Shutter and Stumble

"You can tell a lot about a station from its coffee. You can tell a lot about a man from his clothing. And you can tell everything about an idiot from the moment he realises he's driven three hours in running shorts."

The station's foyer smelled like every police station foyer I'd ever walked through — floor polish fighting a losing battle against boot rubber, the ghost of someone's takeaway lunch drifting from a bin that needed emptying, and underneath all of it that institutional baseline of concrete and recycled air that you stopped noticing after your first year in uniform but never fully stopped smelling. Hobart's version had more coffee in the mix than Devonport's. The expensive kind, from the machine in the corner rather than the instant stuff we spooned from communal tins up north. You could tell a lot about a station's budget from its coffee arrangements.

I signed in at reception, badge out, the constable on desk duty running his eyes over my details with the efficiency of someone who'd processed a hundred sign-ins already today and would process a hundred more before knock-off. If he noticed the running shorts and athletic shirt — the whole sweaty, underdressed reality of my current presentation — he kept his opinion to himself. Probably saw stranger things daily. Hobart was like that.

The hard drive case sat against my hip through the bag's fabric, its padded weight a steady reminder of why I was here and what I was supposed to be doing. Concrete purpose. Something I could complete competently without making a mess of it. Ellen had been very specific about the delivery — get it to Sarah Lahey at CIB, don't dawdle, don't lose it, and for God's sake don't plug it into anything on the way down. That last instruction had been delivered in the tone she reserved for things she considered obvious but felt compelled to say anyway, the verbal equivalent of a safety label on a kettle warning you the contents might be hot.

The stairwell was cool — concrete and steel holding the overnight chill the way a workshop floor did, reluctant to surrender it even when the building above had given in to the heating system. My footsteps echoed off the walls, each flight punctuated by a fire door with a small wired-glass window offering glimpses of corridors and office spaces that got progressively busier as I climbed. My calves had seized during the three-hour drive and the first two flights reminded me of it — that tight, borrowed-legs feeling you got when you'd sat too long after a run without stretching properly.

Should've stretched. Should've changed clothes. The list of things I should've done differently was getting long enough to need its own case file.

Second floor. CIB.

The temperature shifted as I pushed through the fire door — warmer, thicker, the recycled air carrying that particular police station smell turned up to eleven. Burnt coffee, cleaning chemicals, and the faint must of old case files that never quite left no matter how modern the building pretended to be. Every station had its own version. Devonport's leaned heavier on the chemicals — the night cleaners used something industrial-strength that could strip paint if you let it sit. Hobart's had that coffee note layered through it, richer, more complicated, and underneath both the same base note of paper and perspiration and accumulated time that lived in every station from Burnie to Bridgewater. The smell of people working hard at things that mattered, day after day, year after year, until the walls absorbed it like stain into timber.

The CIB unit sprawled across the floor in that open-plan configuration that was supposed to encourage collaboration but mostly just meant everyone could see when you were scrolling your phone instead of working. Desks clustered in teams, case files piled in arrangements that probably made sense to the people sitting behind them — the line between organised chaos and actual chaos being mostly a question of whether you could find what you needed within thirty seconds of someone asking for it. Keyboards clattered in overlapping rhythms. Phones murmured. Someone three desks in laughed at something and someone closer told them to keep it down with the weary authority of a person who'd already asked twice and was considering whether the third time warranted getting out of their chair.

The fluorescent panels overhead cast that flat, dimensionless light that photographers despised and evidence photographers tolerated because they had no choice. Fluorescents lied about everything they illuminated. They erased shadows so completely that faces lost their contour, turned healthy skin tones grey-green, stripped warmth from every surface until the whole room looked like it had been photographed for an insurance claim. If you wanted to make a beautiful space ugly, you didn't need a demolition crew. You just needed eight-foot tubes and a suspended ceiling grid. I'd photographed crime scenes under fluorescents — the kind of lighting that made bruises look worse and blood look fake, that turned living rooms into morgues and offices into holding cells. It was the visual equivalent of that voice people put on when they were trying to sound professional but actually sounded like they were reading from a script — technically correct, emotionally dead.

I spotted Sarah immediately.

