Condemned
The fence around 14 Cope Street had been cut once already. Someone had peeled back a section near the loading dock and reattached it with zip ties instead of proper clamps. Kate found it on her second pass of the perimeter, running her torch along the base of the chain-link with her palm over the lens so only a sliver of light bled through her fingers.
She killed the torch and listened. Traffic on Cleveland Street, a distant siren winding down. The building rose five storeys above her, dark except for the orange bleed of streetlights catching the upper windows. Half the glass was gone. A demolition notice stapled to a plywood hoarding every six metres warned of asbestos, structural compromise, and a start date of Thursday.
Thursday. Forty hours from now, give or take.
She'd parked the Corolla three blocks away on a residential street, tucked between a tradesman's ute and a skip bin. Her bag sat at her feet — torch, bolt cutters, a copy of Marcus Riley's case file, two bottles of water. She'd left her phone in the glovebox. If she got picked up in there she didn't want her call history anywhere near this building.
Marcus had been on death row for eleven months. The appeal had failed in September. The mercy petition was sitting on the Attorney-General's desk and would stay there, because the AG was up for re-election and Marcus Riley had been convicted of killing a police officer's daughter. Kate had exhausted every legal avenue she could find, and two she'd invented, and now she was standing outside a condemned building at ten past midnight with bolt cutters in a gym bag.
The original case files from the 2019 investigation — the ones the prosecution claimed were destroyed in the Surry Hills station flood — hadn't been destroyed. They'd been moved. Kate had spent three weeks tracing the chain of custody through archived transfer logs and a retired clerk who owed her a favour and a records request that should have been routine but came back with four pages redacted. The trail ended here. Suite 307, third floor, filed with the old tenancy records of a law firm that had dissolved in 2021.
She crouched and worked the zip ties off the fence section with her fingers. They popped quietly. She pulled the chain-link back far enough to push the bag through, then herself, shoulder first, feeling the cut wire ends catch on her jacket.
The loading dock was three metres up with no ramp. She found a fire exit instead, around the east side. The door was steel, dented, hanging a centimetre off its frame where the hinges had warped. She got the bolt cutters on the padlock and leaned her weight into it. The hasp snapped with a sound like a branch breaking.
She stood still for thirty seconds. Nothing.
Inside, the ground floor was stripped to concrete and cabling. The torch beam found bare walls, ripped-out partition frames, a stack of old ceiling tiles furred with dust. The air was thick — plaster dust and something chemical, maybe adhesive solvent from where they'd pulled up the flooring. A pipe somewhere above her ticked and settled. Near the stairwell entrance, a plastic bucket with a dried brown ring inside it sat against the wall, and a length of orange extension cord ran from nowhere to nowhere along the baseboard.
She found the stairwell. The handrail was gone, just bolt holes in the wall where it had been removed. She tested the first step with her weight before committing. It held. The concrete was solid but the landing between floors had a crack running through it wide enough to fit her thumb.
Second floor. She swept the torch across the corridor. Doors numbered 201 through 212, most of them open, some missing entirely. The carpet had been pulled up in long strips and left in rolls against the wall.
Third floor. Suite 307 was at the end of the corridor, past a collapsed section of false ceiling that hung in sheets. She stepped over a tangle of electrical conduit and stopped at the door. It was closed. Locked. A different lock than the others — newer, a Lockwood deadbolt that had no business being on a door in a building marked for demolition.
Kate set the bag down and looked at the lock. Bolt cutters wouldn't work on a deadbolt. She hadn't brought a pry bar. She pressed her shoulder against the door and pushed. The frame was old but the lock was solid.
She thought about Marcus. The last time she'd visited him at Lithgow, three weeks ago, she'd told him about the files. Told him she was close. He'd gone quiet, then stood up and called for the guard.
She hadn't been back since. He'd refused her last two visit requests.
Kate unzipped the bag and pulled out the bolt cutters. She couldn't cut the lock but she could work on the hinges. She wedged the blade behind the top hinge pin and levered. The pin shifted. Her hands were already slick.
Kate put the bolt cutters down and looked at the wall beside the door frame. The partition walls on the lower floors had been stripped to studs. This one still had its plasterboard, but it was the same cheap commercial sheeting — twelve millimetres, maybe less. She knocked on it with her knuckles. Hollow.
She braced her left hand against the corridor wall, drew her knee up, and drove her heel into the plasterboard about forty centimetres from the door frame.
The sound was enormous. It bounced down the corridor and came back layered with echoes from the stairwell. She froze with her foot still through the wall, plaster dust sifting down around her ankle, and waited.
Somewhere below, water moved through a pipe. A slow gurgle, then nothing.
