4338.224 · August 12, 2018 AD
The Ceiling Lowers
The station is wrong before Stout reaches the front doors. Too many vehicles. Too many lights burning in offices that should be dark. A constable heading for the toilets at speed with a face the colour of concrete. Whatever happened overnight at has hit the building like a bomb — and the man waiting in the conference room has already decided that anything connecting six dead bodies to a missing detective will reach Stout through channels that aren't Stout's to control.
Sunday morning. The station is wrong before Stout reaches the front doors. Jeffries Manor — six confirmed dead overnight. Louise in the drawing room. Rebecca on the first-floor landing. Emily in her bedroom. Margaret Ashford in the kitchen. Dennis Carrick on the driveway. Peter Haynes in the staff quarters. Tom Jeffries in Melbourne since Friday. Katie missing — vehicle still in the garage. Thelma missing — ninety-one years old, no body.
Woolley is running it. The same man who delivered the withdrawal directive on the third. The same man who warned Stout in the station kitchen. Now standing at the head of the table with two officers Stout doesn't know and a whiteboard turned away from the door. Anything relevant to the Jenkins case will be flagged through appropriate channels. The phrase closes around Stout's investigation like a fist.
Then the interstate enquiry results arrive. The Smith family home in Adelaide — emptied overnight on the first of August while police watched. The same signature as Pillinger Street. Paul Smith in Broken Hill — house closed, family relocated to Queensland, neighbour confirms Beatrix visited and seemed lovely. Every name Beatrix volunteered leads to another empty house. Every verification confirms her story and deepens the impossibility. She handed him the threads knowing that pulling them would unravel nothing.
The only witness who could have told him what happened on the second of August is lying dead in her drawing room, and the institution is closing around his investigation one foot at a time.
