The Unredacted Truth Awakens

Malia's POV

For a moment the screen gave us nothing but white, and I thought, it's broken. We've broken it. All of this, and it's broken.

Then the white thinned into a pale grey, and a shape rose out of it. A circle of dark blue, then a crest in gold thread, then a scatter of small raised stars around a shield. It sharpened line by line, the way a photograph comes up in a tray. Beneath it, in plain block capitals, came the words I'd spent months aching to read.

**VICTORIA POLICE. COLD CASE UNIT. FILE NO. 0417-C.

SUBJECT: CALLAN. HOMICIDE.

STATUS: UNREDACTED. RESTRICTED ACCESS.

I heard Jarrah make a small sound, like a man who'd been struck gently in the chest.

"It's real," he said. His voice was nothing but air. "It's actually real."

I couldn't speak. My hand was still pressed to the glass, and I took it away slowly, as if the screen might bite. Jarrah's fingers stayed wrapped around the other. The seal glowed in the dimness, and I thought of every closed door I'd stood outside in my life, every locked drawer in my father's house, every time I'd been told it's nothing, Malia, it's a grown-up business.

There was nothing left to hide behind.

"Scroll," I managed.

Jarrah laid one finger on the glass and drew it down. The seal slid away. Beneath it, clean white text appeared in a narrow column, with a heading in bold.

OPENING SUMMARY.

I'm going to remember the next minute for the rest of my life.

I read it the way you read a menu in a language you only half know, hunting for the words you understand and skipping everything else. Date of incident. The night I already knew. Location.The dock. Cause. Two lines about the injuries that made Jarrah's hand tighten on mine until it hurt, and I didn't say a word. Witnesses interviewed. A list, with most of the names blacked out in the old copy and now not.

It was so ordinary. That's what shocked me. Police language, flat and careful, with the dull rhythm of a form being filled in. I had expected something that would announce itself. A thunderclap. A blazing line.

Instead, the summary moved steadily on, paragraph by paragraph, setting out a chain of facts so patient I almost lost the thread. A shooter, identified and later found dead. A hired contract, arranged through a go-between. A payment trail, followed through four shell accounts and a holding company in Singapore, then, in the last month of the investigation, back to a single point.

"Malia." Jarrah's voice was strange and flat. "You don't have to keep going. I can read the rest and tell you."

"No."

"Please."

"No. You said I'd read it all the way to the end." I swallowed. "He said that too. My father. I think I need to know why he wanted me to."

I took the final step on my own. I leaned in until the words were all I could see, and I read the last line of the opening summary, the one that stood alone at the bottom of the column.

The payment for the contract was traced to a private account held in the name of Alastair James Kilsyth.

The room did not change. That was the thing I couldn't forgive. The lamp went on swaying. The clock went on ticking. Somewhere behind the doors, a man coughed.

I read it again. And a third time, because I'd been taught to double-check numbers, and because some small and very young part of me was waiting for the letters to rearrange themselves into someone else.

Alastair James Kilsyth.My father's name. The name on the brass plate by our front door. The name on the cheques that had paid for my school, my piano lessons, the wedding dress I'd never needed. The name he'd said into the phone every evening of my childhood, Alastair Kilsyth speaking, in that warm, patient, bedtime voice.

He had known. All along. Every Sunday dinner. Every time Jarrah's name came up at that long polished table, he smiled and passed me the salt.

"It could be wrong," I said. I heard how ridiculous it sounded. "It could be a mistake. They make mistakes."

"Malia."

"It could be a forgery. People forge things. He's always..."

"Malia." Jarrah's hand was gentle on my elbow. "Look at me."

I couldn't. If I looked at him, I'd have to be a person who had just read it.

"I think," I said, with great care, "that I'm going to be sick."

My legs stopped working.

I didn't fall. Jarrah caught me, as he'd caught me at the edge of the water, with both arms and all his weight, and I felt his sharp intake of breath as my body hit the wound at his side. He didn't let go. He lowered us both to the stone floor and gathered me into his lap as if I'd been made to fit there.

And then it came. All of it, at once, like he'd said it would.

I don't know what noise I made. I know my mouth was open and nothing I said had words in it. I know I gripped his shirt with both hands, burned and unburned, and held on, because he was the only solid thing in the world. I know the grief wasn't for one person. It was for a whole house of rooms I'd thought I knew. A girl on a bicycle with her father jogging beside her, steadying the seat. A voice reading her *The Wind in the Willows* every night for a winter.

I had loved a man who paid for Callan to die.

"I'm here," Jarrah kept saying. "I've got you. I'm here. I'm here."

"He taught me to ride a bike."

"I know."

"He sat up with me. When I was sick. He..." My voice split. "And all that time he was..."

"I know, love. I know."

"It's not fair." I hadn't said that since I was a child. "It's not *fair. I wanted him to be innocent. I wanted him to be a bad father or a cruel one. Just not..." I couldn't find the word. "Not *this. I could have lived with the rest."

Jarrah rocked me, very slightly, the way you'd rock something that has broken in your hands. His breath was uneven against my hair. After a long time, I understood that he was crying too, silently, tears I could feel running down into my scalp.

