Kennel Four

"I can tell you what I saw. I can't tell you what I didn't see. And right now, what I didn't see is the problem." — Constable Evans

The morning shift started at six.

Evans arrived at five-forty, the way he always did — early enough to change into uniform without rushing, late enough that he didn't have to make conversation with the night shift officers who were counting down their final minutes. The locker room on the ground floor was empty when he pushed through the door, the fluorescent strips buzzing to life above him as though the building itself was only half awake.

He changed quickly. Uniform pressed the night before, boots polished while watching the football, belt assembled in the same order every time — radio, cuffs, torch, notebook. The routine was muscle memory now, eighteen months since graduating from Rokeby, fourteen months since transferring to Hobart. Long enough that the building had stopped feeling like someone else's workplace and started feeling like his.

The corridor outside the locker room was quiet. Night shift had drawn down to skeleton staffing — the Operations Control Room on the ground floor still manned, custody still monitored, but the rest of the building holding its breath between shifts. Evans could hear the distant murmur of the control room's radio traffic through the wall, the constant low chatter that never stopped regardless of the hour. Somewhere above him, the building's ventilation system pushed heated air through ducts that rattled faintly in the ceiling cavities.

His first task was the basement.

Every morning shift began with facility checks — a rotation shared among the junior constables that covered the ground floor public areas, the custody suite, and the basement services. Evans had drawn basement this week, which meant the vehicle garage, the K9 holding area, and a visual sweep of the corridors connecting the forensic laboratory and evidence lockup. He didn't enter the lab or the lockup — those were secured spaces with their own protocols — but he checked the doors, confirmed the access panels showed green, and noted anything that looked different from the day before.

He took the internal stairs rather than the lift. The stairwell was concrete, unadorned, the kind of space that existed purely to move people between floors without pretending to be anything other than functional. His boots echoed on the steps — a hollow, repeating sound that seemed louder than it should have been at this hour. The basement access door required his card and a four-digit code. He swiped, punched the numbers, heard the magnetic lock disengage.

The basement opened around him.

The vehicle garage stretched away to his left — fifty-two bays under strip lighting that ran in long parallel lines across the concrete ceiling. A mix of marked patrol cars, unmarked operational sedans, and the personal vehicles of officers and civilian staff who'd secured one of the building's limited parking allocations. At this hour, the garage was more empty than full — night shift patrol cars still out, personal bays waiting for the day shift arrivals who wouldn't begin filtering in for another hour. The occupied vehicles sat in scattered clusters, the gaps between them giving the space the feel of a room that hadn't finished filling.

Evans walked the central aisle, his torch off — the overhead strips provided enough light, and he'd learned early that switching on a torch in a lit space made you look like a trainee who hadn't figured out where the light switches were. He checked the vehicle log mounted on the wall near the roller door. Nothing flagged. He glanced down the rows — nothing out of place, nothing moved, the overnight stillness undisturbed.

He turned right at the far end of the garage, into the narrower corridor that led past the forensic laboratory and the evidence lockup towards the K9 facility. The corridor was dimmer here — fewer overhead strips, the concrete walls closer together, the ceiling lower. The building's mechanical systems were louder in this section, the bass hum of the climate control units vibrating through the floor beneath his feet.

The forensic lab door was closed, its access panel glowing green. He checked it without touching — visual confirmation, same as yesterday, same as every morning this week. The evidence lockup next — heavy steel door, dual-authentication panel, steady green indicator. He noted both in his logbook. Time: 06:03. All secure.

The K9 facility was at the end of the corridor, around a final corner where the basement narrowed to its furthest extent. Four individual kennels of stainless steel construction, each one approximately two metres deep by one and a half metres wide, mounted against the back wall. Concrete floor with drainage channels. A small preparation area to the left — sink, storage cupboard, food containers, lead hooks on the wall. The space was designed for short-term holding rather than permanent accommodation, a place for operational dogs to rest between deployments.

Three of the four kennels were empty. They'd been empty all week — no other handlers had dogs deployed from the station at present. The fourth kennel, the one closest to the corner, was Jargus's.

Evans had checked on the dog yesterday morning — his first day on the basement rotation. The house search team had brought Jargus in from Karl Jenkins' residence on Saturday afternoon, a German Shepherd who'd been alone for three days in a locked house, unfed, unwatered, waiting for an owner who hadn't come home. Senior Constable Hartley from the K9 unit had assessed him, fed him, settled him into the basement kennel as a temporary measure until longer-term arrangements could be made. Nobody had made those arrangements yet. The dog had been here less than two days, but his presence in the basement had already become a quiet fact of station life — something officers mentioned in passing, something the morning shift checked on without being asked. Nobody wanted to be the person who decided what happened to Karl Jenkins' dog, because deciding felt like giving up on Karl Jenkins coming back to claim him.

Yesterday morning had been Evans' first time seeing Jargus up close. He'd heard about the dog — everyone in the station had — but the kennel check had put him three metres from a German Shepherd who carried the same quiet intensity as the detective he belonged to. Jargus had heard Evans' footsteps from the corridor and had been standing when he rounded the corner, ears forward, watching. Not wagging, not barking. Just watching, the way a trained dog watched — assessing, categorising, waiting to see whether this particular set of footsteps belonged to the person he was waiting for.

Evans rounded the corner.