She was slumped at her desk like someone who'd abandoned any pretence of posture, head propped on one hand, staring at her computer screen with the kind of stillness that could mean deep concentration or something much closer to unconsciousness. My eye catalogued it before my conscious mind caught up — the composition of exhaustion, the way it rearranged a body into shapes that told their own story without the subject's permission. Her shoulders hunched forward, pulling her whole frame inward as though she were trying to occupy less space than she actually needed. The visible tension in her neck, muscles contracted into a curve that would cost her later if it wasn't costing her already. The angle of her head against her palm — load-bearing rather than resting, the hand doing structural work that the spine had apparently given up on.

Under those fluorescents, the exhaustion showed with clinical clarity. Every shadow the tubes should have cast was instead flattened out, leaving her face exposed in that merciless, detail-rich, depth-poor way that made people look like evidence photographs of themselves. I could see the darkness beneath her eyes, the slight hollowing at her temples, the way her skin had that translucent quality it got when someone wasn't sleeping enough or eating enough or both.

She looked absolutely exhausted. Not tired — tired was fixable, tired was a good night's sleep and a proper breakfast and maybe a weekend where nobody needed anything from you. This was something deeper, more structural. The kind of bone-level depletion that settled in when the demands on you outpaced your capacity to meet them and showed no sign of stopping. I'd seen it on colleagues during the Launceston floods, when we'd worked seventy-two consecutive hours and people started moving through the world like the air had thickened around them.

But this wasn't operational exhaustion. This was something more personal, more corrosive. I'd seen this specific version before — on Dad's face during the years Mum's confusion had crept from occasional to persistent. That same hollowed-out quality, as though something essential had been removed from behind the eyes and the rest of the face was just holding its position out of habit, maintaining the shape of a functioning person through stubbornness and muscle memory whilst whatever fuelled the actual functioning had quietly run dry.

Her grandmother. Ellen had mentioned it when she'd called — terminal illness, apparently. Not as gossip, not as background colour, but in the clipped, matter-of-fact way Ellen delivered information she considered relevant to the task at hand. She's going through it with her grandmother. Don't be a pain in the arse about it. Which, translated from Ellen, meant: be decent, be quick, don't make her day worse than it already is.

That kind of caregiving broke people. I'd watched it happen — colleagues whose parents deteriorated, whose partners declined, who arrived at work running on caffeine and denial and held themselves together through sheer bloody-minded stubbornness because the alternative was acknowledging a grief that hadn't technically started yet but was already everywhere, in every room, in every quiet moment, waiting.

I walked over, suddenly and acutely conscious of how I looked. All technical fabric and visible muscle and bare legs — more skin showing than was appropriate for inter-station evidence delivery, more gym than CIB, looking like I'd taken a wrong turning on the way to a Sunday morning parkrun rather than driven three hours on official business. The other detectives barely glanced at me — a stranger with a badge not unusual enough to warrant sustained attention in a building full of people who assessed threats for a living — but I felt every step across that open floor like I was crossing a stage in the wrong costume.

Dad's voice, quiet and certain in the back of my head: Shorts, mate? To a CIB unit?

Yeah. I know, Dad. I know.

The hard drive case pressed against my hip through the bag. Concrete purpose. Professional obligation. Something I understood, something I could deliver without complication. Hand it over. Be decent about her grandmother. Get out.

"Sarah!" I called, pitching my voice to carry without shouting — the way you called to someone across a workshop floor, loud enough to cut through ambient noise without startling the person at the next bench.

Except I'd misjudged. Badly.

Her head jerked up violently, neck snapping back with enough force to look painful. Her eyes flew open — that particular wide-eyed panic of someone caught not just resting but genuinely unconscious, dragged back to the surface by a sound that had no business being that loud in an environment she'd clearly forgotten she was in. Her arms flailed as she nearly went face-first into her keyboard, catching herself with the clumsy gracelessness of someone yanked from sleep before the dream had finished, before the body had time to remember where it was and what the rules were for being there.

"I'm awake!" she blurted, the words erupting louder than she'd intended — defensive, automatic, the verbal equivalent of a reflex kick. Several nearby detectives looked over with carefully neutral expressions that said they'd register no official opinion on what they'd just witnessed but would absolutely be discussing it in the break room within the hour.

