A Partner He Did Not Request

Detective Karl Jenkins had worked in Organised Crime Division at Tasmania Police headquarters on Liverpool Street since 2008. For the six years since Detective Sergeant Charlie Claiborne had left the division, he had worked largely alone, drawing on other detectives for individual operations and returning his cases to his own desk when they were done. His results were the best in the division. Inspector Samuel Woolley, who oversaw policing operations across metropolitan Hobart and had once commanded an Organised Crime Squad himself, regarded the arrangement as a risk. Too much of the division's work existed only in one man's notes.

Detective Constable Sarah Lahey had been appointed to that rank in February, after more than a year on the detective training pathway in the Southern Criminal Investigation Branch. Detective Senior Sergeant Ian McCrae's recommendation praised her interviewing and her rapport with witnesses. It also noted her long hours and her habit of following leads without first telling anyone. Woolley read it as a description of the partner Karl needed and of the risk that came with her.

Woolley called them into his office on the second floor together, shortly after nine. He told them they would be working as partners from that morning. Karl objected immediately, with Sarah in the room. He said he had not asked for a partner, did not need one, and did not have time to train a detective constable while carrying his current caseload. Woolley heard him out and told him the decision was made. Sarah said nothing during the exchange. When Woolley asked whether she had anything to add, she said she had read Karl's file and had expected exactly that response.

A desk in Karl's pod in the north-west corner of the first floor had been cleared for her over the weekend. Karl spent the rest of the morning briefing her on his three active matters. He did it thoroughly and without warmth, handing her each file with an account of where it stood and what remained. She read them at her new desk through lunch.

That afternoon they drove to Bridgewater to re-interview Tanya Melrose, the partner of a courier in a methamphetamine supply investigation that had stalled. Melrose had ignored two written requests from Karl to give a further statement. Sarah knocked, introduced herself by her first name, and was invited in. Over the following two hours, at Melrose's kitchen table, she drew out an account of her partner's movements through the previous winter that he had told no one else.

Karl took notes and asked almost nothing. Near the end he asked one question about the date of a trip to Launceston that Melrose had placed in the second week of July. A fuel receipt already on file placed her partner's car in Devonport on that day. Sarah had not noticed the conflict. Melrose, pressed on it, changed her account. The correction gave the investigation its first fixed point in months.

They drove back to Hobart in silence. Neither acknowledged what the other had done in the interview.

At the end of the day, Woolley stopped at each of their desks separately and asked how the first day had gone. Each told him it had gone fine. He recorded in his own notes that evening that both of them meant it, and that neither would have admitted it to the other.