Five Letters, No Trace

"There's a window between when you learn something and when the paperwork starts. What you do in that window defines what kind of copper you are."

I stopped outside Interview Room Three, Ellen's paper still folded in my hand.

The corridor was empty. That Saturday stillness pressing in from all directions, the building breathing slowly around me like something waiting to see what I'd do next. I had minutes at most before Karl arrived, before Sarah brought him here looking like warmed-over death and smelling of last night's regrets, before this became an official investigation with official channels and official limitations. Before I had to be Sergeant Claiborne instead of whatever I was right now—a man standing in a corridor with someone else's secrets burning a hole in his palm.

I unfolded the paper. Read the name. Five letters.

The connection wasn't immediately clear—but Ellen didn't pass names without reason. She'd spent thirty years building a map of how things actually worked in this state, who pulled which strings, which closets held which skeletons. Whatever thread linked this person to Thomas Jeffries, to the watchers Louise had surely noticed over the years, to the silence that had swallowed Charles a decade ago—that thread was real. Ellen had been sitting on it. Waiting for the right moment, the way a fisherman waits for the tide to turn before casting.

Louise Jeffries walking into the station had been that moment.

I pulled a scrap of paper from my own pocket—a corner torn from an old report, the kind of debris that accumulated in jacket linings over years of carrying too much paperwork and never quite clearing it out—and copied the name in my own hand. Quick. Hurried. My handwriting came out worse than usual, the letters cramped and angular, betraying the adrenaline I could feel humming beneath my skin. Then I folded Ellen's original and slipped it into my inner pocket, against my chest where I could feel it through my shirt like a second heartbeat. That one would be burned later, reduced to ash that couldn't testify. What I gave Louise needed to be untraceable to anyone but me.

I pushed open the door.

The room hit me with its particular atmosphere—stale air, disinfectant, the accumulated residue of a thousand difficult conversations soaked into the walls like old smoke. Louise looked up from her chair, her posture shifting from weary patience to sharp attention in the space of a breath. She'd been counting minutes again—I could see it in the way her eyes moved to the clock on the wall and back to my face, calculating how long I'd been gone, what might have happened in that time.

"We don't have long," I said, crossing to the table in three strides. "Jenkins is on his way. Lahey's bringing him now."

She frowned. "What's happened?"

I didn't sit. Couldn't. The urgency was real—not performed, not tactical—and sitting would have cost seconds I didn't have. Would have meant settling into the familiar rhythm of interview, question and answer, the careful dance we'd done for months after Charles vanished. This wasn't that. This was something else entirely.

"I just received word," I said, reaching into my jacket. My fingers found the scrap of paper, the corners already soft from handling. "Through channels I can't discuss. This doesn't leave this room, Louise. And it has nothing to do with whatever's happened to Kain or Jamie. You need to keep those things separate in your mind. Completely separate. Can you do that?"

Her expression didn't waver. "Yes."

Of course she could. Louise Jeffries had been building compartments in her mind since before I'd met her, probably since childhood, learning to keep the parts of herself that mattered locked away where they couldn't be touched. The woman who'd sat across from me month after month in the aftermath of Charles's disappearance, answering questions without ever breaking, without ever giving me anything I could use—she understood how to keep things separate better than most detectives I'd trained. Better than me, probably, if I was honest about it.

I slid the paper across the table. The name faced her, five letters in my hurried scrawl, the ink still slightly tacky where my sweating palm had smudged the final letter.

"Memorise it. Then give it back."

She looked at it. I watched her eyes move across the letters, tracking them left to right, then right to left, committing them to whatever locked room she kept for information too dangerous to speak aloud. Her face gave nothing away. She might have been reading a shopping list, a weather report, anything ordinary. But I could see the tension in her jaw, the slight flare of her nostrils as she breathed in through her nose and held it.

Then she refolded the paper and slid it back across the scarred surface of the table.

"What does this person have to do with Thomas?"

"I can't tell you that." My voice came out flat. Final. The way it had to, the way I'd trained it to sound when there was no room for negotiation. "I shouldn't even be telling you this much. But after what happened with Charles—after everything—"

I stopped. Felt my jaw tighten around words I couldn't say, teeth grinding against each other like I was trying to chew through something that wouldn't break down. Ten years of unanswered questions. Ten years of watching the Jeffries family circle around a wound that never healed, never scarred over, just kept bleeding in ways only they could see. And now Kain was missing. Jamie was missing. And the threads were starting to pull together in ways I couldn't yet see but could feel in my gut, the way you feel a storm coming before the sky changes, pressure building in your sinuses and something electric in the air.

"You deserved to know there's a thread," I said. "If anything happens. If things escalate. That name might be useful."

"Is Thomas in danger?"

"I don't know."

"Is Thomas dangerous?"

The question hit harder than I'd expected—like a fist I hadn't seen coming, landing somewhere in my chest where the soft parts were. Not because it was unfair—it wasn't—but because I didn't have an answer. Thomas Jeffries had been a shadow at the edge of my awareness for years. Watched by people whose names I didn't know, for reasons I couldn't confirm. Connected to things that operated below the surface of official channels, in the spaces between what was written down and what actually happened.

"I don't know that either," I said. "And that's the truth."

