The Fifth Lie

“Lies don’t just pile up—they start numbering themselves, keeping score while you pretend not to.”

When I stepped back into the kitchen, Sandra was exactly where I'd left her—leaning against the bench, her posture relaxed but deceptively so. The tablet had disappeared, replaced by her phone, thumb scrolling in that lazy, distracted rhythm of someone letting themselves be pulled along by idle distraction rather than urgent purpose. A faint smile curved her lips, not quite joy, not quite amusement—the soft satisfaction of a message that didn't demand a reply, at least not yet.

The morning light slanted across her hair, catching on strands of silver that had begun threading their way through the chestnut. She pretended they weren't there, the same way she pretended birthdays were just numbers and exhibition deadlines didn't unnerve her. I pretended not to notice either. An unspoken pact of omission, one of many in a marriage that had survived by carefully tending its silences. My mother had gone grey early too, before the lupus had taken everything else. Sandra would hate the comparison, but I made it anyway, privately, the way you make comparisons you know better than to voice.

I moved to the counter and topped up my coffee. The act itself—the pot, the mug, the pour—carried a kind of grounding force. Routine, simple and unthreatening. The warmth that seeped into my fingers gave me something to cling to, something ordinary. The ceramic mug, chipped at the handle from the time Amelia had knocked it against the tap, fit perfectly against my palm. Real, in a way the morning's theatre hadn't been.

Sandra didn't lift her gaze when she spoke. Her tone was conversational, so casual it could have been a remark about groceries or parking permits. But the distance between us was weighted with something else—the fact that only minutes earlier I'd slipped evidence into a drawer in the study like contraband.

"You seen the RSVP list yet?"

The question landed lightly, but it wasn't idle. Nothing Sandra asked about MONA was ever idle. The gala had consumed her attention for months, had become the centrepiece of conversations I'd learned to navigate without truly engaging. She'd earned this moment—years of committee work and gallery politics and careful relationship-building, all crystallising into an event where her name would appear on programmes and press releases alongside people who'd never expected to share space with a policeman's wife.

I kept my eyes fixed on the stream of coffee, watching the swirl of dark liquid settle into stillness. The motion reminded me, unwillingly, of the ink inside the snow globe—only this swirl lacked menace, lacked design. Just caffeine and habit, nothing more.

"Haven't checked," I said.

The truth was different. I had checked. More than once. I knew the guest list better than Sandra realised, had scoured it the way you scan a crime scene—looking for anomalies, for names that didn't fit, for links that shouldn't exist. It was the same instinct that had made me cross-reference witness statements in the Barwick case, the same pattern-seeking that had caught the inconsistency in Bradley Mitchell's expense claims. And now, after this morning—after Row A, Seat 6, after the invitation folded in the dead man's jacket, after the snow globe etched with a date that refused to loosen its hold—I wanted nothing more than to keep that list away from this kitchen, from this house, from her.

Not yet. Not until I understood the rules of whatever game we'd been conscripted into.

Lie number three.

The taste of it was metallic, sharper than the coffee on my tongue. They were building now, these lies—stacking one atop another, small and self-contained, but accumulating weight all the same. I'd sat across from suspects who'd done the same thing, watched their stories grow more elaborate with each telling, each small untruth requiring two more to support it. The architecture of deception, Dr Kirkpatrick had called it once, discussing how trauma survivors sometimes constructed false narratives to protect themselves from memories too painful to face. I'd thought he was talking about other people.

She gave a soft hum of interest and kept scrolling, her fingernail—perfectly manicured in that understated, art-world way she favoured—tapping lightly against the glass. A rhythm without urgency, the kind of absent percussion that suggested she'd already decided the answer to her own question and didn't particularly need mine.

I lifted the mug to my lips and took a long sip, hoping the bitterness would ground me. Instead, it tasted scorched. Ash. Like something that had been left too long on the flame, ruined past redemption. The taste clung, acrid and unyielding, coating my tongue until I had to force the swallow.

And then, as I lowered the cup, my gaze shifted—unthinking, casual. Landed on the fridge.

And stopped.

The MONA gala invitation—the one that had been fixed to the door with Amelia's ceramic star magnet—was gone.

For a moment, I didn't move. Just stood there, staring at the bare rectangle of space where it had been. Centre frame, prominent, deliberately positioned so every time the fridge opened, the invite caught your eye. Sandra had aligned it like an exhibit piece, as if it were already part of her world. Not merely paper, not merely ink, but a marker of belonging.

That invitation had meant something. More than access to a gala. It was validation—evidence that her name carried weight now, that she'd worked her way into a circle that didn't open itself easily. The Harris family connections had helped, of course—her father's reputation, her mother's old friendships with gallery board members—but Sandra had built something beyond inheritance. She'd earned this. And it had sat there for weeks, an unspoken triumph she could glance at each morning with the faintest curve of satisfaction.

