4338.211 · July 30, 2018 AD
Small Mutiny
Detective Karl Jenkins returns to the Hobart police station from a failed pursuit at Myrtle Forest with a request for his sergeant and enough mud on his boots to mark the corridor between the bullpen and the office. Sergeant Charlie Claiborne refuses him without looking up. What follows in the station carpark is a small mutiny — quiet, unrecorded, undertaken by a detective who has spent too long outside the institution to step back inside it without breaking something.
Charlie Claiborne had been at his desk since before two, working through a stack of incident reports with the steady unremarkable pace of a man who had decided some years ago that the proper response to institutional chaos was institutional neatness. He knew his detectives were on their way in from Myrtle Forest. He knew roughly what they would ask for when they arrived. He had decided what he was going to say to them before the patrol car crossed the Bridgewater turn-off. The decision was correct. The decision was also, he understood, going to land badly.
Karl Jenkins walked into the office with mud to his thighs and Sarah Lahey behind him. He did not sit. He made the request the way he had been trained to make it — factual, specific, grounded in what they had brought back from the forest. Charlie did not look up. He said no the first time, and no the second, and the third time he laid down his pen and explained calmly that standard patrols were already passing the Claremont address, that the resources were correctly calibrated, and that the dedicated stakeout was redundant. The explanation was correct in every particular.
Karl knew it was correct. The knowing did not reach the place in his chest where the refusal had landed. After the bedroom at Berriedale and the goose at the Owens' and the woman in the cubicle, a no on the stakeout was not a small no. It was one more closed door at the end of a day that had been closing doors on him since breakfast. He left the office with the kind of force that produces door-slams the bullpen notices.
Sarah Lahey followed him out on her own exhausted legs. The stitches in her right palm had been weeping fresh blood since Myrtle Forest, and the further knock to her head that she had not reported had been pulsing behind her eyes since a rake handle at the Owens' barn. She had filed a false incident report for Karl at breakfast. She had run the plate on Gladys Cramer's Corolla at a hundred and ten kilometres an hour through the foothills. She had walked into the forest at Myrtle Forest ahead of him because the bracelet in the mud was a lead and she had been the one to find it. Her day had been hers. The decision forming in her now was hers too.
Karl reached his own car — not a patrol car — and got in without turning to see whether she was still behind him. The silence in the cabin was immediate and suffocating. His breath fogged the windscreen. The silver-haired woman from the cubicle came back to him against his will — the hair in the torch beam, the body folded small against the back wall, the impossible colours blooming around her in a vortex the cubicle had no business producing. He must be losing his mind, he thought, and the thought arrived with the small cold clarity of a thing he had been refusing to think all afternoon.
The passenger door opened. Sarah got in without asking. She pulled the seatbelt across her chest with her uninjured hand, closed the door, and did not look at him. Karl turned to look at her, and what he saw was not forgiveness or loyalty or anything he had earned. It was the quieter thing: she had decided. The decision had not been a reaction to him. It had been taken inside her own day, for reasons that were hers, and she had carried it into the seat beside him.
He leaned across the console and kissed her. He did not plan to. She did not pull away. Her hand came up to his collar and stayed there, and the handbrake dug into his ribs, and neither of them said the things that would have been said by two people who had not spent the preceding day learning to speak to each other in physical force. When he pulled away, her eyes were closed. Then they opened, and she turned her face toward the windscreen without speaking.
Inside the station, at the end of a corridor neither of them would walk back down that evening, Charlie Claiborne finished the report he had been signing when Karl walked in, squared the edges of the stack with a small precise motion, and reached for the next one.
The engine started on the first try. Karl pulled out of the station carpark into the thin drizzle that was all that remained of the afternoon's rain, and turned north toward Claremont, and Sarah Lahey did not tell him to turn around.
