The Tab Ellen Closed

Sarah Lahey slammed the phone down at her own desk for the third time that afternoon. Hobart Airport administration had kept her on hold for the better part of an hour. Six times through the same hold-music loop. Twice that many assurances that her call was important. The investigation was no further forward than it had been at eleven in the morning, and the winter light was already beginning to fail behind the station windows. She shoved off from her desk and crossed the bullpen toward the corner in which Ellen Lowe had set up camp.

Ellen had been in her chair for most of the afternoon. A cooling cup of tea sat beside her keyboard. A browser window was open on her screen, and on the browser window was a Facebook profile. The profile was sparse. Carefully privacy-locked. The man it belonged to was called Oscar Lahey, and Oscar Lahey lived in London. He had not set foot in Tasmania for years, and he was the subject of a quiet inquiry Senior Sergeant Mason Wright had handed Ellen a few days earlier on the strict understanding that the inquiry would not leave her desk. Oscar was also the younger brother of the detective whose footsteps Ellen could now hear crossing the bullpen toward her.

Ellen closed the browser tab. The movement was small, unhurried, entirely unremarkable. Nothing on her face moved with it.

Sarah dropped into the visitor's chair beside the desk and performed an exhausted sigh. Ellen told her to go away. Neither of them meant it, and both of them knew. For the best part of a year now the two of them had been running the same small ritual at the same desk in the same corner — detective arriving in frustration, administrator pretending not to care, task handed over, task accepted, something owed added to the running tally neither of them had ever committed to paper.

Sarah named her task. Airport checks at Hobart and Launceston on two missing men — Jamie Greyson and Kain Jeffries. The Spirit of Tasmania ferry, she remembered at the last moment, pivoting back from her hasty escape. Ellen sighed through her teeth and agreed to take it on, the theatre of reluctance performed so casually it would have deceived anyone except Sarah and anyone except Ellen herself.

The two names had arrived in Ellen's ears in a particular order that Sarah did not know mattered.

Jamie Greyson was an aged care nurse at Vaucluse Nursing Home. Vaucluse was where Jane Lahey had been a resident for some years. Jane Lahey was Sarah's grandmother — ninety-two years old, recently and quietly diagnosed with something terminal, the woman who had taken Sarah and her younger brother into her own house after an accident in the Swiss Alps had ended their parents' marriage to living. Jamie Greyson had looked after Jane across the last several years of her residency. Kain Jeffries was the great-grandson of the woman who had been Jane's closest friend across six decades of Hobart life — Thelma Rose Jeffries, still alive out at the sandstone manor at Granton, presiding over her own nine decades with the same quiet stubbornness Jane had always matched. Jane and Thelma had sat beside each other at more community functions, hospital visits, and garden parties than Ellen could have counted if she had tried. The thread between the Lahey name and the Jeffries name ran back further than the detective currently slumped in the visitor's chair had been alive.

Ellen kept none of this on her face.

Sarah knew nothing of any of it, and Ellen was not the person who would tell her. Mason's inquiry into Oscar was not hers to speak about. The Vaucluse connection was not hers to speak about either, because the natural course of Sarah's investigation would turn it up in its own time, and because Ellen had spent three decades learning to recognise the difference between a fact she was paid to find and a fact she was paid to hold.

The file changed hands. A case number. A short list of typed questions. Two names.

Sarah stood to leave. You mean you still owe me, Ellen called after her, dry enough to leave a scratch. Sarah tossed an acknowledgment across her shoulder and was already moving back toward her own desk, already dialling the next number, already elsewhere.

Ellen watched her go. Then she picked up the file, set it beside the cooling cup of tea, and dialled the first of the airport contacts in her own rolodex. The hold music at the other end of the line was more civilised than the hold music Sarah had been getting. That, too, was institutional relationships.