Dust That Tells No Lies

"I've spent years reading crime scenes. This one had nothing to say — no footprints, no tracks, no proof he'd ever been there at all. And that was the most terrifying thing I'd ever seen." — Detective Sarah Lahey

Sarah was off the portico and onto the gravel before the image had fully registered — the open shed door, the empty grounds, the silence where Karl should have been. Her boots crunched against the loose stone, the Glock up, her gaze sweeping left to right in the trained, systematic pattern that years had made instinctive. The parked cars. The fountain. The camellia hedge. The tree line, dense and close and full of places a person could vanish into within seconds.

Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound except the wind and the faint murmur of the river below the eastern boundary.

Behind her, the front door banged open.

"What's happened? Where —"

Sarah spun. Louise stood on the portico in her bare feet, her face white, her eyes already fixed on the open shed door with an expression of dawning horror that told Sarah the older woman had leapt to the same conclusion she had — that the open door and the empty grounds meant something had gone badly, irreversibly wrong.

"Get back inside!" Sarah's voice came out harder than she intended — not a command but a shout, ragged with the adrenaline that was flooding her system and stripping away every layer of professional composure she'd maintained since they'd arrived. "Louise! Get inside and lock the door!"

Louise flinched as though she'd been struck. For a terrible second she stood frozen on the sandstone steps, bare feet pale against the stone, her body caught between the compulsion to see and the instinct to obey. Then something in Sarah's voice — the fear in it, the rawness of it — cut through, and she retreated. The front door closed. Sarah heard the deadbolt engage, a sound that should have been reassuring and wasn't.

She turned back to the shed.

Fifteen metres of gravel and winter grass separated her from its open door. She covered the distance at a pace that was faster than a walk and slower than a run — the measured, deliberate advance of someone who has been trained to approach unknown situations without sprinting headlong into them, even when every nerve in their body is screaming at them to sprint.

"Karl!" She called his name across the open ground, and the sound of it — swallowed immediately by the wind and the vast, indifferent space of the Jeffries estate — made her feel suddenly, terribly small. "Karl, are you in there?"

No answer. The wind shifted, pushing a scatter of dry elm leaves across the gravel in front of her. The shed door swayed slightly on its hinges, and the darkness beyond it gave nothing back.

She reached the door. Corrugated iron walls, green paint weathered to a dull, flaking patina. The padlock hung from the hasp where it had been when they'd arrived — unlatched, the shackle hooked through but not engaged. The concrete apron beneath her boots was damp, stained with the familiar tidemarks of oil and rust. She could smell the interior before she stepped inside — old timber, damp earth, the faint metallic quality of corrugated iron in cold air.

And beneath all of it, something else. Something she couldn't name. A charged, almost electric quality to the air that raised the fine hairs on her arms beneath her jacket.

Sarah stepped through the doorway and into the shed.

The first thing Sarah registered was the emptiness.

Not the absence of Karl — though that hit her immediately, a physical blow to the centre of her chest — but the emptiness itself. The quality of it. The way it pressed against her from all sides like a change in pressure, like the held-breath silence of a room that should contain something and doesn't.

The shed was roughly three metres by three, its walls lined with the sparse remnants of garden maintenance — a rake, a shovel, a pair of long-handled loppers hanging from nails driven into the timber framing. A hand trowel. A length of twine looped over a hook. These clung to the walls like the last evidence of a life that had otherwise been stripped from the space, and their presence only made the absence below them more glaring.

Because the floor was bare. Completely, impossibly bare. Not a single object sat on the concrete — no pot, no bucket, no bag of soil, nothing that might have been knocked aside or stepped over or disturbed by someone entering or leaving. The floor was as clean and empty as if it had been swept to the edges and then beyond, everything that had ever rested on it simply removed.

No Karl. No Luke. No motorbike.

Sarah stood in the centre of the concrete floor and turned a slow circle, her eyes cataloguing everything the space contained and everything it didn't. The dust on the floor was undisturbed. That was the detail that caught her first and held her — the thin, even layer of grime that covered the concrete showed no footprints except the ones she was making right now. No scuff marks. No drag marks. No tyre tracks from a motorbike that she had heard — she was certain she had heard — less than two minutes ago. The dust lay in the same fine, settled film it would have lain in if nobody had entered this shed for weeks.

