The Space Where No Should Be

"She answered every question I put to her. That's not the same as telling me anything." — Detective Sergeant Alexander Stout

The interview room was on the ground floor. Room Three — the smaller one, the one with the table bolted to the floor and the recording equipment built into the wall behind a panel that didn't quite sit flush with the plaster. Stout had used it twice before during this investigation. Both times he'd sat across from people who had fragments of the picture and didn't know they had them. This time was different. This time the person across from him had pieces she knew she was holding.

He stood in the corridor outside the door with a folder under his arm and his hand on the handle and he didn't go in.

The corridor was empty. Half past eleven at night and the station had the particular atmosphere of a building operating outside its normal rhythms — lights on that were usually off, voices in rooms that were usually silent, the low hum of a ventilation system working harder than it needed to because someone had adjusted the thermostat and nobody had thought to change it back. The floor was linoleum. His boots left faint prints on it — dried mud from the forest, grey-brown crescents that marked his path from the entrance to this door.

He hadn't changed. There hadn't been time, or he hadn't made time, or the distinction between those two things had stopped mattering somewhere between the forest and the station car park. His trousers were stiff below the knee where the mud had partially dried during the drive back. His tactical vest was in the boot of his car — he'd removed it in the car park, peeled it off and dropped it on the back seat and stood in the cold for thirty seconds with the rain still on his skin before walking inside. The vest had Sarah's blood on it. His shirt beneath it did too — a dark patch on the left side of his chest where his hands had pressed against her neck and the blood had run down his wrists and soaked through the fabric. He'd washed his hands in the bathroom. Soap and water, three times. The blood was gone from the surface but it remained in the creases of his knuckles and beneath two fingernails on his left hand where the scrubbing hadn't reached.

The badge was in his trouser pocket. He'd transferred it from the vest before dropping it in the car. An automatic movement, the same relocation he'd performed that morning when dressing for the operation. Vest to trousers. Evidence to pocket. Secret to secret.

He opened the door.

The room was small. Three metres by four, perhaps less. The walls were painted the particular shade of grey that government buildings defaulted to when nobody cared enough to choose a colour — not warm, not cold, just absent. The fluorescent tube overhead cast a flat, even light that eliminated shadows and made everything in the room look slightly worse than it was. The table was steel-framed with a laminate surface, bolted to the floor through brackets that had been painted over so many times they'd lost their edges. Two chairs on one side, one on the other. A recording unit on the wall — digital, the red standby light glowing.

Gladys Cramer sat in the single chair on the far side of the table.

She was smaller than she'd been in the forest. That was Stout's first thought and he knew it was irrational — she hadn't changed size, she'd changed context. In the car park she'd been a figure in headlights, a shape moving through rain, a body crashing through undergrowth. Here she was a woman in a chair under a fluorescent light, and the light did what fluorescent light always did to people who'd been through something — it found every line, every shadow, every point where the face had given up trying to hold its shape.

She was wearing a custody tracksuit. Grey. The kind the station kept in a storeroom on the ground floor — one size, no size, shapeless cotton that hung from her frame like something borrowed from a much larger person. The sleeves covered her hands. She'd pushed the right sleeve back to her wrist but the left one remained extended, her fingers invisible inside the fabric, the cuff bunched in her palm. Her hair had dried in the station's warmth but it had dried wrong — flat on one side, crimped on the other, a lopsided asymmetry that she either hadn't noticed or hadn't cared enough to fix. There were scratches on the right side of her neck, thin lines where branches had caught skin during the run. Two plasters on her left hand — applied during processing, covering cuts she'd received when she fell on the trail.

Her hands were on the table. Both of them, resting on the laminate surface, the fingers of her right hand wrapped loosely around a paper cup of water that she hadn't drunk from. The cup was full. The water was still. Her hands were not shaking, which surprised Stout until he looked more closely and saw that they weren't still either — there was a fine, constant tremor running through her fingers, so slight that it was only visible in the surface of the water, where it produced a faint, continuous ripple that caught the overhead light.

She looked up when he entered. Her eyes tracked him from the door to the table — dark eyes, the whites slightly reddened, the skin beneath them carrying the bruised, hollow look of someone who had been crying or who hadn't slept or both. She watched him pull out the chair. Watched him sit. Watched him place the folder on the table between them. She didn't speak. Her mouth was set in a line that wasn't hostile and wasn't neutral — it was the particular expression of a face that had used up its available responses and was waiting to find out what would be required of it next.

