Forty-Three Minutes

Charles William Jeffries had been reported missing at the end of August, after he failed to arrive in Melbourne for what he had described as business. The search for him belonged to Victoria Police. Tasmania Police's interest was narrower. It concerned whether the disappearance of a former chief financial officer of the state's largest family company was connected to fraud, extortion or money moving through Jeffries Industries. Organised Crime Division was asked to conduct a set of procedural interviews, and the work was given to Detective Sergeant Charlie Claiborne and the division's newest detective, Karl Jenkins.

Most of the interviews were with company officers. Louise Jeffries was not one. She was a financial analyst at First Point Credit Union and had never held a position at Jeffries Industries. But in the weeks since Charles vanished, she had sat with her husband, Thomas, at the dining table at Jeffries Manor most nights, working through the company's accounts as he took full control of them. Her name had come up in three separate interviews as the person who understood those accounts best.

She came to the company's Hobart offices on a Thursday morning and was shown into a conference room on the top floor. She brought her own folder of working papers. Claiborne opened the interview, set out its purpose and the limits of what she was obliged to answer, and left after the first ten minutes to take a call. Karl conducted the remainder alone.

Louise answered every question put to her, and none at greater length than it required. She gave figures from memory and checked them against her papers before letting them stand. She identified two transfers from the previous financial year that she had already flagged to Thomas as poorly documented, explained why she did not think either was improper, and told Karl where the supporting records were held. When he asked about Charles himself, she said she had met her father-in-law only a handful of times in the past decade and had not spoken to him in more than two years. She did not offer an opinion on whether he was alive, and Karl did not ask for one.

Her manner was clipped and exact throughout. Karl recorded in his notes that she was cooperative, precise and fully in command of the material. He did not record his own reading of her. Her composure was being held in place with effort, and the coolness of her answers seemed to him to come from strain and fatigue rather than from hostility towards the police. Her family had moved permanently into the manor that month. She had four children at home, a husband newly in charge of a company his father had left in disorder, and a full-time position of her own.

At one point she asked whether the interview would be the last. Karl told her he could not promise it would be. She accepted the answer without complaint.

The interview ended after forty-three minutes. Louise gathered her papers, thanked him, and left to return to work. Karl stayed in the conference room after she had gone. He rewrote two pages of his notes that did not need rewriting, numbered them, and checked the numbering twice. Claiborne found him still there half an hour later. He asked whether anything had come of it. Karl told him the books were clean and that Mrs Jeffries knew them better than her husband did.