What the Name Buys

"I've learned that institutions respond to two things: policy and leverage. If you can't invoke the first, you'd better be prepared to apply the second."

The drive from Granton to Hobart took forty-three minutes. I know this because I counted every one of them, the way I'd once counted contractions in the delivery room — a desperate attempt to impose mathematics on situations that defied rational management.

Thomas's flight to Melbourne had departed at seven-fifteen. I'd checked. Three times. I'd watched the plane lift off on the flight tracker app, a small blue icon climbing away from Tasmania and taking with it the last obstacle between me and what I should have done days ago.

The guilt of that thought sat beside me in the passenger seat like an unwelcome hitchhiker. You waited for your husband to leave before reporting your son missing. The accusation circled in my mind, looking for purchase. What kind of mother does that?

The kind of mother, I reminded myself grimly, who'd spent twenty-eight years learning that the Jeffries handled things privately. The kind of mother whose husband would have insisted on calling lawyers before police, on managing the narrative, on protecting the family's reputation as though reputation were a currency that could be exchanged for missing children.

Thomas would be furious when he found out. I found I didn't particularly care.

The Hobart Police Station materialised through my windscreen like a rebuke made architectural — all brutal concrete and institutional indifference, the kind of building that seemed designed to make you feel guilty before you'd even walked through the door. I pulled into the car park and sat for a moment, hands still on the steering wheel, watching my knuckles whiten.

You're stalling, I told myself. Get out of the car.

I got out of the car.

The automatic doors wheezed open with the enthusiasm of a public servant on a Monday morning, admitting me to a lobby that smelled exactly the way police station lobbies apparently smelled everywhere — disinfectant, floor wax, and the accumulated anxiety of everyone who'd ever stood where I was standing, trying to find the words for unspeakable things.

Someone had attempted to humanise the space with a water feature, one of those modern arrangements where water trickled over black stones in what was presumably meant to evoke serenity. It evoked, instead, the persistent need to visit the lavatory. I made a mental note to locate the facilities before any lengthy interviews.

The lobby was sparsely populated at this hour. A woman clutching a manila folder sat in one corner, her lips moving in what might have been prayer or rehearsal for whatever ordeal awaited her. Near the door, a young man sprawled across two chairs with the boneless lethargy of someone whose relationship with consciousness was negotiable. They both looked up as I entered, assessed me as irrelevant to their personal catastrophes, and returned to their private miseries.

I understood. I was about to join their ranks.

The reception desk dominated the far wall — a raised fortress of pale wood and security glass that communicated, with admirable clarity, that the people behind it were in here and you were very much out there. Above it hung the Tasmania Police insignia, polished to a gleam that suggested someone's entire job consisted of buffing that badge. Flanking it were the inevitable posters: See Something, Say Something; Domestic Violence: Break the Silence; various other exhortations to engage with a system that, in my experience, preferred its citizens silent and compliant unless they had something useful to report.

I approached the desk with the measured stride I'd perfected over decades of walking into rooms where I wasn't entirely welcome. Chin up. Shoulders back. The posture of a woman who expected to be taken seriously, even when — especially when — she wasn't certain she would be.

The officer behind the glass was a woman approximately my age, with auburn hair pinned back in a style that suggested either efficiency or a profound lack of time for personal grooming that morning. Her uniform was immaculate, her posture textbook-correct, her expression arranged into that particular configuration of polite attentiveness that public-facing employees deployed as a first line of defence against the general populace.

She looked up as I reached the counter, and I watched her eyes perform the automatic assessment: well-dressed, composed, probably not here to report a stolen bicycle or complain about a neighbour's barking dog. Her expression shifted infinitesimally — slightly more alert, slightly more wary. The well-dressed ones, her face seemed to say, were often the most difficult.

"Good morning," she said, her voice carrying that processed warmth of someone who'd said the same words approximately forty thousand times. "How can I help you today?"

"Good morning. I need to report two missing persons."

The words came out steadier than I'd expected. Perhaps because I'd rehearsed them on the drive, turning the syllables over in my mouth like stones I was learning to swallow.

Her fingers moved to her keyboard with the automated efficiency of muscle memory. "I see. And what are your details, please? Full name?"

"Louise Elizabeth Jeffries."

I watched for the reaction. There wasn't one — not yet. The name hadn't registered, or she hadn't made the connection. She typed it into her system with the same mechanical autonomy she'd probably use for any name, her eyes fixed on the screen.

"Address?"

"Jeffries Manor, Granton."

