The Street Where the Voice Followed

“People think madness is loud—shouting, chaos, broken glass. But it’s not. Madness is quiet. It walks beside you and whispers your name like it’s always known it.”

I was barely aware of Sarah driving past me later, her car gliding by in silence. She didn't even slow down. No horn. No window rolled down. No glance.

In that moment of being passed by, not acknowledged, I felt the full weight of my actions crystallise into something tangible. I'd crossed a line that couldn't be uncrossed. Whatever professional partnership we'd built, whatever complicated personal connection had been developing beneath it, I'd destroyed it with one violent, uncontrolled moment.

I kept walking.

Each footstep was steady, deliberate, my boots scraping softly against the uneven footpath. The concrete was old here, cracked and lifted by tree roots, creating a geography of small hazards I navigated on autopilot. How many times had I walked streets like these? How many crime scenes had I approached with this same measured gait, this same professional composure?

But there was no composure now. Just forward momentum. The mechanics of movement stripped of purpose beyond the need to be elsewhere, anywhere but standing still replaying the moment Sarah's head hit the wall.

I didn't know where I was going—only that standing still wasn't an option. Movement felt like the only thing keeping me from crumbling entirely.

The street curved downward, following the contour of the hill. Berriedale's residential streets all seemed to slope, draped across the landscape like fabric over furniture. To my left, through gaps between houses, I could see the Derwent catching the last of the dying light—a ribbon of dull silver threaded through the valley floor. The mountain rose beyond it, a dark mass against a darkening sky.

Inside me, the rage hadn't disappeared. It had evolved. What had started as a blinding, chaotic fury in that house—at Gladys, at Luke, at myself—had now cooled into something harder. More focused. Dangerous.

A blade, not a fire.

The whisper echoed in my skull like a scratched record, playing on an endless loop that I couldn't silence:

"Bye, Karl."

Smug. Confident. Real.

It had been real.

Not some trick of nerves or echo of guilt. Not some psychological artefact dragged up from memory. Not stress-induced auditory hallucination or the product of a mind pushed too far. It had been Luke. I knew it as surely as I knew my own name. And I would prove it. No matter the cost.

The certainty wasn't rational—I understood that on some level. A detective's mind is trained to demand evidence, to build cases on facts rather than feelings. But this went deeper than professional training. It bypassed reason entirely and lodged itself somewhere more primal. I'd heard that voice. My ears, my brain, my entire nervous system had processed those words as external stimuli, not internal invention.

"I know I heard it," I said aloud, voice low and sharp in the empty street.

The words came unbidden, a verbal assertion of sanity in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary. My voice sounded strange to my own ears—rougher than usual, with a quality I didn't recognise. Was this what madness sounded like? Or was this what truth sounded like when spoken by someone everyone else had decided was wrong?

The cold carried my words away in a plume of condensation, dissipating into the frigid air like so many truths before them—spoken and lost. But the sentiment remained. Anchored deep in my chest. A hook embedded in vital tissue that couldn't be removed without causing catastrophic damage.

This wasn't over.

I couldn't let it be over.

The voice. The missing men. The lies. The contradictions. They were all part of something larger—something coiled and hidden just beneath the surface. And I would unravel it. Even if it meant burning every bridge behind me.

Jamie Greyson and Kain Jeffries hadn't simply vanished. Louise hadn't fabricated her concern. Gladys hadn't been protecting an innocent man. Luke Smith wasn't blameless in whatever was unfolding. There was a pattern here—a web of connections and deceptions that made sense if only I could see it from the right angle, with the right light.

Even if it meant walking away from everything I'd built.

My career. My reputation. Whatever remained of my relationships with colleagues who'd trusted me. The version of Karl Jenkins that had existed forty-eight hours ago—methodical, reliable, by-the-book—that man was gone. In his place was this: a detective who'd broken into a home, manufactured evidence, assaulted his partner.

But perhaps that methodical man had been the lie, and this was the truth finally revealing itself. Perhaps I'd always been capable of this, and it had simply taken the right combination of pressure and obsession to bring it to the surface.

Darkness outside, darkness within.

A familiar companion.

I'd spent my career moving through darkness—literal darkness at crime scenes, metaphorical darkness in the human capacity for harm. I'd thought I understood it. Thought I could navigate it whilst remaining separate from it, like a diver in deep water who knows to watch his gauges and surface before the pressure does permanent damage.

But the darkness had been inside me all along. Not something I moved through, but something I carried. Something I'd fed with every case that went unsolved, every moment of self-doubt, every compromise between what the job demanded and what my conscience could bear.

And now that darkness had found its voice.

"Bye, Karl."

Two words. A taunt. A promise. A truth I'd prove even if I had to tear the world apart to do it.