Detective Inspector Wendell Albercombe (Human)

"It's not a case," he said, over the soup. "I want that understood. It's a machine and a shelf."

"Yes, sir."

"Three years it's gone round that floor. Three years. Same square, same hour, never once so much as brushed the shelf. And twelve nights ago it decides my evidence is litter and starts filing it. Filing it. There's a form. They've a form for tidying my bolts away and not one for telling me they've done it." He put the spoon down. It was the contested spoon; he had brought it home by mistake and was now eating with it, which Jeeves had noticed and declined to regard as a subject. "And in two days the bin releases it to reclamation. Six weeks of cases. To be melted into somebody's bulkhead."

"Two days, sir. The hold is fourteen; the oldest slip is dated the third."

Albercombe looked at him. "You've read the slip."

"I read the form when it circulated, sir. The Compact's compliance office issues a circular with each new requirement. One likes to know what the household's furniture is now obliged to do."

"What new requirement."

"The thirteenth, sir. Effective the third of the month. It extends the loose-article control to every deck area not within a registered berth or sealed store, citing the fold-proximate monitoring baseline." A pause of exactly the right length. "The bureau's evidence shelf is an open shelf on a common floor, sir. It has been, I gather, since the bureau was built. Under the twelve it was nobody's business. Under the thirteenth it is unit four's."

Albercombe sat with that.

"A spoon," he said eventually. "What does a spoon do to a fold."

"The circular does not say, sir. I have found that the circulars seldom do."

He picked the spoon back up, looked at it, and put it in his pocket instead of the soup. "Fine. Fine. The shelf gets a door. It gets registered as a sealed store, tonight, on a route reconciliation, which is a maintenance discrepancy and goes in the queue that comes to me, and I approve it, and unit four goes back to its square." He was already standing. "And I want to know who put that bag on my desk."

"I couldn't say, sir."

"You've a theory."

"I have an observation, sir, which is that in three years the bureau's cat has never once been seen to carry anything, and that this remains the case." Jeeves began clearing. "Your coat is by the door. The records room is unlocked until midnight."