The weather had changed overnight. It was still cloudy and wet, as usual, but a polar wind was strafing the country from the north. It pelted the façade of the police station with heavy flakes of snow—the first snow of the season. A layer of slush covered the path leading up to the building's entrance.

Art shivered as he approached, but his resolve to retrieve his digital belongings was burning hot.

The upper-floor geraniums had disappeared, and a man was lifting one of the last flower crates from its brackets at a ground-floor window.

The defloration of the police station—its de-flowering, in the original sense, fair punishment for seizing my computer.

Grinning with this thought, Art pulled open the large, wood-glass-and-iron front door and entered. The lobby was dry and heated, a perfect contrast to the world outside.

A uniformed, grim-faced monument of a receptionist had caught him in her sights, watching his every move with no outward sign of emotion.

Art approached her, fished Bossi's form from his coat, unfolded it, and placed it on her counter. "Hello, I'm here to retrieve my stuff."

"Hmm..." She studied the form. "Will you please have a seat." Her question-command was underlined by her hand gesturing towards a wooden bench at the wall opposite.

Without waiting for him to comply, she grabbed the form and vanished down a corridor.

Art shrugged and sat down as ordered.

The wall behind the receptionist's deserted counter held a no-nonsense clock. Its stolid, black arms left no doubt that it was 15:33, while the stepwise progress of their thin, restless sibling told a tale of seconds of precious life wasted while idling at a police station.

A poster to the right of the timepiece advertised another fact:

IN EMERGENCIES

DIAL 112

AND KEEP CALM

The uppercase, blue, sans-serif writing oozed authority. He made a mental note to take the advice, at least if he would ever get his phone back.

Heavy footsteps approached from the corridor. The receptionist reappeared. "Mr. Sharpe."

Art got up and suppressed the urge to salute her. She stood aside and extended her arm into the doorway she just had emerged from. He passed her looming frame with inches to spare. She followed him.

The hallway seemed to intersect the whole building, with doors on both sides and with a window at its end displaying a wintery courtyard.

"Next right."

The door stood open and admitted him to an office—Mrs. Bossi's office, Art concluded from the ponytail topping a head ducked halfway behind a desk.

The door banged shut behind him.

"Hello, Mrs. Bossi," Art said.

She sat up and placed a bag on her desk, obviously the prize she had been digging for. It was white with blue writing and extolled the virtues of the 112 number and of staying calm.

"Hello, Mr. Sharpe." She smiled.

The size of the bag made Art hope that his digital equipment was within reach.

"Please take a seat." She nodded at a chair opposite her desk. "Inspector Savage has asked me to go through some... points with you. Then you can grab your stuff and go."

Some points?

He sat down as she grabbed a binder and opened it. The first page held notes and a photograph—Art's photograph.

He looked grim on it—and upside down from where he sat.

A police file—about me.

Art was torn between being flattered and frightened.

She turned a few pages. "Ah, here it is. Just some questions..." Her hand reached for a digital recorder on her desk. "I'll have to record this for the protocol."

Art nodded.

A pen had appeared in her fingers. She tore a blank sheet of paper from a notepad, placed the binder on her lap, leaned back, and looked at him. The smile had fled her face, and the freckled territory was invaded by a frown.

"Inspector Savage is busy with another... business. So you'll be interro..." She squinted at him, "...interviewed by me."

You sure seem to enjoy your bad-cop role.

Her eyes returned to the binder, and she turned some pages. "Ah yes, here it is. You've written a couple of e-mails to your friend Dan in... Hawaii. In some of them, you've mentioned Mrs. Knooch. Do you remember?"

A wave of heat rushed over Art's face. Yes, he had mentioned Knooch to Dan. And there was one detail he remembered clearly—an incriminating detail.

She arched her eyebrows at him.

"Yes, I remember. I... called her a turtle, in one of these e-mails. I plead guilty." He tried to grin, but his ears burned. An unbidden memory popped up in his mind—a scene from elementary school, when he had been ordered to the principal's office after having felt-penned, in a dare, that penis on a wall of the boys' washrooms. It had worn a smile on its head.

She nodded. "Yes, you've called her a turtle. Do you remember why you did that?" Her face was stony.

Art hated this. "I'm sorry. It was a metaphor... a silly image, no more."

