The Sound of the River Breaking

“The river never forgets what’s been dumped into it. You can skim the surface all you like, but sooner or later, everything you’ve tried to bury comes floating back up.”

Detective Lahey's hand drifted along my inner thigh, slow and deliberate. Her touch—light, but purposeful—sent a ripple through me, nerves sparking awake in places dulled by fatigue and guilt.

After yet another blazing argument at my house the night before, we'd found a language that needed no words. In the quiet aftermath of anger, the tension between us had unravelled into something else. Not forgiveness, not clarity—just the simple, shared instinct to reach for what felt human.

Her fingers inched closer, teasing a line that skirted the edge of control. My hands tightened on the seat's edge, knuckles pressing into worn vinyl, my breathing shallow, pulse beginning to surge. The air in the car felt thick, charged with the kind of electricity that precedes a storm. I dared a glance at her—lips parted slightly, eyes half-lidded, the barest hint of a smile tracing the corners of her mouth.

Sarah had a way of disarming me that no interrogation room confession ever could. It wasn't just attraction, though God knows there was plenty of that. It was the way she understood the weight I carried—understood because she carried her own. We'd both lost too much sleep to this job, sacrificed too many pieces of ourselves to the machinery of justice. When we were together like this, we could pretend, for just a moment, that we were more than the sum of our case files and compromises.

It was a moment carved out of the madness, reckless and fragile, yet grounding. A pause in the relentless march of days that had blurred together into one continuous investigation, one endless chase.

We were parked in a secluded car park behind the old woolsheds near Macquarie Point, the unmarked police car tucked behind a crumbling brick wall overlooking the Derwent. Through the windscreen, I could see the river's pewter surface catching the afternoon light, rippling with the breeze that swept down from kunanyi. The water looked clean from here—deceptively so. I knew better. Years of industrial runoff, decades of secrets dumped into its depths. Like everything in this bloody case.

The investigation, the horrors it had unearthed, the things I hadn't told her—they all hovered just beyond the windows, waiting to be let back in. The body beneath the stairs at Luke’s house. The face I'd... Christ. My jaw clenched involuntarily, and Sarah's fingers stilled for a moment, as if she could sense the darkness creeping back in. For now, we shut them out. For now, we pretended we were just two people stealing a moment, not two detectives drowning in a case that made less sense with every passing day.

But the world refused to stay away.

The sharp burst of the police radio fractured the stillness, jolting both of us upright. The crackle cut through the car's interior.

"CITY632," it spat, shrill and insistent, the dispatcher's voice carrying that particular urgency that every copper learns to recognise—the tone that means this isn't routine, this is now.

I cursed under my breath, untangling from the moment, my hand reflexively moving to adjust my shirt, straighten my collar, zip up my fly. The spell had broken. Reality came flooding back with all the grace of a boot through a door—urgent, unforgiving, impossible to ignore.

Sarah responded immediately, her voice flipping to professional in a breath, that remarkable ability she had to compartmentalise. One moment she was the woman whose touch had made my pulse race; the next, she was Detective Lahey, all business. "CITY632, go ahead."

The dispatcher's voice came through, clipped and direct. "Disturbance at a property in Granton. Female caller claims a Mr Luke Smith is on-site. You've requested alerts for anything related."

Luke Smith.

The name hit me like a physical blow, adrenaline slamming through my system so fast it made my vision sharpen, my hands twitch. Days of chasing ghosts. Days of dead ends and disappeared leads and that bloody nightmare that still woke me at 3 AM, drenched in sweat, hearing that voice: Bye, Karl.

"Fuck me," I said aloud, the urgency already overtaking everything else. My hand shot out, shoving Sarah's hand away—gently, but firmly—as I reached for the ignition with the other. No time for apologies. No time for anything but movement.

"This is it. Tell them we're on it."

My fingers fumbled with the keys for half a second before I found the ignition. The engine growled to life on the second turn, that familiar rumble beneath us, and I slammed my palm against the dashboard controls. Red and blue lights stuttered across the dashboard, casting alternating shadows across Sarah's face as she was already relaying our acceptance over the radio, jotting details with one hand whilst I took the first sharp turn out of the car park.

The tyres protested against the gravel, spitting stones as we accelerated. I barely registered the jolt as we bounced over the gutter onto the main road. My mind was already three steps ahead—running through the geography of Granton, calculating routes, considering backup, weighing the odds that Luke Smith was actually there or whether this was another false alarm, another glimpse of smoke where there might not be fire.

But it felt different this time. It felt real.

My heart pounded, the moment of intimacy now buried under the sudden clarity of purpose. The tenderness between us, the warmth of her touch—all of it evaporated like morning mist, replaced by the cold, hard focus that every detective knows: the hunter's instinct when prey finally shows itself after days in hiding.

A disturbance in Granton. A woman saying Luke Smith was there.

Whether it was another dead end or the lead we'd been praying for, I didn't know. But I could feel it in my gut, that sixth sense that develops after enough years on the force—the feeling that something was about to break. Either the case, or me, or both.

I gripped the steering wheel hard enough to make the leather creak, knuckles white, jaw set. Beside me, Sarah was checking her sidearm. I caught her reflection in the side mirror—her face had transformed from softness to steel, that same metamorphosis I felt in myself. We were professionals again. Partners. And we were finally, finally, closing in.

The afternoon light continued as we sped through Hobart's northern suburbs, the sun casting long shadows across the road ahead of us, and I had the fleeting, irrational thought that we were chasing one of them—that Luke Smith was himself a shadow, always just ahead, always just out of reach.

But not this time. Not if I could help it.

I was done waiting.

Done chasing.

Done with the nightmares and the questions and the bodies that kept appearing whilst answers stayed buried.

Whatever was waiting for us in Granton, I was ready for it.

Or at least, I told myself I was.