The Name in the Room

The drive to Battery Point was conducted in a silence that had nothing to do with the case. Karl Jenkins kept his hands at the prescribed positions on the wheel and his eyes on the slick of the Derwent, and Sarah Lahey kept hers on the passenger window, and the wreckage of the previous night sat between them on the centre console like an object neither of them was willing to acknowledge.

The Pafistis residence sat at the head of its driveway with the assurance of a building that had been designed to outlive everyone currently inside it. Sandstone, columns, a fountain murmuring to itself in the circular drive, and a woman waiting at the open door before either detective had reached the threshold. Sharon Pafistis received them in cream silk and a chignon assembled at five in the morning, her Cornish vowels worn smooth by seventeen Australian winters, her composure the kind that gets built one client at a time across two decades in the beauty trade. She had been holding herself together since her husband had failed to come home, and she intended to go on holding.

The interior of the house pressed in on Karl in ways he had not been prepared for. Imported marble, original art he half-recognised from auction catalogues, a kitchen arranged with the discipline of a still life — the kind of accumulated taste that made his damp boots feel like a small criminal trespass. He produced his notebook because the ritual of writing things down was the only structure he had brought with him into a room that did not need him. Sarah arranged herself differently. She had always preferred to read a witness through their possessions as well as their words, and she drifted along the edges of the living room with the quiet attention of someone touching for fault lines in a wall.

The early questioning ran in its expected grooves. Sharon answered in the steady, slightly rehearsed cadence of a woman who had spent the sleepless night practising how to be useful to the police. Adrian had left the previous morning before nine to meet a client about a quote. He had not called. He had not texted. The hand at her wrist found the gold bangle from their tenth anniversary and turned it once, twice — a small private gesture from childhood that had survived into the adult vocabulary of her composure. Somewhere between a holiday photograph and a question about her daughters, the carefully held tense of her marriage slipped from are into were, and was corrected too quickly to be a slip of grammar alone. Both detectives marked it. Neither wrote it down.

The name arrived as half-memory. Sharon could not be certain — Adrian's consultations had long ago become the background noise of a marriage in which two careers had run parallel rather than entwined — but she thought he had said the client was Luke Smith. She offered the syllables with an apologetic upward lilt, the way a person offers a coin they suspect may not be currency, and was unprepared for what those syllables did to the man sitting opposite her. Karl Jenkins stopped breathing. The notebook slid from his knee onto the silk of the rug and he did not reach for it. Behind his eyes, the dream he had not shaken since the small hours reassembled itself in pieces: a window, a knife, a whispered farewell with his own name in it.

Almost in the same breath, the evidence arrived in Sarah's pocket. Two emails, opened in a dining room where Sharon's wedding album still lay spread across the Tasmanian oak from earlier in the morning — twenty-year-old photographs of a Cornish summer, a young woman in cream silk, a young man with a slightly crooked smile. Phone records from Nial Triffett's mobile, threaded through with calls from a worried wife and ending, near the bottom, with a single call from the same Luke Smith. ATM footage from the withdrawals against Jamie Greyson's account, showing a face that was not Jamie's — broader at the shoulder, heavier at the jaw, half-turned toward the lens with the unconcern of a man who did not believe he could be seen. Three missing men. One name running through all three like a wire under the floorboards. Coincidence had stopped being available to either detective as an explanation.

What had walked into the Pafistis house that morning as the third in a tidy series of unrelated cases walked out of it as something else entirely. Karl told Sarah she would have to finish with Sharon alone, and she began to protest because the protest had nothing to do with the warrant and everything to do with the previous night, and he was already past her, already moving through the marble entrance hall with the quickening of a man who had finally been given something to chase.