The preparation area was unchanged. Sink clean, cupboard closed, leads hanging on their hooks. The overhead strip light was on — it ran continuously in this section, no motion sensor, just permanent low-wattage illumination that the K9 protocols required for animal welfare.

The first three kennels were empty. Steel floors, steel walls, steel mesh doors. Each one locked with an electronic bolt that showed red when engaged and green when released. Red, red, red. Empty, empty, empty.

The fourth kennel was locked.

The electronic bolt glowed red. The steel mesh door was flush against its frame, the latch seated, the mechanism engaged. Evans could see the indicator clearly from three metres away — the small LED light steady and unblinking in the basement's permanent twilight.

The kennel was empty.

Evans stopped walking. His right hand, the one holding the logbook, lowered to his side. His left hand stayed where it was — hanging loose, fingers slightly curled, the posture of someone whose body had registered something before their mind had caught up.

He looked at the kennel. At the steel mesh door with its red indicator light. At the concrete floor inside, dry and clean. At the bedding — a heavy-duty canvas pad that Hartley had brought from the K9 unit's stores — sitting exactly where it had been placed, showing none of the compression or displacement that a thirty-five-kilogram dog would leave after a night of sleeping or pacing.

The bedding hadn't been slept on.

Evans stepped closer. His boots made a sound on the concrete that seemed to come from very far away. He was at the mesh now, close enough to press his face against it, close enough to see every corner of the two-metre space. The food bowl in the far left corner was empty — clean-empty, licked-empty, the way it had been yesterday morning after Evans had fed him at the start of his shift. Jargus had eaten yesterday's food. But the water bowl beside it was full to the brim, its surface perfectly still. If the dog had been in this kennel overnight, the water level would have dropped. Even a small amount. A dog drinks. A dog moves. A dog leaves evidence of its presence on every surface it touches — hair, scratches, moisture, the warmth of a body that had lain somewhere for hours.

There was nothing.

Evans tried the door. His hand closed around the mesh and pulled. The bolt held. He stepped back and looked at the empty kennel and ran through the obvious explanations first, the way he'd been trained to. Someone from the K9 unit had collected Jargus overnight — a transfer to the unit's own facility, or Hartley making longer-term arrangements. Or the night shift had taken him out for exercise and hadn't returned him yet. Or a decision had been made above Evans' level and nobody had thought to inform the morning rotation.

He checked the logbook.

Every K9 facility had one — a hardback A4 book mounted on a clipboard beside the preparation area sink. Every interaction with an animal in the holding kennels was recorded: feeding times, water changes, exercise, welfare checks, transfers in or out. The log was the paper trail that ensured continuity between shifts, that prevented a dog being fed twice or not at all, that documented who had accessed which kennel and when.

Evans flipped to the current page. Yesterday's entries were in three different hands. His own at 06:04 — Fed Jargus. Water topped up. Dog alert, eating well. A second entry at 14:20 in handwriting he didn't recognise — Welfare check. Dog resting. Water refreshed. A third at 19:35, signed by Constable Derwent — Evening feed. Exercised in garage bay 48 (15 mins). Returned to kennel. Dog settled. Bolt confirmed.

19:35. That was the last entry. Nearly eleven hours ago. Nothing after it. No overnight check — which wasn't unusual for short-term holding where the dog was healthy and settled. No transfer note. No collection record. No entry from anyone indicating that Jargus had been removed from the kennel for any reason.

According to the log, Jargus should still be here.

Evans looked at the kennel door. At the electronic bolt showing red. At the empty space behind the mesh where a thirty-five-kilogram German Shepherd should have been lying on a canvas pad that showed no sign of having been slept on.

He pulled the door again. The bolt held.

Evans looked at the empty kennel one more time. At the untouched water. At the unslept bedding. At the locked door with its steady red light. Then he turned and walked back along the corridor, past the evidence lockup, past the forensic laboratory, into the garage, his pace faster than the walk in, his boots louder on the concrete, the logbook forgotten in his hand.

He was at the internal stairs before he thought to use his radio. He keyed it and waited for the click.

"Control, this is Evans, basement level. I need Sergeant Briscoe down here."

A pause. The night shift operator's voice came back, bored with the final thirty minutes of a twelve-hour shift. "What's the nature, Evans?"

Evans stood in the stairwell with one hand on the radio and the other on the concrete wall and tried to find words for something he didn't have a category for. A missing dog. A locked cage. The absence of evidence that anything had been inside it for hours.

"The K9 holding area," he said. "Kennel four. Jargus is gone."

"Gone where?"

"That's what I'm trying to work out. The kennel is locked — bolt engaged, red light, mesh intact. The facility log shows Constable Derwent fed and exercised him at nineteen-thirty-five last night and returned him. That's the last entry. No transfer, no collection record, nothing to indicate he was removed. But the kennel is empty and the bedding hasn't been slept on."

The radio was silent for three seconds. In the Operations Control Room on the ground floor, a night shift operator processed a sequence of statements that individually made sense and collectively didn't, and decided it wasn't worth unpicking with twenty-eight minutes left on the clock.

"Copy, Evans. I'll page Briscoe."

Evans clipped the radio back to his belt. Stayed in the stairwell. Listened to the building breathe around him — the pipes, the ducts, the hum of a structure that housed a thousand systems designed to monitor, record, secure, and contain.

One of those systems had failed. Or none of them had. Evans couldn't decide which possibility was worse.