She kicked again, widening the hole, then twice more in quick succession until the sheeting cracked along a vertical seam and a section the size of a car door folded inward. The steel stud behind it was spaced wide enough to fit through. She pulled the jagged edges back with her hands, felt a screw head rake across her lower back as she twisted sideways through the gap, and stumbled into Suite 307.
She swept the torch around the room and stopped.
The carpet was still down. Grey commercial tile, clean. No plaster dust, no debris, no hanging ceiling panels. A swivel chair with a broken arm sat in front of a desk. Two filing cabinets stood against the far wall, side by side, both with their drawers closed. The air smelled different in here — stale but not chemical. Like a room that had been shut up, not gutted.
Kate crossed to the filing cabinets. The first was full of tenancy records for the dissolved firm, Pascoe Hargraves — lease agreements, bond receipts, insurance paperwork. She pulled each drawer, rifled through, shoved it closed. Nothing that shouldn't be there.
The second cabinet was different. The top drawer held a single expandable folder, thick, held shut with a rubber band that snapped when she pulled it. Inside: photocopied police reports with case numbers she recognised. Witness statements. Crime scene photographs still in their plastic sleeves.
Kate sat down on the floor with the folder in her lap and held the torch between her teeth.
The witness statements were wrong. Not wrong like errors — wrong like a different case. There were three she'd never seen before. Names that hadn't appeared in any disclosure document. One was a neighbour who placed the victim's father — Detective Senior Constable Rory Garner — at the house forty minutes before the time of death the prosecution had established. Another was a paramedic's supplementary report noting injuries inconsistent with the murder weapon entered into evidence.
She turned the page. A handwritten note on NSW Police letterhead, undated, in handwriting she didn't recognise: Per discussion with DPP — these statements not to be included in brief. Copies held offsite.
Kate took the torch out of her mouth. Her hands were shaking. Not from cold.
This wasn't a lost file. This was a buried prosecution. Someone inside the DPP's office had coordinated with investigating police to suppress exculpatory evidence in a capital murder case. If these statements had been disclosed, Marcus Riley's trial would have gone differently. Maybe no trial at all.
She understood now why Marcus had stopped talking to her. He knew what was in these files. He knew whose name was on that note. And he'd decided that whatever it cost him — even his life — he wasn't going to be the one to pull that thread.
From below — second floor, maybe the stairwell — a sound. Not wind. Not a pipe. The definite mechanical sound of a door latch catching.
No phone. No camera. She was sitting on the floor of a condemned building with the most important documents she'd ever held and no way to copy them.
Below her, footsteps. Slow, deliberate, testing the floor the way she had. Someone who knew the stairs had no handrail.
Kate killed the torch. The dark was total. She pressed the folder flat against her chest and listened. The footsteps reached the second-floor landing, paused, then continued up.
She moved fast and quiet. Pulled the most critical pages from the folder — she didn't count them, just grabbed what her hands found first — and shoved them inside her shirt, flat against her stomach, tucking the hem into her jeans to hold them. The crime scene photos went into her waistband at the small of her back. The rest she put back in the folder and slid the folder into the bottom drawer of the second cabinet, under the Pascoe Hargraves insurance paperwork where it hadn't been before.
The footsteps reached the third floor.
Kate stood behind the desk, one hand on the chair back. Her bag was still in the corridor, on the other side of the hole she'd kicked through the wall. The bolt cutters were out there too. She could see nothing. She could hear the person moving down the corridor — not rushing, not hesitating. Walking like they knew where they were going.
A torch beam swept through the hole in the wall. It found the desk, the chair, Kate's hands on the chair back. It stayed on her.
The woman stepped through the hole in the wall sideways, leading with her shoulder. She was mid-fifties, grey hair cut short, wearing a high-vis vest over a dark jacket. She held the torch low, angled up, so it lit her face from below.
"Door's deadbolted."
"Is it? Huh. Demolition company must have secured it during the final walkthrough. I'm Diane. I'm with Kellaway Demolitions — we've got the contract on this one. Doing a last check before Thursday."
Kate said nothing. Diane's boots were clean. Not scuffed-clean, not wiped — clean like she'd put them on in a car five minutes ago. The dust on the corridor floor outside held two sets of footprints: Kate's, coming and going from the stairwell, and Diane's, coming from the other direction. From further down the hall. From a part of the third floor Kate hadn't been to.
"And you are?"
"Leaving."
Diane shifted so she stood squarely in the gap in the wall. Not blocking it, exactly. Occupying it.
Kate felt the pages shift against her stomach. The paper was warm now, body temperature.
"I could ask you the same thing."
