Dispatches and Dead Air

“Most lies aren’t in what you say—they’re in the space you leave around the truth.”

I'd just stepped back from the row of seats when my phone buzzed in my coat pocket—sharp, insistent, and bloody predictable. The vibration cut through the theatre's hush like an insect trapped in glass, a reminder that the outside world hadn't forgotten me. Protocols, politics, paperwork—all the things waiting just beyond these walls, eager to drag me back out of this pocket of silence and into the grind. The invitation sat heavy against my chest, evidence I'd already compromised, and now the machinery of the department was reaching for me.

I didn't need to check the screen. The timing alone told me everything. Some instincts you develop from years on the job—the rhythm of calls that come too quickly, too neatly. The way certain officers seemed to know about cases before the scene tape was even strung. I'd investigated officers like that during my Professional Standards years, the ones with sources in dispatch, the ones who always seemed to arrive before they were called.

But I checked anyway.

Detective Sergeant Alexander Stout.

Of course it was him. His name burned across the screen, bright against the scratches that laced the glass like fine spiderwebs—years of careless drops onto bitumen, of being shoved into pockets mid-chase. Each mark a reminder of the places the phone had gone with me, the weight it had carried. Liam had offered to replace it last Christmas, something newer, sleeker, but I'd refused. Some tools you keep because they've earned the damage. Because the scars mean they've survived.

Stout didn't need the brief. He never did. He'd have been perched over the dispatch logs the second they flickered across the system, waiting like a crow on a fencepost, black eyes scanning for weakness, ready to swoop the moment something landed off-centre. He had that particular sixth sense some officers cultivate—the ability to smell the blood in the water before the knife even falls. I'd worked with men like him, though I'd tried to be different. Tried to investigate with fairness rather than hunger. Stout had no such pretensions.

I let it buzz. Two rings only. Then silence.

The sound carried oddly in the cavernous theatre, bouncing off velvet and stone until it felt louder than it was. Sophie's head lifted briefly, her eyes flicking toward me in silent question, before she returned to her careful, measured work. She didn't ask. Good instincts, that girl. Knowing when questions would help and when they'd only complicate.

No voicemail. Of course not. He wouldn't leave one. Too clean for that, too careful to risk having his voice preserved in a place it didn't belong. He'd wait, let me be the one to move first. That was Stout's way: patience wrapped in politeness, professional courtesy masking the quiet satisfaction of a man who knew he'd unsettle you simply by not pushing. I'd used similar techniques myself in interrogations—the deliberate silence, the expectant pause that made suspects fill the void with confessions they'd never intended to make.

He didn't need to chase. He only needed to wait.

I tapped out a message, quick and tight, my thumbs moving with the efficiency of long practice—the same clipped rhythm I'd used a thousand times before while balancing coffee in one hand and a half-finished report in the other. Dad's watch caught the faint light as my wrist moved, the old timepiece marking seconds I was about to fill with lies.

Routine unattended death. Preliminary only. Will advise.

Sent.

The word routine lingered on the screen like a stain. Heavy. False. A mutual fiction, one of those lies both parties acknowledge without ever calling it what it is. I'd typed similar words before, in reports that smoothed over complications, in briefings that shaped narratives before they could shape themselves. But never with evidence in my pocket. Never with my wife's gala invitation tucked against my ribs like a brand.

Bradley Mitchell had started this way too. Small lies. Reasonable omissions. I'd sat across from him in that interview room and watched him justify each step, each tiny deviation from procedure, until the pattern became undeniable. It was just one piece of evidence, Charlie. Just one. Who was it going to hurt?

I didn't move straight away. Just kept the screen cupped in my palm, the glow spilling across my skin. It carved the lines of my hand into relief—calluses, creases, the faded scar cutting across my knuckle from that pub brawl in Glenorchy fifteen years back. The one where a suspect's brother had come at me with a broken bottle and I'd put him down harder than necessary, riding the adrenaline until my hands shook. All the history a hand could carry. The hand of a man who'd signed off on more "routine" deaths than he cared to count, though none of them had ever looked like this.

Three dots appeared. A flicker, a hesitation. Then gone. Like Stout himself had opened his mouth to speak but decided silence would do more damage.

Read.

No reply.

Of course not. He wouldn't need one.

The things I'd left unflagged, the deliberate smoothing-over of a scene that screamed theatre to anyone who'd done more than a decade in the job. A staged body, an unaddressed invitation to a gala my wife was organising, evidence I'd pocketed instead of logged. Any one of those details would have been enough to escalate the case. Together, they were a bonfire I was deliberately not lighting.

And Stout would know. He always knew. He had a gift for sniffing out omissions, for reading the empty spaces between words. He built his career not on what people reported, but on what they failed to. Technicalities repackaged as revelations. Oversights recast as sins. I'd built a similar career once, but I'd tried to use those skills to protect good officers from unfair accusations as much as to catch bad ones. Stout had no such balance. He was prosecution without defence, suspicion without benefit of doubt.

He was clever. Strategic. The kind of copper who sharpened his instincts more than his smile. A man who pressed every shirt sleeve to a crease sharp enough to cut and filed his case notes with colour-coded tabs, each page aligned like soldiers on parade. The opposite of my father, who'd gone to work with sawdust in his hair and never owned a tie until Mum bought him one for my graduation from the Academy.

It wasn't vanity. Not with Stout. It was how he thought—clean lines, sharp edges, no clutter, nothing left to chance. His order was his armour. His precision, his weapon.