Still nothing. Perhaps she was new. Perhaps she simply hadn't been paying attention in 2008 when Charles had vanished from his study and the name Jeffries had been splashed across every newspaper in Tasmania for weeks. Perhaps — and this seemed most likely — she was simply doing her job, processing information without engaging with it, a human interface for a bureaucratic machine that cared nothing for context or history.

"And the nature of your report, Mrs Jeffries?"

The nature of my report. As though I were filing a complaint about a faulty appliance or a delayed delivery. As though my son and brother could be reduced to a category, a checkbox, a field in a database.

"My son, Kain Jeffries, has been missing for two days," I said, keeping my voice level. "And my brother, Jamie Greyson, has been unreachable for four days. I believe both disappearances are connected."

Her typing slowed. I saw her brow furrow slightly — the first crack in the professional facade.

"Two days," she repeated, and there it was: that particular tone I'd been dreading. The tone that preceded explanations about waiting periods and standard procedures and the statistical likelihood that missing adults had simply chosen to be elsewhere. "Mrs Jeffries, I understand your concern, but typically we advise—"

"I'm aware of typical advisories," I interrupted, and I heard the edge enter my voice despite my best efforts to suppress it. "I'm also aware that my son left to check on my brother two days ago and has not been seen or heard from since. His fiancée hasn't heard from him. His friends haven't heard from him. His phone goes directly to voicemail. This is not typical behaviour."

The officer's expression had solidified into something more guarded. I recognised it — the look of someone preparing to deploy policy as a shield against human distress. I'd seen it in bank managers explaining why they couldn't extend credit, in doctors explaining why certain treatments weren't covered, in every institutional gatekeeper I'd ever encountered who'd decided that rules mattered more than circumstances.

"I appreciate that this is distressing," she began, and I felt my jaw tighten at the word distressing, as though my son's disappearance were merely an inconvenience, an emotional overreaction to be managed rather than a crisis to be addressed. "But without evidence of—"

"The address," I said, cutting her off again. "You typed the address. Jeffries Manor."

She blinked. "Yes?"

"Jeffries Manor, Granton. As in Charles Jeffries. As in the disappearance that your department investigated for three years without resolution. As in the case that is, I believe, still technically open."

I watched the recognition dawn across her face like a sunrise over a particularly bleak landscape. Her fingers froze above the keyboard. Her eyes widened slightly, then narrowed as she reassessed me — not as another anxious relative to be processed and dismissed, but as something considerably more complicated.

"You're—" she started.

"Charles Jeffries was my father-in-law," I confirmed. "He vanished from his study in 2008. No body was ever found. No explanation was ever provided. And now my son has disappeared whilst visiting a property in Berriedale, and I would very much appreciate it if someone took that rather more seriously than the standard advisory would suggest."

The transformation was immediate and, I confess, darkly satisfying. The professional detachment evaporated, replaced by something closer to alarm. Her hand moved toward the phone on her desk with the urgency of someone who'd just realised they were holding a live grenade.

"I — yes, of course, Mrs Jeffries. If you'll just give me a moment—"

She was already lifting the receiver, already dialling an internal extension, her eyes flickering between me and the screen as though I might vanish like my father-in-law if she looked away for too long.

I waited, watching her speak in low, urgent tones to whoever had answered. I caught fragments — "Jeffries," repeated twice, "missing persons," "connected to the 2008 case" — and felt the machinery of institutional response begin to grind into motion around me.

This was what the name bought. Not justice, necessarily. Not competence. But attention. The particular attention that came with being connected to an unsolved mystery that had embarrassed the department for a decade. The attention of people who didn't want another Jeffries disappearance on their watch, another investigation that went nowhere, another black mark on their closure statistics.

I should have felt grateful. Instead, I felt tired. And angry. And desperately, achingly aware that somewhere out there, Kain and Jamie were waiting — for rescue, for discovery, for someone to care enough to look for them — whilst I stood in this antiseptic lobby leveraging a family name I'd never asked for against a system that shouldn't have required leverage in the first place.

The officer — I still didn't know her name; her badge was angled away from me — hung up the phone and rose from her chair with newfound purpose.

"Mrs Jeffries, Sergeant Claiborne will be with you shortly. In the meantime, if you'll follow me, I'll take you to a more private room where you can wait."

"Interview Room Three?" I asked, the question emerging before I could stop it.

She hesitated, clearly thrown by my familiarity with the station's geography. But of course I knew it. I'd spent hours in these rooms after Charles disappeared, answering questions that led nowhere, providing information that illuminated nothing. The layout of the Hobart Police Station was etched into my memory like a scar.

"Yes," she said carefully. "If that's... acceptable?"

Acceptable. As though I had preferences about which sterile box I'd be deposited in whilst waiting to learn whether my family had suffered another inexplicable loss.

