Superintendent Rasa Oyelaran (Human)

The cat had been on her desk for four hours. She had worked around him, and she was aware that she had been thinking about it the way she thinks about a witness, which annoyed her because he was a cat.

A junior detective knocked. The Inspector's stamp was gone again — off his desk, inside the last half hour, and the Inspector was saying words about it.

Oyelaran looked at the cat. The cat had not moved in four hours. He looked back at her with the composure of a man who has been sitting in an interview room since breakfast and intends to be there at supper, and she thought, clearly and against her will: that is an alibi, and I am going to have to write it down in my own hand, because nobody else in this building can.

She got up.

The courtesy rabbit was standing in the corridor outside her door, bolt upright, ears flat, which she had never once seen it do. It was facing the records cabinet. She looked where it was looking.

There was a cat on top of the records cabinet with the Inspector's stamp under one paw. It was grey and white and young, and it was not the station cat, and every person on the bureau floor had walked past it at least twice that morning.

"Whose is that?" she asked the room.

The room said, one after another, the cat, and heard itself, and stopped.

The door at the end of the walkway was propped with a boot. Behind it, in the transfer berths, a family four weeks aboard: a mother filling in something at a fold-down table, and a boy of about eight who took one look at the Detective Superintendent in his doorway and said "Zhulik," in the voice of a child who has been waiting for this. It was the cat's name. His mother said, with the calm of a woman who has explained it before, that it meant more or less what the cat did. Their small-livestock application was in the compliance queue, week five, pending. Until it cleared, the boy's cat was not on Eden. And an animal that is not on Eden cannot have taken the stamp — so, by the habitat's own logic, the animal that had taken it was the only one that could.

She went back to her desk. The cat was where she had left him. She took the return out of the tray and read the mascot's line again, and found the form gave her one box per animal and no line at all for an animal the form did not know about. So she used the notes field. Recovered items attributable to a second cat, unregistered, small-livestock application pending, reference attached. Mascot within my sight throughout the most recent loss. She ticked acceptable, initialled it, sent the family's application up the queue with the same initials on it, and observed that a second cat had just entered Eden's record as a footnote on the first cat's welfare return, which is how most things enter Eden's record.

The review was withdrawn the next morning. She noticed that the cat had left her desk within a minute of her initialling the form, and she put the timing in the tray on the left, with the other things she intends to think about, and has not yet.