Everything That Echoes

“Patterns don’t whisper — they repeat. Over and over, until you finally admit you’ve been hearing them all along.”

The interview room, in its clinical indifference, had a way of magnifying human vulnerability. Its bare surfaces and humming fluorescent lights created a stark theatre for truth—whatever that word meant anymore. The walls were painted that particular shade of institutional beige that existed nowhere in nature, a colour designed to be neutral but instead achieved a kind of aggressive blandness that made everything feel slightly unreal.

I watched Jenny as she settled into the metal-framed chair, her posture alert but weary, eyes flicking around the room like she was searching for an anchor, for something to fix her attention on besides the enormity of what had brought her here. I recognised the look: the moment when grief hadn't quite taken hold, but fear had already fastened itself like a clamp around the ribs, tightening with each breath.

The room smelled faintly of disinfectant and old coffee, the accumulated scent of a thousand difficult conversations, a thousand revelations and confessions and breakdowns. If walls could absorb emotion, these would be saturated with it—desperation and rage and sorrow seeping into the very plaster.

I took the seat opposite, wincing slightly as the movement pulled at the raw skin beneath the bandage, the cuts protesting the shift in position. I pulled a notepad and biro from my breast pocket with my right hand—still intact, still functional, still useful for the tasks of detective work.

"Your full name, please?"

"Jenny Alexandra Triffett."

Her voice was steady, controlled, though I could hear the effort it cost her to maintain that composure.

I wrote it in neat block letters at the top of a fresh page, adding the date in the corner: Sunday, 29 July 2018. There was something calming about the ritual of recording a witness's details—a rhythm, a structure, a framework to hang chaos from. The familiar motions that had remained constant across hundreds of interviews, across three police departments and more cases than I could remember.

I lifted my eyes to meet hers, and for a heartbeat, the room felt... different. Her features, though strained with worry and exhaustion, held a softness that gave me pause. It wasn't beauty in the superficial sense—though she was attractive in that understated way that spoke of someone who didn't think much about their appearance, who had more important things to worry about. It was something rooted in her earnestness, in the vulnerability she was trying so hard to contain.

A feeling I hadn't expected to surface in a professional setting, let alone today, of all days. Fatigue does strange things to the emotional filter, strips away the protective layers we maintain between ourselves and the world, leaves us exposed to sensations and responses we'd normally suppress.

I fought it off, pushed it down with the practiced efficiency of someone who'd spent years not feeling things at inappropriate moments. Emotional entanglement was dangerous—even curiosity about her life outside this room was a step too far, an opening I couldn't afford. Still, I felt something pull, some primal reflex that wasn't entirely professional, that existed in the space before conscious thought could categorise and dismiss it.

But Jenny wasn't waiting for me to gather myself, wasn't giving me time to rebuild the professional walls I'd felt momentarily crumbling.

"My husband, Nial, is missing. He has been since yesterday morning," she said. Her voice was steady but threaded with tension.

I nodded, acknowledging the severity without leaping into assumption, giving her space to continue at her own pace. "How do you know he's gone missing?"

"Because I haven't seen him since yesterday morning."

Blunt. Just facts. No embellishment, no emotional appeals, no attempts to convince through rhetoric. It was how I preferred to interview, and how I preferred to be spoken to. There was something almost reassuring about that directness, that refusal to dress up reality in prettier language.

"But you have heard from him, yeah? That's what the receptionist was saying, right?"

The shift in her expression was immediate and striking. Her jaw tightened, her eyes going hard in a way that transformed her face entirely. "I thought Linda was my friend," Jenny said, coldly, each word dropping like a stone into still water. Her eyes cut to the wall, to the two-way mirror that reflected us both back at ourselves, lips pursed with suppressed anger.

There it was again—something else beneath the surface, revealed by the crack in her composure. Hurt, yes, but more than that. A breach of trust. Whatever her frustrations with Linda, they weren't just about this morning's dismissal. This was deeper, more personal, the kind of wound that comes from being failed by someone who was supposed to understand, who should have known better.