I understood it better than most. My own desk told a similar story: methodical stacks, pens aligned, case files squared off. Not because I cared about appearances but because I knew what chaos did if you gave it room. Dr Kirkpatrick had explained it during therapy—the need for external order when internal order fails. You control what you can, Charlie, because you've seen what happens when control slips. Order was the only barricade against the mess waiting outside the station walls. If you wanted to survive out here, you had to keep the inside straight. Even when the inside was already buckling under accumulated weight.

There'd been a time, years back, when I thought Stout might've made a decent ally. Before the corners hardened, before suspicion settled into his bones. Back when we were both younger, less entrenched, still willing to see the good in one another. He'd been thorough then, articulate. The kind of detective who could tug at the single loose thread in a flawless alibi and unravel the whole thing before anyone else had even noticed the snag. We'd worked a case together in 2008, a fraud ring operating through Launceston businesses, and his attention to detail had been genuinely impressive. I'd recommended him for commendation.

But somewhere along the way, it had soured. His skill hadn't dulled—it had sharpened into something colder. He stopped hunting criminals and started hunting cracks in other men's work. As though the game itself mattered more than the outcome. As though proving someone wrong carried the same satisfaction as putting a killer in cuffs. I'd watched the transformation with the particular discomfort of someone who recognised the potential for it in himself. The job could do that to you, if you let it. Could turn you from protector to predator without you ever noticing the shift.

Above the exit, the fluorescent bulb flickered twice, the light stammering before steadying again. The shadows it cast swept across the red velvet seats, row after row of them stretching back into the dark. All empty. All facing the same direction, like they'd been waiting longer than we had. The theatre settled around me — old timber shifting in the cold, the same sounds every building this age makes when it thinks no one's listening.

You didn't need to dislike a bloke to distrust him. And I didn't dislike Stout. Not really. We'd shared whisky after bad nights, raised glasses at the same wakes, stood shoulder to shoulder through the endless carousel of departmental restructures. We'd both seen good officers pushed sideways while the bland and the pliable drifted upward on the tide of politics. We'd both grown cynical in similar ways, for similar reasons. The difference was what we did with that cynicism.

But trust?

I trusted him about as far as I could throw the theatre marquee.

The case would land on his desk eventually. That was inevitable. Major Crime would inherit it, and with them, Stout—all sharp edges and sharpened questions, delivered with that peculiar intensity of his. The kind that made you feel you'd already blundered before you'd even opened your mouth. He didn't need answers; he needed leverage. And I wasn't ready to give him any. Not with the MONA invitation burning a hole in my evidence pouch. Not with Sandra's name potentially threading through whatever this was.

I needed time. Time to see what I was really standing in. Time to follow the thin, treacherous line of breadcrumbs that had begun to appear—crumbs that seemed to lead in only one direction. Toward my own door. Toward the house in Battery Point where my wife was probably waking now, finding my note, making her morning tea, not knowing that a dead man had been found holding an invitation to the gala she'd spent months organising.

I slid the phone back into my pocket and turned to the stage. Sophie was crouched now, photographing the rear exits, her camera flash strobing briefly against the wings. For a moment the darkness gave itself up, revealing a nest of ropes, pulleys, and counterweights—the machinery of illusion. Devices built to trick an audience, to draw curtains, lower chandeliers, summon worlds from the void with the pull of a cord. The glimpse was fleeting, but it was enough to remind me that we were standing in a place designed for deception. A place where nothing was what it appeared, where every surface concealed mechanisms meant to manipulate perception.

Rather like the scene before me. Rather like the lie I'd just sent to Stout.

Sophie moved carefully, her expression composed, her routine unbroken. But the tension in her shoulders betrayed her. She felt it too—that wrongness that seeped into the air, thick as smoke, impossible to name but impossible to ignore. The same wrongness I'd felt walking into scenes that turned out to be more than they appeared. The Barwick case had started with similar unease, a missing child that everyone assumed was a runaway until I'd noticed the stepfather's hands wouldn't stop moving. This had that same quality. That same sense of hidden architecture beneath the visible surface.

Ivan had withdrawn to a chair near the lobby doors. He sat heavy, shoulders slouched, gaze fixed on the grey wash of morning leaking through the foyer glass as though it might eventually offer him something resembling an answer. His coffee cup rested beside him, abandoned, the steam long since gone. He'd seen enough death before—the set of his face told me that. A soldier learns when to step back, when to let others handle the scene. I'd learned similar lessons, though mine had come from different wars.

And yet... his posture betrayed him. There was a tautness in the way he held himself, a readiness coiled in the set of his frame. He wasn't finished. He hadn't said everything. Not yet. I recognised that tension—the weight of information not yet shared, words being weighed and measured before release. I'd sat across from hundreds of witnesses carrying that same burden. Some eventually unburdened themselves. Others took their secrets to graves of their own.

The theatre held still. No movement. No sound.

Just the shift—subtle, imperceptible, but there. Something small, sharp, sliding into place with finality. Like a gear catching. A lock turning. That jolt you get when you wake in the dark and know — without needing to see — that someone is standing in the room with you.

The body remained in its chair. His carefully arranged clothes, his mismatched socks, his face stubbornly refusing recognition. A figure stripped of identity but heavy with intention. Whoever had put him here had something to say, and they'd said it in a language they expected me to read.

I wasn't equipped to answer it yet. Not with Stout circling. Not with the invitation I was withholding. Not with Sandra's name hovering at the edges of everything I was learning. There was something larger here, something already in motion, and I wasn't ready to name it. Naming it would give it shape. And I wasn't ready to admit how close that shape might already be to my own front door.

And Stout? I could picture him now. Coffee in one hand, case file in the other. His tie knotted too tight, smoothed flat with a firm palm. Watching the dispatch logs. Lining up his questions like blades. Waiting for me to make the next move.

Just as someone, somewhere, had planned.