Briscoe arrived in seven minutes.

Evans heard him before he saw him — the stairwell door on the ground floor opening and closing, then footsteps descending. Not hurried. Briscoe didn't hurry. In thirty years of policing he'd learned that the speed at which you moved towards a problem determined how much control you had when you reached it. He came down the stairs at the same measured pace he brought to everything — deliberate, steady, the rhythm of a man who would assess before he reacted.

He was in uniform but incompletely assembled. Shirt buttoned, trousers pressed, boots on — but no belt, no radio, no equipment. He'd come straight from wherever he'd been when the page reached him, stopping only long enough to confirm the location. His face carried the expression Evans had seen on him dozens of times — neutral, receptive, holding space for information that hadn't arrived yet.

"Show me," Briscoe said.

Evans led him through the garage without speaking. Past the rows of vehicles, past the fleet log, into the narrower corridor. Briscoe's eyes moved the way they always moved — sweeping left and right, cataloguing, noting. The lab door: closed, green. The evidence lockup: closed, green. The corridor's overhead strips casting their permanent low light across the concrete. Everything in order. Everything exactly as it should be.

They rounded the final corner into the K9 facility.

Briscoe stopped beside Evans at the fourth kennel. He looked at it for a long time. His hands were at his sides. His breathing didn't change.

"Walk me through it."

"Last entry in the facility log is Constable Derwent at nineteen-thirty-five. Evening feed, fifteen minutes exercise in the garage, returned to kennel, bolt confirmed. Nothing after that. No overnight entries, no transfer notes, no collection records." Evans gestured at the logbook on the clipboard beside the sink. "I fed him yesterday morning at oh-six-oh-four. Derwent had him last. Between Derwent's entry and me arriving this morning — nothing."

"You've spoken to Derwent?"

"Not yet. He'd have been night shift or evening. He's either gone home or still in the building somewhere."

"Find him. After we're done here." Briscoe turned to the kennel. "And now."

"Red light. Bolt engaged. Door hasn't been opened. Bedding unslept on. Water bowl full. Food bowl licked clean from yesterday's feed."

Briscoe stepped forward. He didn't touch the mesh — he examined the bolt mechanism first, bending slightly to bring his eyes level with the electronic housing. The LED was steady red. No flickering, no fault indication. He looked at the frame where the bolt seated into the receiver. Clean. No tool marks, no scratches, no indication that anything had been forced or tampered with. The mesh itself was intact across every panel — no cuts, no bends, no separation from the frame. He moved along the kennel's exterior, checking each joint where steel met steel, each weld point, each corner where the mesh panels were riveted to the frame supports.

"These kennels," Briscoe said. "What's underneath?"

"Concrete slab. Same as the rest of the basement."

"Drainage?"

"Channels in the floor. Run to a central drain near the preparation area. The grates are bolted down — I checked them yesterday when I started the rotation."

Briscoe crouched. Looked at the concrete floor inside the kennel through the mesh. Looked at the drainage channel that ran along the base of the back wall. The grate was in place — a narrow steel strip, maybe fifteen centimetres wide, bolted at both ends. Even if the bolts were removed, the opening was far too narrow for a German Shepherd. For anything larger than a rat.

He stood. Looked at the water bowl. Full, surface undisturbed. Looked at the bedding. No compression, no displacement, no hair visible from this distance. Looked at the food bowl. Empty, licked clean.

"Who else has access to these kennels?"

"K9 handlers have their own cards. Senior Constable Hartley set Jargus up on Saturday — she'd have access. The duty sergeant's card opens all basement facilities. And any card with basement-level clearance would get you through the corridor doors, but the individual kennel bolts require a specific K9-authorised swipe."

"How many cards carry that authorisation?"

"I'd have to check with IT. Handlers, the K9 unit supervisor, duty sergeants. Maybe ten, twelve cards total."

Briscoe absorbed this without visible reaction. He turned from the kennel and surveyed the preparation area — sink, cupboard, leads on hooks. Everything in place. No signs of disturbance. No water on the floor that might suggest the dog had been removed and washed down. No hair caught on edges or corners that might indicate an animal being manoeuvred through a space it resisted moving through. No scratches on the floor beyond the ordinary wear of a facility that had been in use for fifteen years.

"The other kennels," Briscoe said. "Were they locked or unlocked?"

"Locked. All three. Red lights."

"When you arrived at the basement access door from the stairwell — was there anything different? Anything at all. The door, the corridor, the garage."

Evans had been asking himself the same question since he'd keyed the radio. He'd walked the route mentally three times while waiting for Briscoe, retracing every step from the stairwell to the kennel, looking for the detail he'd missed, the thing that was wrong that his eyes had passed over without registering.

"Nothing," he said. "Everything was exactly as I've seen it every morning this week. The garage was normal. The lab and lockup doors were green and sealed. The corridor was clear. There's nothing out of place anywhere between the stairs and this kennel."

Briscoe looked at him. Not with suspicion — with the steady appraisal of a sergeant who needed to know whether the constable in front of him was reporting accurately or filling gaps with assumptions.

"You're certain."

"I'm certain of what I saw, Sarge. I can't be certain of what I didn't see."

Something shifted in Briscoe's expression. Not approval exactly — recognition. The answer of a young officer who understood the difference between observation and interpretation.