Stout sat. Placed his hands on the folder. Looked at her.

The room held the silence the way interview rooms always did — not as absence but as pressure, the four walls and the closed door and the sealed window creating a space where sound had nowhere to go and silence became a substance you could feel against your skin.

He could smell the forest on himself. The particular scent of Tasmanian bush after rain — eucalyptus and decomposition and wet earth — clinging to his clothes, his hair, his hands beneath the soap. He wondered if she could smell it too. Wondered if the smell reached across the table and found her and carried her back to the trail and the mud and the ferns and the ten seconds that neither of them would ever fully share with the other.

Gladys's eyes dropped to his hands on the folder. Came back up to his face. Dropped to his hands again. She was looking at his knuckles — at the creases where the skin folded, at the faint discolouration that the bathroom soap hadn't erased. She was reading what was on his hands the way she'd read the forest and the rain and the officers emerging from the trees. She knew whose blood it was.

Stout reached across and pressed the record button on the wall unit. The red standby light changed to green. A soft click, then the faint hiss of the recording medium engaging.

"Interview commenced twenty-three thirty-two, eighth of August, two thousand and eighteen. Present are Detective Sergeant Stout and Gladys May Cramer." He paused. Looked at her. "Ms Cramer, you've been offered legal representation and have declined at this time. Is that correct?"

Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. "Yes." The word came out dry, cracked at the edges, the voice of someone who hadn't spoken in hours and whose throat had forgotten how to produce sound without effort.

"You may request legal representation at any point during this interview. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"You've been informed of your rights and the nature of the matters under discussion. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

Three yeses. Each one quieter than the last. Each one delivered with the minimal effort of a person conserving whatever remained in the reserve that had carried her through the day — through the car park and the forest and the handcuffs and the processing and the custody tracksuit and the empty room and the hours of waiting for someone to come through the door and ask her questions she may or may not be able to answer.

Stout opened the folder. The pages inside were printed — witness statements, timeline summaries, evidence logs. He didn't need them. He knew every line on every page. But the folder was part of the architecture of the interview — the physical presence of documentation on the table between them, the implication of thoroughness, the weight of what had been assembled.

He looked at Gladys. She looked at him. The water in the paper cup trembled.

"I want to ask you about Detective Karl Jenkins," Stout said.

Something shifted in her face. Not much — a fractional tightening around her eyes, a slight drawing-in of the muscles at the corners of her mouth. The kind of movement that most people wouldn't register but that Stout had spent a career learning to see. She'd heard the name and the name had produced a response, and the response was not fear or guilt or recognition. It was something closer to confusion. The faint, involuntary adjustment of a person who had expected one question and received another.

She'd been expecting him to ask about Sarah.

"Karl Jenkins," she repeated. Not a question. A recalibration. Her fingers moved against the paper cup, a slight rotation, the water shifting.

"Yes," Stout said. "I'd like to start there."

Gladys looked at him. Her eyes moved to his face and stayed there but the focus was wrong — too flat, too fixed, the gaze of someone whose visual system was operating independently of whatever was happening behind it. She'd heard the name. She'd registered it. But the machinery that should have processed the name and produced a response was running on something other than full power.

She didn't speak.

Stout waited. Ten seconds. Fifteen. The recorder turned. The fluorescent tube hummed. The water trembled in the cup.

"Gladys."

Her eyes shifted. Not to him — they were already on him. The shift was internal, something recalibrating behind the irises, a mechanism clicking over from one setting to another. Her mouth opened a fraction.

"What about him." Not a question. The inflection was flat, the words arriving without the upward pitch that would have made them an inquiry. A statement wearing the shape of a question.

"You've had contact with Detective Jenkins. On the twenty-ninth of July, he pulled you over during a routine traffic stop. He identified himself and subsequently followed you to an address in Berriedale."

Gladys blinked. The slow blink. The one that lasted too long and seemed to require conscious effort to complete, as though the eyelids had forgotten their return journey and needed reminding.

"Yes," she said.

"Can you tell me about that?"

Silence. Her fingers found the paper cup. Touched its rim. Withdrew.