That wasn't possible.

She'd watched Karl cross the gravel towards this door. She'd seen him — silhouetted against the fading afternoon, his stride unhesitating, his hand reaching for the latch. She'd heard the engine. She'd —

She looked up. The rafters were draped with cobwebs, their filaments intact, undisturbed by any recent movement. The corrugated iron roof was complete — no gaps, no openings, no way in or out except the door she was standing in front of. The timber walls were solid, their joints tight, no missing planks or concealed exits. The shed was exactly what it appeared to be: a simple, enclosed structure with one entrance, four walls, a roof, and a concrete floor.

And it was empty.

Sarah felt something give way inside her — not a dramatic collapse but a quiet, structural failure, like a load-bearing wall developing a crack that wouldn't show on the surface but that changed everything about what the building could support. The professional part of her mind continued to function, cataloguing and assessing, searching for the rational explanation that had to exist because sheds didn't swallow people. Karl had entered this space and he had left it, and there was a way he had done that, and the evidence would show her how if she looked hard enough.

But beneath the professionalism, in the place where instinct lived and where the body knew things before the mind was willing to acknowledge them, something else was forming. A cold, spreading certainty that the evidence wasn't going to show her anything. That the dust and the cobwebs and the undisturbed air were not concealing a logical explanation but were, in fact, the explanation — that whatever had happened in this shed had left no trace because it was not the kind of thing that left traces. That Karl had walked through that door and into something that the toolkit of her training and her experience and her years of detective work had no capacity to address.

"What have you done now, Karl?" she whispered.

Her voice sounded wrong in the enclosed space — flat, absorbed by the corrugated iron walls, returned to her as something thin and unfamiliar. The question hung in the air for a moment and then was gone, and the silence that replaced it was worse than any answer could have been.

She stood there. Seconds passed — five, ten, she couldn't have said. The shed breathed its cold, metallic air around her, and the tools hung on their nails, and the dust lay undisturbed, and the cobwebs held their shapes, and Karl Jenkins was nowhere.

Then Sarah turned, stepped back through the doorway, and walked out into the grey afternoon.

The grounds of Jeffries Manor stretched before her, unchanged. The manicured lawns. The fountain. The parked cars. The avenue of bare elms leading away to the road. The house with its drawn curtains and its locked doors and the two women sheltering inside it. Everything exactly as it had been when she and Karl had arrived — how long ago? Fifteen minutes? Less? — except that Karl was gone and the shed was empty and nothing about what had just happened was possible.

Sarah stood on the gravel outside the shed and felt the wind push against her. Damp. Cold. Carrying the first faint suggestions of rain and the distant, ubiquitous scent of eucalyptus that followed you everywhere in Tasmania, into every room and every crisis and every moment of your life. Above the ridgeline, the clouds had thickened to a uniform grey that offered no break, no variation, no point of reference for how much time had passed or how much remained.

From somewhere far below the property — down the hill, through the trees, along the road that wound back towards Granton and Claremont and the city beyond — she heard sirens. Faint. Growing. The sound threading through the bush and the wind and the river noise with the thin, insistent urgency of something that had been set in motion and couldn't be called back.

Backup was coming. People were coming. People who would ask questions she didn't have answers to, who would want to know where her partner was, who would look at this empty shed and the undisturbed dust and the intact cobwebs and would ask her to explain the inexplicable.

Where is Karl?

She didn't know.

What happened here?

She didn't know.

What did you see?

Nothing. She saw nothing. She heard an engine and she ran downstairs and she came outside and the shed was open and Karl was gone and there was nothing — no evidence, no trace, no indication that another human being had set foot in this space since the last time someone had hung a rake on a nail and closed the door behind them.

The sirens grew louder. Closer. Winding up the road towards the property.

Sarah stood alone on the gravel, the Glock hanging at her side, and waited for the world to arrive and demand explanations she could not give.