Diane smiled. It was brief and unconvincing.
Diane's torch beam drifted to the filing cabinets. It lingered on the second one — the drawer Kate had closed but not fully, a centimetre of gap visible at the top. Then it came back to Kate. The woman hadn't moved toward the cabinets. Hadn't looked surprised by the room, by the carpet still being down, by any of it.
"I'm a lawyer. I had reason to believe documents relevant to a client's case were stored in this suite."
"Find anything?"
The question hung there. Kate watched Diane's hand — the one not holding the torch. It hung loose at her side.
"Lease agreements. Insurance paperwork. Nothing useful."
"That's a shame. Long way to come for nothing."
From the stairwell, two floors down, the sound of a radio squelching. A man's voice, too far away to make out words, answering it.
The radio squelched again. Closer now — ground floor, maybe already on the stairs.
Kate moved toward the hole in the wall. Diane was standing inside 307, three steps from it, torch still angled up. Kate went straight at her and Diane shifted — not much, just enough. Kate turned sideways through the gap, felt the broken plasterboard scrape her hip where her jacket had ridden up, and grabbed her bag from the corridor floor.
Diane came through the wall behind her.
Kate went the other direction. Past 308, 309, into the part of the third floor where Diane's footprints had come from. The corridor turned left and the torch beam found a fire door propped open with a chunk of concrete. Beyond it, the west wing opened up — a larger space, maybe a former open-plan office. The ceiling was intact here. Drop tiles still in their grid, some sagging with water damage.
She heard Diane following. Not running. Walking fast, her boots loud on the bare concrete.
Kate kept moving, sweeping the torch low across the floor. A gap where floor tiles had been pulled up showed the subfloor beneath — particle board, soft with damp.
Kate found what she was looking for. A second fire exit at the far end of the west wing, steel door, push bar. She hit the bar with her palm. It didn't move. She hit it again, harder. Rusted shut or bolted from outside.
She turned. Diane was ten metres back, silhouetted against the faint light from the corridor. She'd stopped walking. Her breathing was audible — short, tight pulls of air.
"You've been here before."
"So what if I have."
"Your footprints came from this direction. You weren't checking the building. You were already in it when I arrived."
Diane said nothing. Below them, a door opened and the radio sound sharpened — the security guard was on the second floor now. Kate could hear his footsteps, heavier than Diane's, and the low murmur of him talking to someone on the other end.
Diane's voice dropped to almost nothing. The composed cadence from Suite 307 was gone — the sentences came out clipped, bitten off.
"That guard finds the hole in your wall, he calls police. Then it's not just trespass. It's you, a defence lawyer, with stolen police documents shoved in your clothes. How long before they connect it to Riley?"
"Who sent you here."
Diane looked at the floor, then back.
"You put suppressed witness statements from a capital murder case in a filing cabinet in a condemned building."
Diane pressed both palms against her face and held them there, then dropped them.
Below, the guard's footsteps stopped. A torch beam swept the second-floor corridor — Kate could see its reflection bouncing off the stairwell ceiling through the fire door behind Diane. Then his radio again, a burst of static and a tinny voice she couldn't parse.
Kate set her bag down.
"Someone who's been cleaning up after Rory Garner for six years. And I'm done. I was done. Two more days and I was done."
Her voice cracked on the last word.
"Then you kicked through a fucking wall."
A door slammed on the floor below. The guard's footsteps started again — toward the stairwell. Going up.
Kate looked at the dead fire exit behind her. Looked at the corridor behind Diane, where the only way down was past a security guard who was now climbing to the third floor. Looked at the sagging ceiling tiles above them, the soft particle board beneath their feet, the drop into darkness where the floor tiles had been ripped away.
"Why would you help me."
Diane stared at her.
Kate didn't move. She stayed where she was, back to the dead fire exit.
"Garner's sister."
Diane didn't deny it. She looked like someone who'd been bracing for a specific question and finally heard it.
"You said 'cleaning up after Rory Garner.' Not Detective Garner. Not Garner. Rory. And you knew what was in those files without opening them."
"Half-sister. Different mothers."
Below them, Dave's torch beam swept the third-floor corridor. The light reached the fire door and stopped, a bright rectangle on the concrete wall. Kate watched it. Diane watched it.
The light moved on. His footsteps continued past the fire door, toward Suite 307. Toward the hole in the wall.
"He killed his own daughter."
Diane crossed her arms tight against her ribs.
"Told him what."
"That Rory hit her. Had been hitting her since she was fifteen. She was going to make a statement. Rory went to the house to talk her out of it."
From the corridor, a shout. Dave's voice, clear now: "Hello? Someone on this floor?" A pause. Then the sound of him stepping through the broken wall into 307.
