Detective Inspector Wendell Albercombe (Human)

There was a bag of bolts on his desk.

Wendell Albercombe looked at it for a while before touching it, which is the habit of a man who has been handed enough things by this habitat to have learned not to. It was his bag of bolts. The tag was the bureau's: the Kessler fastener dispute, two dock contractors each swearing the other's lot was the substandard one, a case so boring it had been on his desk for six weeks and was due at a hearing in four days. He had last seen the bag on the evidence shelf, where evidence goes. It was now on his blotter, and clipped to it was a form he had never seen before in his life.

Unattended Article Report. Location: bureau floor, shelf E3. Time: 0304. Collected by: housekeeping unit four. Disposition: lost property, records room, fourteen-day hold.

He read it twice. Then he went to the evidence shelf and stood in front of it.

The shelf was clean. Not tidied; clean, in the way of a thing that has been emptied on a schedule. Six weeks of a boring man's boring cases — samples, seals, a contested spoon, the bolts' companion bag with the other contractor's lot in it — gone, and in their places nothing at all, which is the one thing an evidence shelf must never hold.

"Who," he asked the floor, "has been tidying my shelf."

The floor did not know. The junior detectives had not touched it. The Senior Sergeant had assumed the Inspector was reorganising. The Superintendent, passing, looked at the empty shelf and then at him and said nothing in a way he had known her long enough to translate, which was that is your shelf, Inspector, and this is your morning. Reeves, asked directly whether it had moved anything, said directly that it had not, and that it held an inference on the question and would state it if asked. He did not ask. He was not, at that moment, in a condition to be told anything by anyone politely.

He went to the records room instead, with the form, and found the lost-property bin, and found in it six weeks of his caseload in clear bags with a slip on every one, filed as litter. Every slip said the same thing in different hours: shelf E3, housekeeping unit four, fourteen-day hold. The oldest was dated twelve days ago.

He took the bolts' companion bag and the spoon and left the rest, because an Inspector who empties a lost-property bin into his coat is a different sort of referral, and he went back to his desk and sat in front of the question that the form had not answered. He knew who had tidied his shelf. It was unit four. What he did not know was why a machine that had walked the same square for three years had, twelve nights ago, decided that his evidence was rubbish.

He did not ask Reeves. He did not want the answer in the bureau's voice, with an inference attached and the Superintendent's translation already waiting. He wanted to complain about it first, properly, at volume, to somebody who would not write it down.