Damn. Hadn't meant to startle her that badly. But she'd been properly gone — not dozing, not resting, but the kind of deep, ambush sleep that your body imposed when you'd pushed past every reasonable limit and it stopped negotiating. I knew the feeling. Your body didn't ask. It simply decided you were finished, and you woke up wherever it had put you down.

I stood there as she scanned the room, disoriented, trying to locate the source of the voice that had woken her. I watched her check the detective sitting several desks away — Karl, I thought, Jenkins, though I'd only met him once at a training event and couldn't be certain at this distance. He was absorbed in his screen, completely unmoved by her dramatic resurrection. Not the source.

Her eyes continued searching, tracking across the office with the slightly unfocused quality of someone whose brain was still coming online, still running diagnostics on a world that had shifted configuration while she was out. Then they found me — or rather, they found my legs first, which given what I was wearing was probably inevitable.

I watched her gaze travel upward. It had that involuntary quality — not deliberate assessment but the eye's natural response to encountering something unexpected in its field. Calves first. Then thighs. The shorts, which had felt perfectly normal at five-thirty this morning on a gravel road in Spreyton and now felt approximately three inches shorter than any garment had a right to be in a professional setting. Then the athletic shirt, technical fabric clinging to my chest in a way that was entirely functional for running and entirely conspicuous for everything else. All the way up, past the messenger bag strap cutting diagonally across my torso, to my face, where I was assembling the most professional expression I could manage given the circumstances.

Which was, apparently, not very professional at all.

"Duncan," she said finally, lifting her eyes to meet mine.

There was something in her expression I couldn't quite read — layers of it, like light behaving differently at different depths. Surprise on the surface, obviously. But underneath, something else moving, rearranging itself. The kind of micro-shifts in facial muscle I'd been trained to notice during conflict resolution work — not deception exactly, but the visible process of someone deciding which version of themselves to present. The face behind the face, choosing its arrangement. I couldn't tell what she'd landed on. Relief, maybe. Discomfort. Polite confusion about why a senior constable from Devonport was standing in her CIB unit dressed like he'd been interrupted mid-workout.

All of the above, probably.

"It's so good to see you again. And so much of you," she added, a smirk pulling at the corner of her mouth as she gestured at my outfit.

Heat crawled up my neck. Not fast — slow and thorough, the way sunburn announced itself hours after the exposure, starting below the collar and working its way upward with the steady inevitability of something that couldn't be stopped once it started. Of course she'd notice. Of course she'd comment. Sarah Lahey didn't do polite fiction when observation was available. She had that quality — sharp, precise, unwilling to let an easy target pass without acknowledgment — and normally I appreciated it, the honesty of it, the refusal to pretend things were other than what they were.

Right now, though, with the things in question being my bare legs and sweat-marked athletic shirt, I could have done with a bit more polite fiction and a lot less accuracy.

"You too, Sarah," I managed, trying to return the warmth through the mortification that was doing its level best to turn my face the colour of Devonport brick. "It's been a while. I wasn't sure whether I should call you."

The words came out carrying more than I'd meant them to. Shaped like a statement but holding the bones of a question — why the texts stopped, why the conversation we found that night dried up without explanation, whether I imagined the whole thing or whether something actually passed between us that meant what I thought it meant. Three messages I'd sent over the weeks after. Nothing heavy — a sunset photograph I'd taken from the Mersey Bluff that I thought she'd like, a link to an article about a case methodology that connected to something she'd said, a simple how are you going? that sat unanswered in my phone like a small, patient question I'd eventually stopped asking.

I'd told myself she was busy. CIB detectives operated on different timescales to senior constables in regional stations. It didn't necessarily mean anything.

Her face flushed — visible even under the fluorescents, colour rising fast and involuntary, the kind of physiological response you couldn't control no matter how composed the rest of you tried to be. The body's honesty, broadcasting what the face was still negotiating.

"I'm so sorry, Duncan," she said quickly, the words tumbling out with the slightly rushed quality of something released under pressure. "I got distracted. My grandmother is unwell."

"I'm so sorry to hear that," I said, and meant it completely. Whatever the silence between us meant, whatever I'd built or imagined or hoped for — none of it weighed anything next to that. A grandmother dying. The slow, grinding cruelty of watching someone you loved become less of themselves, knowing the direction and being unable to change it. "Your grandmother is a lovely woman."

