Four Names in the Smallest Room

Louise Jeffries had been waiting eleven minutes inside the smallest interview room of Hobart Police Station by the time the door finally opened. For ten years she had handled Jeffries matters the Jeffries way — quietly, privately, the family's reputation wrapped around every decision like a shroud — and for ten years the result had been the same: silence, absence, a father-in-law who had stopped existing one afternoon in 2008, and a police sergeant who had sat across from her month after month that year without ever getting the answers he was hunting for. She had come to Interview Room Three this morning because her son was missing, her brother was missing, and she was finally done being quiet.

Sergeant Charlie Claiborne opened the door on a knee that had seized up some time ago and was no longer forgiving him for it. He was walking into this room carrying a morning that had already broken into pieces once, on a name Linda Hodgman had brought to his office door an hour earlier in a voice she reserved for twice a year.

Detective Sarah Lahey followed him through the door seven minutes later than she was supposed to, with a heavy silver Mont Blanc pen in her fist that she had taken from the meticulously ordered desk of her partner. Her partner was not in the building to be asked first. The weighted warmth of the borrowed pen inside her closed hand was the only friendly object she had carried into the room.

The formalities at the scarred table were brief. Louise's hand trembled as she shook Sarah's. Charlie opened with a question that had two words too many in it — this time — and Louise felt the slap of it before she had decided how to answer.

The first name came out in clipped separate syllables. Her son. The second, after a pause she had built deliberately. Her brother. Then the descriptor, flat and exact: her brother, the gay one. Sarah, not quite following the rhythm, asked a follow-up that landed wrong, and Louise snapped the answer back with the practised speed of a woman who had spent most of her adult life turning grief into defence. Sarah flinched. Louise had not come to manage her.

Then the third name. Luke Smith.

It travelled the short distance across the scarred table and arrived inside Charlie Claiborne's chest with the small hard click of a round finally chambering. He kept his face very still. He asked Louise, in the voice he used when he wanted a witness to keep going, why she did not trust Luke Smith.

Louise turned to look at him properly. And the word she used in her reply put everything into the air at once.

Charlie.

Not Sergeant. Not Claiborne. Charlie. It landed against the institutional green of the walls like an alarm bell, and across the table Sarah's head turned sharply and caught the small fractional blush rising in her sergeant's face before he recovered it.

Louise pressed on in the same steady voice. She had not, she said, come to speculate. She had come to report a conclusion. She believed Luke Smith had done harm to both Jamie and Kain. And she wanted to speak with Detective Karl Jenkins.

The name Karl Jenkins was the fourth name to enter the room that morning, and it arrived with the particular weight of a request that was not really a request. Charlie cautioned her. Louise refused to be cautioned. Her gaze held his across the table with the pressure of a woman who had already decided.

Charlie turned to Sarah. The whispered instruction — find Jenkins — carried inside it a weight Sarah could not yet measure.

She rose, the silver pen still warm inside her fist, and left the scarred table behind her. The door clicked shut, and Louise and Charlie were alone in the smallest room in the building with a decade of shared silence pressing down on the air between them.