The Cigarette Ellen Didn't Smoke

The courtyard at Hobart Police Station was a small square of concrete and struggling plants that existed mostly for fire codes. On most mornings it contained nothing more interesting than a desperate smoker or two. On this particular morning it contained Sergeant Charlie Claiborne, Mrs Louise Jeffries of Jeffries Manor, a hand resting on an elbow that did not belong to a sergeant touching a witness, and a mouth held close enough to an ear that whatever was passing between them was being passed in the register people used for things they did not want even the air to overhear.

Detective Sarah Lahey saw it through the scratched reinforced glass of the corridor doors.

Her morning had been a comedy of small disorganisations — a phone mislaid and retrieved from the locker room basin, two missed texts from Karl, the accumulated fatigue of a night barely slept. Her attention had been somewhere between apologetic and scattered until the shape beyond the glass resolved and her professional focus snapped into place with an almost audible click. Louise's posture was loose. Louise's shoulders were angled toward Charlie, not away from him. Everything in the body language beyond that glass contradicted the body language of a woman asking her local sergeant for news about her missing son.

Sarah began to edge along the wall of the corridor toward the courtyard doors with the carefulness of a detective who had decided a risk was worth taking.

Fifteen metres further down the same corridor, Ellen Lowe had a cigarette packet in her cardigan pocket and a manila folder under her arm containing the results of yesterday's airport and ferry checks on Jamie Greyson and Kain Jeffries. She had been walking, with the steady economy of a woman whose morning was about to include five minutes of peace, toward the same courtyard Sarah was approaching from the opposite direction. Then she saw the detective edging along the wall. Then she saw what the detective was edging along the wall toward. Then she made the kind of small fast decision three decades at Hobart Police Station had trained her to make.

The cigarette would have to wait.

Ellen did not know what her sergeant and the witness from Jeffries Manor were discussing in the courtyard this morning. She did not need to. She had been reading institutional shapes since before Sarah Lahey had been born, and this shape had the particular outline of something a young detective's ambition could turn into a career-ending complication inside a single afternoon.

She shifted the manila folder to a more prominent position — visible evidence of legitimate professional business — and called the younger woman's name down the corridor with the particular cigarette-worn rasp that made detectives in this building turn their heads on reflex.

What followed was a small unhurried operation conducted without any of the participants, except its author, understanding they were inside one. Ellen planted herself in front of Sarah with the airport folder open. She scolded her for not answering her phone, quite possibly inflating the number of times she had attempted the call. She pressed into delivery of the airport results with a professional momentum that discouraged interruption. Hobart negative. Launceston negative. The Spirit of Tasmania negative, but security footage of the past several weeks was being shipped down from Devonport in the care of a man called Duncan, a piece of information that arrived in Ellen's own voice with a warmth she briefly wished she had not permitted.

Throughout the delivery, Ellen touched Sarah's elbow in the small accidental way a person touched an elbow when they were guiding somebody without calling it guiding. She turned them both around across the course of a single sentence about ferry schedules. And when the sentence finished, Sarah's back was to the courtyard glass, and Ellen's was to the wall, and the small physical reorientation of the two women relative to the scene beyond the panels was complete.

Ellen did not turn her head to check the courtyard. She did not need to. The small shift in the quality of the light behind her and the muffled closing of a door somewhere to the left told her that the sergeant and the witness had concluded whatever business they had brought to that particular patch of concrete, and had moved back into the building in whatever direction they had chosen not to be seen leaving it.

She finished the airport report. She accepted Sarah's thanks with the thin politeness it deserved. She walked away down the corridor.

Sarah turned at last back toward the glass.

Empty. Scattered leaves moving in the morning breeze. A metal bench slick with dew. Concrete stained with old water marks and cigarette ash. Whatever had passed between her sergeant and Louise Jeffries in that small square had passed without witness and without record, and Sarah was going to carry the unease of it for the rest of her morning without a single piece of evidence she could put in front of another person to make it real.

Ellen reached her desk, filed the folder into the stack Sarah would eventually come and collect, and finally pulled the cigarette packet from her cardigan pocket. The courtyard would still be there in ten minutes. The cold air and the five minutes of peace would keep. She had been paid to be useful in quiet ways for most of her adult life, and being useful in quiet ways was a skill that did not tolerate being interrupted in the middle of its work by a smoke break.

She did not know whether Sarah would ever understand what had just been done on her behalf. She did not particularly need her to.