On Sunday evening, Farah entered the living room with a cup of green tea in her hand, and discovered Kevin and Todd engaged in mutual ignoring of each other. They had somehow taken up every seat in the room as well, and Farah had to drag a chair from the crammed kitchen.

She pushed the chair closer to Todd. He raised his eyes from his phone, gave her a warm smile, and was immediately back to the phone again. Farah tapped her fingers on the nearby coffee table. This case had been their strangest yet, on the account of strange things stubbornly refusing to happen to them.

“So,” Farah said, and took a minute long break to come up with something to say next. “I still can’t scrape off the crepe batter from the stove.”

“Hey.” Todd was alert at once, sitting up straight in the armchair. “Why didn’t you tell me you were cleaning? I would’ve helped.”

“I didn’t think I’d need help.” She shrugged. “And it’s my stove after all.”

“Yeah, true, but… I live here too,” Todd pointed out. “We should, you know, we should split the responsibilities and so.”

“I can decide for myself which housework to do, Todd,” Farah replied, ever so slightly annoyed. “I’m not five. I can clean a stove if I have to.”

“And I’m telling you that you didn’t. Have to,” continued Todd, a tad bit more annoyed that Farah had been. “Cause I could have done it for you.”

“If I needed you to clean the stove,” Farah was now visibly annoyed, “I would have asked you, damn it!”

“Guys,” Kevin said, and made them both turn their heads with enough speed and velocity to cram their necks. “Are you seriously arguing about who gets to do housework?”

Both were momentarily stumped by this question. Then, Todd spoke.

“You could have volunteered to clean the stove,” he said to Kevin with the intonation of a father who was trying to appear strict but hadn’t the slightest clue of how strictness worked. “You got it dirty in the first place.”

“I don’t know how to clean off stuff like that!” Kevin found this suggestion hilarious

“Maybe it’s time to learn then.” Todd shrugged.

“Hey.” Kevin seemed miffed. “It’s not my fault I was born rich. I never had the proper nurturing environment to acquire those skills, okay?”

“Dude, being a rich isn’t a disease.” Todd snorted with laughter. “You know you can give away your money at any moment, right?”

“But my financial advisers say that’s bad,” Kevin whined.

The following moment of intense eye rolling in profound silence was disturbed by a ringtone that neither Farah or Todd recognized. The sound of some thundering classics piece made Kevin fall out of the couch, leap towards Farah and grab onto to her like a frightened baby monkey. Todd stared at him in decisive confusion.

“They’ve come for me!” Kevin proclaimed. “Save me Farah.”

“It’s… the phone,” Todd commented. “Yours.”

“Oh,” Kevin said, but didn’t let go of Farah just yet.

The phone meanwhile continued to ring, which prompted Todd to get up, pick the seemingly unscathed iPhone from the floor on which it had landed after Kevin’s leap, and hand it over to its owner.

“Woah,” the man muttered, staring at the screen as if it was his first look at an extremely precious giant diamond. “It’s… it’s Alexandra.”

“Answer it!” Todd urged, almost prepared to either push the button himself or punch the man in the face.

But Kevin beat him to the first option, and, untangling himself from Farah, switched the call to the speaker.

“Kevin Alistair McDougall!” the phone yelped, which made Kevin flinch.

“Alex?” he replied.

“God I knew you were a pig but this is crossing all the lines!” a pleasant though piercingly loud voice carried on. “Please tell me that you are severely ashamed of yourself and regretting your decision already or I will lose the last shred of hope in men that I have stored deep in my delusional wishfully thinking brain.”

“What are you talking about?” Kevin’s eyebrows were engaged in some sort of exotic dance on his forehead.

