Seven Days Without Answers

The Broken Hill Police Station occupied its position at 357 Argent Street with the unyielding permanence of a building constructed to outlast the community it served. Red brick and sandstone, trimmed with the architectural confidence of the Federation era, its facade faced the street with the impassive authority of an institution that had been absorbing the town's troubles since 1892. The corrugated iron roof had weathered nearly a century of dust storms. The clock tower — that vertical declaration that law and order had arrived to stay — marked the late afternoon hour against a sky still carrying the residual humidity of the previous day's storm.

Violet had not planned to come here. The intention had formed somewhere between the school gate and the corner of Argent Street, assembling itself from the accumulated weight of the past two days — the newspaper, the ballad, Clarke's lesson, the cryptic note, the man in the arcade whose eyes she could not stop seeing when she closed her own. The station had presented itself to her feet before her mind had fully articulated why she was walking toward it. By the time she stood at the bottom of the sandstone steps and looked up at the heavy front door flanked by its stoic columns, the question of whether she should enter had already been answered by the fact that she was entering.

The door yielded with a creak that suggested hinges accustomed to heavier hands than hers.

The interior struck her as an accumulation of sensory information that arrived simultaneously. Sound first: telephones trilling in discordant intervals, typewriters maintaining their mechanical percussion, voices conducting the business of law enforcement at various pitches of urgency. Then smell — bitter coffee brewed past the point of palatability, the tang of sweat and ink, the institutional scent of leather and linoleum and paper that had been accumulating in filing cabinets for decades. Then light, fluorescent and unforgiving, illuminating a space designed for function rather than comfort.

Officers moved through the room with the grim purpose of people whose workload had exceeded their capacity to process it at a pace that permitted rest. Navy shirts bore the creases of extended shifts. Faces carried the particular exhaustion that distinguished overwork from mere tiredness — a depletion that reached beneath the physical into something more fundamental.

The Sally Harlow investigation had been running for seven days. The station bore the evidence of that duration the way a body bore the evidence of fever: heightened activity, diminished reserves, the machinery working harder to compensate for the absence of the thing it needed most, which was resolution.

Violet crossed the threshold and found a bench against the far wall, settling onto cracked vinyl that bit at the backs of her legs through her school skirt. The bench placed her amongst the station's civilian population — a man twisting a wide-brimmed hat in his hands with the slow rotation of someone processing anxiety through repetitive motion, a woman staring at the opposite wall with enforced patience, others occupying the space with the particular stillness of people who had surrendered their afternoon to institutional time.

The corkboard near the front desk drew her attention. Faded wanted posters curled at their edges. Community bulletins overlapped in pinned layers — fire ban notices and fundraiser announcements sharing space with the faces of people whose names had become categories: wanted, missing, sought for questioning.

Above the bench, sepia-toned photographs in wooden frames documented the station's lineage. Moustached officers from previous decades stared out with the grave formality that early photography demanded, brass buttons and peaked caps belonging to an era when the authority they represented had been newer and perhaps more certain of itself. A plaque beneath one frame read: Constable Edward Mallory, Fallen in the Line of Duty, 1926.

Violet sat beneath these ghosts of previous service and watched the present conduct its business.

Barry Glasson occupied the centre of the room with the gravitational authority of a man around whom the investigation orbited. He was forty-three years old, promoted to detective sergeant two years earlier, and the seven days since Sally Harlow's disappearance had carved new lines into a face that Broken Hill's sun and wind had already mapped thoroughly.

His blue shirt bore the creases of a shift that had begun before dawn and showed no indication of concluding before dark. His sleeves were rolled to the elbows, exposing forearms that held a clipboard with the controlled tension of hands that wanted to be doing something more useful than holding paper. His jaw was set in the particular configuration that Violet recognised from years of observing him at school events and barbecues — the expression of a man whose thoughts operated at a depth his face could not fully contain.