"Right." Briscoe took one more look at the empty kennel. At the locked door with its red light. At the full water bowl and the unslept bedding. Then he made a decision. "This area is sealed as of now. Nobody enters, nobody touches anything. I want the corridor taped from the garage junction to this wall. Both directions."

"Sarge —"

"And I want the overnight surveillance footage from every camera in this basement pulled and ready to review within the hour. Every camera. Garage, corridors, stairwell access, the lot. If the lift was used overnight, I want that footage as well."

Evans was already reaching for his radio when Briscoe stopped him.

"Evans. One more thing."

"Sarge?"

"The access logs. Every door between the Liverpool Street entrance and this kennel requires a card swipe. Every swipe is time-stamped and logged. I want a complete printout of every access event in this building between eighteen hundred hours last night and oh-six hundred this morning. Every door. Every card. Every floor."

The scope of the request registered on Evans' face — not resistance, but the dawning understanding that what Briscoe was describing wasn't a response to a missing dog. It was the opening stage of a crime scene investigation inside their own station.

"You think someone came in and took him," Evans said.

Briscoe didn't answer immediately. He looked at the kennel one more time — the locked door, the red light, the concrete and steel and mesh and bolts that constituted a containment system designed specifically to prevent exactly what appeared to have happened.

"I think a dog was inside a locked cage last night and isn't inside it this morning," Briscoe said. "And I think that until I understand how, I'm treating this space the way I'd treat any scene where something has been removed from a secured location without authorisation."

He paused. The basement hummed around them — mechanical, constant, the sound of systems operating exactly as designed.

"And Evans — this stays between us and the officers we need to involve. No corridor talk. No break room speculation. The moment this gets out to general staff, we lose control of the narrative and we spend the rest of the day managing reactions instead of finding answers. Understood?"

"Understood, Sarge."

"Good. Start with the footage. I'll handle the access logs and notify the duty inspector."

Evans left the K9 facility at a pace that was controlled but only just. His footsteps receded along the corridor — past the evidence lockup, past the forensic lab, into the garage. The stairwell door opened and closed.

Briscoe stood alone in the basement's furthest corner with four locked kennels and the absence of a dog that should have been in one of them. The strip light above him hummed at its constant low frequency. The water bowl sat full and still behind the mesh.

He took out his notebook. Opened it to a fresh page. Wrote the date, the time, and the first entry of what he already understood would become one of the strangest reports of his career.

0620. K9 holding. Kennel 4 — electronic bolt engaged (red), door sealed, mesh intact. Kennel empty. Bedding undisturbed. Water bowl full. No signs of forced entry or tampering. Dog (Jargus-9B, assigned DC Jenkins) not present.

He underlined the last two words. Closed the notebook. Put it in his pocket.

Then he stood at the kennel and waited for the answers that the building's systems would either provide or fail to provide, and tried not to think about the fact that Karl Jenkins had allegedly disappeared from a locked shed at Jeffries Manor four days ago and now Karl Jenkins' dog had disappeared from a locked cage in Karl Jenkins' own station, and that the word impossible was starting to lose the protective certainty it had always carried.

The surveillance room was on the ground floor, tucked behind the Operations Control Room in a windowless space that smelled of warm electronics and stale coffee. Six monitors mounted in two rows of three, a desk with a keyboard and mouse, a swivel chair that had long since lost the battle with ergonomic standards. The room was designed for one person — two at most — reviewing footage in response to specific requests. It was not designed for what it was about to accommodate.

Evans had the overnight footage queued by six-forty. He'd roused the night shift IT officer — a civilian contractor named Pham who worked the graveyard rotation maintaining system uptime — and between them they'd pulled camera feeds from every basement unit, the ground floor entrance, the stairwell cameras, and the lift's internal lens. Fourteen feeds covering the period Briscoe had specified. Eighteen hundred to oh-six hundred. Twelve hours of footage from fourteen cameras. One hundred and sixty-eight hours of material compressed onto six screens.

Briscoe arrived at six-fifty with two uniformed constables — Henderson and Parr — and closed the door behind him. The room contracted around five bodies and the heat of the monitors and the particular airlessness of a space where ventilation had been designed for one occupant.

"Start with the K9 facility camera," Briscoe said.

Pham brought it up on the centre screen. The feed showed the four kennels from an elevated angle — a wall-mounted camera positioned above the preparation area, covering the full width of the facility. The image was sharp. The station's security system had been upgraded eight months ago, replacing the older analogue cameras with high-definition digital units that recorded at twelve frames per second with infrared capability for low-light conditions. The basement's permanent strip lighting meant the infrared wasn't necessary, but the resolution was excellent — every bolt, every mesh panel, every centimetre of concrete rendered in clinical detail.

Pham set the playback to eighteen hundred. The timestamp ran in the upper right corner. The image was static. Four kennels, three empty, one occupied. Jargus was lying on the canvas pad in kennel four, his head resting on his forepaws, his ears slightly back. The posture of a dog that had given up expecting the footsteps it was listening for. The water bowl was full. The food bowl was empty.

"Speed it up," Briscoe said.

Pham set the playback to sixteen times normal speed. The timestamp accelerated. Eighteen hundred. Nineteen hundred. Twenty hundred. Jargus shifted occasionally — lifting his head, adjusting his position on the pad, once standing and circling before settling again. The movements were compressed into flickers at this speed, the dog appearing to twitch and jolt like a creature in a time-lapse nature documentary. The water level dropped fractionally. The strip light held its constant glow. Nothing else moved.