"Linda?" I asked, keeping my tone light, coaxing without pushing. Sometimes the best interrogation technique was simply appearing curious, giving people permission to explain without feeling interrogated.

Jenny turned back to me, eyes narrowing slightly, assessing whether I was genuinely interested or simply following procedure. "Linda. The receptionist."

I gave a slow nod.

"So, you know her, then."

"Yes. Apart from also being my sister-in-law, our families have known each other for years. We share great-grandmothers on my mother's side."

That got a smile out of me—small, but genuine, breaking through the professional mask I'd been maintaining. The comment was so quintessentially Tasmanian, so perfectly illustrative of the tangled genealogies that characterised the island. "You must be Tasmanian, then."

Jenny chuckled, a sound that seemed to surprise her as much as it surprised me. It was slight, barely more than a breath, but it softened the lines around her mouth, eased some of the tension from her shoulders. "A bit obvious that, isn't it?"

"Yeah," I said, relieved to see the ice thawing between us, even briefly.

She studied me then—really studied me, her gaze more penetrating than before. Her voice was gentler this time, curious rather than defensive. "Are you from here?"

The question caught me off-guard, pulling me out of the comfortable rhythm of the interview. Witnesses don't usually ask about you, don't turn the interrogation around to examine the interrogator. It was a small inversion of power dynamics, a reminder that this was a conversation between two people, not just a professional extraction of information.

I hesitated, feeling a flicker of my own history rising unbidden—Queensland, Jamie, Moggill Creek, all the reasons I'd fled south to this island at the bottom of the world.

"No. South Australia originally. Ended up here somehow."

The version I gave was clean. Sanitised. The version I repeated when I didn't want to explain why Tasmania had become my hiding place too, why I'd put as much distance as possible between myself and the mainland, between my present and my past. The version that suggested random chance rather than desperate escape.

She smiled faintly, and I saw the gratitude in her eyes, not just for the information, but for the fact I hadn't brushed her off, hadn't retreated into pure professionalism, hadn't reminded her that I was asking the questions here. The room felt different again—less like an interview, more like a conversation between two people trying to navigate impossible circumstances. A dangerous drift, a blurring of boundaries I usually kept religiously intact.

And for a second—just a second—I found myself wondering. Not about Nial, or her missing dog, or why Linda had been so quick to dismiss her concerns. But about the kind of man who walked away from a woman like this. A woman with fire and sorrow dancing in equal measure behind her eyes, who fought for what mattered to her, who refused to accept bureaucratic dismissal when she knew something was wrong.

I cleared my throat and adjusted my posture, straightening my back, pulling myself physically upright as if that could restore the professional distance I felt slipping. Enough softness. Enough personal connection. I was here for answers, not attachments. To help her find her husband, not to wonder about her life or her marriage or the space she occupied in the world.

"Tell me about yesterday," I said, voice returning to its neutral register, slipping back into the comfortable cadence of professional inquiry. "From the beginning."

And so, with a breath that seemed to steady her, a visible gathering of composure, Jenny began.

"Nial had just finished in the shower. He was staring off into the mirror. He was distracted. I could tell something was bothering him, so I rubbed his damp shoulder gently. It always relaxed him so quickly when I did that."

I bet it did, I thought, then cursed myself silently for the lapse, for the immediate and inappropriate image that flashed through my mind. The intimacy in her tone—so calm, so measured, so matter-of-fact about physical affection—disarmed me in ways I hadn't anticipated. Not just because of what she said, but how she said it. Her words didn't land like witness statements, didn't maintain the emotional distance most people instinctively created when describing their lives to strangers. They unfurled like memories, lived-in and soft-edged, carrying the texture of actual experience rather than recounted fact.

There was affection in every syllable, an unselfconscious intimacy that spoke of years together, of bodies and routines known so well they'd become unconscious. And it struck me harder than I'd expected, landing somewhere I'd thought was safely armoured against such things.

