Enrolment in Master of Criminology – University of Adelaide (Karl Jenkins)

Karl Jenkins came back to the University of Adelaide in the February heat to enrol again, this time in the Master of Criminology and Criminal Justice. He was twenty now, and no longer a school-leaver feeling his way through the enrolment halls; he had finished his first degree, and he came onto the campus already launched on the rest of his life, a recruit of the state police who had entered training only months before.

That was the striking thing about the enrolment, to anyone who paused over it: he was taking the degree part-time, on top of the job. He had begun his police training at the end of the previous year, and most men in his position would have given themselves wholly to that — the long days, the drill and the law and the procedure, were demanding enough on their own. Karl proposed instead to carry a research degree alongside them, in the evenings and on his own time, and he did it not because anyone had asked it of him but because resting was not in his nature, and because achievement was, for him, very nearly the proof that he existed.

The degree he had chosen turned toward forensic science. Where the criminology of his first years had been concerned with why people offended and how a society answered them, this was the harder, more technical edge of the same subject — the science of evidence, the disciplined reading of what a crime left behind, the machinery by which a suspicion could be turned into a proof. It was the most exact and method-bound corner of the field, and it suited Karl exactly, drawing as it did on precisely the patience and precision that everything in him ran toward.

The criminology department knew him already. He had been their honours student only months before, and his return so soon — part-time, and while training full-time for another career entirely — was the kind of thing the staff remarked on, admiringly and with a faint unease at the pace the young man set himself. Dr Stephen Cottrell, who had supervised his honours dissertation, saw him enrolled without surprise; it was entirely in keeping with what he knew of him.

The enrolment was the plain, part-time kind, fitted around a working life. There were no lecture-hall crowds and no ceremony to it, only the choosing of a research direction and the signing of the forms that put him back on the university's books, now as a postgraduate. Karl went through it with the same exactness he had brought to it as a boy of seventeen, except that the exactness had hardened since: he knew now precisely what he wanted from the degree, and precisely how he meant to fit it into the rest of his crowded life.

He gave no sign that the double load weighed on him, and perhaps, that February, it did not. He had set himself to become very good at a difficult and serious kind of work, and he had decided that he would learn it from both ends at once — in the training rooms of the police and in the after-dark lecture rooms of the university. He signed his enrolment, settled the shape of a year he had just made far heavier than it needed to be, and went back out to the two demanding lives he had chosen to lead at the same time.