the matte-black case were two weeks of security footage from every camera at the Devonport ferry terminal — passenger boarding, vehicle decks, foot terminals, every Spirit of Tasmania crossing across the past fortnight. Duncan had been instructed by Ellen Lowe in a phone call the previous afternoon to deliver the case to Detective Sarah Lahey in person.

What Duncan saw across the desk when Sarah's head came off her hand was nothing Ellen had not already prepared him for.

He had spent a particular set of years in the same house as a father caring for a mother whose mind had been quietly leaving the building over a long stretch of months, and the years had given him a clinical eye for the specific texture of caregiver exhaustion. He recognised it on Sarah inside half a second. The structural work her hand had been doing for her spine. The hollows under her eyes. The translucent quality of skin on a person whose body had stopped allocating its limited resources to anything that was not load-bearing. The thing that was not tired, because tired was fixable. The thing that was deeper than tired and was not going anywhere.

The exchange that followed across the desk was the kind of small awkward exchange that happened between two people who had carried unfinished business into a room without being prepared to do anything about it.

Sarah, surfacing slowly into the situation she had woken up inside, made a small unguarded joke about the running shorts. Duncan flushed in the slow inevitable way his cardiovascular system had been broadcasting his mortifications to him since he was twelve years old. He told her it had been a while, in a sentence shaped like a statement but holding the bones of a question — three text messages sent and never answered, a sunset photograph from Mersey Bluff, an article link, a quiet how are you going? that had sat in his phone like a small patient question he had eventually stopped asking. Sarah told him her grandmother was unwell, and the half-truth came out fast because the whole truth was that she had been actively avoiding him since a Friday some weeks earlier whose contents she had no memory of, and the half-truth was easier than the whole. Duncan, to his quiet credit, allowed it to be the half-truth. He said her grandmother was a lovely woman, and he meant it, and the small genuine landing of his condolence softened the temperature between them by several degrees.

Then Sarah pivoted to the work and Duncan handed her the case.

Their fingers brushed in the quiet ordinary way fingers brushed during the transfer of an object between two people, and Duncan registered without permitting himself to comment on it that Sarah's hands were cold. Not air-conditioning cold. Cold in the way the hands of a person whose body had stopped routing warmth to its extremities went cold. He thought briefly about asking her whether she had eaten anything today, and then declined to do so on the grounds that a man in running shorts had no standing whatever to diagnose a CIB detective's welfare in front of her colleagues during a Sunday morning evidence transfer.

What happened next happened in something less than the duration of a shutter firing.

Duncan's gaze, while he was holding Sarah's eyes properly, dipped once and came back up. From the inside, it was the entirely involuntary action of an eye that had been trained across twenty years of photography to register unposed faces as honest subjects — and Sarah's exhausted unguarded face had been doing the particular thing exhausted unguarded faces did, which was being more present and more real than careful composure ever permitted. From the outside, in the visual register of the woman behind that face, it was a man's eyes dipping toward her collarbone and lingering a fraction of a second longer than they had any business doing. Both readings were true. They met somewhere over the corner of the desk, and the room's temperature changed.

Sarah closed.

She did not want this conversation, and she did not want it now, and she did not want it on three hours of broken sleep with her grandmother's diagnosis sitting inside her chest like a small cold stone. She produced a small bright lie about Ellen Lowe being excited to see Duncan. She produced a second small bright lie about Ellen having to leave shortly for court. The two lies, deployed in quick succession, gave Duncan the manufactured urgency he needed to extract himself from her desk with whatever was left of the morning's dignity.

Duncan understood the construction of both lies at the same speed Sarah was building them. He thanked her for the steer. He said it had been good to see her. He walked back across the busy floor carrying the small private knowledge of a man who had spent twenty years training his eye to register unposed subjects honestly and had just looked at a colleague in a way he could not afterwards authorise.

Karl Jenkins, several metres away, did not look up from his screen.