Nowhere to Go but Down

Tasmania is an island. The fact operates differently depending on what you need from it. For tourists it means isolation refined into beauty — coastline and wilderness and the particular quality of distance from the mainland that transforms remoteness into attraction. For residents it means community compressed by geography, lives overlapping in ways that continental populations cannot replicate, the six degrees of separation that elsewhere require effort here collapsing to two or three without anyone trying. For detectives investigating missing persons, it means something else entirely. It means boundaries. Finite roads, finite ports, finite points of departure. A closed system whose edges can be checked.

Sarah Lahey had checked them. Both airports — Hobart and Launceston — returned negative results. No record of Jamie Greyson or Kain Jeffries having boarded any flight in the preceding fortnight. The Spirit of Tasmania ferry carried the same verdict: no passenger records matching either name. Duncan Flack was transporting security footage from the boarding cameras — the possibility of aliases or undocumented passage could not be eliminated entirely — but the likelihood was negligible, and both detectives understood this without needing to say it. The men had not left.

The confirmation should have felt like progress. In practical terms it narrowed the search area to sixty-eight thousand square kilometres — large enough to hide in, small enough to search with sufficient resources and time. It eliminated the mainland, eliminated the possibility that the missing men had simply walked away to new lives in Melbourne or Sydney or anywhere beyond the reach of the Bass Strait. It gave the investigation edges, constraints, the kind of defined territory that made systematic searching possible.

Instead, it felt like the walls of something closing. Three men who could not have left the island had nonetheless disappeared from it so completely that no conventional investigative tool — financial records, phone data, airport manifests, ferry logs — could locate them. They existed somewhere within Tasmania's borders. They occupied space, consumed air, cast shadows. But the systems designed to track people through the modern world had lost them as thoroughly as if they had stepped out of it entirely.

Karl returned to the office carrying Nial Triffett's details in his notebook and the morning's trespass beneath his sleeve. Sarah watched him arrive — noted the new witness he had escorted to an interview room without briefing her, noted the hours unaccounted for, noted the glove he wore on his right hand and the careful way he held his left wrist against his body. She did not ask about the glove. She asked about the woman. Karl offered the name with the specific economy of a man deciding how much truth to release and when, parcelling information in fragments that required Sarah to extract each piece through questions she should not have needed to ask.

Nial Triffett. Fencing contractor from Fern Tree. Left home the previous morning for a job with an unidentified new client. Vehicle gone. Dog vanished from a locked house. Text message received in phrasing his wife had never heard him use. Sarah's first assessment — infidelity — was reasonable, procedurally sound, statistically likely. Karl did not disagree with the assessment. He disagreed with its sufficiency. Another man, another vehicle, another text composed in the wrong vocabulary. The signature was too precise to be coincidence, too consistent to be independent occurrence, too familiar to the detective who had heard the same specific frequency of wrongness from Louise Jeffries days earlier and from Jenny Triffett that morning.

The BOLO went out. Nial's ute fed into the system that would flag it for every patrol car and traffic officer in the state — another vehicle description circulating through an island small enough that staying hidden should have been difficult and was proving, against all expectation, remarkably easy. Phone records were requested. The data would take time to arrive, would require the particular patience that characterised most actual detective work — not the dramatic confrontations and brilliant deductions of public imagination but the slow accumulation of digital breadcrumbs, the tedious assembly of timelines from call logs and cell tower pings and transaction histories.

Sarah settled into the prospect of hours reviewing ferry CCTV — grainy footage, pixelated faces, the mechanical rhythm of scan and dismiss that would consume the remainder of her day and possibly the next. The work was necessary and thankless and exactly the kind of methodical grinding that solved cases more often than instinct or intuition. She accepted it with the resigned professionalism of a detective who understood that one frame, one face turned at the right angle, one second of footage captured in the background of someone else's boarding, might break the investigation open. Or might yield nothing at all. Either outcome required the same hours of attention.

Karl, briefly alone at his desk while Sarah processed the BOLO, returned to the name. Killerton Enterprises. The search was habitual now, compulsive in the specific way that unresolved questions became compulsive when they had been carried long enough — fingers finding the keys without conscious direction, the query submitted before the mind had fully decided to submit it. The results appeared with the same institutional politeness they always displayed. Glossy corporate website. Billion-dollar construction conglomerate. San Francisco headquarters. Global reach. No Australian operations. No connection to anything that mattered to this investigation or to the frightened man who had carried the name in his pocket at Moggill Creek fifteen years earlier.

He closed the browser tab before Sarah returned. The movement was too fast, too defensive — the specific gesture of concealment that betrayed guilt even when performed for an empty room. The name retreated to its usual position: present, unresolved, occupying the space between what Karl could prove and what he could not stop believing.