She nodded slowly. I could see her filing that away too—the uncertainty itself a kind of information, a data point in whatever calculation she was running behind those sharp eyes. If I'd been sure of Thomas's innocence, I would have said so. If I'd been sure of his guilt, I wouldn't be standing here at all, wouldn't be passing information to his wife in a room designed to extract confessions from people who had things to hide.

"When this investigation proceeds," I said, dropping my voice lower, barely above a murmur, "into Kain and Jamie—I need you to understand something. If this becomes relevant, I'll be the one to raise it. Not you. You don't mention Thomas. You don't mention anything we've discussed. You focus entirely on your son and your brother. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"If you bring this up yourself, it complicates things. For you, for Thomas, for the investigation. It creates connections that may not exist. It muddies the water."

"I understand."

"And if anyone asks about your husband's whereabouts—"

"He's in Melbourne," she said, her voice perfectly level, not a tremor in it. "Board meeting. He'll be back tomorrow evening. I didn't want to worry him until I had more information."

I held her gaze. Saw the steel underneath the exhaustion, underneath the fear she was carrying for her son and her brother, underneath everything. The woman who'd learned to survive by knowing exactly what face to wear and when, who'd married into a family that demanded masks as the price of entry and had paid that price without complaint.

"Good."

I glanced toward the door. Still quiet beyond it. But time was running out—I could feel it draining away, sand through fingers, each second bringing Karl closer.

"Charlie," Louise said quickly, her voice dropping to barely more than a breath. "Whatever this is—whatever they think Thomas has done or might do—does it have anything to do with Charles? With what happened in 2008?"

I felt my face close. Couldn't help it—the shutters came down before I could stop them, years of training taking over, protecting me from saying things I'd regret. Some doors weren't meant to be opened—not here, not now, not with Karl minutes away and the official machinery about to grind into motion, gears turning that couldn't be stopped once they started.

"I can't answer that."

Which was, of course, an answer. We both knew it. The silence I offered was louder than anything I could have said.

She leaned forward, her hands flat on the table now, the careful folded composure finally breaking. "They've been watching him for years."

Not a question. A statement. And the confirmation I'd suspected but never received—that Louise had seen the patterns too. The surveillance. The careful distance certain people kept from the Jeffries family while never quite looking away. The sense of being observed from angles you couldn't identify, tracked by eyes that belonged to no one you could name.

"Who?" I asked.

The word came out louder than I'd intended. My voice wasn't built for whispers—thirty years of commanding rooms had trained the subtlety out of it, had turned my vocal cords into instruments designed for cutting through noise and making people listen whether they wanted to or not. The question echoed slightly against the institutional walls, bouncing back at me like an accusation, and I saw Louise's mouth open to answer—

Footsteps in the corridor. Close. Too close.

My hand moved before conscious thought, crumpling the paper into my fist. I felt my posture shift, muscles realigning, the professional mask reassembling itself over whatever had been showing underneath. Sergeant Claiborne, stepping back into place like armour being donned, like a costume I'd worn so long it felt more real than the man inside it.

The knock came.

"Oh, Sergeant," Sarah's voice called through the door. She pushed it open with a casualness that didn't quite ring true—something in the rhythm of it was off, a half-beat too slow, the kind of entrance you made when you'd heard something and were pretending you hadn't.

My fist tightened around the paper. Louise's face had gone blank. Perfect composure. The mask she'd worn for a decade, sliding back into place without a seam showing, without a crack visible anywhere. Two people who'd learned to hide what they were thinking, now hiding it from the one person in the doorway who might have reason to wonder.

"Did you find Jenkins?" I asked, already knowing the answer. Of course she had.

"Yes," Sarah replied. "He's on his way now."

I didn't look at Louise as I passed. Didn't acknowledge our conversation, didn't offer reassurance or farewell, didn't let my eyes meet hers in any way that might be remembered or reported. Any warmth now would only invite questions. Any human acknowledgement would be a thread someone might pull later, unravelling everything.

I walked out. Sarah followed. The door closed behind us with a click.

In my fist, the paper with the name—my handwriting, my responsibility, my neck on the block if anyone ever found out—was already softening from the heat of my grip, the fibres breaking down, the ink probably smearing against my palm. I'd burn it later. Find a quiet moment, a bathroom with a lock, a match or a lighter, and watch the name turn to smoke and ash. The name was Louise's now, locked in whatever compartment she'd built for things too dangerous to speak aloud.

The corridor stretched ahead, fluorescent lights humming their endless complaint, the station going about its Saturday business as if nothing had changed. Karl was coming, probably still looking like something scraped off the bottom of a pub floor. The official investigation was about to begin, with all its forms and protocols and documented chains of custody.

And underneath it all, threads were pulling tighter—threads that connected Luke Smith to Jamie Greyson, Jamie Greyson to Louise Jeffries, Louise Jeffries to a name I'd just passed across a table in a room designed to make people feel small. Threads I couldn't see clearly yet but could feel, tugging at something in my chest, drawing patterns I didn't understand.

I didn't know where those threads led. Not yet.

But I was starting to feel the shape of something larger. Something that had been building for years, maybe decades, growing in the dark like roots beneath pavement, waiting for the right moment to crack through the surface and show itself.

Today might be that moment.

I straightened my shoulders, felt them crack, felt the exhaustion pull at my spine like weights hung from my vertebrae. Thirty-odd hours without sleep. A case that was already tangled beyond anything I could pretend to understand. And somewhere in this building, a woman I'd just made complicit in something that could end both our careers.