Australian Federal Police Agent Aaron Falk looked broodingly out of his office window at the spectacular view of suburban Canberra laid out before him. As he sipped broodingly at his coffee, he couldn’t help but muse on the strange journey that had led him here. When he’d joined the AFP, it had been because of his lifelong passion for traffic control, yet somehow he’d ended up the force’s number one solver of murders that happen in conditions of variable moisture. How could he have predicted, when he left home with nothing but a pair of brown corduroy trousers and a backpack full of glossy headshots of Mick Keelty, that he’d one day have a corner office from which you could see all the way to Belconnen? He smiled broodingly to himself.
There was a knock at the door. A quiet, hesitant knock: the kind of knock that speaks of a lifetime’s uncertainty in the face of complicated office politics. Aaron knew that anyone who knocked in this way had wrestled with the question of how to tackle the systemic prejudices and barriers thrown up before those of diverse races, genders and sexualities. The knock pierced his heart, and he wept inwardly for the unnecessary anguish caused over years to the knocker’s gentle soul by cruel and unfeeling bureaucracy married to white male privilege. The knock spoke to him in articulate but muted tones: it whispered, “I am knocking, but I am afraid to come in, lest I fall foul of the hidden world of entitlement and nepotism that is modern policing”. And yet, was there not also in the knock a hint of erotic promise? A seductive knock, yes: a knock that spoke of one whose spirit had often been crushed beneath callous and arbitrary exercise of unaccountable authority, yet who defiantly remained a sexual being, unashamed of their desires.
Aaron took a deep brooding breath, and with the feeling that his life was about to change forever, said the words that always reminded him of his father: “Come in”.
The door opened, and Constable Alison Freeman, the AFP’s newest and most diverse recruit, entered. She held in her delicate multicultural hands a Manila folder, which she handed to Aaron with utmost professionalism mingled with flirtatious playfulness.
“Sir, there has been a murder.”
“My God,” said Aaron, scarcely able to believe it. “That’s the fourth one this year, and it’s only November.”
“The local police specifically asked for your help on this one, sir,” said Constable Freeman, in a voice that almost completely concealed the smouldering passions that never left her. “They say they’re incompetent and have no idea where to start so they thought they needed an actual policeman rather than the pathetic rabble of cretins who pass for a police force in the kind of worthless country shithole that will slap a badge on anyone too unemployable to collect trolleys at Coles. It’s all in the report.”
Leafing broodingly through the folder, Aaron once again allowed a smile to play across his full, ruby-red lips. “Constable, have you ever considered how amusing is fate?”
“No, never!” Freeman screamed, desperately trying to protect her reputation.
“It’s indeed a funny thing,” he mused. “Once upon a time I was known as the cop you wanted if a crime were committed in a dry place. Then I proved that I could also solve crimes in wet places, after I demonstrated that wetness is really just another kind of dryness. I’ve proven myself in the Dry, and I’ve proven myself in the Wet. So, Constable, what’s left?”
Constable Freeman shrugged while applying eye drops. “I don’t know, sir. What?”
Aaron looked her in the eye broodingly. “The final frontier, Constable. Slight dampness.”
Freeman gasped. She gasped again. She gasped for several minutes until the fragment of cheese in her throat finally dislodged itself. “So…you mean…”
With a brooding grin, Aaron Falk nodded. “That’s right. Saddle up, Constable. The game is afoot.”
With a cry of excitement, Aaron and Freeman leapt onto their horses and rode like the wind out of AFP headquarters, and into…the unknown.
To be continued…