4338.207 · July 26, 2018 AD
The Apprentice Who Went to Check
On 26 July 2018, twenty-three-year-old construction apprentice Kain Jeffries left Jeffries Manor to check on his uncle at a Berriedale address. His phone stopped transmitting forty minutes later. His vehicle was never found. His uncle's partner claimed he never arrived. His mother reported him missing two days later, presenting detectives with a disappearance that left no crime scene, no witness, no vehicle, and a pregnant fiancée waiting for a father whose last known act was doing a favour for his mum.
Louise Jeffries had been trying to reach her brother Jamie for days. The calls went to voicemail. The texts sat unread. The silence was wrong — Jamie was not the kind of person who went quiet, and his partner Luke Smith's assurances that everything was fine carried a tone that Louise, who had spent a decade distrusting Luke on instinct she could not fully articulate, found worse than no answer at all.
She asked her son to drive over and see for himself.
Kain Jeffries was twenty-three, two and a half years into a construction apprenticeship, and six months away from becoming a father. He was the kind of young man who said yes when his mother asked him to do something, even when the timing was inconvenient and the errand seemed straightforward enough to wait. He left Jeffries Manor on the morning of 26 July 2018 and headed for Berriedale.
His phone stopped transmitting at 9:40 AM. His vehicle was never located. No witness has confirmed that he arrived at the address. When Louise visited the property herself, Luke Smith met her at the door and told her Kain had never come. Jamie, Luke said, was in Melbourne.
Two days later, Louise walked into Hobart Police Station and filed reports for both her son and her brother. She had sent Kain to find answers. Instead, he became another question — one that Southern Division, despite everything it would sacrifice in the attempt, could not answer either.