I shifted uncomfortably in my chair, suddenly aware of my own posture, of the throb in my wrist beneath its neat bandage, and the stark contrast between the warmth of her recollection and the cold sterility of this room, of my own solitary life. The line between professional detachment and personal reaction blurred for a moment, wavered like a heat mirage, but I caught myself before it could slip further.

"And then his phone rang," she said, her gaze not meeting mine now, focused instead on her hands folded in her lap. "He went off to the bedroom to take the call."

I leaned forward slightly, professional interest sharpening. Now we're getting somewhere, I thought. A sudden phone call, taken privately, followed by a disappearance. Not the first time I'd heard that sequence in a missing persons case. In fact, it was almost standard—the catalyst, the moment when normal routines fractured and something else began.

"Do you know who he was speaking to?" I asked, keeping my tone neutral, careful not to crowd her, not to suggest any particular answer or interpretation.

"No." She shook her head, frustration evident in the movement. "I disrobed myself and got into the shower."

There it was again—that unflinching honesty, that complete absence of self-consciousness about sharing intimate details. No artifice, no embellishment, no attempt to maintain privacy or dignity. Just detail, delivered with the precision of someone who understood that in investigations, everything might matter, that the smallest detail could be the one that broke a case open.

And yet, it jarred something in me. The mention of her undressing came out with such matter-of-fact simplicity that it shouldn't have affected me—but it did. Not because of what she said, but because it was a glimpse into a private world, unguarded and unfiltered. Too human. Too real. Too intimate for this stark room with its fluorescent lights and scratched table.

I reminded myself to remain focused, pulled my attention back to the facts being presented rather than the images they conjured.

"What happened after the phone call?" I asked, pushing the interview forward, moving past the moment that had unsettled me.

"Well, I was still in the shower when he poked his head in to say that he was just going out to meet with a new client about a potential fencing job. And then I assume he left."

A fencing job. The detail lodged in my mind immediately, something concrete to investigate, to verify or disprove. It wasn't much, but it was something. I wrote it down carefully, underlining new client twice with firm strokes of the pen. Fencing contractors were usually booked weeks in advance, worked from established client lists and referrals—someone calling out of the blue for an urgent job raised questions, suggested irregularity.

"You assume?" I prompted, catching on the vagueness of her last sentence, the gap between what she'd witnessed and what she'd inferred.

"When I was done in the shower, he was not about. His ute was also gone."

That drew a slow breath from me, involuntary, the air catching slightly in my throat.

Another ute.

The threads were beginning to tangle in a way that couldn't be ignored, couldn't be dismissed as coincidence or pattern-seeking in unrelated data. Jamie—gone. Kain—gone. Kain's ute—missing. Now Nial—also gone, with his vehicle. The connections weren't yet clear, the mechanism linking them still obscure, but they were tightening. If I tugged on one thread, what else would unravel? What larger pattern would emerge from these individual disappearances?

"And the dog?" I asked, pulling my attention back to the immediate case rather than the larger pattern I was beginning to perceive. "Did you say before that your dog was also missing?"

She nodded, then frowned, the expression suggesting internal conflict about how to characterise the situation. "Yes," then quickly shook her head. "And no."

I looked up from my notes, pen stilling. "Sorry?"

"Well, yes, Buffy is now missing. But she wasn't earlier in the morning. Sammy was playing with her after Nial had left."

That changed things. Changed the timeline, changed the interpretation of events, added complexity to what had seemed like a simple sequence.

The distinction between Nial's disappearance and the dog's absence suggested separation of events, different agents or causes. Buffy had been home after Nial left. That could mean he hadn't intended to be gone long, hadn't planned an extended absence. Or that someone else had returned to the house later, after he'd departed. Someone who'd taken or removed the dog for reasons I couldn't yet imagine.

"Was the house locked when you noticed Nial wasn't back?"

"Yes. Front and back. I even checked the side gate. Everything was shut up. Nothing disturbed. Not until... well, not until she was gone too."

"Buffy?"

"Yes. She's never wandered before. If anything, she's lazy. Always glued to Sammy's side. He's been crying himself sick since last night."