To Violet, he had always been Mandy's dad first and a detective second — the man who brought sausage rolls to the Girl Guides fundraiser, who stood slightly apart from other parents at school concerts as though his professional habit of surveillance could not be entirely suspended even in civilian settings. But here, in the station that was his natural environment, the proportions reversed. The father receded and the detective emerged.

What Violet saw was a man being slowly consumed by a case whose demands exceeded the resources available to meet them.

Senior Constable Philip Johnson stood beside him. Phil was twenty-nine years old, a miner's son who had returned to Broken Hill from a Sydney posting five years earlier, bringing with him a methodical approach to police work that complemented Barry's intensity the way ballast complemented sail. His compact frame carried the particular steadiness that distinguished him from the more volatile energy radiating from his senior officer.

His face — square-jawed like his father Albert's, watchful like his mother Margaret's — held the controlled patience of a man who understood that his role in this partnership was to prevent passion from compromising procedure. His neatly trimmed moustache twitched when he spoke, a habit that surfaced when the effort of maintaining professional composure required more of him than the conversation's surface suggested.

At home on Beryl Street, his wife Emily was managing two-year-old James and infant Laura alone for the third consecutive evening. Phil carried this knowledge the way he carried everything — quietly, without complaint, filed in the compartment of his mind that held the personal costs of professional obligation.

The exchange between the two men carried the weight of an argument conducted in variations across all seven days of the investigation. The same essential disagreement assuming different forms depending on the hour and the latest development, but always returning to the fundamental tension between urgency and methodology.

Barry's frustration was audible even from the bench where Violet sat. Not in volume — he controlled that with professional discipline — but in the steel that edged his words, the way his hands moved through the air as though physically pushing against a resistance that procedure imposed and the situation could not afford.

Every minute wasted was another minute Sally could be out there. The words reached Violet with the clarity of something spoken not merely to the man beside him but to the universe that had permitted this situation to occur.

Phil received this pressure with the steadiness of someone who had been absorbing it for days and had developed the internal architecture to support the weight without buckling. His response carried the measured cadence of a man who believed in what he was saying even as he acknowledged the emotional legitimacy of what his colleague felt.

They could not afford to act without evidence. Credibility, once lost, could not be reclaimed. The investigation required leads rather than instincts.

The words were correct. Phil knew they were correct, had known since the academy that emotion was the enemy of effective police work. But correctness provided no comfort when a woman was missing and the landscape that held her secret surrendered nothing to mere procedure.

What neither man knew — what no one in the station knew — was that Sally Harlow was still alive. Seven days into captivity, held somewhere, she remained breathing and conscious and terrified. Her survival depended on a timeline that had nothing to do with the argument being conducted over a cluttered desk.

The urgency Barry felt was more justified than he could have articulated. The caution Phil counselled was more dangerous than he could have known. Both men were doing their best with the information available to them, and the information available to them was insufficient for either approach to succeed.

The station absorbed their tension the way it had absorbed a century of accumulated stress — through its sandstone walls and high ceilings and the institutional patience of a building that had outlasted every crisis it had contained.

The telephones continued their trilling. The typewriters maintained their percussion. The civilians on the benches waited.

Violet watched from her position near the wall, her school bag resting against her leg, her body still whilst her mind worked through the implications of what she was observing. She had come seeking something — information, perhaps, or confirmation that the connections she was assembling were not merely the products of an overactive imagination.

What she found instead was the human cost of an investigation that had not yet produced results. A detective whose dedication was consuming him. A senior constable whose measured caution was being tested to its limits. A station full of officers whose collective competence had not yet been sufficient to answer the question the town was asking with increasing desperation.

The creak of the front door admitted a figure Violet recognised before her conscious mind registered the identification.

Mandy Glasson stepped into the station with a posture Violet had not seen from her before. The usual fire in her hazel eyes had banked to embers. Her hair hung limp. Her shoulders carried a slope that suggested weight distributed not across muscle but across spirit. She paused in the doorway, scanned the room with the automatic surveillance she had inherited from her father, and when her eyes found Violet on the bench the relief that crossed her face was genuine but incomplete.