And she was. I remembered her from the station barbecue the previous summer — a small woman with sharp eyes and a voice that carried the particular authority of someone who'd outlived any concern about whether her opinions were welcome. She'd found me near the drinks table, asked what I did, and when I'd said community policing in Devonport she'd nodded like I'd confirmed something she'd already suspected about me.

Then she'd told me a story about American servicemen teaching her to dance during the war — delivered with timing and detail that drew laughter from me before I knew it was coming, the genuine kind, surprised out of you by someone who understood that the best stories weren't performed but offered. I'd taken a photograph of her later that afternoon, unposed, caught mid-conversation with a group of officers who were all leaning toward her like she was briefing them on a case. Late afternoon light, golden and generous, the kind that fell across faces like a kindness. One of those shots where everything aligned without arrangement — subject, light, moment — and the image told a truth the photographer couldn't have planned.

I'd thought about printing it for Sarah. Never had. One of those intentions that lived permanently in the space between meaning to and getting around to it, gathering dust alongside all the other small acts of connection I'd considered and then talked myself out of because the moment had passed or the gesture felt too much or I couldn't work out what it would mean if I actually did it.

Sarah's expression softened at the mention of her grandmother. A small shift — a millimetre of tension releasing from muscles that had been holding too tight for too long — but I noticed it the way I noticed changes in light or shifts in someone's breathing during a difficult conversation. The body's language was always more honest than the mouth's, and right now her body was saying that someone acknowledging what she was carrying had briefly made the carrying lighter.

"Thank you," she said quietly.

The moment held. Something genuine passing between us that had nothing to do with unanswered texts or whatever awkwardness lived in the gap between what had happened that night and what either of us was willing to say about it. Just two people standing in a room full of fluorescent light and other people's business, acknowledging that someone they both cared about was suffering, and that this fact outweighed everything else.

Then she shifted gears. I watched her do it — deliberate, conscious, the way you'd feel a transmission engage. A decision made with the body before the words followed. Shoulders squaring slightly. Chin lifting a fraction. Professional territory. Work. The solid ground of tasks and procedures and things with clear edges.

"Did you bring the hard drive?"

"Oh, yes, of course," I said, grateful for the return to concrete purpose the way a swimmer was grateful for finding the bottom with their feet — suddenly stable, suddenly knowing where they stood. This I could do. Evidence transfer. Chain of custody. The mechanics of professional competence that didn't require navigating emotional undercurrents I was clearly not equipped for.

I shrugged the bag off my shoulder — the messenger bag Rebecca had bought me after the old one disintegrated, all weatherproof fabric and reflective cycling strips that I didn't need because I didn't cycle, but the bag was good and arguing with a gift that worked seemed ungrateful. The movement pulled the shirt across my chest, technical fabric stretching taut over muscle in a way that was completely unremarkable on a running trail and completely conspicuous in a CIB office. I felt the stretch happen, felt the fabric tighten and hold, and wished very intensely that I'd packed a jumper. Or a coat. Or a full hazmat suit. Anything with more coverage and less performance fit.

I reached into the bag and retrieved the protective case — slim, matte black, padded — and held it up. "Here it is."

The gesture felt immediately ridiculous, and I knew it was ridiculous even as I committed to it. I was presenting a hard drive like it was something ceremonial — an offering, a trophy, a gift that warranted being displayed at arm's length rather than simply placed on a desk and signed for. It was evidence in a padded case. Two weeks of ferry security footage. Not something that needed to be held aloft. But I was already holding it up, and lowering it now would look stranger still — like cross-threading a bolt and realising too late, the damage done in the instant before your brain caught up with your hands, nothing to do but keep going and hope the repair was possible later.

"Two weeks' worth?" Sarah asked, reaching out to take the case from me. Her fingers brushed mine during the transfer — the physics of passing an object between two people, nothing more than that — but I noticed how cold her hands were. Not surface-cool from the air conditioning but deeply cold, the kind that came from poor circulation or irregular meals or a body that was routing its limited resources to essential systems and had decided that warm extremities weren't making the priority list. The hands of someone running on reserves they'd already spent.

I wanted to say something about it. Ask whether she'd eaten today. Whether she was looking after herself between looking after everyone else. But I had enough awareness to recognise that a man in running shorts had no standing to diagnose a CIB detective's welfare based on finger temperature during an evidence handover. Some observations, however accurate, didn't earn themselves a voice just because you'd made them.

