Saturday Corridors

"You learn more about a detective in the half-second before they answer than in anything they actually say."

The corridor stretched ahead, that peculiar Saturday stillness settling over the station like a tarpaulin thrown over furniture nobody plans to use. My footsteps echoed against linoleum that had seen better decades—scuffed pale where a thousand coppers had worn their paths between desks and interview rooms and the coffee machine that never quite heated things properly. The sound came back to me too loud in the absence of the weekday noise that usually swallowed it. Somewhere distant, a phone rang twice and stopped. Nobody home, or nobody who wanted to answer.

I was tired. The kind of tired that sits behind your eyes like ground glass, that makes your thoughts wade through something thick and resistant. Thirty-odd hours since I'd slept properly, and the coffee I'd abandoned in my office had done nothing but coat my stomach with acid and regret. My knee had stiffened during the walk from my desk—I'd been sitting too long, letting it seize up—and now each step sent a dull complaint up through my thigh. The pills were back in my drawer. The pills were always back in my drawer, waiting for me to admit I needed them.

A movement at the far end caught my attention—someone rounding the corner with purpose, case file tucked under one arm, takeaway coffee in hand. Detective Lahey. She walked with that particular intensity she brought to everything, head slightly forward, shoulders set like she was pushing into a wind only she could feel. Already thinking three steps ahead. Always thinking three steps ahead, that one.

I'd watched her work for nearly two years now, ever since she'd been paired with Karl under my supervision. Twenty-nine years old, orphaned young when her parents went down in a helicopter somewhere in the Swiss Alps, raised by grandparents in the Derwent Valley—the kind of childhood that either leaves people cracked through the middle or fires them into something harder than anyone should have to be at that age. Sarah had come out the latter. She read witnesses the way my old man used to read racing forms, intuiting what they weren't saying from the shape of their silences, from the way they held their hands, from the half-second pause before a lie that most people never notice. Her reports were thorough without being the kind of doorstops that made your eyes slide off the page. She didn't waste words, didn't waste time, didn't waste the patience of supervising officers who had better things to do than decode cryptic updates or chase clarifications through three rounds of questions.

But I'd noticed other things too. The hours she kept, matching Karl's unhealthy rhythms like she was trying to prove something—to him, to herself, to whoever was keeping score in whatever game she thought she was playing. The way she looked at him when she thought no one was watching, that particular quality of attention that went beyond professional interest into territory I recognised from my own marriage's early years. The conversations that died when I approached, cut off mid-sentence with the guilty haste of people discussing something that couldn't bear overhead hearing. I'd seen partnerships blur before—knew the damage it caused when the job stopped being the job and became something messier, something that clouded judgement and compromised cases and left careers scattered like wreckage after a storm. I'd noted it in performance reviews with careful phrasing, the kind of language that created paper trails without forcing confrontations. I hadn't intervened. Perhaps I should have. Perhaps I'd been too busy with my own bleeding edges to address someone else's.

She'd do. With Karl unreachable and Louise Jeffries waiting in Interview Room Three, I needed someone who could read a room and keep her mouth shut about what she read. Someone competent. Sarah was that, whatever else she might be.

I slowed my pace, letting her close the distance. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, one of them flickering in that arrhythmic way that always reminded me of a dying heartbeat. When she was ten feet away, I spoke.

"Detective Lahey."

She stopped, spine straightening, shoulders squaring. The reaction was automatic—years of training overriding whatever she'd been thinking about, whatever weight she'd been carrying in that forward-leaning walk. Her eyes met mine, guarded. There were shadows under them, I noticed. Purple-grey crescents that makeup couldn't quite hide. She hadn't slept well either, or hadn't slept enough. The takeaway coffee—something from that place on Murray Street, by the look of the cup—suggested she'd come in early, on a Saturday, for reasons of her own. Reasons that probably had Karl's name attached to them somewhere.

"Yes, Sergeant Claiborne?"

"Are you busy?"

I watched her process the question, the slight flicker of uncertainty before she controlled it. She was trying to work out what this was about—whether it was routine or something else, whether my presence in this corridor at this hour meant trouble she needed to brace for. Good instincts. Wrong moment to indulge them.

"Right now, Sir?"

"Yes, right now, Detective."

Her hesitation lasted half a second. I counted it. Half a second of calculation, of weighing options, of deciding how much truth to offer and how much to hold back. "No, Sir. What do you need?"

"Have you seen Detective Jenkins yet?"

Something shifted in her expression—minute, quickly suppressed. A tightening around the mouth that pulled her lips thinner, a fractional widening of the eyes before she shuttered them again. The kind of micro-expression that most people miss but that twenty-three years of interviews had taught me to read like words on a page. She knew where Karl was, or could guess. She knew why he wasn't answering his phone. The question was whether she'd cover for him.

"No, not yet, Sir."

She'd cover for him. Of course she would. Whatever was happening between them—and something was happening, had been happening for months now—it had progressed far enough that loyalty trumped protocol. I filed that away in the same drawer where I kept all the other things I'd noticed and not yet acted on. The drawer was getting crowded.

I considered her for a moment longer than necessary—long enough for her to feel the weight of assessment, to understand that my question hadn't been casual. Karl's celebration at Salamanca, the whisky I'd bought him before slipping away to Wrest Point. Karl's absence this morning, his phone ringing out to voicemail. Sarah's deflection, smooth as river stones but just as hard underneath. The threads connected in ways I didn't have time to unpick, not with Louise Jeffries waiting, not with Jamie Greyson's name hanging in the air like the smell of cordite after a shot's been fired.

"You'll have to join me then."

I saw the surprise register—a flicker across her features before professional composure reasserted itself, smoothing her expression back into neutral readiness. This wasn't how I usually operated, and she knew it. Karl was her partner; cases involving Karl's connections should go through Karl. But I didn't have the luxury of explaining, and she didn't have the standing to ask. Some mornings you just had to trust that your sergeant knew what he was doing, even when he wasn't entirely sure himself.

"You've got five minutes. Then I want you to join me in interview room three."

"Yes, Sergeant."

I turned and walked away, my knee protesting the pivot with a grinding complaint I ignored through long practice. Already thinking about what waited in that room. Louise Jeffries, with her financial analyst's brain and her composure that had never cracked across months of careful questions about her father-in-law's disappearance. Jamie Greyson, her brother—twelve years younger, connected to Karl through history I'd never fully mapped but knew was serious enough for records to vanish, for files to go missing, for the kind of silence that only falls when someone with authority decides protection matters more than transparency. And the name she might or might not speak aloud, the one that had detonated behind my eyes when Linda had delivered her news.

Luke Smith.

I could feel Sarah's gaze on my back as I walked, could sense her trying to work out what was coming. She'd find out soon enough. We all would.

Five minutes. Then we'd see what Louise Jeffries knew, and what she was willing to tell us about the people who'd vanished from her life.