"He pulled me over," she said. The words came out individually, each one separated from the next by a gap that was slightly too wide — the speech pattern of a person assembling sentences from components rather than producing them whole. "I'd been to the bottle shop. He wanted to see my licence. The other officer did a breath test."

"The other officer was Detective Sarah Lahey."

Gladys's whole body responded — not a flinch, not a movement, but a contraction. A pulling-inward. Her shoulders drew closer to her neck. Her hands retreated from the table into her lap. The space she occupied in the chair shrank by some imperceptible measure, as though the name had a gravitational force that compressed everything near it.

She didn't speak. Her eyes were on the table now — on the laminate surface, on a point approximately where the cup sat, but not on the cup itself. On nothing. On the space where something should have been.

"Gladys."

Nothing.

"After the breath test. Jenkins identified himself and asked to follow you to the Berriedale address."

"Yes." Barely audible. A vibration in the throat more than a word.

"What happened at the address?"

Silence.

"Gladys, what happened when you arrived at the Berriedale property with Detective Jenkins?"

Her mouth moved. Stopped. Moved again. "He came inside. Looked around. He was looking for Jamie." A pause. Long. The kind of pause that should have contained more words but didn't. "Jamie wasn't there."

"Jamie Greyson."

"Yes."

"And then?"

"He left." Two words. Delivered to the table. To the space where nothing was.

Stout watched her. She was retreating. Each answer shorter than the last, each response arriving from further away, the woman in the chair receding like a tide pulling back from a shore. She was answering — technically, minimally, in fragments that confirmed documented events without adding anything to them. But the person producing the answers was operating at such a reduced capacity that the answers themselves were barely functional.

He pressed forward. Not aggressively — with the steady, measured pressure of a man who understood that the person across from him was in a fragile state and who needed what she had regardless.

"The following day. The thirtieth. There was a pursuit. A high-speed chase through Collinsvale, ending at Myrtle Forest."

Gladys's jaw tightened. The muscles along the hinge flexed once, hard, then released. Myrtle Forest. The name landing in this room for the second time and carrying twice the weight.

"You were driving one of the vehicles involved. You abandoned the car at the forest car park and fled on foot."

"Yes."

"Into the forest."

"Yes."

"In the rain."

Nothing. Just the word sitting in the air between them, unanswered.

"Karl Jenkins disappeared on the afternoon of the second of August," Stout said. "From Jeffries Manor. Were you at Jeffries Manor on the second of August?"

"No."

"Do you know what happened at Jeffries Manor?"

"No."

"Do you know why Karl Jenkins disappeared?"

Gladys's hands emerged from her lap. She placed them on the table — flat, both hands, fingers spread. The gesture was identical to the one she'd made when she first sat down, and Stout recognised it now for what it was. Not grounding. Bracing. The posture of a person holding themselves against something that was pressing from inside.

"No," she said.

The word was the same word she'd given to every other question — the same monosyllable, the same flat delivery, the same minimal expenditure of energy. But this one was different. Not in its sound. In its quality. The previous answers had been fragments of a person barely functioning — the automatic output of a mind too damaged to produce more than the minimum. This answer was chosen. This answer was the one deliberate act in a sequence of involuntary responses. Gladys had heard the question and had decided — somewhere beneath the shock and the grief and the exhaustion — that the answer was going to be no and that nothing was going to change it.

Stout could feel it. The wall. Not the smooth, strategic walls she might have erected on a better night with a clearer mind. Something rougher. Something built in extremity from whatever materials were at hand — shock and silence and a single syllable repeated until it became a fortification. The wall wasn't elegant. It didn't need to be. It just needed to hold.

"Luke Smith," Stout said.

Nothing. Not even the monosyllable. Gladys's hands pressed harder into the table. The whitening spread from her fingertips to her knuckles.

"Gladys, what can you tell me about Luke Smith?"

Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened. "He's Jamie's partner." The words came out as though they'd been dredged from deep water — heavy, waterlogged, requiring visible effort to bring to the surface.

"Do you know where he is?"

"No."

"Do you know where Jamie is?"

"No."

"Do you know —"

"No."