Her voice cracked on that final sentence, the first real break in her composure since we'd begun. The emotion she'd been suppressing up until now trembled to the surface like something breaking through ice. She blinked hard, fighting tears that wanted to come, maintaining control through visible effort.

I gave her a moment, letting the silence speak for itself, providing space for emotion without demanding its expression or suppression.

This woman wasn't simply reporting a missing husband in some abstract, administrative sense. She was reporting a rupture in her life, a fundamental disruption of the patterns that defined her existence. A household disturbed in stages, normality unravelling thread by thread.

As I scribbled another note—dog taken after N left? Who? Why?—I caught the tremor in my handwriting and paused to steady my pen. My wrist ached, but it wasn't just the injury from this morning's window-breaking—it was the pressure of something rising, building, demanding attention. A case that had begun with vague concern now pulsed with urgency, with the sense that time mattered, that delays could have consequences I didn't want to contemplate.

Three disappearances. Two vehicles. Three stories that didn't quite add up, that violated the known patterns of the missing persons' lives in ways their families couldn't accept.

"Sammy, your son?" I asked, seeking clarity on the family setup, though her tone had already told me more than her words ever could about the relationship between father and son.

"Yes. He's almost four." Her voice cracked under the weight of it, the careful control fracturing again. "He misses his father so much already. He was so upset when Nial wasn't there to tuck him into bed and read him his bedtime story. They have a nightly routine."

She paused, swallowing hard, throat working against tears, and I saw them forming—not the theatrical kind deployed for manipulation or sympathy, but the silent, hot tears of someone keeping themselves from breaking apart by the sheer will of habit, by the determination not to collapse when collapsing would mean admitting defeat.

The mention of a child altered the emotional landscape of the room entirely, shifted everything into sharper, more painful focus. A three-year-old boy—almost four, she'd specified, as if those months mattered, as if the approaching birthday made everything more urgent—waiting for a father who never came home. That simple image—one I had encountered in too many homes, too many statements, too many bedrooms still lined with Lego bricks and soft toys and books waiting to be read—struck harder than most.

It cast Nial's disappearance in a different light, gave it weight and specificity it hadn't fully possessed when he was just "a husband." Not just a man gone, but a father—a nightly constant, an essential presence in a small child's universe—missing from his child's world.

I reached out instinctively, laying my gloved hand over hers before I'd consciously decided to do it. It was warm, trembling slightly beneath my palm. The contact felt significant, more intimate than the professional distance should allow. "It's okay, Jenny. We'll find Nial," I said softly, though inside, I knew better than to offer guarantees, knew that promising outcomes in missing persons cases was a rookie mistake, a kindness that could transform into cruelty if the promise couldn't be kept.

Still, people in that much pain don't need probability—they need possibility. A thread of hope to hold onto, however frayed and thin. Something to keep them moving forward rather than collapsing under the weight of worst-case scenarios.

Her hand gripped mine. Just for a second, her fingers tightening before releasing. The pressure was brief but conveyed volumes—gratitude, desperation, a silent plea that I not be like the others, that I actually follow through.

"Why aren't all police officers as kind as you?" she asked, the words emerging quietly, almost wonderingly.

I hesitated, caught off-guard by the directness of the question, by the implied criticism of my colleagues. There was gratitude in her voice, yes, but bitterness too—a subtle indictment of those who'd treated her like a statistic rather than a person, who'd hidden behind procedure and criteria whilst a woman's husband vanished and her child cried himself to sleep.

I gave a small shake of my head, redirecting. "What do you mean? Have you already spoken to another officer?"

"Yes, of course," she said quickly, the words emerging with residual frustration.

There it was. The gap in the timeline, the thing she hadn't mentioned yet. It was almost always there—people went to the authorities before they reached detectives, encountered the front-line responders whose job was to filter and categorise, to determine what qualified for investigative resources and what didn't. She'd likely encountered a uniformed officer or someone on triage duty, someone who had followed procedure perfectly and left her with little else.

