The Lift Home

The text from Karl Jenkins reached Glen Crosswell at his desk in the middle of witness statements that had taken longer than they should have, and asked for a favour phrased so plainly that Glen registered the unusualness of it before the content. Karl had walked out on his own partner mid-interview at Battery Point and needed someone to bring her back to the station. Glen had been about to knock off early for the first time in weeks, with vague intentions of stopping at a maritime antique shop on Elizabeth Street to ask after a chronometer that had not arrived in months. Instead he picked up his keys, gave the antique shop another silent reprieve, and went to retrieve a colleague he had never quite known what to do with.

The Commodore in which Glen collected Sarah Lahey was overdue for the kind of cleaning that only happened when the wife threatened to do it herself. Takeaway containers in the door pockets, parking receipts drifting across the dashboard, a faint underlay of cigarette smoke that the air freshener had stopped pretending to address. Sarah climbed in with her bag held against her like a small civil defence, and the silhouette of Sharon Pafistis vanished from the doorway in the rear-view mirror as the tree-lined street folded itself shut behind them. Neither of them said anything for the first half-kilometre. Glen, who had never been good at quiet, recognised it for the kind of silence that needed waiting on rather than filling.

What he opened with, when he opened, was crude in the way of a man who knew no other entry point. A throwaway line about the office, a glancing observation about Karl having looked rough that morning, the casual fishing he had been deploying on witnesses for two decades. Sarah parried each probe with the polished neutrality of a woman who had built a career on giving Glen Crosswell precisely nothing. Under any other circumstances the exchange would have died there. What kept it alive was the second question, which was not a probe at all. Glen asked her about her head.

The injuries had been visible to him since morning — the bandaged hand, the careful way she held herself, the particular pallor of a body running on a deficit it had not been allowed to repay. He told her, without preamble or performance, the story of his father on the deck of the Alida Rose in the nineties: a man who had taken a knock and decided he was fine, and had collapsed three weeks later from a subdural that had nearly killed him. Glen had been fifteen at the time. He had carried the lesson about stubbornness and warning signs ever since, with the imperfect honesty of a man who had also failed to apply it to himself. He delivered the anecdote without expectation of reply. Sarah, who had been braced for an entirely different conversation, found herself looking at him properly for the first time, and reassessing the ground beneath the assessment she had been making for years.

The conversation that followed travelled in widening circles around the things neither of them was going to say directly. The Pafistis case. Karl's abandonment of it. Sergeant Claiborne's predictable refusal of the warrants, which Glen had overheard through walls he described, accurately, as tissue paper. The cynical bargain at the heart of modern policing, in which forms outweighed bodies until the bodies became too many to file. Glen offered each observation in the dark register of a man who had spent eighteen years inside the bargain and stopped being surprised by it. Sarah, who had not yet stopped being surprised, listened in a way she had not been able to listen all afternoon, because the speaker was not asking her to be a partner or a witness or a detective, only a person sitting in a passenger seat.

Halfway back to the station Glen took an unannounced turn into a Davey Street servo on the pretext of needing petrol, which was true, and on the unspoken understanding that the woman beside him had not eaten since some hour she could no longer locate. He came back with two coffees and a paper bag and put a cheese and bacon roll into her hands and used her first name without any of the inflections it usually carried in his mouth. Eat the bloody roll. Take the win. She did. The food landed in her body with the small visible relief of a system that had been holding itself upright against its own depletion, and the rest of the drive softened into something neither of them had brought into the car at the start of it.

In the station car park, Glen found his way through the harder thing — an oblique, scaffolded admission that he had crossed lines, said things he should not have said, been the colleague nobody quite trusted at close range — and the slightly easier thing that followed it, which was a promise not to weaponise whatever he had noticed about her partnership with Karl. He delivered both with his eyes fixed on the brick of the station's back entrance rather than on the woman beside him, because eye contact would have made the moment unsurvivable. He told her she ought to take tomorrow off and knew as he said it that she would not. He told her, almost as he was opening his door, that her partner was an idiot if he could not see what she was in the professional capacity, and added professional capacity as a hurried clarification that fooled neither of them. He had spent eighteen years in this job perfecting the art of saying things and immediately retreating from having said them. The retreat was as honest in its way as the saying.

They walked into the station as two people who had never been friends and were not going to be friends, but who had, in the space of one short and unwanted lift home, recognised one another more accurately than the rest of the building had managed in years. Glen held the back door for her without subtext. Sarah went through it and stopped a few paces inside, half-turned as though she had something more to add, and Glen kept walking because some moments were better closed by the smaller party deciding not to push them further. Behind him, in the direction he was no longer looking, a colleague turned and went the other way, carrying with her the blunt, unlikely small mercy of having been seen by the man she had spent her career trying not to be in a room with.