"It's fine," I said. "Lead the way."

She guided me through a security door — her card beeping against the reader with a sound that felt oddly final — and into the corridor beyond. The walls here were painted that particular shade of institutional green that seemed designed by committee to be maximally depressing whilst remaining technically inoffensive. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead with the enthusiasm of a dying insect.

We passed notice boards covered with the usual detritus of police work: wanted posters, safety announcements, a flyer advertising the upcoming staff Christmas party that seemed wildly optimistic given that it was only July. Faces stared out from the missing persons notices — young and old, smiling and serious, all of them frozen in moments that had preceded their disappearances.

Would Kain's face join them? Would Jamie's?

I pushed the thought down, hard, locking it away in the mental compartment I reserved for things I couldn't afford to feel. Not yet. Not here.

"Here we are," the officer said, stopping at a door marked with a small plastic placard: Interview Room 3. She pushed it open and gestured me inside with the manner of a hotel concierge showing a guest to a particularly underwhelming suite.

The room was exactly as I remembered: windowless, fluorescent-lit, furnished with the absolute minimum required for human occupation. A metal table bolted to the floor. Plastic chairs that looked like they'd been designed by someone who'd studied discomfort as an academic discipline. Walls painted in that same institutional green, interrupted only by a mirror that wasn't fooling anyone about its true purpose.

"Can I get you anything while you wait?" the officer asked. "Tea? Coffee? Water?"

The hospitality felt surreal — as though the proper response to a woman reporting her missing family members was to offer refreshments, to make her comfortable in a room designed specifically to make people uncomfortable.

"No, thank you," I said. Then, before she could retreat: "There is one thing."

She paused, hand still on the door frame, her expression shifting into that wary attentiveness of someone expecting a difficult request.

"Detective Karl Jenkins," I said. "I'd like him to be involved in this case."

I kept my voice measured, reasonable — a request, not a demand. Not yet.

Something flickered across her face. Recognition, perhaps, or simply the complication of a civilian making specific personnel requests. "I can certainly pass that along, Mrs Jeffries, but I'm not sure—"

"He was involved in the investigation after my father-in-law's disappearance," I continued, as though she hadn't spoken. "He knows the family history. The context." I paused, letting the weight of that settle. "I believe he'd want to be informed, given the... similarities."

The word similarities hung in the air between us. Another Jeffries. Another disappearance. Another case that might spiral into years of unanswered questions and empty files.

"I'll make sure Sergeant Claiborne knows," she said, and I heard the shift in her tone — no longer dismissive, no longer merely procedural. She understood now that this wasn't a preference to be noted and ignored. This was a strategic request from someone who knew exactly how these things worked.

"Thank you," I said. "I appreciate it."

She nodded once, then retreated, the door clicking shut behind her with a sound that echoed in the empty room like a full stop at the end of a sentence.

I was alone.

I checked my phone — still nothing from Kain, still nothing from Jamie, still the same terrible silence that had driven me here in the first place. The screen displayed the time: 9:47 AM. The statement form noted my arrival at 10:30, which meant I had the better part of an hour ahead of me, sitting in this room, waiting for people who might or might not be able to help.

Forty-three minutes to get here. God knows how long to get answers.

I set the phone on the table and folded my hands in my lap, assuming the posture I'd learned in decades of board meetings and difficult conversations. Composed. Patient. Giving nothing away.

The fluorescent lights hummed their tuneless song overhead. The mirror watched, empty or occupied — I neither knew nor cared. And somewhere in the building, Sergeant Claiborne was hunting for a detective who apparently hadn't arrived when expected, whilst I sat in this sterile box and tried not to calculate the odds of ever seeing my son or brother again.

Jeffries Manor, Granton. The address that opened doors and closed conversations. The name that carried weight — and, it seemed, a curse.

Charles had vanished from that address in 2008. Now Kain had vanished trying to investigate another disappearance. And I sat in Interview Room Three, waiting for the police to take seriously what the Jeffries name had apparently been shouting for a decade: that something was very wrong, and no one could explain why people kept disappearing into silence.

The chair was, as predicted, profoundly uncomfortable. I shifted slightly, trying to find a position that didn't feel like penance.

At least, I thought grimly, Thomas isn't here to tell me I'm overreacting.

The thought was uncharitable. It was also true. And in the absence of any other comfort, I held onto it like a small, sharp stone in my pocket — something to grip when the waiting became unbearable.

The door remained closed. The lights continued their hum. And somewhere in the building, the machinery of investigation was beginning to turn — slowly, reluctantly, but turning nonetheless.

I would wait. I had become very good at waiting.

But I was done waiting alone.