Now there was nothing but a handwritten grocery list, scrawled in her efficient script: bread, milk, coriander. And below it, a curling drawing Amelia had done half a decade ago, edges browned from time and fridge heat. A house, lopsided but earnest, with five stick figures standing proudly outside. The fifth, unmistakably, was Rex—our border collie, immortalised in crayon long before his hips gave out last winter. I'd held him at the end, at the vet's surgery in Sandy Bay, Sandra too upset to stay in the room, the children too old to be shielded from death but young enough to be devastated by it. I'd told myself I'd frame Amelia's drawing properly one day. Preserve it. Another small intention worn thin by the abrasion of years.

I leaned against the bench, forced my posture into ease, the mug cradled loosely in my hands. My eyes drifted deliberately, as though still half-engaged in Sandra's low commentary about digital confirmations and the silent politics of who'd been invited, who hadn't, and who was pretending not to care.

But my pulse had quickened, and each beat landed harder than it should. I masked it—the way I'd done in interview rooms, in morgues, at scenes where the bereaved searched the detective's face for truth he couldn't yet give them. Control the expression. Keep it neutral. Because the one thing you never do is let anyone see what you've just seen.

The absence of that invitation was no accident.

"They're doing everything online now," she said absently, her voice balanced perfectly between interest and that cultivated art-world detachment—as though she wanted me to know she was paying attention, but not too much. "Even seat allocations. I saw Enid Pennicott tagged in something last night. Looked very smug."

Enid Pennicott. I knew the name—one of Sandra's gallery rivals, a woman who'd made a career of being photographed at the right events with the right people. Sandra mentioned her the way athletes mention competitors they pretend not to care about.

I made a sound in my throat, low and indistinct, the kind of grunt that could mean agreement, disinterest, or the simple acknowledgement of sound. I added a slow nod for good measure—just enough engagement to keep the moment alive, without offering any purchase for further conversation.

Inside, I wasn't listening at all. Not to Sandra, not to Enid Pennicott's smugness, not to anything except the hollow echo ringing through me at the sight of that blank space on the fridge. My mind was running laps, each circuit faster, tighter, closing in on itself.

I hadn't touched Sandra's invite. I knew that as surely as I knew my own name. The one I'd taken was from the dead man in the theatre—folded neatly, bagged with evidence, now hidden. But hers? Hers had been here. I remembered it clearly. Cream cardstock. Gold embossing. The same weight of exclusivity in paper form. One pinned to the fridge with a cracked star magnet. One folded into the jacket pocket of a corpse.

Two.

Hadn't it?

Memory, I reminded myself, is a liar. It doesn't capture, it reconstructs. Every time you pull a detail forward, it frays at the edges, rewoven by expectation, by habit, by hope. Dr Kirkpatrick had explained this during our sessions after Moonah—how the brain doesn't store memories like photographs but rebuilds them each time they're accessed, incorporating new information, new fears, new wishes. Had I seen it specifically this morning as I passed the fridge? Or was I pulling yesterday forward and pinning it here, now, because I needed it to still exist? Because the alternative—that it had vanished between the theatre and home—was too precise, too calculated to face head-on.

The ordinary becomes invisible with time. A magnet. A slip of paper. A rectangle of cream against stainless steel. Easy to overlook. Easy to forget until it wasn't there.

And yet I was certain.

Wasn't I?

I waited, patient and still, until her phone buzzed again. Her thumb moved, face tilting toward the screen, features softening with the faintest flicker of amusement—a private smile reserved for messages I wasn't meant to see. That was my opening.

I drifted across the kitchen, mug still in hand. To anyone watching, it was nothing more than a man shifting his weight, stretching his legs. But each step was deliberate underneath the casualness.

The bin gave its usual soft resistance as I nudged the lid open with my foot. I leaned just enough to peer inside.

Nothing.

No cream cardstock curled in on itself. No gold embossing dulled by coffee grounds. No torn fragments, no corners peeking out beneath clingfilm and eggshells. Just the sour mix of domestic detritus—coffee grounds, yesterday's yoghurt tub, Amelia's half-eaten toast, edges stiffened now with cold butter.

I straightened, eyes flicking across the bench, scanning as I would a scene. No piles of paper, no coffee rings obscuring it, no misplaced envelope caught beneath the stack of bills by the fruit bowl. Nothing behind the toaster. Nothing under the placemats. I even brushed the corner of the cutting board, just in case.

It hadn't been misplaced. It hadn't been discarded.

It had been removed.

A hand had taken it. Deliberately. Silently.

By whom? And for what purpose?

The questions thickened in my chest, curling like smoke that refused to clear. This was the part of investigations I'd always found most unsettling—not the violence itself, but the gaps. The things that should be present but weren't. The absences that spoke louder than evidence.