"Really? Please, do tell," I encouraged, though I was bracing for what would follow, already anticipating the story. Most early reports—especially ones involving missing adults—went nowhere fast, got categorised as "not urgent" or "insufficient evidence" or "likely voluntary absence."

"Well naturally, after Buffy disappeared—which gave me quite the fright—I called the police to report her disappearance," she said, then added with more hesitation, with the tone of someone confessing something shameful, "and Nial's."

The sequencing was intriguing, revealing something about her psychology and priorities. The dog's disappearance came first in her narrative mind. Not because Buffy was more important than her husband—of course not. But because that was the moment things shifted from strange to serious, from concerning to frightening. When your husband doesn't come home after saying he'll be late, you worry. When your dog vanishes too, inexplicably, from a locked house, you panic. That's when abstract concern crystallises into concrete fear.

"But they didn't seem too worried about Nial, did they, Mrs Triffett?"

She let out a huff, a sound of pure exasperation. "No."

"And why was that?"

She looked down at her hands, then closed her eyes briefly. I could see the war playing out behind her closed lids—the struggle between self-protection and the need to be heard, between maintaining dignity and exposing the painful suggestions that had been made about her husband, her marriage, her judgment.

"You can tell me the truth, Jenny," I said, gentler this time, deliberately using her first name to signal that this was a safe space, that judgment wouldn't be forthcoming. "I won't judge you."

Her eyes flew open, blazing with sudden anger. "Judge me! You're no different to the rest of them. I know what you're all thinking."

The flash of anger was sharp and unfiltered, raw in a way that suggested I'd touched exactly the wound I'd been trying to avoid. There was pain underneath it—a raw, festering hurt barely held in check, the accumulated injury of being dismissed and doubted and having aspersions cast on her husband's character, on their marriage, on everything she thought she knew.

I didn't flinch. Didn't correct her assumption. Didn't defend myself or my colleagues. I just waited, maintaining eye contact, showing through my stillness that I could absorb her anger without retaliating, without shutting down. And when her breathing slowed slightly, when the initial flash of rage burned itself out, I said it for her, named the thing she was struggling to articulate.

"They questioned his fidelity, didn't they?"

She stared at me, long enough that I wondered if she was going to tell me to leave her alone, to get out, to stop making her relive this humiliation. Then, finally, a small nod. Barely perceptible, but definite.

"Yes," she whispered.

The word hung in the air, heavier than it had any right to be, weighted with all the implications and insults that came with it.

It wasn't new territory. Missing husbands, like missing wives, too often triggered the same cynical assumptions from investigators who'd seen too many cases resolve themselves into affairs and abandoned families. "He's having an affair." "He'll turn up after the weekend with a hangover and weak excuses." "Give it time—they always come back or they don't want to be found." Procedure dressed up as wisdom, pattern-recognition calcified into prejudice.

But hearing it from her lips—not as a suspicion she harboured, but as something imposed upon her by people meant to help, by the system she'd turned to in desperation—was different. It transformed an institutional failure into a personal violation.

"Did you believe it?" I asked softly now, genuinely curious about her answer rather than just fishing for information.

She looked at me, defensive at first, barriers rising against judgment. But something in my tone must have reassured her, must have communicated that the question was honest rather than accusatory.

"No," she said firmly, conviction solid beneath the word. "I didn't. I don't. He wouldn't do that to us. Not to Sammy."

And the way she said "us"—not "me," not his wife, but us, the collective unit—made it feel like a small, fragile kingdom. Her, Nial, the little boy, and the dog. Four beings holding on to their rituals and routines like an anchor in a world that shifted too easily, that threatened to dissolve the certainties they'd built their lives upon.

I nodded, jotting something down though it wasn't strictly necessary, though I'd remember this exchange without notes. I just needed a second to collect myself, to process the sudden surge of emotion her words had triggered. The room felt warmer now, or maybe it was my bandaged wrist beginning to sting again under the strain, the cuts protesting the extended interview. Or perhaps it was simply the tension of knowing I was hearing yet another version of a story I already knew, another iteration of a pattern I was only beginning to recognise.