Twenty-one hundred. Twenty-two hundred. Twenty-three hundred. Midnight. The timestamp rolled from 05/08 to 06/08 and kept counting.

"Slow down," Briscoe said at 01:00. "Normal speed from here."

Pham adjusted. The footage returned to real-time. Jargus was lying on the pad, awake — his eyes open, his head up, ears in the alert-forward position that Evans recognised from every morning he'd approached the kennel. The dog was listening to something.

01:14. Jargus stood. The movement was sudden — not the gradual unfolding of a dog rising from sleep, but the sharp, immediate transition from prone to standing that a trained animal made when it detected something worth responding to. He faced the mesh door. His body was rigid. His ears were fully forward. His tail was low and still.

"He's heard something," Henderson said from behind Briscoe's shoulder.

"Quiet," Briscoe said.

01:15. Jargus remained standing. His nose was working — Evans could see the slight movement of the dog's head as he tested the air coming through the mesh. Then something changed. The rigidity left his body. Not gradually — all at once. The tail lifted. The ears softened. The posture shifted from alert to something Evans had never seen in the dog before. Recognition. The dog was recognising a scent.

01:16. Jargus whined. There was no audio on the feed, but the behaviour was unmistakable — the slight opening of the jaw, the tremor along the flanks, the weight shifting forward onto the front paws. He pressed his nose against the mesh and held it there.

"He knows whoever's coming," Evans said.

Briscoe said nothing. His eyes were fixed on the screen.

01:17. Nothing visible. Jargus remained at the mesh, nose pressed to it, tail moving now in short, tight arcs. Whatever he could smell was getting closer, but the camera showed only the empty preparation area and the corridor entrance beyond it.

"Put the corridor feed up," Briscoe said. "Side by side."

Pham brought the basement corridor camera onto the left screen, synchronised to the same timestamp. The corridor stretched away towards the garage junction — concrete walls, strip lighting, the lab and lockup doors visible along the right side. Empty.

01:18. The corridor was empty. Jargus was still pressed against the mesh.

01:19. The corridor was empty.

01:20. The corridor was empty. And then it wasn't.

She appeared at the far end, where the corridor met the garage. Not from the garage itself — from the stairwell access door beside it. The door opened and she stepped through and the first thing Evans registered was that she moved like someone who knew exactly where she was going. No hesitation at the threshold. No pause to orient. No head movement suggesting she was reading signs or checking directions. She came through the door and turned left towards the K9 facility with the directional certainty of a person who had walked this route before, or had studied it until the walk was unnecessary.

She was short — five foot four, perhaps five foot five. Her hair was silver, catching the overhead strip light as she passed beneath each fixture. Dark clothing — trousers, a fitted jacket, what appeared to be flat-soled shoes. She carried nothing in her hands. Her pace was even, measured, purposeful. Not fast, not slow. The pace of someone who was neither fleeing nor hurrying because hurrying would imply uncertainty and this woman moved with none.

"Freeze it," Briscoe said.

Pham paused the footage. The woman was captured mid-stride, three-quarters of the way along the corridor, her face angled slightly downward and to the left. The resolution was good enough to see the line of her jaw, the set of her mouth, the shape of her brow. But the angle — the slight downward tilt, the partial turn away from the camera's position — denied a full facial capture. She knew where the camera was. The angle of her head was precise enough to provide a profile without providing identification.

"Can you enhance?"

Pham zoomed. The image held its clarity — the upgraded system's resolution surviving the magnification better than the old analogue units would have. The woman's face was visible in three-quarter profile. Forehead, nose, the line of the cheekbone, the corner of one eye. Mid-thirties, perhaps. Hard to say with certainty. The features were composed. Controlled. The face of someone who was aware of being observed and had calibrated exactly how much of herself to reveal.

"Continue," Briscoe said.

The footage resumed. The woman reached the K9 facility and entered the preparation area. On the right screen, the kennel camera showed her appearing from the corridor entrance — the same even stride, the same unhurried purpose. Jargus was pressed against the mesh of kennel four, his entire body oriented towards her, the tail moving in those short tight arcs that spoke of recognition rather than excitement.

She walked directly to kennel four. Passed the empty three without a glance. She knew which one held the dog. She stopped at the mesh and stood for a moment, looking down at Jargus. The dog looked up at her. The camera couldn't capture what passed between them in that exchange of gazes, but Evans watched Jargus's body language transform — the tension leaving him entirely, the tail slowing to a steady sweep, the weight settling back onto his haunches as though some long-held vigilance had been released.

She knelt.

The movement was unhurried. She lowered herself to the concrete beside kennel four, positioned so that she was level with the dog. Her knees were on the floor, her weight resting back on her heels. She extended both hands through the mesh — the gaps between the steel wires wide enough for a human hand but not for a German Shepherd's head — and touched the dog's muzzle.

Jargus closed his eyes.

"She's not opening the door," Henderson said.

He was right. The woman's hands were through the mesh, resting on the dog's face, but she made no move towards the electronic bolt. No card was produced. No attempt was made to access the locking mechanism. She knelt on the concrete and held the dog's muzzle through the steel mesh and stayed.

The timestamp counted. 01:21. 01:22. 01:23.

