Superintendent Rasa Oyelaran (Human)

The form was one page long and had a box on it, and somebody had ticked the wrong box.

Eden's small-livestock return comes round every quarter, one line per animal, and Rasa Oyelaran signs two of them: a courtesy rabbit on loan to the filing room, and a station cat nobody remembers acquiring. Detective Achebe's rabbit is on Detective Achebe's allowance, and Achebe is particular about it. Each line has a conduct box. Acceptable or unacceptable. In all the years she had signed the return, she had never once seen the second box used, and had assumed, without thinking about it, that it existed for the same reason lifeboats do.

This quarter the return came back to her from the deck's monitoring officer with the cat's box ticked unacceptable and a list attached.

The list was good. That was the trouble with it. Fourteen small objects gone from the bureau floor over three weeks, nine recovered: a stylus from the Senior Sergeant's desk, found in his own boot; the Inspector's initialling stamp, found on top of the records cabinet; a seal crimp behind the water urn; a reel of evidence tape inside a coat; reading glasses in a vent grille. Nothing on it weighed more than a spoon. Everything recovered had been recovered from somewhere high or somewhere enclosed, and the monitoring officer had written under the list, in the plain hand of a person doing her job, consistent with station animal (cat).

Oyelaran read the regulation twice, because she already knew what it said. An unacceptable opens a conduct review at the welfare office. The review sits within a fortnight. Its usual finding is that a habitat is no place for an animal whose conduct is a matter of record, and its usual outcome is a carrier on the next transfer out. Nobody is cruel about it. It is a form, and the form has teeth.

She noted, professionally, that the evidence was circumstantial. She noted that she could not interview the suspect. She noted that the cat sat on top of the records cabinet most afternoons, which was where the stamp had been found, and that she had never in her life seen him carry anything. And she noted — with some irritation, because she is a Superintendent and he is a cat — that she had an opinion, which was that in all the years he had been on this habitat he had never once been in the wrong place, and that a thing which has never once been in the wrong place does not usually begin, after all this time, by stealing a spoon.

She put the return in the tray on the left of her desk, the one for things she intends to think about, and went to the morning briefing.

When she came back the cat was sitting on her desk.

He had never done that.