Someone disappears.

Someone who loves them says "it's not like them."

And someone else—someone with authority, with the power to help or hinder—shrugs and says "they'll turn up."

Except sometimes they don't.

Sometimes they're gone forever, and the people left behind spend the rest of their lives wondering what they missed, what they could have done differently, whether that last conversation or touch or moment together could have changed anything.

I pressed on, the weight of my earlier thoughts coalescing into a sharper line of questioning. I knew she was holding something back—not in malice or deliberate deception, but in fear. The kind that clutches at the throat, that makes you question whether speaking a truth might somehow make it more real, might transform possibility into certainty.

"And there was something else you told them, wasn't there, Jenny?" I asked gently, my voice barely above a murmur. "Something that pressed them to conclude you had no case for a missing person's report."

She didn't speak immediately—just nodded. A slow, almost imperceptible tilt of the head. A tear escaped from beneath her closed eyelid, streaking down her cheek like the last trace of something she'd fought desperately to hold back. It glistened in the thin fluorescent light, unbidden and unashamed, a physical manifestation of the pain she could no longer fully contain.

"What did you tell them?" I asked, my voice softer now, almost apologetic for having to ask, for forcing her to speak the words that had sealed her husband's case as "not urgent."

"While the police were with me," she said quietly, each word emerging with visible effort, "I received a text message from Nial. He said that he was still with the potential client and was going to be home late."

"Fuck."

The word left me before I could stop it—raw and unfiltered, erupting from some place deeper than professional consideration. It was unprofessional, inappropriate, exactly the kind of reaction that would get you reprimanded in any normal interview situation.

The moment it escaped, I felt a ripple of regret—not for the sentiment, which was entirely accurate, but for letting it show so openly, for dropping the mask of detached professionalism. Procedure dictated restraint, emotional control, careful management of the power dynamic between detective and witness.

But that single syllable had done what caution could not—it opened something in her. Her eyes lifted to mine, wide and vulnerable and searching, and for the first time since we sat down, I saw not just a witness, not just a wife reporting her husband missing—but someone desperately trying to believe the world hadn't suddenly turned upside down, that reality was still something she could trust.

She didn't flinch at the profanity. In fact, I think it comforted her in some strange way. It meant I wasn't just another clipboard with a badge and a script. It meant I understood the significance of what she'd just told me. It meant I cared enough to have an emotional response rather than just recording facts and moving on to the next question.

A message. Of course there was a message. There's always a message these days. The soft digital alibi, delivered from a distance, written in just enough vagueness to keep the wolves at bay whilst providing plausible deniability. It's the new currency of disappearance, the modern replacement for phone calls that could be traced or letters that required physical presence to post.

Just like Jamie supposedly being "in Melbourne," according to Louise’s explanation of events. Just like Luke saying Kain "never showed up," despite all evidence suggesting he'd arrived at the house.

The pattern was screaming at me now, impossible to ignore.

"He told me not to wait up for him," she added quietly, the tremor in her voice tugging at something deep in my chest, pulling at emotional strings I'd thought I'd successfully severed years ago. "He's never said that to me before."

I noted the shift immediately—not just in tone, but in substance. A change in routine, in the established patterns of their communication. A new phrase introduced into an otherwise stable domestic vocabulary. Words like those don't just arrive randomly—they carry intent. And whether that intent is to soothe, deflect, or deceive, it rarely means nothing.

People are creatures of habit, especially in long-term relationships. They develop linguistic patterns, established ways of saying goodbye or goodnight or I love you. When those patterns break, when new phrases appear that violate the established grammar of a relationship, it's worth noting. It's often significant.

I leaned back slightly, the legs of the chair squealing across the floor—sharp and metallic, far too loud for the fragile stillness that had settled in the room. Jenny didn't even flinch, didn't register it consciously. Her gaze had gone distant again, drifting somewhere far from this interview room, back to a home now too quiet, a bed too cold, a child asking questions she couldn't answer.

