Venus and the Wolf

"Talent buys you an audience. It doesn't buy you the benefit of the doubt."

The Palace Hotel sat on the corner of Argent and Sulphide Streets like something that had wandered out of another century and decided to stay. I'd walked past it twice since arriving in Broken Hill — once on my first morning, disoriented and still adjusting to the light, and once on my way back from the supermarket with a bag of groceries and the growing suspicion that I'd moved to Mars. Both times I'd noticed the building without really seeing it. Now, following Harding and Brock through the front entrance, I saw it properly for the first time.

The murals stopped me. Floor to ceiling, wall after wall — vast painted landscapes that shouldn't have worked in a pub but somehow did. Red desert stretching to a burning horizon. Gum trees rendered in colours that were simultaneously wrong and exactly right. And on one ceiling, unmistakably, Botticelli's Venus rising from her shell, gazing down at the beer taps with the serene indifference of a Renaissance goddess who'd seen worse.

"First time?" Brock said, catching me staring.

"It's not what I expected."

"Nobody expects it." He steered me towards a table by the window with a hand that didn't quite touch my shoulder. "That's sort of the point."

Harding was already pulling out a chair, his coat finally conquered and draped over the back of it. He settled in with the slow, satisfied exhale of a man arriving at the one place in his day that made sense. The table was dark wood, scarred with decades of use — ring stains and scratches and at least one set of initials carved near the edge that someone had tried, half-heartedly, to sand away.

Through the window, Argent Street baked in the midday sun. A ute crawled past with its windows down. An older woman crossed the road without looking, her shopping bag swinging. Friday lunchtime in Broken Hill, and the pavement had the dazed, unhurried quality of a town that had collectively decided the week was already over.

A waiter materialised — young, bored, notepad ready.

"Two schooners," Harding said, gesturing between himself and Brock with the ease of a man who didn't need to check what his colleague was drinking. "And whatever she's having."

"Black coffee, thanks." I caught the glance that passed between them — not mocking exactly, but noting. Filing. The new officer who ordered coffee at the pub on a Friday. I let it land and didn't explain myself. There would be time enough for beers with these two. This wasn't it.

Brock leaned back in his chair, arms wide along the backs of the neighbouring seats, claiming space the way he claimed everything — automatically, without thought. The light from the window caught the side of his face and I noticed, not for the first time, that Brock Polden was an unreasonably good-looking man. It was the kind of observation I filed under professionally irrelevant and then immediately failed to stop noticing. The jaw, the shoulders, the sun-darkened forearms — it was absurd, frankly. Like someone had ordered a country cop from a catalogue and ticked every box twice.

I opened the menu and studied it with unnecessary intensity.

"The steak's good," Brock offered.

"Is it?"

"It's always good. I always get the steak."

"That's not a recommendation, that's a habit."

He grinned. I ordered the grilled barramundi with salad. Harding chose a club sandwich without looking at the menu. Brock ordered his steak, medium-rare, with chips and a side of predictability.

The drinks arrived. Brock took a long pull of his schooner and set it down with the careful precision of a man savouring something he'd been thinking about since ten o'clock. Harding drank more slowly, turning the glass between his fingers. My coffee was adequate — not good, not terrible, the kind of coffee that existed in country towns as a gesture towards the concept rather than an execution of it.

For a few minutes we talked about nothing. Brock asked where I was living — I told him about the flat on Crystal Street, the landlord who'd left a laminated list of instructions including do not feed the cockatoos, they will never leave. Harding mentioned the heritage walk I should do if I had a free afternoon, then corrected himself — when, not if, because afternoons freed themselves up in Broken Hill whether you planned them or not. I asked about the murals and learned that most of them had been painted by an Indigenous artist named Gordon Waye, and that the pub had been famous since a film crew turned up in the nineties to shoot Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and put the place on a map it hadn't asked to be on.

It was easy. Easier than I'd expected. The dynamic between Harding and Brock was well-worn — the older detective's dry, measured commentary against Brock's blunter delivery, each of them leaving space for the other in a way that spoke of years rather than months. I was the new element, and they were making room for me with the casual generosity of people who understood that small stations either became families or became unbearable, and had long since chosen the former.

The food arrived. Brock attacked his steak with the focused silence of a man who treated meals the way he treated most things — directly, without ceremony. Harding ate his sandwich in halves, wiping his fingers on the napkin between sections. I picked at my barramundi and tried to remember the last time I'd eaten a meal with colleagues that didn't involve someone checking their phone every thirty seconds.

