The Drive at the Edge of the Desk

Sarah Lahey carried the matte-black hard drive case down two flights of stairs to the basement of Hobart Police Station and through the narrow concrete corridor that led to the under-resourced room the rest of the station referred to, with rather more grandeur than the room deserved, as the tech department.

The room was several degrees colder than the floors above. The fluorescent strips in the ceiling cast the kind of dim grey-green light that was bright enough to work by and never bright enough to feel comfortable in. The air carried the steady audible vibration of more equipment than the room had been built to house, and the faint smell of warm electronics that had been working too hard for too long. At the far end of the lair, behind a semicircle of six monitors arranged in a configuration that looked more like the cockpit of something requiring a pilot's licence than a desk anyone could sit comfortably at, Sarah found her cousin James.

James Longey was the digital forensics analyst Hobart Police Station had quietly come to depend on for the kind of evidence work the rest of the station did not entirely understand and was not, on the whole, interested in attempting. He was also Sarah's first cousin on her mother's side. Jane Lahey was grandmother to both of them — Jane having raised James's mother in the same Hobart house that she had later raised Sarah and Oscar in after the accident in the Swiss Alps — and the shared grandmother was the structural reason Sarah was carrying a hard drive of unknown provenance down to her cousin in the basement instead of plugging it into the computer at her own desk on the second floor. Both of them understood the reason without needing to discuss it.

James had been working a cryptocurrency fraud case for the past three hours when Sarah's footsteps reached him through the corridors. The case had absorbed his attention to the exclusion of food, time, and the cold coffee at his elbow, and he had been close to a breakthrough on it when his concentration was interrupted. He turned in his chair, registered his cousin in the practised half-second a forensic analyst could not unlearn, and read off her face the things her face was telling him without her permission. Tired in a way that was no longer fixable by sleep. The shoulders of a detective with case-hooks in. A hard drive in both hands held like an object whose weight did not correspond to its mass.

The handover was efficient. Two weeks of Spirit of Tasmania security footage — every camera, every angle, every Bass Strait crossing across the past fortnight. Senior Constable Duncan Flack had brought it down from Devonport that morning. Sarah was looking for two men, Jamie Greyson and Kain Jeffries, who might have boarded the ferry under their own names, or under aliases, or as stowaways, or who might not have boarded at all. She would settle for whichever of those answers James could give her first.

James turned the matte-black case over in his hand with the small assessing weight that came from having handled thousands of them. He calculated, in the careful way he calculated everything, that two weeks of multi-camera footage from a terminal as busy as Devonport meant something in the region of three hundred and thirty-six hours of recording, and that even with the automated facial recognition pipeline he had built across his four years in this basement, the work was not going to be quick. He told her he could have preliminary results by tomorrow morning and a full analysis by Tuesday.

He plugged the drive into one of his secondary analysis machines and watched the operating system recognise the device with a soft chime. Then he turned back to Sarah and asked her when she had last eaten something that had not come from a vending machine.

Sarah deflected the question and thanked him. James watched her climb back through the corridors of the building toward the second floor with the small lightening of a person who had successfully placed a piece of her morning into a pair of hands she trusted.

What James did after his cousin left the room, however, was not what his cousin imagined he was doing.

The cryptocurrency fraud case had been waiting on his central monitor through the entire handover. The pattern he had been chasing through the blockchain for the past three hours had not gone anywhere. The momentum of the investigation had — and James knew, from the experience of every similar case across the past four years, that momentum was the one resource he could not import from somewhere else. He had promised Sarah preliminary results by the following morning. He had not promised her immediate action. He could keep the promise and finish his own work first.

He pushed the matte-black hard drive case to the edge of his desk to make room for the printed analysis he was about to generate, set the ferry footage import running in the background where it would crawl through its initial scan across the next several hours, and went back to the cryptocurrency investigation.

Family came first, he had told her. He had meant it when he had said it. He still meant it. He just needed to finish this first.