A Southern Transfer

Karl Matthew Jenkins reported for duty with the Queensland Police Service at Stafford police station, in Brisbane's Metropolitan North District, transferring from South Australia Police with the rank of constable and a little over four years' service behind him. He had arrived in Brisbane two days earlier at the end of a three-day drive from Adelaide, his car loaded with everything he owned. His sister Jessica was the only member of the family who had come to see him leave.

The transfer followed two unsuccessful applications to the South Australian Criminal Investigation Branch, in 1998 and 1999, each declined for insufficient experience despite the assessors' view that he was a strong candidate. The Queensland offer gave him a busier district, a wider range of work and a city in which no one knew him. It also put two thousand kilometres between him and a family he had never learned how to be close to.

The station's officer in charge, Senior Sergeant Graham Mitchell, had read Karl's file before he arrived. His South Australian references were strong on casework, documentation and composure, and noted, in the careful language of performance reports, that he took little part in the life of his team. Mitchell took both halves seriously. He welcomed Karl formally, assigned him to general duties with a view to investigative support work, and paired him with Constable Dean Harlow, a Brisbane-born officer of three years' service who knew the district's streets and most of its regulars.

The day itself was ordinary. Karl drew his Queensland uniform and kit, sat through the morning briefing, and spent the afternoon on an orientation patrol with Harlow through Stafford, Chermside and Kedron in the wet-season heat. Harlow's attempts at conversation were answered politely and briefly. Karl's own questions were precise and procedural: the district's reporting requirements, the documentation the post-Fitzgerald Service demanded for every use of force, the workings of the station's case-management system. He wrote the answers down.

The station formed its first impressions quickly. A southern transfer with a master's degree, who did not drink with the shift and did not talk about football, drew some scepticism in the meal room, and the scepticism was not entirely unkind. Harlow reported to Mitchell at the end of the day that Karl was competent, thorough and very hard to talk to. Mitchell made a note of it.

Karl stayed an hour past the end of his shift to read the district's crime figures for the previous year, then drove back to the furnished flat he had rented in Kedron, where most of his belongings were still in boxes.