Chapter Text
“No-man’s land under snow is like the face of the moon: chaotic, crater ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness.”
Lieutenant Wilfred Owen, in a letter to his mother, January 1917.
Detective Inspector Jack Robinson was a man of routine. He showered and shaved first thing in the morning. He put on the kettle and read the newspaper. He had a cup of tea and a piece of toast before he left home for work. He drove his car to the City South Police Station- he was a responsible, compliant driver and had never been given as much as a warning or a speeding ticket. As he walked to his office from the building entrance, he greeted his constables with a head nod. He worked his cases with meticulous care. He stopped at a small market near his house every evening for fresh vegetables, and then went over case files while he ate supper. He caught up on his reading and gardening on his days off, and he enjoyed to ride all the way across town and back on his bicycle every Sunday morning.
It was never different. It was always the same. Things rarely changed.
But when they did change, they wreaked havoc.
He met Ms. Fisher. Things changed. Chaos followed. He fell in love with her. More change. Chaos morphed into madness. He thought she had died in a car crash. The pain was unbearable. He drowned in regrets.
The body in the wreckage wasn’t hers. Relief washed over him. He drowned in alcohol. He decided they were better off apart. He hadn’t seen her in two months. Things hadn’t changed back to the way they had been before they’d met. He missed her. He was sad. Love morphed into longing. Depression followed.
He took comfort where he could and supposed there would not be more changes now. That things would stay the way they were at the moment.
He was wrong.
He woke up early on April 25th and followed his usual routine. He showered and shaved, read the newspaper, and breakfasted in the kitchenette. He drove to work, nodded his head good morning to his junior constables, and sat at his desk to revise the evidence on his latest case: the murder of a train guard.
Something another train guard had said when they’d first taken his statement didn’t seem right. Jack knew there was something wrong, he just couldn’t tell what it was despite being sure the answer was probably staring at him right in the face. After half an hour, he noticed a pattern he had missed before.
He grabbed his hat and coat from the hanger and informed Constable Collins that he would try to catch a train to Craigieburn, where the victim had lived. He wanted to talk to the wife again, and he wanted to go to Craigieburn by train. He had a suspicion of what the motive could have been, but he needed to check something first to confirm it.
He was waiting in line at one of the ticket windows located at the entry to Flinders Street railway station when all of a sudden a noise like thunder was heard, and the distinctive smell of smoke filled the air. Then there were screams, a turmoil, and panic ensued.
The sounds, the smells, the smoke and the uncontrolled chaos- he was immediately taken back to a time and a place he had fought very hard to put behind. Many years had passed, but in that moment he could have sworn he was still in the war, that it all had been a dream, that the conflict hadn’t ended and he had not made it home yet.
A bomb had just gone off at platforms 4 and 5.