"And Marcus walked in after."
"Marcus was in love with her. He found her on the floor and Rory standing over her. And Rory — Rory told him. You say anything, you're the one they'll believe did this. You know they will."
Kate swallowed. The building creaked around them, some load-bearing thing adjusting to its own slow collapse.
"You kept the files. You could have burned them."
"Yes."
Kate waited. Diane didn't elaborate. She stood with her arms locked around herself, chin down.
"You put a new lock on that door. You visited four times this month. You weren't burying them. You were standing next to the grave trying to decide."
Diane made a sound. Not a laugh.
"I built him six years. That's what I had."
Dave's voice again, from inside 307 now: "Control, this is Dave at Cope Street. Got a breach on the third floor, looks like forced entry. I need police attendance." The radio crackled an acknowledgment.
"Come with me. Right now. You sign a statutory declaration, you testify to what you just told me. We can get Marcus off death row."
Diane's hands hung at her sides, open, empty.
"He's already killing Marcus."
The radio went quiet in 307. Dave's footsteps moved back into the corridor, and this time they turned toward the fire door. Toward the west wing.
"The shaft. Now. Go left past the elevator bank, there's a maintenance panel with a yellow handle."
Kate grabbed her bag and went. She heard Diane behind her — not walking this time, running, boots slapping concrete. The corridor narrowed past the elevator bank, the ceiling dropping where ductwork had been partially stripped. Kate's torch found the yellow handle. She wrenched the panel open. A vertical shaft, maybe a metre square, with metal rungs bolted to the wall going up into darkness.
Kate went up first. The rungs were slick with condensation and grit — calcium deposits from leaking pipes, maybe. Her bag swung against the shaft wall with each pull. Below her, Diane grabbed the first rung and started climbing.
Two floors up, Kate hit a hatch. She braced her shoulder against it and pushed. Cold air flooded the shaft. She hauled herself onto the roof and turned back, reaching down.
Diane's hand found hers. Kate pulled. Diane came up gasping, rolling onto the tar paper, and lay there with her chest heaving.
The roof of 14 Cope Street was flat and open. Sydney spread out around them — the rail yards to the south, the towers of Surry Hills catching light to the north. A plane was descending toward Mascot, red light blinking. Kate could hear the hum of a ventilation unit on the next building over.
Below them, muffled by five floors of concrete, Dave's torch beam swept the west wing and found nothing.
Kate crouched beside Diane, who was still on her back, staring up.
"Get me off this roof first."
Kate didn't answer. She looked east. The fire escape on the neighbouring building was close — three metres, maybe less, with a half-wall between the rooftops. Below, a siren started up on Cleveland Street. Heading this way or not, she couldn't tell.
They lay on the tar paper and waited. The roof was exposed on all sides but the parapet wall gave them cover from the street, and from up here the building's decay was invisible — just flat bitumen and a rusted ventilation housing and the sky.
Below, Dave's voice carried up through the shaft they'd left open. Fragments — 'third floor,' 'wall's been kicked in,' 'yeah, I'll hold the scene.' Then his footsteps moved away from the west wing, back toward Suite 307, and stayed there.
Kate counted minutes by her own breathing. She got to what felt like ten before Diane spoke.
"Who buries something and then puts a better lock on the coffin."
Kate said nothing.
"Don't. Not yet. I know what I did."
A siren started on Cleveland Street. It grew, peaked, passed. Not for them. Kate exhaled and felt her ribs ache where the screw had caught her.
Twenty minutes. Maybe thirty. Dave's radio crackled once more from deep in the building, then went quiet. No police had arrived, or if they had, they were at the perimeter, not on the roof. Kate sat up slowly and looked east.
The neighbouring building's fire escape was close — three metres across, with a half-wall she could step over if she trusted the guttering to hold. The drop between the buildings was five storeys of nothing.
"Can you make that jump."
Diane sat up. She looked at the gap.
"It's not really a jump. More of a step."
"Then we go now. While he's holding the scene downstairs."
Kate went first. She climbed the parapet, swung her bag across, and stepped onto the guttering of the next building. It bowed under her weight — a low metallic groan — and then she was over, both feet on the fire escape landing, hands on the railing.
Diane followed. She didn't hesitate. She came across with her eyes fixed on Kate's outstretched hand and grabbed it hard enough to hurt.
Five flights of rusted steel. Kate's hands left rust on everything she touched.
They came out in a lane behind a row of terrace houses. Bins, a bicycle chained to a drainpipe, the smell of jasmine from someone's back fence. Kate leaned against the wall and let the bag slide off her shoulder.