The room was silent. Five people watching a woman kneel beside a locked cage and touch a police dog through the bars. The banality of the image — its gentleness, its almost devotional quality — sat in sharp contrast to the fact that this woman was in the basement of a police headquarters at one in the morning without authorisation, having navigated a secure building with the confidence of someone who belonged there.

01:24. The kennel camera flickered.

The image stuttered — not a freeze, not a blackout, but a brief visual distortion that rippled across the screen like heat haze rising from tarmac. Two seconds, perhaps three. The woman was still kneeling. Jargus was still at the mesh. Then the distortion passed and the image stabilised and the timestamp jumped from 01:24:17 to 01:24:22.

Five seconds of footage missing. Or corrupted. Or simply absent.

"What was that?" Briscoe said.

Pham was already checking. His fingers moved across the keyboard, pulling up the raw file data, examining the codec, looking for the technical explanation that five seconds of lost footage demanded. "Some kind of interference. The file's intact on either side — no corruption in the data stream before or after. But those five seconds are just... not there. The camera was recording. The storage was receiving. But the data for that interval is blank."

"Blank how?"

"Not overwritten. Not deleted. The file structure shows continuous recording — no gaps in the write sequence. But the image data for those frames is null. As though the camera was recording nothing."

"Electrical fault?"

"Possibly. But only on this camera. The corridor feed is uninterrupted." Pham pointed to the left screen, where the corridor footage showed the same timestamp range without any distortion. "Whatever caused this was localised to the K9 camera only."

Briscoe looked at the kennel camera footage after the distortion cleared. 01:24:22. The woman was still kneeling in the same position. Her hands were still extended through the mesh. Everything appeared identical to the frame before the interference.

Except the kennel was empty.

Jargus was gone.

There was no transition. No intermediate frame showing the dog moving or the door opening or the animal being extracted through an aperture that didn't exist. One moment the dog was there — pressed against the mesh, eyes closed, the woman's hands on his muzzle. Five seconds of nothing. Then the dog was not there. The kennel held its water bowl and its canvas pad and its food bowl and its locked door with the red light steady and unchanged, and it held nothing else.

The woman remained kneeling for four more seconds. Then she stood. The movement was as precise and unhurried as the descent had been — she rose from the concrete, withdrew her hands from the mesh, and straightened her jacket with a small gesture that looked almost habitual. She didn't check the kennel. She didn't look for the dog. She didn't react in any visible way to the fact that an animal she'd been touching through the bars three seconds ago was no longer present.

She turned and walked back towards the corridor.

"Follow her," Briscoe said. His voice was quiet. Not calm — controlled. The voice of a man forcing steady air through a throat that wanted to tighten.

Pham switched feeds as the woman moved through the building. Corridor camera: she walked back past the evidence lockup and the forensic lab at the same measured pace. Garage camera: she crossed the vehicle bay floor without deviation, her reflection sliding across the polished panels of a marked patrol car. Stairwell camera: she climbed the internal stairs to the ground floor, one hand trailing the railing, her footsteps inaudible on the footage but presumably echoing the way Evans' had echoed five hours later.

Ground floor corridor camera: she emerged from the stairwell into the main hallway. The Operations Control Room was twenty metres to her right. The door was closed, but behind it three operators were managing overnight radio traffic, monitoring dispatch screens, coordinating the skeleton resources of a sleeping city. She turned left, away from the control room, towards the Liverpool Street entrance.

"How did she get past control?" Parr said. "Three operators on duty. The corridor's right there."

"Door was closed," Evans said. "At that hour they're watching screens, monitoring radio. They're not watching the corridor through a closed door."

"But the system — someone swipes in at one in the morning, wouldn't that flag something?"

"Not if the card is valid," Briscoe said. "A valid card produces a valid entry. The system logs it, grants access, moves on. The operators see dozens of access events per shift — officers coming and going, civilian staff, maintenance contractors. An authorised swipe at oh-one-eighteen doesn't generate an alert. It generates a line in a log that nobody reviews until someone has a reason to look." He paused. "We have a reason now."

Reception camera: the woman crossed the ground floor public area. The space was empty at this hour — the twelve bolted seats unoccupied, the bullet-resistant glazing reflecting the security lights in long horizontal bands. She approached the Liverpool Street doors from inside and pressed the after-hours release. The lock disengaged with a sound the camera didn't capture, and she pushed through. The glass caught her reflection for a moment — silver hair, dark clothing, the composed face with its controlled angles — and then she was through and the reception area was empty again.

External camera: Liverpool Street. The woman descended the front steps and turned right along the footpath — steady, unhurried, the same measured pace she'd maintained through every metre of the building. Within seconds she'd passed beyond the camera's coverage, and the frame held nothing but empty steps and the bollards and the streetlights casting their orange pools across the pavement.

The timestamp read 01:31. Ten minutes. Ten minutes from the stairwell door in the basement to Liverpool Street. Ten minutes moving through a building that housed active operations, a manned control room, CCTV coverage on every floor, electronic access logging on every door.

And somewhere in the middle of those ten minutes, in five seconds of absent footage, a thirty-five-kilogram German Shepherd had ceased to exist inside a locked steel cage.

The surveillance room was very quiet. The monitors glowed. Pham's fingers hovered over the keyboard without touching it.

"Play the kennel camera again," Briscoe said. "From the moment she arrives. Normal speed."

