The Tarpaulin Hour

Saturday morning had settled over Hobart Police Station the way Saturday mornings always did, like a tarpaulin thrown over furniture nobody had any plans for. A phone ringing twice in some distant office and then stopping. Linoleum scuffed pale along the walking lines. The low mechanical hum of a coffee machine nobody had asked to start.

Charlie Claiborne came down the corridor from his office on a knee that had seized up and was not forgiving him for it. He had not slept in something close to thirty hours. The pills he kept for the knee were still in his desk drawer, where they would stay. The drawer beside them — the private one, the one that did not appear in any performance review — was, he had recently begun to suspect, getting crowded.

Sarah Lahey came round the far end of the corridor with a takeaway coffee in her hand and the small forward lean of a woman walking into a wind only she could feel. She had changed into her uniform in the locker room a few minutes ago with the careful discipline of a person assembling armour, and by the time her sergeant's voice reached her she had almost finished the job. Her body understood the voice before her mind did. Spine straight, shoulders squared, before she turned.

What passed between them in the corridor was small and routine on its face — a question about whether she had seen her partner yet that morning, an answer she gave in the wrong half-second.

She did not know she had hesitated. She believed she had given the answer at the clean professional speed of a detective with nothing to hide. But a half-second is a long time in the attention of a sergeant who has spent twenty-three years reading interview rooms, and Charlie had read it for exactly what it was. The small micro-expression. The faint fractional widening of the eyes before she shuttered them. The loyalty underneath. He filed the half-second into his crowded drawer alongside everything else he had noticed and not yet acted on, and decided, with the weary efficiency of a man who had no time left for elegance, that the loyalty was useful. Competent women who would keep their mouths shut about what they had read were the precise commodity the next half-hour of his life required.

He told her she would have to join him instead. He gave her five minutes. He named the room.

The room was the word that landed hardest. Interview Room Three was never used lightly. Claiborne did not conduct interviews. The combination of the two arrived inside Sarah's chest with the slow adrenal weight of a morning that had just stopped belonging to her.

He turned and walked away on the knee that was now openly complaining, already back inside the room in his head — already with the woman waiting in it, already with the brother, already with the name Linda had brought him, already with a door he had not been expecting to have to open again for ten years. He did not look back. He had use for the woman at the other end of the corridor, and he trusted her competence more than he trusted almost anyone else in the building, and that was as much of the morning as he had time to think about.

Behind him, Sarah counted her five minutes. The hum of the bullpen thinned around her into the particular sterile silence that gathered around a detective who had just been conscripted without being told she had been conscripted.

The tarpaulin hour kept its quiet over the rest of the station. Each of them walking into the next five minutes carrying the wrong idea about what the other had just understood.