I don't know how long we stayed like that.

At some point the sobbing wore itself out and left me hollow and shaking, my face wet against his collar. The lamp had stopped swaying. The screen still glowed. Jarrah hadn't moved, though I knew every inch of him must be screaming.

"Let me up," I whispered. "Your side."

"No."

"Jarrah, you're bleeding through."

"I'll bleed later." He tightened his arms. "I'm not letting go of you yet."

I gave up. I rested my head against his chest and listened to his heart, which was going fast and hard, like an animal's.

"You've been quiet," I said.

"I'm thinking."

"About what?"

He didn't answer straight away. When he spoke, his voice had changed. It was low and level and cold, a stillness so complete I felt it through his ribs. It was the voice I'd heard once before, at the boardroom table, when he'd said, *Thorne, you're removed.* But that had been a door closing. This was the sound of a door being forged.

"I'm thinking that I spent two years hunting the man who pulled the trigger," he said. "I thought he was the end of it. And the whole time, the man who paid for it was sitting in your family's house, eating at your table." He drew a slow breath. "I'm thinking that he put a ring on a map and watched us walk onto it. He sat in his study and listened to me grieve."

"Jarrah..."

"I'm not finished." His hand moved on my back, slow and gentle, at odds with the words. "I'm going to take it from him. Every berth, every account, every man who'd carry his name. Every door he's ever walked through. I'll take his house. I'll take his chair at the table. I'll take his name off the plate and put it in a file in a drawer where nobody will ever look at it again." He paused. "And when I've finished, Malia, he'll know exactly who did it, and exactly why. I'll make sure he's alive to know it."

I should have been frightened. Some distant, careful part of me noted that I should be.

I wasn't. What I felt, lying against his chest with the screen glowing white over us, was something quiet and terrible. Recognition.

"Not alone," I said.

"I know."

"I mean it. This is mine too. He's my father. I'm the one who has to look him in the eye." I lifted my head and met Jarrah's gaze. His face was grey and ragged and utterly steady. "You said, partners. You gave me a ring. If you're going to take him apart, you're going to do it with me."

"Then we do it with you."

"Promise me."

"I promise." He put his forehead against mine. "Whatever it costs. Whatever it takes. He'll answer for Callan, and he'll answer to you."

I closed my eyes. For a moment I let myself rest there, in the circle of his arms and the ruin of everything I'd thought I knew, and let the new knowledge settle like cold water into the cracks.

My father paid for it.

I hadn't stopped loving him. That was the awful part. Under the grief and the fury, the old love lay there intact, stubborn and ridiculous. It didn't make me weak. Jarrah had said that. But it did make me feel like I'd have to carry two people for the rest of my life: the man I'd lost and the man I'd found.

"There's more."

I said it before I realised I had. My eyes had drifted past his shoulder to the screen, where the column of text had continued scrolling slowly on its own, beyond the summary, past the dividing line, into a new section I hadn't noticed.

Jarrah followed my gaze. "More what?"

"It didn't stop." I pulled free of him and got to my knees. The text was smaller now, and arranged in a different way. A table. A list. I felt my breath go thin. "It's a witness schedule. There are names."

I read down the column without being able to stop. Most were strangers. Two I recognised from the dock. And then, halfway down, in line with the others, in the same flat typeface, one I'd have known in the dark:

KILSYTH, ELENA MARIE. Witness 4. Statement taken at residence.

My mother's name. My mother, who'd walked out of our house when I was eleven, whom my father had said was dead, in a flat final voice, at the foot of my bed.

I stopped breathing.

There was a status column running along the right-hand edge of the table. Most of the entries said deceased or unlocated. Beside my mother's name were two words, in capitals, in the same neutral type as the rest.

RELOCATED. ACTIVE.

I read it. I read it again.

"Active," I said. My own voice sounded like it came from the next room. "What does that mean? Active. Active means..."

"Malia." Jarrah was staring at the same line. The blood had drained from his face. "Active means alive."

"She's* dead*.* He told me she was dead."

"I know. I know he did."

"I was eleven. I *cried* for..."

A sound cut across the room, and it wasn't the clock.

Three knocks. Slow, measured, from the far end of the tunnel. From the vault doors. The same sound I'd heard just before the screen went white, and was put out of my mind.

Marcus's voice rang down the passage, sharp with alarm. "Boss! Miss! Somebody's at the door!"

"Stay back!" Jarrah was already on his feet, dragging me up with him, one arm around my waist. "Don't open it. Whatever it is, don't open it."

"It's not one of theirs." Marcus sounded winded. Almost afraid. "There's no engine. No men. Just... a voice. A woman. She's at the grille, the broken one, speaking right into it."

My knees nearly went again. Jarrah's arm tightened.

From somewhere far down the stone throat of the tunnel, small and cracked and impossibly distant, a woman's voice came echoing back through the ruined speaker. It was a voice I hadn't heard in eleven years, and I'd have known it at the bottom of the sea.

"Mali?" it said. "Mali, sweetheart, is that you in there?"