They watched it again. The woman entering. The dog recognising her. The kneeling. The hands through the mesh. The five seconds of visual interference. The empty kennel. The woman standing, turning, leaving.

"Again."

They watched it a third time. Nothing changed. Nothing revealed itself. The footage showed exactly what it showed and explained nothing about what it meant.

Briscoe reached past Pham and paused the footage at 01:20:41 — the frame where the woman first appeared at the corridor entrance, stepping through the stairwell access door with the certainty of someone who'd walked this route a hundred times.

"That door requires a card swipe," Briscoe said.

"Every door between the entrance and the kennel requires a card swipe," Pham confirmed.

"Then we know exactly which card she used. Pull the access logs. Every swipe between oh-one-hundred and oh-one-thirty-five. Every door she touched."

Pham began typing. The room waited. Henderson and Parr stood behind Briscoe's chair, neither speaking, both staring at the frozen image of a silver-haired woman stepping through a door she should not have been able to open, into a building she should not have been able to enter, walking towards a dog she should not have been able to reach.

The access logs would tell them which card. The card would tell them whose credentials. And that answer, Briscoe suspected, would raise questions far worse than the ones already filling this room.

The access logs took eleven minutes to compile.

Pham worked in silence, pulling data from the building management system while the surveillance feeds held their frozen frames on the monitors around him. The room had grown warmer with five bodies and six screens generating heat into a space with inadequate ventilation. Henderson had shifted his weight three times. Parr hadn't moved. Briscoe stood behind Pham's chair with his hands clasped behind his back in the posture of a man who was prepared to wait as long as the answer required.

Evans watched from the doorway. He'd positioned himself there without consciously choosing to — half in the room, half in the corridor, his body making the decision his mind hadn't articulated yet. The corridor represented the station he'd known for fourteen months. The room represented something else. He stayed at the threshold.

"Here," Pham said.

The access log appeared on the lower left monitor — a spreadsheet of timestamps, door identifiers, card numbers, and status codes. Pham had filtered for the timeframe Briscoe specified: 01:00 to 01:35, 6 August 2018. The entries were sparse. Between one and one-thirty in the morning, a police station operated at minimum activity. Most doors went untouched for hours.

Six entries.

Pham highlighted them in sequence, each one marking a point on the woman's route through the building.

01:18:03 — Liverpool Street main entrance. Card accepted. Status: ACCESS GRANTED.

01:18:47 — Ground floor internal security door (reception to main corridor). Card accepted. Status: ACCESS GRANTED.

01:19:22 — Stairwell B access (ground floor to basement). Card accepted. Status: ACCESS GRANTED.

01:19:58 — Basement corridor access door. Card accepted. Status: ACCESS GRANTED.

01:27:14 — Basement corridor access door. Card accepted. Status: ACCESS GRANTED.

01:28:03 — Stairwell B access (basement to ground floor). Card accepted. Status: ACCESS GRANTED.

Six swipes in. No exit swipe — the Liverpool Street doors operated on an after-hours release from inside, no card required. Every internal door she'd touched on camera, confirmed in the log. The timestamps aligned precisely with the surveillance footage — the system and the cameras telling the same story. A woman had entered the building at 01:18, descended to the basement, spent approximately seven minutes in the K9 facility area, and walked out through the front doors without the system recording her departure.

"All the same card?" Briscoe asked.

"All the same card." Pham scrolled to the card identifier column. Six entries. Six identical card numbers. He copied the number and ran it against the staff credentials database.

The result returned in four seconds.

Pham stared at the screen. His hand moved to the mouse, then stopped. He looked at the card number. Looked at the name the database had returned. Looked at Briscoe's reflection in the monitor.

"Sarge."

"What is it?"

"The card." Pham's voice had changed. The professional detachment of a technician reporting data had been replaced by something tighter, something that carried the particular strain of a person who understood the implications of what they were about to say before they said it. "The card used for all six access points is registered to Detective Senior Constable Karl Jenkins."

The name landed in the surveillance room like a physical object. Evans felt it from the doorway — the shift in the air, the way Henderson's breathing paused, the way Parr's hand moved involuntarily to the back of the nearest chair as though he needed something solid to confirm the floor was still beneath him.

"Jenkins," Briscoe said. The word came out flat. Not a question. A confirmation of something he was processing rather than doubting.

"Card number TPC-4471-KJ. Issued fifteenth of November 2003. Assigned to Detective Constable Karl Matthew Jenkins, Criminal Investigation Branch, Southern Division." Pham read from the screen without inflection, letting the data speak for itself. "Current status —" He stopped.

"Current status," Briscoe repeated.

"Active."

The word should have been impossible. Evans knew it was impossible. Every officer in the building knew that when a colleague was reported missing, their credentials were deactivated as a matter of standard security protocol. Access cards, system logins, building authorisations — all of it suspended within hours of the report being filed. Karl Jenkins had been missing since the second of August. Four days. His card should have been deactivated on the second. At the latest, the third.

"When was the card last modified?" Briscoe asked.

Pham navigated to the card's administrative record. The screen filled with a history of the credential — issue date, assigned officer, access level, modification log. Most of it was routine. Annual renewals. Access level adjustments when Karl moved between units. The standard bureaucratic trail of a police identification card over fifteen years of active service.

The final entry was not standard.

"Fifth of August," Pham said. "Yesterday. Sixteen-twelve hours. The card's status was changed from SUSPENDED to ACTIVE."