“You know damn well what I’m talking about,” Alex responded, appalled. “The ring! And fuck, McDougall, it’s expensive, whatever, the most expensive thing you’ve ever bought if that wasn’t another hideous lie, but if you needed it back, you should have asked!” she fumed. “I would have taken the time to personally come into your stupid mansion and throw it into your stupid face but no, you had to sneak into my apartment! I can’t believe you copied my key as well even though you said you wouldn’t, that’s just…”

“Alex!” Kevin interrupted her. “I didn’t take the ring. It’s yours. All the gifts I gave you are yours. I’d never, and, uh anyway, you’re the one who’s trying to get me killed, so…”

“Trying to get you killed?” the voice from the phone went up in pitch. “Are you kidding me, McDougall? Do you think I care enough about you to do something like that? I had to get your phone from your secretary, for god’s sake, I googled your company like three times before I got the name right.”

“I am confused,” Kevin said to no one in particular, and handed Farah the phone. “Please talk to her. I need a moment.”

Farah regarded him with slight concern, but took the phone and switched the speaker off. She then left for the kitchen to talk undisturbed.

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re insufferable?” Todd asked matter-of-factly, not a hint of malice in his voice.

“No, they usually tell me ‘it is a pleasure to work with you, Mr McDougall’,” Kevin replied, seemingly not offended.

“Alternative question: is everyone you interact with paid by you?”

“Most of them, yeah.”

“Right.”

When Farah returned from the kitchen five minutes later, she was already going through several mental calculations at the same time. She pointed her finger at Kevin, lost her thought, and stopped again. Then opened her mouth to speak, then stopped yet again.

“Two things,” she spoke at last, and began to pace the room slowly. “She has not hired a hitman, an assassin, or anyone of that description. She wants absolutely nothing to do with you, and even if she wanted you dead,” Farah told Kevin casually, “she would have done it herself, and I honestly believe that she could. Second.” She paused in the middle of the room. “Someone did take her ring. Only that ring. Nothing else. No signs of her place being robbed either, apparently.”

“Couldn’t she have just lost it?” Todd suggested.

“Unlikely,” Farah replied. “She hasn’t worn it anywhere in a month. It was in her apartment all the time. She never even moved it. So it was almost definitely stolen, except why would someone take that ring from a whole bowl of expensive jewelry and leave everything else? Which means,” she was back to pacing, “that these are…”

“…mysterious circumstances,” Todd finished for her. “And maybe the ring disappearing and Kevin’s, uh, thing, are…”

“…connected!” Farah finished for him. “Yes.”

“What, and I cannot stress this enough, the hell are you two talking about?” Kevin looked at Todd, then at Farah, then at Todd again.

“Finally this is feeling like a case.” Todd beamed. “I need to call Dirk,” he added, already reaching for his phone. “This is his area.”

*

Approximately at that same moment, Dirk and Roger were stepping out of the car next to a shabby picket fence painted a faint shade of blue. While Roger searched his pocket for the keys, Dirk peered over the fence to examine the premises.

There stood a small wooden house surrounded by a wildly unkempt garden, which had blended into the local ecosystem and was threatening to claim the house’s terrace with its vines as well. A stone path, overgrown with moss, snaked through the grass and bushes. Two benches stood in the corner of the land, right under an old twisted cherry tree. The house’s terrace, which was barely big enough to host four people, was decorated with faded paper flags and plastic flowers.

The place was undoubtedly abandoned, slowly losing signs of human habitation - but it still held memories of its humans, if only distant memories.

“Don’t mind the mess.” Roger smiled, leading Dirk down the thread-like path and past various trees, bushes, and round spots of flowerbeds. “The inside of the house is a tad disorganized. Been a while since I cleaned it last.”

“Absolutely no problem,” Dirk assured him.

He stood aside patiently while Roger fumbled with another key, commenting on how rusty the lock had gotten and how the vines had to be dealt with and the paint on the facade was well-overdue for a refreshing. When the mechanism finally clicked and the door opened, a faint whiff of cold air and mold reached Dirk’s nose.

He entered the house after Roger and blinked.

He knew messes; he was really quite well acquainted with messes. But the state of this house was not natural. It wasn’t just entropy taking its course - a pile of unsorted items here, a few old dishes molding over there - the usual kind. This was overturned furniture and mounds of books on the floor, scattered cutlery and broken mugs and dirty footprints all over.

The house had clearly been robbed.