Diane wiped her face with the back of her hand. Kate didn't look at her.
"I can't represent you — conflict of interest, Marcus is my client. But I know someone who will. Tonight, if I ask her."
Diane leaned against the opposite wall. Three metres of lane between them.
"He'll come for me. You understand that."
"He'll come for both of us. That's why we don't go home tonight. My car's three blocks from here. We go to my office, we get this on the record before sunrise, and then Rory Garner can explain himself to people with badges."
"Okay."
They walked. Kate led them east through the lane, past dark windows and parked cars. Behind them, 14 Cope Street stood dark against the sky. Thirty-two hours until the wrecking crew.
Kate found the Corolla where she'd left it, wedged between the ute and the skip bin. She unlocked it and reached into the glovebox for her phone. Three missed calls from a number she didn't recognise. One voicemail. She'd listen later.
Diane got in the passenger side without being asked. She pulled the seatbelt across her chest and clicked it.
Kate started the engine. The dashboard clock read 2:47 AM.
She pulled out of the parking spot and turned north toward the city. In the rearview mirror, Cope Street shrank to a silhouette, then a gap between buildings, then nothing.
Diane started talking before they hit Cleveland Street.
Kate's office was on the second floor of a converted terrace on Abercrombie Street. She'd left the heating off and the room was cold enough that their breath showed when they walked in. Diane sat in the client chair without being asked. Kate locked the door, dropped her bag on the desk, and went to the kitchenette.
She boiled the kettle. While it heated she opened her bag and took out the documents — creased, gritty with plaster dust from the bag's lining — and laid them flat on her desk under the lamp. She photographed each page with her phone, then locked the originals in the office safe. The safe's dial was stiff. She hadn't opened it in months. The carpet under her desk was stained where she'd spilled coffee weeks ago and never cleaned it, a brown blotch the shape of nothing in particular.
She made two cups of tea. Diane took hers with both hands and didn't drink it.
"Full name, date of birth, current address. Start there."
Diane started. Kate wrote it down longhand on a statutory declaration form — she didn't trust the printer not to jam at four in the morning. Diane's middle name was Ruth and she spelled it without being asked.
The statement took two hours. Diane spoke in fragments at first — dates wrong, then corrected, then corrected again. Kate noted both corrections. Diane's voice steadied as she went. By the time she reached Marcus at the house, the night Garner killed his daughter, she was speaking in full sentences. Flat. Precise. Testimony voice.
Kate slid the declaration across the desk.
Diane read it. She signed. Kate witnessed. The pen made a faint scratching sound in the quiet office and then it was done — six years of silence converted into three and a half pages of statutory declaration.
"What happens now."
"I call a colleague for you. Someone good. Then I file an emergency application with the Attorney-General's office the second they open. The mercy petition's already sitting there — this gives it teeth."
"Will it be enough."
"A signed witness implicating a serving detective in the murder he pinned on someone else. Suppressed exculpatory evidence with a handwritten note from inside the DPP's office. Yeah. It's enough."
Kate boiled the kettle again. She didn't want more tea. She wanted to be doing something while Diane sat in the client chair staring at the signed declaration.
At 5:20, Kate stepped into the stairwell to make the call. Her colleague answered on the second ring — criminal defence, fifteen years. Kate gave her the short version. The line was quiet for four seconds.
Kate came back inside.
"I haven't spoken to Rory in three weeks."
Kate looked at her. Three weeks. The same three weeks since Kate had told Marcus about the files. Since Marcus had stopped talking.
The intercom buzzed. Kate flinched hard enough to knock her hip against the desk. She hadn't buzzed anyone in. The street door was locked.
She went to the window. Below, on the footpath, a kid. Mid-twenties, skinny, wearing a backpack over one shoulder. He was shifting from foot to foot and looking up at the building.
He pressed the intercom again.
"Kate? It's Sam. Sam Wakefield. I'm a clerk at — I was a clerk at Pascoe Hargraves. The old firm. I know you were at Cope Street tonight. I followed you there but I lost you when you went inside and I've been sitting in my car for three hours trying to decide whether to do this."
His voice came through the intercom tinny and rushed, words tumbling over each other. Kate could see him from the window — he'd taken the backpack off and was holding it against his chest.
"How did you know I was here."
"I followed you from Cope Street. I saw your car leave. I just — I didn't know if I should come up. I've been parked on the next block. Look, I know what was in Suite 307. I helped file it there."
Kate's hand hovered over the buzzer. The sky outside had gone grey. A truck rumbled past on Abercrombie Street. Diane was watching her from the client chair, the signed declaration on the desk between them.
Kate pressed the buzzer.