"Suspended when?"

"Third of August. Oh-nine-fifteen. Suspended by IT Services as part of the missing persons security protocol." Pham scrolled through the entry. "Standard procedure. The suspension was initiated by a system administrator following the formal missing persons notification. That's all normal."

"And the reactivation."

"Sixteenth-twelve yesterday. The status was changed from SUSPENDED to ACTIVE." Pham paused. "The modification was made from an administrator terminal."

"Which terminal?"

"Fourth floor. Digital Forensics and Cybercrime Unit. Terminal DF-07."

The fourth floor. Not the basement IT office. Not the ground floor operations desk. The fourth floor — the specialist unit that handled digital security, system administration, and the technical infrastructure that underpinned every electronic system in the building. Someone with administrator-level access to the building management system had logged into a terminal on the fourth floor yesterday afternoon and reactivated Karl Jenkins' access card.

"Who was logged into that terminal at sixteen-twelve?" Briscoe's voice had dropped. Not quieter — denser. Each word carrying more weight than the one before it, the accumulation of a man building a chain of evidence he didn't want to be building.

Pham typed. The query ran. The result returned.

"The terminal was accessed using a generic administrator account. Admin-DF-Master. It's a shared service account — used for system maintenance, batch updates, configuration changes. Multiple staff have the credentials."

"How many?"

"I'd need to check with the unit supervisor. But shared admin accounts of this type are typically accessible to four or five senior technical staff. Maybe more."

"So we can identify the terminal but not the person."

"Not from the logs alone. The shared account doesn't require individual authentication beyond the account credentials themselves. Whoever used it would need to know the admin password, which limits the field, but it doesn't give us a name."

Briscoe turned from the screen. Looked at the surveillance footage still frozen on the centre monitor — the silver-haired woman at the corridor entrance, mid-stride, her face angled precisely away from identification. A woman who had walked through a police station using a missing detective's credentials that someone inside the building had reactivated for her less than ten hours before she'd used them.

"Evans."

"Sarge."

"Seal this room. Nobody enters, nobody reviews this footage, nobody accesses these logs without my direct authorisation. Pham — log yourself out of every system you've accessed this morning and do not discuss what you've seen with anyone. Not colleagues, not supervisors, not your own reflection. This is now a formal security investigation."

Pham nodded. His face had settled into the careful blankness of a man who understood that the information on his screens had moved beyond technical anomaly into territory with career-ending implications for someone, and that proximity to that information carried its own risks.

"Henderson, Parr — I need the fourth floor access logs for yesterday afternoon. Specifically, who was on the floor between fifteen hundred and seventeen hundred hours. Card swipes, sign-in sheets, whatever exists. Get it quietly. If anyone asks why, you're conducting a routine audit of building access procedures. Say nothing about Jenkins' card. Say nothing about the kennel. Say nothing about any footage."

Henderson and Parr left. Their footsteps retreated down the ground floor corridor in step — two officers carrying instructions they hadn't fully processed yet, walking past the Operations Control Room where three fresh day-shift operators were settling into their positions and scanning overnight incident reports that contained no mention of a missing dog or a silver-haired woman or a dead man's credentials coming back to life at sixteen-twelve on a Sunday afternoon.

Not a dead man. A missing man. Evans corrected himself and the correction felt worse than the error, because dead was final and missing was a door that wouldn't close.

Briscoe remained in the surveillance room with Pham and Evans. The monitors held their frozen frames. The woman at the corridor door. The empty kennel with its locked bolt. The access log with Karl Jenkins' name in seven consecutive rows.

"Sarge," Evans said from the doorway. He'd been holding the question since Pham had read the card number, holding it the way you held something that might cut you if you gripped it wrong. "Karl's card. Someone reactivated it yesterday. And then someone used it last night. The woman on the footage — she had his card. His physical card. The one that was issued to him."

"Yes."

"Karl's wallet was recovered from his bedroom on Saturday. During the house search. His personal effects — wallet, keys, phone. They were on his bedside table. But his access card —" Evans stopped. Thought. "His access card wouldn't be in his wallet. It's a separate credential. Officers carry it on a lanyard or in a badge holder. It could have been on him when he disappeared."

"It could have been."

"So this woman has Karl's physical access card. And someone inside this building reactivated it for her. Which means —"

"Which means someone in this station knew she was coming," Briscoe said. "Knew what she needed. And made sure she could get it."

The surveillance room hummed. The monitors glowed. The access log held its six entries — six doors opened by a card that should have been suspended, carried by a woman who shouldn't have existed inside these walls, leading to the disappearance of a dog from a cage that was never unlocked.

Briscoe took out his notebook. Wrote a single line beneath his earlier entry from the kennel.

Card TPC-4471-KJ (DC Jenkins) reactivated 05/08 16:12 from terminal DF-07 (4th floor) via shared admin account. Used by unidentified female 06/08 01:18-01:30 to access building and K9 facility. Six access points logged. Kennel bolt not disengaged at any point. Dog absent from locked kennel.

He closed the notebook.

"I need to make a phone call," he said. "Stay here. Touch nothing."

He stepped into the corridor and pulled out his phone. Scrolled to a number he'd never had cause to dial at this hour. Detective Sergeant Stout.

The phone rang twice. Three times.

Stout picked up.

"It's Briscoe," he said. "I'm at the station. You need to come in."