It would have been easy—almost comforting in its familiarity—to begin assembling the standard narrative: man under financial stress, meets someone new, stages a slow fade from domestic life. The pieces could fit, just as they had in other cases over the years. Just as they fit in dozens of cases across Tasmania every year, men and women who walked away from marriages and families and responsibilities without warning or explanation.

The statistical likelihood pointed in that direction. Most missing persons weren't victims of foul play—they were people who'd chosen to disappear, who'd built new lives elsewhere, who'd decided that starting over somewhere else was preferable to dealing with whatever complications they were running from.

And yet, something gnawed at me, refused to let me settle into that comfortable explanation.

Because Louise had said the same thing about Jamie. It's not like him. He wouldn't just leave without saying goodbye properly. He wouldn't abandon his family like this.

Because Jamie had vanished in just as many layers of soft ambiguity, of text messages and vague explanations and suggestions of trips that didn't quite add up.

Because Kain had driven off to look for his uncle and simply never returned, his vehicle still unrecovered.

Because now there was Nial. Another man, another vehicle, another vague last-known location. Another family insisting this wasn't like him, that something was wrong. And another text message—always a text, never a voice call, never a face-to-face conversation. Never anything that required real-time presence or couldn't be easily faked.

The pattern wasn't just emerging anymore—it was pounding against my skull like a headache that refused to go away.

Jenny's certainty, like Louise's before her, wasn't rooted in denial or delusion—it was grounded in pattern recognition of a different kind. In the muscle memory of a life shared with someone whose behaviours and responses had become as familiar as breathing. That's what you come to know in long partnerships, in marriages that work. The texture of someone's absence. Whether it's an accident, a betrayal, or something worse. Whether the silence feels like choice or like something that's been imposed.

And in her voice, in her tears, in the way she held herself together whilst simultaneously falling apart, I could feel that she didn't believe he had chosen to disappear. She believed he had been taken—from her, from his son, from the life they'd built together. Removed rather than departed.

And a part of me—a growing, insistent part that I couldn't quite silence—was beginning to believe it too.

I exhaled slowly, trying to steady the tide of my own thoughts, to impose some order on the chaos accumulating in my mind. The room felt smaller somehow, the walls inching in as the air thickened with things unsaid—fears half-formed, connections unconfirmed, patterns emerging from data points that shouldn't be connected but somehow were.

"Do you know of a Luke Smith?" I asked, my voice kept carefully neutral, the question emerging as more of a probe than a direction.

The name escaped my mouth as a test, a thread cast out into the murky waters of coincidence, hoping it might snag something beneath the surface. I'd spoken it without preamble, without context, without warning. Just the name, isolated and hanging in the air between us. If she recognised it, her expression would change before the words even reached her lips. That was the hope, at least—that genuine recognition was faster than conscious deception, that the micro-expressions would betray knowledge even if she tried to hide it.

Jenny's brow furrowed slightly, confusion evident in the lines that formed. She tilted her head, the gesture unconscious, the body language of someone genuinely trying to place a name and coming up empty. "No. The name doesn't sound familiar." She paused, searching my face for clues about why I'd asked. "Should I know him?"

Her question held no defensiveness, no attempt at evasion. Only genuine puzzlement and a hint of concern that she was somehow failing to provide information I needed, that her ignorance might be hindering the investigation.

"No," I said simply, shaking my head, allowing a small smile that was meant to be reassuring. "Just... something I'm looking into."

The answer was deliberately vague, giving nothing away whilst also not shutting down the possibility entirely. And just like that, the thread slipped from my fingers and vanished into the depths. No visible link between her husband and Luke Smith. At least not one Jenny was aware of, not one that existed in her conscious knowledge of Nial's life and work and social connections.

But that didn't mean the connection didn't exist. That was the thing about investigations—absence of evidence wasn't evidence of absence. Hobart was small—small enough that lives overlapped in ways people didn't always notice or acknowledge. Small enough that someone could be central to multiple people's stories without those people ever knowing about each other.