She crossed to the bench and sat beside Violet, their knees touching in the unconscious proximity of friends who had spent years calibrating the distance between their bodies to the exact measurement that communicated solidarity without requiring conversation.

Mandy spoke of her father with the careful vocabulary of a daughter who loved what she was describing even as she feared what it was becoming. He was barely home. He slept in his office. When he was present, he was absent — his body occupying the house on Chloride Street whilst his mind remained at the station, pacing through the investigation's corridors, reviewing evidence that refused to assemble into a picture that made sense.

Margaret had grown snappy and watchful. Listening to the radio with an attention that suggested she was waiting for news not yet broadcast. Peering through windows at a street that held no threat she could name but whose ordinariness had begun to feel provisional.

Violet told Mandy what she had been carrying since the previous day's history lesson. The connection she was constructing between Emily Sullivan's disappearance and Sally Harlow's — the parallels that exceeded what coincidence could comfortably explain. Two women drawn to the same territory, both vanishing without trace, separated by a century but united by the landscape that had absorbed them.

She spoke of the Girl Guides camp. Silverton, already approved, already organised. An opportunity to investigate, to explore the ground that Emily Sullivan had described in her letters and that Sally Harlow had been researching when she disappeared.

Mandy's response carried the tension between loyalty and prudence that characterised her relationship with Violet's more ambitious impulses. She wanted to help. She also wanted to survive helping. The Outback was not a classroom exercise, and whatever had taken Sally Harlow had not been deterred by the woman's experience or her precautions.

Across the station, Barry Glasson's attention shifted.

The detective had been reviewing documents at his desk when something pulled his focus. Perhaps the familiar pitch of his daughter's voice. Perhaps the peripheral registration of her form on the bench. He looked up, and his expression underwent the transformation Violet had glimpsed earlier but now saw in full: the detective receding, the father emerging, and the guilt that occupied the space between the two roles surfacing like something long submerged breaking the water's surface.

He crossed the station floor and stood over them. His height and his fatigue and his authority combined into a presence that filled the space between the bench and the ceiling.

His gaze moved between the two girls — his daughter and his daughter's closest friend — and whatever assessment he conducted in those few seconds produced a result visible in the softening of his jaw. His voice, when it came, had been stripped of the steel it carried when addressing colleagues and replaced with something rawer and more vulnerable.

He spoke to Mandy first. An apology for his absence that cracked on the word home, as though the concept itself had become fragile in his mouth.

Then he turned to Violet with an expression that reassembled professional authority over the personal vulnerability that had momentarily surfaced. The detective reclaiming territory the father had briefly occupied. His warning was direct: leave the investigating to the professionals. The Outback did not forgive mistakes. Amateur involvement in active cases created risks that extended beyond the amateurs themselves.

Violet received the instruction with the outward composure of respect and the inward resistance of someone who had already committed to a course of action the instruction was designed to prevent. She told him her heart was in the right place. She did not tell him that her heart's location was considerably further along the road to Silverton than he would have found acceptable.

An officer approached with a clipboard and murmured something that recalled Barry to his professional obligations. He departed with a final glance — half warning, half worry — his shoulders hunching as he moved away.

Phil Johnson watched the exchange from his position near the desk, his arms folded. His expression carried the particular sadness of a man who understood what this case was costing his colleague and who could see the same cost being levied on the detective's daughter.

Phil's own children — James and Laura — occupied a different hemisphere of concern, but the principle was the same. The work reached into the homes of the people who performed it and extracted payments that no salary could compensate. He had tried to counsel Barry toward balance. The counsel had been received and filed in the same cabinet where Barry stored all advice that conflicted with the investigation's demands — acknowledged, respected, and disregarded.

The girls rose from the bench. The station continued its operations around them, indifferent to their departure in the way that institutions were indifferent to all individuals whose presence did not contribute to the institution's function.

They moved toward the door, past the sepia photographs and the corkboard and the man still twisting his hat, and stepped out onto the sandstone steps where the afternoon's harsh gold light was softening toward amber.