The dog in the night

On Friday morning, Amira found Pak Hassan sitting outside the lab with Kopi, the brown dog who lived at the school, lying at his feet. The old guard was usually taciturn, but today he wanted to talk.

"Thirty years I have worked here," he said, "and nobody has ever robbed this school. Now they say I slept on the job."

"Pak Hassan, did Kopi bark on Thursday night?"

The guard looked surprised. "No. Not once. The cleaner was working in the next room until after midnight, and she heard nothing at all. In the morning Kopi was still lying by the lab door, as calm as ever."

It seemed an innocuous detail, but Amira had an uncanny feeling that it mattered more than anything else. Kopi barked at everyone she did not know: delivery drivers, new teachers, even parents. Last month she had barked for ten minutes at a man who came to fix the air conditioning.

"Then the person who took Silver Blaze was not a stranger," Amira said slowly. "Kopi knew him."

Wei Jie stared at her. "So it wasn't Dev? Ryan still thinks he came to sabotage the robot."

"Kopi has never met Dev. If he had walked into the lab at night, she would have woken up the whole street."

It was the pivotal moment of the case. Inspector Lim, who had come to collect Pak Hassan's statement, listened with a serious face. He was a cool, slightly aloof man who rarely praised anyone. All week he had told reporters that the evidence was inconclusive. Now he wrote something in his notebook and underlined it twice.

"And who does the dog know best?" he asked.

"The people who are here at night," said Amira. She did not finish the sentence. She could only surmise where the robot was now, but she was beginning to understand who had carried it out of the lab.