Like that penis.

She made a note then looked up at him. "Did she give you any reason to dislike her?"

He truly hated this conversation—every treacly-slow second of it. What else had he written in that e-mail? There must have been something about her telling on him for his lack of stair sweeping activity.

He wavered, torn between the temptation of denial and the potential tactical advantages of the embarrassing admission that he had suspected her to be a tattletale.

"I guess you're talking about that thing I wrote to Dan about her telling on me." He looked at her, waiting for her reaction.

She lifted her shoulders and eyebrows in a synchronous hop. "You're doing the talking here."

Art decided to go with the truth. "You know, I had to sweep the stairs last week. And someone had complained to the janitor that I hadn't done my part. I thought it was her. I had met her one evening... two nights before she died. She mentioned something about the stairs being dusty. But, you know, my e-mail to Dan... it was just a joke. Nothing serious. You can't seriously think that... I would have killed her over that."

She shrugged once more. "Probably not, but I'm only asking questions. Inspector Savage does the thinking here." She tapped her pen on the binder, then took some notes.

"Anything else..." She looked up again, "that I should know about you and Mrs. Knooch."

What else was in these blasted e-mails? He didn't remember to have written other tales about his late neighbor, so he shook his head.

"Very well. As you wish." She looked at him. One of her freckles sat dead center on the tip of her nose.

He shrugged, trying to echo her gesture of moments ago.

She turned another page in the binder.

"Okay, so let's get to our second question."

Second question?

He longed for this interview to end.

"It's about that egg," she said. "The one you cleaned up when you finally did sweep the stairs."

He wondered if there was a trace of sarcasm in her voice, but that wonder paled when a suspicion gained substance in his head. Did she know that Knooch had dragged him out of bed, that morning, to shove his nose into the yolky mess?

She can't know that. Can she?

He decided to play innocent. "What is it, about that egg?"

"You've said..." She again tapped the pencil against the page in the binder, "... that you've talked to Mrs. Knooch when you were... removing that egg."

He hesitated. Should he get himself a lawyer? But he knew none in this country, and his neighbors hadn't called for any of their ilk during their last interview. So he nodded in reply to Bossi's question, but a small puddle of unease lurked quietly at the bottom of his stomach.

"Did you discuss how... that egg came to be. I mean, how it ended up broken on that landing? Who left it there?"

Art tried to remember his discussion with Knooch. "Yes. She said she suspected one of the neighbors."

"Did she mention a name?"

She had suspected Rashid Pathan. But he felt reluctant to say so—why should he name Pathan now if he hadn't mentioned him last time, in Savage's interrogation?

"I don't remember." He shook his head.

"Okay." She took a note, then tugged her ponytail. "So, let's try another question."

Will this ever end?

He raised his eyebrows.

"We've had a report about a loud discussion... an altercation taking place on the stairs on Saturday noon, that is the noon right after the egg. Did you hear it, or did you see anything?"

"After cleaning away that egg, I left the house. I went shopping." It felt good to have an alibi, for once, even though he would probably not be able to prove it. "I returned after lunchtime. I remember because I had a kebab at the mall."

"So you don't know about any dispute taking place that day at Dumstreet 9?"

"No," He felt on firmer ground now, not having had anything to do with a dispute. "Who was involved?"

"I'm not at liberty to tell you." She closed the binder with a decisive movement and placed it on the table, with her pen on top of it. "I need you to sign this."

She gave him the form, the same one the morose receptionist had seized only a few minutes ago.

Or ages ago?

There was a space on the form for him to confirm that the confiscated wares had been returned. Not daring to check the contents of the bag, he signed.

His hand shook as he wrote his name.

"Here." She handed him the bag.

He glanced inside and saw the glistening aluminum of his laptop. "Thanks."

"You're welcome." Having finished the interview, she was obviously allowed to smile again. "And thanks for your answers." She held out a hand.

"Sure." He shook it.

As he returned to the lobby and passed the receptionist's counter, his friendly "bye" was met with a tiny nod and uncaring silence.

Cerberus' cousin, the single-headed black sheep of the family.

He pulled up the hood of his coat at the sight of the snowscape through the front door's glass panels, then he pushed the cold handle.

"Art?" A woman's voice.