The Ledger That Never Balanced

The room was marginally less oppressive than the interview room Louise had just left — sterile white walls, functional furniture, a single window positioned too high to offer a view but admitting enough daylight to distinguish it from the fluorescent purgatory of formal questioning. Detective Sarah Lahey sat opposite, watching. A Mont Blanc pen lay beside a stack of blank statement forms. Louise picked it up, registered its weight, and began to write.

The formal language came naturally. Louise Jeffries had spent her career as a financial analyst, and the disciplined handwriting drilled into her at St. Mary's had served her well through decades of annotating documents where precision mattered. She wrote her name, her address, her date of birth in neat controlled strokes, and with each line felt the peculiar displacement of reducing a life to administrative data. For years she had written the words Jeffries Manor on forms and documents, and still the address announced her as something she had become rather than something she had always been.

Sarah attempted conversation — how long had Louise lived at Jeffries Manor? The question was pitched as casual, but Louise heard the fishing line beneath it and responded with a sharpness that closed the topic before it could open. She was forty-seven, not an ancient fixture of the estate, and she was not a witness to be handled. Sarah retreated into silence. Louise returned to the statement.

What followed over the next half hour was the most difficult document Louise Jeffries had ever composed. She began with the declaration she had carried for a decade without voicing it formally: that she had serious concerns regarding Luke Smith, her brother's partner, and believed he possessed information relevant to the disappearances of both Jamie Greyson and Kain Jeffries. The words looked exactly as she had feared they would — like the suspicions of an overprotective sister who had never approved of her brother's relationship. Vague. Subjective. Impossible to verify. She wrote them anyway.

The timeline demanded precision, and precision forced Louise to confront dates she had never consciously aligned. Jamie had returned to Tasmania in 2008. He had reconnected with Luke Smith within weeks of arriving. Their childhood friendship had become something more. And in that same year — 2008 — Charles Jeffries had vanished from his study at the manor without explanation. Three events occupying the same twelve months, sitting in Louise's memory like columns in a ledger that had never quite balanced. She noted the coincidence without elaborating on it. The formal record was not the place for speculation she could not yet support.

She documented her brother's communication patterns — the near-daily contact maintained for years, the texts and calls that constituted the rhythm of their relationship — and then the silence that had broken it. Five days without a word from Jamie. Five days during which she had told herself there were reasonable explanations, that his nursing shifts were demanding, that he was entitled to periods of quiet. Each sentence documenting the silence was an admission of her own failure to act. She had noticed something was wrong. She had not responded immediately. She had waited.

And while she waited, she had sent Kain.

The pen moved across the page with particular difficulty when she reached the morning of 26 July. She recorded that she had asked her twenty-three-year-old son to drive to Jamie's residence in Berriedale, to check on him and report back. She recorded that Kain had left Jeffries Manor at approximately half past eight in the morning. She recorded that she had not heard from him since. Three days. No returned calls. No texts read or responded to. His phone going directly to voicemail, as though the device itself had ceased to exist.

The guilt that attended these sentences was not something the formal language could contain. She had been afraid to go herself, too uncertain of what she might find, and had allowed her son to walk into a situation her instincts had already identified as wrong. The careful restraint she had maintained for years — the respect for Jamie's autonomy, the reluctance to interfere, the determination not to be the overbearing sister — now looked like negligence. Now her patience looked like the thing that had cost her Kain.

Sarah interrupted a second time, remarking that Louise and Karl Jenkins sounded like they had a bit of a history. Louise's pen stopped mid-word. She set it down, met the young detective's eyes, and delivered a rebuke precise enough to end the line of inquiry permanently. Whatever Sarah thought she had observed about Louise's connection to Detective Jenkins was not relevant to the disappearance of two people, and Louise was not a puzzle to be solved for professional curiosity. Sarah apologised. The flush on her neck confirmed she understood she had overstepped.

Louise returned to the statement and wrote what she had never been able to articulate aloud: that her distrust of Luke Smith was not based on evidence that would satisfy an investigation, but on a pattern recognition she could not name. He was charming when it suited him. There was a coldness beneath the surface that had made her uneasy from their first meeting. Jamie, who was gentle and trusting by nature, had seemed increasingly diminished in Luke's presence over the years — quieter, more careful, the laughter coming less easily, the spontaneity replaced by a watchful stillness Louise did not recognise. She had told herself it was maturity. She was no longer certain.

She documented her suspicions, her failed attempts at contact, her encounters with Luke's evasions, and her formal request for investigation. She read back through what she had written — a complete account, as thorough and precise as a decade of unease could produce — and signed her name at the bottom of the final page. The signature looked strange to her. It belonged to a woman who had believed that careful planning and reasonable behaviour could protect the people she loved. That woman felt very far away.

Louise slid the completed statement across the table. Sarah took it with a professionalism that did not quite disguise her curiosity. Louise collected her handbag, checked her phone — nothing, still nothing — and allowed herself to be escorted toward the exit by a woman half her age who did not yet understand what it meant to document your own failure in language designed to sound composed.