The third answer arrived before the question was complete. Stout stopped. Gladys's eyes had moved from the table to his face and what he saw there was not defiance. It was depletion. The absolute, terminal exhaustion of a person who had nothing left — no energy for answers, no capacity for evasion, no resources for the careful navigation of questions that might lead somewhere dangerous. She was empty. The interview had been drawing from a well that was already dry when it started, and now even the residual moisture had evaporated.

She was looking at him the way she'd looked at the forest canopy while lying on her back in the mud with a broken bottle in her hand and a woman dying three metres away. The same unfocused, uncomprehending stare. The same absence behind the presence. She was in the chair but she wasn't in the room.

Stout tried once more. The last attempt. Not because he expected it to work but because the investigation demanded it and the recorder was running and the professional obligation to ask every question that could be asked didn't cease simply because the person being asked had ceased to function.

"Gladys. Do you know where Karl Jenkins is?"

The silence lasted thirty seconds. Stout counted them. Not deliberately — his mind counted them the way a mind counts anything that stretches past its expected duration, the automatic tracking of time in a space where time had become the primary medium.

Gladys looked at him across thirty seconds of fluorescent hum and trembling water and the distance between a detective who needed an answer and a woman who wasn't going to give him one. Her mouth stayed closed. Her hands stayed flat. Her eyes stayed on his face with that terrible, vacant fixity that could have been resistance or collapse or both at once.

She didn't say no. She didn't say anything.

And the absence of the word was different from the word itself. Stout heard it. The space where no should have been and wasn't. Every other question had received its monosyllable — automatic, reflexive, the minimum viable response. This question received nothing. And nothing was not the same as no.

He closed the folder.

"Interview suspended at zero-twelve, ninth of August, two thousand and eighteen."

He reached across and pressed the button on the wall unit. The green light returned to red. The hiss ceased. The room's silence changed — not in volume but in character, the removal of the recorder altering the quality of the quiet the way removing a witness alters the quality of a conversation.

Stout stood. The chair scraped. Gladys flinched. The same flinch from when he'd sat down — involuntary, physical, the nervous system responding to sharp sound regardless of what the conscious mind was doing.

He picked up the folder. Looked at her. She didn't look back. Her eyes had returned to the table, to the cup, to the space where nothing was. She was gone again. Wherever she went when the questions stopped — wherever the broken bottle and the rain and the sound of glass on skin took her — she was there and not here.

He walked to the door. Opened it.

Sienna was in the corridor. Leaning against the opposite wall. Arms folded. Her own folder — thicker, tagged, belonging to a different investigation and a different set of questions — pressed against her ribs. She looked at him.

Stout stepped into the corridor and pulled the door closed behind him. The latch clicked. The sound was small and final.

Sienna didn't ask. She read his face and the folder and the empty hands and the mud on his boots and the stiffness in his shoulders and the particular quality of defeat that a detective carries when he has spent an hour in a room with the answer and walked out without it.

"She's all yours," Stout said.

Sienna nodded. Straightened from the wall.

Stout walked down the corridor to the observation room — A space barely larger than a cupboard, unlit, a chair and a desk and a window that was a mirror from the other side. He sat down in the dark.

Through the glass, Gladys hadn't moved. Same position. Hands flat on the table. Eyes on the space where nothing was. Sienna sat down across from her, placed her folder on the table, and pressed the record button. The green light came on.

"Interview commenced at zero-fifteen, ninth of August, two thousand and eighteen. Present are Detective Inspector Sienna Blackwood and Gladys May Cramer." She opened the folder. "Gladys, I want to talk to you about Cody Jennings."

Gladys's hands pressed harder into the table. Her knuckles whitened. Her mouth opened and closed and the sound that came through the observation speaker was too quiet for Stout to hear, or there was no sound at all.

He sat in the dark on the other side of the glass and watched an interview that wasn't his begin to ask the questions he couldn't ask, in a case that had grown past the borders of the one he'd been given. The badge pressed against his thigh. The answer to his question was somewhere in that room, inside a woman who had given him nothing and who was now giving nothing to someone else, and the wall between them was made of glass and silence and seven days of evidence that pointed everywhere except the place he needed to reach.

He stayed until there was no reason to stay and then he stayed longer, because the alternative was driving home through empty streets and sitting in a house that wasn't empty of a missing detective's belongings and trying to sleep while the investigation he'd been running for a week settled into the shape of its own failure around him.