I didn't ask her. Couldn't. Not yet. The theatre still pressed against my ribs, the weight of the snow globe still humming in the drawer behind me. Adding this question—here, now—would be like striking a match in a room already filled with gas.

So I drained the last of the coffee, the taste flat now, metallic at the back of my throat, and set the mug down with quiet finality. It sat like lead in my stomach, heavy and unwelcome.

"Quick call to return," I muttered, voice pitched low, deliberately unremarkable.

Sandra waved a hand in my direction without looking up, her eyes already locked back on the blue-lit screen. Whatever message she was reading mattered more in that moment than me, than the room, than the silence spreading between us.

I let her keep it. And I carried the weight instead.

In the hallway, I moved without sound. The coat cupboard opened with its familiar sigh, wood on wood, a noise no one else would have noticed but which to me always sounded faintly like confession.

From the inside lining of my jacket, I drew out the evidence pouch. The plastic whispered against itself, crinkling in the hush of the house—the sound amplified in my ears until it felt indecently loud.

The invitation was still there. Still immaculate. Its edges sharp, its surface cool—unnaturally so, as if it had been stored somewhere colder than the world outside. The chill seemed to radiate from it, threading into my skin. It brought back the theatre in an instant: the body slumped in perfect stillness, the lingering scent of dust and velvet, the faint mechanical whir of curtains rising with no audience to applaud. The thought arrived like a draft under a locked door: the card was as lifeless, as staged, as deliberately placed as the man who had carried it.

I stepped softly back into the kitchen. The air was warmer there, too warm almost, and Sandra was running the tap, rinsing her mug. Water striking ceramic—ordinary, domestic, a noise that concealed mine. Her back was to me, head slightly tilted in concentration. The kind of distraction surveillance operatives pray for. The kind detectives wait out when shadowing suspects. The kind I'd used a hundred times during my career, and now was using on my own wife.

The moment when a body's attention shifts, and you can move unseen.

My hand moved automatically. I drew the card from the pouch, careful not to smudge its surface, and held it briefly against my chest. For an instant, the gesture felt ritualistic—like an oath, or a shield. Then, with the kind of precision that comes when you know what's at stake, I pinned it back onto the fridge. The magnet clicked faintly as it settled into place, locking the invitation once again into the geography of our kitchen.

Exactly where it had been. Exactly how it should be. No sign of its absence, no suggestion of its journey from theatre to pouch to fridge.

My hands lingered a moment longer, hovering in the air. Because in a way, I'd just done exactly what I'd condemned Bradley Mitchell for. Exactly what I'd testified against in the Royal Commission. Exactly what I'd lectured young officers about during training sessions. Evidence is sacred. The chain of custody is inviolable. The moment you compromise it, you compromise everything.

And here I was, in my own kitchen, substituting a dead man's invitation for my wife's missing one.

I'd broken every rule I'd ever barked at rookies. Contaminated potential evidence. Substituted one reality for another. Crossed a line I'd once sworn was immovable, sacred even.

When Sandra turned back a moment later, drying her hands on a tea towel, the card was already there. Innocent. Fixed. Familiar.

She didn't notice.

And I didn't breathe.

I stood there too long, rooted in place, my gaze fixed on the fridge as though persistence alone might shake loose an answer. As though if I stared hard enough, the bloody thing might creak open its enamel mouth and confess. Explain the vanishing. The return. Offer up some rational thread to tie together what was increasingly feeling like a performance designed with me in mind.

The invitation stared back. Cream card, gold trim, the MONA insignia gleaming faintly in the morning light. Its edges aligned perfectly. Straight. Innocent. It sat as if it had never been touched, never vanished, never crossed the line between domestic ephemera and crime scene evidence. Just another rectangle among shopping lists, dentist reminders, and children's drawings. Kitchen wallpaper. Background noise.

Nothing out of place.

Except everything was.

I knew I hadn't moved it. Knew it had disappeared. Knew that the card now pinned so neatly to the fridge door was the one I'd pulled from a dead man's jacket, sealed in an evidence pouch, hidden in my coat lining. And now, here it was—repurposed, repainted into normality by my own hand.

And the worst of it? I wasn't entirely sure why.

That was what clung to me. Not the shifting ink in the snow globe. Not the parcel with its perfect packaging. Not even the silent man waiting in the theatre seat. But this: me, in my own kitchen, fixing something no one else even knew was broken. Building a façade no one had asked for.

As if by restoring one card to its place on the fridge, I could restore the balance of everything else. Pretend there wasn't a crack running beneath the tiles of our lives.

Tasmania has fault lines like that—hidden beneath hills and paddocks, beneath streets we walk without thinking. I'd learned about them during a case in the nineties, a building collapse in Launceston that had turned out to be geological rather than criminal. Quiet until the moment they're not. And when they shift, the damage isn't always visible on the surface. Sometimes it's just the foundations that move, silently, irreversibly.

