Several years passed in this fashion. Each day Jobing went the long way to Regional Office, walking as a kind of constitutional in all weathers by the canal and observing such burned buildings en route all pockmarked with bullet holes what happened during the siege. Then on arrival he sat in reception, taking always a same seat on the white leather and chrome effect ‘Moose Brand’ Budget Line Sofa (Argos £100) and got nowhere in his investigation whatsoever until he had outstay his welcome and long overdue to go home.

Many times on his notepad in these years Jobbin doodled the words DEAD END. And many times he stood at the window of his room in the Hotel Whatever and thought about throwing himself out of it (the window) into the path of a tram. But somehow he persisted – sending long monthly reports to central office each month that outlined his thinking and after each long day in the Reception of Regional Office spending his night poring over the contents of the envelope that the myseterious (sic) tall woman had given him in Café Myopia. On the papers he found within the envelope was all kind of info. mainly incl. columns of quite boring looking numbers and what seem to be pencil mark or annotations in a spider handwriting on each page but what it was all about he could not really say for sure or know.

As time past year after year Jobing grew his hair longer, and beard and took no pride in his personal appearance looking more and more like a maniac recently released from a jail sentence rather than the legal representative of the Central Office. Dogs avoided him in their path. Receptionists were by and large indifferent to his questions. Meanwhile the door to his hotel room he adorned with a hand maid sign that said NO ENTERY and the walls and floor inside he covered in the very papers as mentioned above, joined and commentated with his own annotations and thoughts, as well as pieces of string, wool and tape that stretched in something like spider webs between the walls and other surfaces, linking different fragments of the evidence with possible questions, post-it-notes, crossings out and theories on how to move fwds in his investigations, turning the whole room into a complicated environment that even he had to negotiate with utmost care. If there was a secret or story in the contents of the envelope, Jobin told himself, it must be here somewhere, contained in that mess and tangle right in front of his eyes but despite all his best efforts impossible to see.

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