"Two weeks' worth. All accounted for," I confirmed. Chain of custody maintained, documentation complete, the drive delivered intact and on time. Whatever else I'd managed to fumble today, the professional obligation was fulfilled. Ellen would get her confirmation that the job was done, and the footage would be where it needed to be for whatever analysis Hobart CIB had planned.

"Great," Sarah said, managing a smile that didn't quite reach her eyes. It was the kind of smile I'd seen on people holding too many things at once — genuine enough in intention but lacking the energy to travel the full distance, because the energy was already allocated elsewhere, every watt of it spoken for by demands that weren't going to wait politely for a smile to finish forming. She glanced up at me, and I tried to hold her gaze properly — steady, professional, the way I'd maintain eye contact with a witness or a colleague or anyone I was interacting with in a work capacity. The same way I'd look at anyone.

But my eyes betrayed me.

They dipped. Just for a fraction of a second — less time than a shutter firing, less than the gap between one heartbeat and the next — but enough. Enough to register the line of her collarbone beneath her shirt, the curve of her shoulders, the way exhaustion had stripped something back from her face that left it more open, more unguarded, more present than careful composure would ever allow. Like those photographs I sometimes caught at the end of long days — subjects who'd stopped performing for the camera and just were, unposed, undefended, real in a way that deliberate composition couldn't manufacture.

Except this wasn't a photograph. This was a person. A colleague. And I'd just looked at her in a way that had nothing to do with professional interaction, and I knew it in the same instant it happened — the way you knew a tool had slipped before the damage registered, that fraction of a second where awareness and action existed in different time signatures, the mind watching the hands do something it hadn't authorised.

I saw the exact moment she registered it.

The shift was subtle — barely perceptible unless you'd spent two decades learning to read the language people spoke without words. A recalibration in her posture. Openness closing like a lens stopping down, reducing the amount of light allowed in. Warmth replaced by something more measured, more defended — that particular adjustment people made when they'd been made conscious of their body in a way they hadn't invited and didn't welcome. I'd seen it before. On victims I'd sat with who were recounting how someone had made them feel observed rather than seen. On colleagues whose space had been entered without permission. That small, self-protective contraction that said I noticed what you just did, and I've adjusted accordingly.

Fuck.

The word arrived in my head like a dropped spanner in a quiet workshop — sudden, ringing, impossible to pretend hadn't happened. One job. I'd had one simple, mechanical task. Collect the drive. Drive to Hobart. Deliver it to Sarah. Be professional. Be decent. Leave. And I'd managed to compromise the whole thing in the exact way I'd told myself not to, in the exact way that confirmed every reason she might have had for not returning my messages, in the exact way that took whatever fragile, tentative thing might have existed between us and put a crack through it that I could hear.

"That's all, thank you, Duncan," she said. Firm. Professional courtesy wrapped around unmistakable dismissal — polite enough to preserve what remained of the interaction's dignity but direct enough to leave no room for alternative interpretation. A door, closed. Not slammed. Just closed, with the quiet finality of someone who'd decided the conversation was over and was simply informing the other participant.

I stood there. Hands empty. Body still present. The bag hanging off one shoulder, the weight of it now feeling conspicuous rather than natural, everything about my physical presence registering as imposition rather than neutral fact. I didn't know the protocol for what came next. Whether I was supposed to turn and walk immediately — no further exchange, just an exit as clean and swift as the dismissal warranted — or whether some additional step existed that would give me a reason to still be here other than the obvious one, which was that I'd broken the interaction and didn't know how to leave the pieces on the floor without making it worse by trying to pick them up.

The silence stretched between us, filling the space with everything neither of us was saying. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, conscious of occupying ground I'd been asked to vacate. Around us, the CIB office continued — keyboards, phones, the steady murmur of people doing work that mattered — all of it carrying on as though this small disaster wasn't playing out three feet from Sarah Lahey's desk. Which, from their perspective, it wasn't. It was just a bloke from up north who'd delivered something and hadn't left yet. Nothing unusual. Nothing worth noticing.

"Uh. I believe Ellen was keen to see you too," Sarah offered.