I tucked the name back into my thoughts like a note slipped into a coat pocket. Not discarded. Not dismissed. Just deferred, filed away for later consideration when I had more context, more information, more pieces of the puzzle assembled.

"Are you going to help me?" Jenny's voice broke through the fog of analysis, raw and sincere, cutting through my internal theorising to remind me that this wasn't an abstract puzzle—it was a woman's husband, a child's father, a life interrupted.

The question struck something inside me, reverberating in places I'd thought were safely insulated from such things. A plea, not for policy or process, but for basic human compassion. For someone to care enough to actually try rather than just follow procedure and file reports. It was the kind of question that forced clarity—reminded you why you took the oath in the first place, why you'd chosen this profession over easier, safer, less soul-destroying options.

"Yes," I said without hesitation, the word emerging with more conviction than I'd felt about anything in weeks. "I am."

The words were simple. Final. A commitment made not because procedure demanded it or because the criteria had been met, but because it was right. Because I could see the pattern forming and couldn't turn away from it. Because despite the ethical quagmire I'd already sunk myself into that morning—trespassing, staged evidence, a window shattered by my own hand, injuries I was actively concealing—I still had some shred of the detective I used to be.

I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out one of my slightly crumpled business cards—the ones I'd had printed when I made Senior Detective, when the promotion had felt like achievement rather than burden. I smoothed it with my thumb before sliding it across the scratched tabletop towards her, the gesture somehow significant, a physical token of commitment.

"I'll open a case file. It won't be official—not yet—but it will be real. I'll treat this as a proper investigation, not just a filed report. You call me if he contacts you again. Even if it's just another text. Especially if it's just another text."

Jenny took the card as though it were a lifeline thrown to someone drowning, as though it represented hope in physical form. Her fingers touched mine briefly in the exchange, and the contact was warm and grounding—startling in its honesty, in the simple humanity of physical touch in this sterile space. Her gratitude didn't need to be spoken, didn't require words to convey. It was written in the way her shoulders eased, in the slight lift of her chin, in the shimmer of hope that passed through her eyes like sunlight breaking through clouds.

"Whatever you need to do your job," she said, the words emerging as both promise and plea. A quiet vow. A passing of trust from her hands to mine, a burden I accepted even knowing I might not be able to bear it successfully.

I nodded, managed a smile—thin, tired, but real. As real as anything I'd offered anyone in weeks.

As I watched her tuck the card into her bag with careful deliberation, treating it like something precious, I couldn't help but feel the shift in the room, in myself. Something about this case—about her, about the pattern I was beginning to see—had already begun to occupy a space in me I couldn't quite define. It wasn't romantic. Not in any conscious sense, not in any way I'd act upon or even fully acknowledge. But it was intimate, in the way that shared grief and determination often were. Her pain mirrored Louise's in uncanny ways—the quiet certainty, the refusal to accept the story being handed to them, the knowledge that something fundamental had been disrupted in their worlds.

And I couldn't help but see myself reflected in that same mirror—someone who knew when something didn't sit right, who could feel the wrongness beneath the surface explanations, even if he couldn't yet explain why or prove it. Someone willing to trust instinct over procedure when the two came into conflict.

As Jenny left the interview room with a quiet "thank you" that carried the weight of desperate hope, I remained seated, staring at the empty chair she'd vacated. I saw it not just as a place where a witness had sat, but as a space now occupied by responsibility, by expectation, by the weight of promises made.

Two women. Two stories. Louise. Jenny.

And three men with two missing vehicles. Jamie. Kain. Nial.

The symmetry was no longer subtle. It was screaming at me, demanding to be heard, refusing to be ignored or dismissed as coincidence.

And I was listening.

Even if it meant everything else—my rank, my future, my carefully buried past, my increasingly fragile grip on ethical behaviour—had to fall by the wayside in the process.

I would find them.

All of them.

Whatever it took.

Whatever lines I had to cross.

Whatever price I ultimately had to pay.