And I couldn't shake the feeling that something had already begun to shift.

Behind me, footsteps whispered across the floorboards—soft, socked, unhurried. The rhythm of domestic life, unbroken. Sandra brushed past, close enough that the sleeve of her jacket almost grazed mine, carrying with her the faint trace of sandalwood perfume I'd bought her last Christmas. A gift I'd chosen hurriedly, distractedly, in a store on Macquarie Street while thinking about a cold case file I'd been reviewing. And yet somehow she'd made it hers. The scent lingered between us a moment longer than she did, hovering like a memory that refused to fade.

"You okay?" she asked, voice low, casual. The kind of question that expected a simple answer, not an excavation.

I didn't turn. Didn't move. Just gave the smallest of nods, my eyes still fixed on the fridge door. "Yeah. Just thinking."

She carried another mug to the sink, tilting it under the running tap. Water hissed as it struck porcelain, the stream scattering into restless patterns on the steel basin before dissolving down the drain. For a second, I envied the simplicity of it—here, then gone. No residue. No shadow.

"About what?"

Her tone was neutral, almost absent-minded, as if she already knew the answer would be one she couldn't—or wouldn't—press on.

My gaze stayed locked on the invitation. That single square of cream and gold. Evidence turned wallpaper. A lie pinned to the heart of our kitchen. A reminder of the morning I'd already rewritten.

"Work. The usual."

Lie number four.

And it slid out cleaner than the ones before. Smoother. Almost natural. Lies have a way of teaching you efficiency. Each one clearing a space for the next, paving a path you only realise you're walking when you're too far along to turn back.

Torres had warned me about this, decades ago in Burnie. The first lie's the hardest, Charlie. After that, they get easier. That's when you know you're in trouble. I'd thought he was talking about suspects. Turned out he was talking about everyone.

Sandra didn't pause, didn't narrow her eyes, didn't dig beneath the surface. She dried the mug with the tea towel slung carelessly over the oven handle, movements unhurried. Not cold. Just... accustomed. This was our choreography—the dance of omissions and half-truths that had become as much a fixture in our marriage as the creaking floorboard in the hall or the chipped mug by the kettle.

She'd stopped asking for details years ago. And I'd stopped offering them long before that.

And in that silence, the distance between us didn't feel like neglect. It felt like routine. Which, in its own way, was worse.

I lingered by the fridge longer than I should have, my eyes locked on the cream card as though sheer focus might prise some truth from its silence. The kitchen hummed softly around me—the tick of the cooling kettle, the faint buzz of the fridge itself—ordinary sounds, grounding sounds, but they did nothing to quiet the unease threading itself deeper into me.

Still watching. Still asking questions I couldn't answer. Had someone taken it? Or had I?

The doubt needled sharp and insistent. The possibility that I'd slipped the card free, absent-mindedly, subconsciously, without memory of the act, was almost worse than imagining someone else had done it under my nose. Because if I had—if I truly had—then the morning's strangeness wasn't just in the world. It was in me. My own perception bending, warping, making a mockery of certainty.

Dr Kirkpatrick had discussed this too, during our sessions after Moonah. How trauma could create gaps in memory, could make the mind do things the conscious self didn't authorise. Dissociation, he'd called it. The brain protecting itself by splitting off actions from awareness. I'd rejected the possibility then. Told him I was fine, functioning, back at work. But standing here now, staring at an invitation I couldn't fully account for, I wondered if he'd been more right than I'd wanted to admit.

That's the danger of memory. Once it's bent, it never returns to its original line. Like a crowbar forced against steel—you can hammer it straight, polish the surface, tell yourself it looks as it always did. But structurally, invisibly, it's altered forever. And when it breaks, it won't break in the same place again.

By the time I stirred, Sandra was already lost to her next task, shoulders angled towards her laptop on the counter, her mind sliding smoothly from one obligation to the next. Always forward, always ticking boxes, closing circles, as though efficiency itself might ward off chaos. Admirable. Exhausting. Necessary. The way she'd held the household together during my worst stretches—after Moonah, after the shipping container case, after all the nights I'd come home hollow and she'd pretended not to notice.

I left the kitchen slowly, carrying the weight of something I couldn't set down. It felt like I'd just covered a hole in the floor with a rug, patted it flat, and then chosen to believe the house was safe again. Pretence layered over fault lines. The kind of makeshift solution that hardens into permanence, because acknowledging the rot beneath would demand more honesty than anyone is prepared to give.

Outside, the morning was beginning to brighten, the fog retreating in thin veils that revealed Hobart's sharp-edged skyline, the river catching faint shards of light. But inside—inside was different. The air pressed heavier, the corners of the house seemed darker, shadows thickening where there should have been none.

As if the house itself had joined the game. As if it too had started keeping secrets.