It was Harding who brought it up. He'd finished the first half of his sandwich and was turning his beer glass again — that slow, contemplative rotation I was starting to recognise as his thinking gesture.

"You know," he said, "I actually know Paul."

I set my fork down. "Paul Smith?"

"We're in the same orchestra." He said it casually, but there was something behind it — a flicker of something I couldn't quite read. Not concern, exactly. Something closer to reluctance, as though he'd been deciding whether to mention it and had only just come down on the side of disclosure. "The Broken Hill Symphony. I play flute. Paul's the pianist — probably one of the best in town."

"I'd say apart from his wife," Brock added, without looking up from his steak.

The comment landed lightly, but I caught the edge of it. Claire played too. Both of them musical, both of them talented, both of them apparently generating strong reactions from everyone who knew them — though in very different directions.

"So you know him well?" I asked Harding. "Personally, I mean."

"Well enough." He picked up the second half of his sandwich, examined it as though it might contain information, then set it down again. "He's a good bloke. Quiet. Does volunteer work — Meals on Wheels, that sort of thing. Reliable at rehearsals, which in a country orchestra is the closest thing to sainthood." A brief, dry smile. "He's not the type to vanish without reason."

There it was. Buried in the caveat, almost offhand, but I heard it. Not the type. Which meant Harding, despite everything he'd said at the station about ignoring Claire, had been thinking about it too.

"But Claire, on the other hand—" Brock started.

"Claire runs a dance school," Harding said, cutting in with the practiced air of a man heading off Brock's vocabulary before it arrived. "She's talented. Genuinely talented. Her concerts are something else — the kids worship her. Half the parents in town send their children to her classes."

"And the other half?"

"The other half send their children to her classes as well," Harding said. "They just don't like her while they're doing it."

Brock snorted into his beer. I waited.

"The thing about Claire," Harding continued, choosing his words with the deliberateness I was coming to associate with him, "is that talent and temperament don't always arrive in equal proportions. She's extraordinary at what she does. She's also..." He searched for the word.

"A nightmare," Brock supplied.

"Challenging," Harding corrected, though his mouth twitched. "She has a history of — how do I put this diplomatically?"

"You don't need to be diplomatic. It's a pub."

"Fine. She makes things up. Or she takes small things and inflates them until they're unrecognisable." He took a sip of beer. "Last year she rang the station claiming someone had broken into their house while she and the kids were sleeping. Brock went out there. Spent two hours going over the property."

"There was no break-in," Brock said flatly. "Not a mark on the doors, not a mark on the windows. The locks were all fine. She'd left the back door open herself and the wind had blown it shut during the night. That was it. That was the whole thing."

"And then there was the harassment complaint," Harding said. "She accused another dance teacher of stalking her — following her to rehearsals, sitting outside her house, sending threatening messages. Filed a formal report. When we looked into it, the other teacher had sent her one text message — one — asking whether they could share rehearsal space at the community centre on alternate Tuesdays."

"That's it?"

"That was the entirety of the stalking campaign." Harding's expression was carefully neutral, but I could see the weariness beneath it. This wasn't gossip for him. This was history — the accumulated weight of incidents that had eaten up his officers' time and produced nothing.

Brock leaned forward, elbows on the table, fork pointing at me like a blunt instrument of emphasis. "And don't forget the orchestra thing."

"Which orchestra thing?" I asked.

"She accused the conductor of changing the programme to deliberately humiliate her. Said he'd swapped out a piece she'd been rehearsing for weeks and replaced it with something she hadn't prepared, to make her look incompetent in front of the audience."

I glanced at Harding. "Had he?"

"He'd updated the programme two months in advance," Harding said quietly. "Sent an email to every member. Claire hadn't read it. But by the time anyone could explain that, she'd already confronted him in the car park after rehearsal, in front of half the orchestra, and accused him of running a vendetta against her."

The picture was forming. Not a cartoon villain — something more complicated and more tiresome. A woman whose talent was real and whose grievances were not, or whose grievances contained a grain of something real that she then buried under so much exaggeration that nobody could find it anymore. The kind of person who had cried wolf so many times that even the people who liked her had stopped listening.

Which was, of course, exactly the kind of person you'd want to listen to if the wolf ever actually showed up.

"So your position," I said slowly, turning my coffee cup on the saucer, "is that Claire's report about Paul is just another one of these."