The shift in her tone was tactical — not warm, not cold, just purposeful. An exit being constructed in real time, materials gathered from whatever was to hand. Ellen. Of course. Ellen, who'd organised this whole delivery, who'd called in the favour, who'd told me exactly where to go and who to see and how to not be a pain in the arse about it. Pleasant enough woman, professionally formidable, the kind of person who kept the machinery of a station running while everyone else took the credit. I'd known her since my Devonport days, when she'd been office manager and I'd been a constable who'd learned quickly that Ellen Lowe's desk was the place you went when you needed something done and every official channel had failed you.

But I couldn't recall her expressing particular enthusiasm about seeing me beyond the professional requirement of confirming the delivery had been made. The idea that she'd been keen stretched credibility — Ellen didn't do keen. Ellen did brisk, efficient, mildly exasperated, and occasionally terrifying. Keen wasn't in the repertoire.

Still. Sarah was offering me a way out. A bridge over the gap I'd created, a structure to walk across that didn't require me to acknowledge what I'd just done or what she'd just seen me do. And I was grateful enough to take it without inspecting the engineering.

"Really?" I said. Probably with more enthusiasm than any human being had ever expressed about the prospect of seeing an administrative officer. But it was a lifeline, and drowning men didn't critique the rope.

Sarah nodded with exaggerated seriousness — the kind of earnest expression that would have been convincing if she'd committed to it even slightly harder, if the performance had been given one more coat of paint. "Oh, yes. I definitely remember her telling me how excited she was to hear that you were going to be visiting today."

The lie was transparent. Every element of it — the overly specific phrasing, the careful emphasis on excited, the slight theatrical quality in her delivery — announced itself as construction rather than recollection. Ellen Lowe, excited about a visit from anyone. Ellen, whose standard greeting was a raised eyebrow and whose highest compliment was the absence of complaint. The image was so fundamentally wrong it would have been funny under different circumstances.

But it was a kind lie. A bridge laid down across uncomfortable ground by someone who could have left me standing there instead. She was being decent about it, giving me somewhere to go and something to do that wasn't hovering at her desk while she counted the seconds until I disappeared. I was grateful for the craftsmanship even as I walked across it.

"But, you know, I'm sure I remember her also saying she had to go to court today. If you hurry, I'm sure you'll be able to catch her before she leaves."

The message couldn't have been clearer if she'd physically pointed at the stairwell door. That way. Now. Quickly. Please. The manufactured urgency providing both direction and velocity — a swift exit reframed as purposeful departure rather than retreat. Masterfully done, really. Under other circumstances I might have admired the technique.

"Oh, thanks," I said, already turning, already orienting myself toward escape with the relief of someone given permission to end something they'd been enduring. "I guess I'd best be going then. Don't want to miss her!"

The cheerfulness in my voice was survival mechanism wrapped in social convention — bright, uncomplicated, the tone of a man who was absolutely not cataloguing his failures in real time but was simply moving on to his next obligation with the easy confidence of someone whose day was going exactly as planned. I adjusted the bag on my shoulder, the familiar weight of it settling against my back.

"Yeah. You'd better hurry," Sarah added, and there was a quickness in it — urgency leaking through the performance like water through a seal that hadn't quite seated properly. "Like, right now."

Subtle as a siren. But effective.

I gave her a wave — tried for casual and cheerful, the easy farewell between colleagues who'd completed a routine evidence transfer and had nothing further to discuss. Whether I managed that or something closer to the desperate semaphore of a man signalling a rescue helicopter, I'd probably never know, and probably didn't want to.

"Bye, Sarah. It was great to see you again."

And it had been. Despite everything — despite the gear, despite the glance, despite standing there like a spare part while she built me an exit out of transparent fiction and barely concealed urgency. It had been good to see her face, even exhausted, even under those merciless fluorescents, even while she was clearly counting down the seconds until I removed myself from her proximity. That admission, sitting quiet and stubborn in my chest, probably said more about the state of things than I was ready to look at directly. Like a photograph you'd taken that showed you something you weren't prepared to see — you could leave it in the camera, but you couldn't un-take it.

"See ya," she replied. A minimal hand gesture — barely a wave, more a dismissal shaped like one. The full stop at the end of a sentence she'd been trying to finish for the last three minutes.