The Knock That Changes Rooms

"Years on the job teaches you to read a face before someone opens their mouth. Some mornings, you wish it hadn't."

The Seiko read 7:43 a.m.

I'd been staring at the same incident report for eleven minutes, the words swimming beneath eyes that had forgotten what rest felt like. The coffee had gone cold an hour ago. I hadn't noticed. Hadn't noticed much of anything, really, except the way my hands wouldn't quite stop trembling when I let them rest too long on the desk.

Keep moving, I told myself. Keep the blood circulating. Keep the thoughts from settling.

But thoughts have a way of settling regardless. Like silt in a harbour after the ferries stop running.

The fluorescent light above my desk hummed its familiar complaint—that low, persistent drone that had soundtracked a thousand late nights in this office. The tube needed replacing; it flickered every few minutes, casting the paperwork in brief strobes that did nothing for the headache building behind my left eye. Usually I found the sound almost companionable, white noise to think against. Today it felt like a witness that wouldn't look away.

My knee had stiffened during the hours I'd spent motionless in this chair, and when I shifted my weight, the joint answered with that grinding protest I'd learned to expect but never quite accept. The pills were in my desk drawer. I didn't reach for them. Didn't want to start the day medicating, even if the day had technically started sometime around midnight and shown no signs of ending.

I checked my watch again. 7:44.

Dad's watch. The one Mum had given him for their twentieth anniversary, back when twenty years of marriage still seemed like something worth celebrating. Rick had pressed it into my palm after the funeral, his grease-stained fingers closing mine around the worn leather strap. He'd have wanted you to have it, Charlie. The face was scratched from decades of building sites, the leather replaced twice now, but the mechanism kept steady time—outlasting the man who'd wound it every morning of my childhood. The weight of it on my wrist was a constant reminder of the man who'd taught me that duty wasn't something you felt—it was something you did, regardless of feeling. He'd been a construction worker, not a policeman, but the principle held. You showed up. You did the job. You kept your hands steady and your mouth shut about the things that made them shake.

"I can't help you if you run."

My own words, echoing back. I'd meant them precisely. I'd seen the device in Beatrix's hands. Recognised it for what it was. And I'd known exactly where she'd go if she chose to use it.

She'd used it anyway. Looked me in the eye, weighed my offer against her own calculations, and leapt through the portal without a backward glance.

I didn't blame her, exactly. Trust was a currency she couldn't afford to spend, not with Leigh's warnings surely ringing in her ears. But I'd hoped my knowledge of Luke—my offer to help protect him—might have tipped the scales.

It hadn't. And now she was beyond my reach, somewhere I couldn't follow, and the threads I'd been managing were starting to fray like old mooring rope.

I pressed my thumb against my temple, feeling the dull throb that had been building since midnight. The pressure helped, marginally. Should have gone home. Should have left the casino, filed what could be filed, and surrendered myself to whatever hours of darkness remained. Instead I'd driven here through streets still wet from overnight rain, the tyres hissing on bitumen, the city not yet awake enough to judge me. Sat in this chair. Watched the sky lighten through the window's venetian slats—grey to pale grey to the washed-out blue of a Hobart winter morning—and tried to calculate the damage.

Beatrix was gone—someone else's concern now, wherever Clivilius had taken her. But the questions she'd carried with her hadn't vanished through that portal. They were still here, circling like gulls over a trawler, waiting for scraps.

The office smelled of stale coffee and the particular mustiness of old case files—paper and dust and the faint chemical tang of photocopier toner. Someone had left a window cracked overnight; the air carried an undercurrent of the Derwent, that briny hint that never quite left Hobart no matter how far you got from the waterfront. I'd grown used to it over the years. Some mornings it almost felt like home.

I reached for my coffee, remembered it was cold, and set it down harder than intended. The ceramic base cracked against the desk like a gavel calling a court to order.

The knock, when it came, was almost a relief.

Three sharp raps. I straightened in my chair, felt the vertebrae crack in sequence—each one a small announcement of the night's accumulated tension—and called out with a steadiness I didn't feel.

"Come in."

Linda stepped through with her usual composure, but today there was a tightness around her eyes. Controlled alarm. She closed the door behind her—the first warning.

"Sergeant Claiborne. Sorry to interrupt, but I thought you'd want to know immediately."

I gestured to the chair opposite my desk. She shook her head.

"What is it?"

"Louise Jeffries is here. She's reporting two missing persons. Her son, Kain, and her brother, Jamie Greyson."

The names hit me in sequence. Louise Jeffries—a decade of interviews surfacing, the Charles Jeffries disappearance, months of careful questions in that grand sandstone manor while her husband Thomas sat rigid beside her and her four children moved like ghosts through doorways at the edges of my vision. A woman whose composure had never cracked, not once, even when I'd pressed on inconsistencies that would have broken lesser witnesses. Financial analyst's precision wrapped around something fiercer underneath. Jamie Greyson—her brother, twelve years her junior, the one she'd mentioned in passing during those interviews with a protective edge that suggested history I hadn't needed to pursue at the time.

And then the third name, the one Linda hadn't spoken, detonating behind my eyes like a flashbang in a closed room.

Jamie's partner is Luke Smith.

I kept my expression neutral through sheer force of habit. Luke, whom I'd offered to protect just hours ago. Luke, who was newly woven into networks I'd spent years learning not to disturb. If Jamie was missing—if Luke was connected to that disappearance—then I needed to know what Louise knew before anyone else heard it.

"There's something else." Linda's voice cut through. "She's asked specifically for Detective Karl Jenkins."

That was interesting. I filed it away. Karl and Louise didn't move in the same circles—she was Jeffries money and charity boards; he was a detective who kept his social life deliberately sparse. But I knew there was history there, complicated history that threaded back through her brother Jamie to something that had happened in Queensland over a decade ago. I didn't know the details. I'd never pushed. But I knew enough to recognise that whatever had occurred between Karl and Jamie Greyson had been serious enough for records to be wiped clean—the kind of scrubbing that only happened when someone with authority decided protection mattered more than transparency. And now Jamie was missing, and Louise was asking for Karl by name.

"Has anyone contacted him?"

"I tried his mobile. No answer. I left a message."

Karl not answering was unusual. The man was methodical to a fault—his phone charged every night, his calendar updated religiously, his case files organised with a precision that made the rest of us look like amateurs. But I'd seen him at Salamanca last night, surrounded by well-wishers raising glasses to his Senior Detective exam results. He'd earned that celebration. I'd stayed long enough to shake his hand and buy him a whisky before slipping away to Wrest Point, where everything had subsequently gone to shit.

If Karl wasn't answering this morning, it meant he'd let himself enjoy the victory more than usual. Fair enough. The man deserved a night without discipline. But today was not the day to drag him across the coals for it—not with a Jeffries sitting in Interview Room Three and Jamie Greyson's name hanging in the air between us.

"I'll handle this myself," I said, pushing back from my desk. My knee protested the movement, that familiar grinding complaint that had been getting worse for months. I ignored it. You learn to.

Linda nodded.

"Yes, Sergeant."

She left, and I was alone again with the morning light and the cold coffee and the fluorescent hum that wouldn't stop bearing witness.

I checked my watch. 7:52.

Somewhere in this building, Louise Jeffries was waiting—a woman I'd spent months interviewing about one family disappearance, now reporting two more. Her brother and her son. And beneath those names, ripples spread outward toward Luke Smith and everything he represented.

I rose, straightened my tie, and felt the weight of the day settle across my shoulders like a coat I couldn't take off.

Some doors, once you walk through them, don't let you back out the same way you came in.

I went to find Jenkins.