The Swept Floor

Behind the woolsheds at Macquarie Point, a radio cracked open the silence Karl Jenkins and Sarah Lahey had been using in place of speech. A disturbance at Jeffries Manor. A name the watch had been flagging for a week. The engine caught on the second try, and the unmarked car turned north out of the pewter light along the Derwent.

They took the gravel drive up to the manor in silence. An iron archway with the name etched into its metal slab let them in, and something cold moved in Sarah's chest as they passed under it — a warning in advance of the reason for being warned. The sandstone rose ahead, colonial and old-moneyed. Karl made his call at the gate before they left the car: no gun, not yet. He had known the woman who lived in this house for years. A drawn weapon was the wrong way to finish something like this.

They did not get as far as the front door.

Louise Jeffries was outside the open door of the large shed in a shaft of late light, holding a kitchen knife in two shaking hands. Mascara had cut channels through her face. Her eyes were wild in a way Karl had never seen them — and he had known her well enough, and long enough, to feel his memory of her and the figure in front of him refuse to reconcile. Sarah walked across the gravel slowly, the way she walked when calm was the only useful thing she had, and took the knife out of Louise's hands. The last of whatever had been holding Louise together went with it. She collapsed sobbing a name Karl had not yet known was part of his caseload. Brianne. Kain's fiancée. Gone, the way everyone around Luke Smith kept going.

Karl sent Sarah inside with her. He turned alone toward the shed.

The manor closed around Sarah and Louise with the long deep hush of an old colonial house in the afternoon. Louise was given something to hold onto — close the blinds, lock the doors — and Sarah took the staircase up with her sidearm drawn, Karl's caution at the gate already set aside. The upstairs corridor ran long in both directions. She cleared the rooms one at a time. The last door was the door.

Thelma Jeffries was very old, very small, and very much still alive in a four-poster bed that had swallowed almost all of her. The room smelled of another century. Her eyes, when they lifted to Sarah's face, were beautiful still — and wrong in a way that did not resolve until the old woman called the name that stopped Sarah where she stood.

Jane, dear, don't go.

Jane Lahey. Sarah's grandmother. A name that belonged in a nursing home in Vaucluse, not in a bedroom at the top of a manor Sarah had never been inside. Her grandmother had begun a conversation last week about the Jeffries family and Sarah's own parents and had not been well enough to finish it. Sarah had assumed she would have time.

She had no time now. Somewhere outside the bedroom window a motorbike engine caught and held and ran clean for a handful of seconds, and then was gone the way sound went when the thing making it had passed out of the world.

Sarah apologised to the old woman in the bed in the wrong name, and took the stairs down two at a time.

Inside the shed, the careful arrest Karl had planned had already come apart.

He had crossed the threshold palms-open, sidearm undrawn, voice professional. Luke had stepped out of the shadows at the back of the shed to meet him and had been the face from the file photographs at last — slender, composed, disarmingly young. The conversation between them had been short, and Luke's answers too clean. He had been performing innocence without the effort innocence required. Karl had heard that particular hollowness in other rooms in other years, and had muttered what he thought of it.

It was the back pocket that ended the talk. A reach, a bark, a startled motion, an old bike crashing to the floor, and Karl over the concrete in three strides with his shoulder in Luke's chest. They went down hard. The fight was short and close and awkward. Karl came up with both wrists pinned above Luke's head and the single bulb in the ceiling stuttering in its socket, and he called Luke a psychopath, and he named the four people Luke had taken, and for the first time all afternoon Luke's composure cracked.

The denial was fast. The denial was real. And then, underneath it, quieter, closer, almost tender, Luke asked the two words that took the air out of Karl Jenkins's chest.

The rage that had been holding Karl's hands drained cold out of him. A face rose inside him without permission — the face of the man in the cupboard under the stairs in Berriedale. His grip loosened.

A burst of static came up through his belt radio that belonged to no dispatcher. The bulb above the door flickered and held. A woman's voice called Luke's name into the shed from behind him, from somewhere nobody should have been standing, and Karl knew the name that came up to meet the voice — Beatrix.

He half-turned to look.

The knee came up into him with the precision of a man who had been waiting for that half-turn all afternoon.

The rest of it was silent. The concrete floor of the shed rippled underneath them the way the skin of a still pond rippled when something moved through it, and the world beneath the floor gave way without a sound. What made sound was everything else — tools, tarps, bags of concrete, the fallen motorbike, the old frame of a ride-on mower — all of it dragged downward as if the centre of the earth had shifted and was no longer in the earth. Two men went with it. The shed closed over the place they had been, and there was nothing left in it but walls and a ceiling and the old barrel-bolt on the outside of the door.

Hard red earth came up to meet Karl Jenkins under a sky that was too bright and too dry. The sunlight was wrong. The air was wrong. A voice that had not come from Luke and had not come from anywhere he could put a hand on spoke inside his head and welcomed him, by name, to a word he had never heard before. Clivilius. He did not understand it. Training moved him before understanding could. He wrestled the man beneath him back down into the dust and pinned him again, and when Luke looked up at him from the red earth of a world that should not exist and said the two words Karl had been hearing in his nightmares for a week — Bye, Karl — Karl hit him once, hard, with everything that had been gathering inside him since Berriedale. Luke went still.

Back at Jeffries Manor, Sarah came off the bottom of the staircase at a run, out through the front door. She ran toward the shed with her gun up and her eyes sweeping the gravel for tyre marks, for a flash of paint, for any sign at all of a motorbike she had heard with her own ears.

Nothing.

Not on the drive. Not behind the shed. Not on the track along the eastern hedges. The engine she had heard clean and full-throated from the upstairs bedroom had left no mark in the dust, no exhaust on the air, no retreating note in the bush. It had simply stopped being a motorbike.

She called Karl's name into the doorway of the shed. The shed gave her nothing back.

She went in.

The inside of the shed took the last of her breath. Not ransacked. Not the wreckage of a fight. A few tools hanging from their hooks. A run of shelving holding what it had always held. But the floor — the concrete expanse where Louise had said a man was trapped, where an old motorbike had been leaning against the wall for a decade, where her partner and a suspect should have been either shouting or bleeding — the floor was bare. Swept. Stripped of every loose thing that could have sat on it, in the four minutes she had been upstairs with an old woman who did not know what year it was.

No tools. No tarps. No boxes. No motorbike. No Karl. No Luke.

Sarah stood alone in the doorway of the empty shed with her sidearm still raised, the afternoon sun coming in behind her, and the question her mind could not yet find a framework to ask came out of her in the only whisper her body had left.

What have you done now, Karl.

The shed gave her nothing back.