Harding and Brock exchanged a look. It lasted half a second — barely there — but I read it clearly. They'd already had this conversation, probably on the walk over, probably without words.

"My position," Harding said carefully, "is that Claire has a documented pattern of exaggeration and fabrication, and that we need to be cautious about allocating resources based on her claims without independent verification."

"That's a very diplomatic way of saying you think she's wasting our time."

The corner of his mouth lifted. "I told you I could be diplomatic."

"Look," Brock said, pushing his empty plate to the side and pulling his beer closer, "I'm not saying something hasn't happened. Maybe Paul's gone walkabout for a few days. Maybe they had a massive blue and he's gone to cool off somewhere. That's not unusual. What is unusual is us chasing our tails because Claire's decided to weaponise the police station."

"But what if she hasn't?" I said. "What if this time it's real?"

The question sat on the table between us, next to the steak sauce and the beer glasses and the remains of lunch. Neither of them answered immediately. Brock looked at Harding. Harding looked at his beer.

"Then we'll find out," Harding said eventually. "The simplest thing to do is go to the house. See if Paul's there. If he is, case closed. If he's not, we check with his work, see if he's been showing up. That'll tell us whether Claire's inventing this or whether something's actually off."

I nodded. It was sensible. Methodical. The kind of approach I'd have suggested myself if I'd had another decade of small-town policing behind me.

"Claire mentioned she's taking the kids to her sister's in Queensland tomorrow," I said.

Harding considered this, tilting his head slightly — that habitual recalibration. "In that case, wait until the afternoon. Visit the house after she's left. It'll be easier without her there — less performance, less drama. You can just look at the place and form your own—" He stopped. Frowned. "Tomorrow's Saturday."

"It is," I said.

"You're not rostered tomorrow." It wasn't a question. He said it the way he said most things — measured, already certain of the answer, checking only as a courtesy.

"No," I admitted. "But I can come in. It's only a welfare check — it wouldn't take long."

Something passed between Harding and Brock. Not a look, exactly — more a shared stillness, the kind of wordless communication that develops between people who've worked together long enough to have entire conversations without opening their mouths. I couldn't read all of it, but I could read enough: keen, isn't she.

"You don't have to do that," Harding said, though his tone suggested he was already considering it.

"I know I don't have to. I'd like to." I kept my voice casual, as though volunteering for an unrostered Saturday was something I did without thinking rather than something I was doing precisely because I wanted them to see me doing it. The new girl from Sydney, proving she wasn't above a weekend callout. Proving she belonged here. It was transparent, and I suspected they both saw through it, and I didn't care.

Harding studied me for a moment. Then he looked at Brock. "You're on tomorrow, aren't you?"

"I'm always on." Brock shrugged, draining the last of his schooner and setting the glass down with a decisive thud. "I live five minutes away. Not exactly a hardship."

"Brock, everyone in Broken Hill lives five minutes away," I said.

He considered this. "Fair point."

"Fine." Harding nodded once — decision made, filed, moved on. "The two of you go out to the house tomorrow afternoon, after Claire's left. Quick welfare check, nothing more. If Paul's there, we're done. If he's not, we check with his work Monday and go from there."

"Reckon he'll be sitting in his lounge room watching the footy with a beer," Brock said, "wondering what all the fuss is about."

"Probably," Harding agreed.

I didn't say anything. I was thinking about the phone call — Greta's voice going thin when the fear leaked through, the dial tone cutting in before Luke's number could reach me, the post-it note tucked in my shirt pocket with LUKE — HOBART written on it in my own handwriting. I was thinking about three people telling me to ignore Claire Smith, and the careful distance Paul's own mother had put between herself and the word worried, as though getting too close to it might make it true.

"Right then," Harding said, reaching for his wallet. "I'll get this one. Consider it a welcome-to-Broken-Hill gesture."

"You don't have to—"

"I insist. You can get the next one." He flagged the waiter with the economy of a man who'd flagged that particular waiter many times before. "Besides, you ordered coffee. It's the cheapest thing on the table."

Brock laughed. I did too — surprising myself with it, the sound strange and warm in a room full of painted deserts and a Renaissance goddess watching from the ceiling. My first Friday lunch in Broken Hill, and I was sitting in a heritage pub with two men who'd told me to ignore the only interesting thing that had happened since I'd arrived, and who'd then — without quite meaning to — given me every reason not to.

I reached into my shirt pocket and touched the post-it note. Still there. Still unanswered.