"Urgh! He is so annoying!" Trixie exclaimed to herself as she returned home, throwing open the front door as Boris and Langford were leaving.

"Who is?" Langford asked, intrigued and curious as to whether Kit had made another appearance in town and started to cause mischief.

Looking at Langford blankly for a moment as if he should have known, Trixie told him, "Stingy. He closed up just as I got there and refused to let me in. He said if Robyn needs anything she can get it herself and in the morning, what a jerk!"

"I can always go over there, persuade him to be a little more helpful." Langford offered, cracking his knuckles.

Trixie shook her head, "No it's ok. I've got enough here to rustle something up though there's no guarantee she'll eat it, especially if you two have upset her."

Ignoring the potential affront in Trixie's remark Boris responded, "We just needed to ask her a couple of questions, questions she answered for us. She's no more upset now than she was when we came in."

"Good." Trixie commented, her face stern, "I don't like it when people hurt her, she doesn't deserve it and after all she's been through she needs a break. She's certainly nowhere near as bad as you made her out to be in the beginning." She directed the last at Langford.

Holding his tongue for the necessity of avoiding an argument that could last for hours and not wanting to outstay his welcome either with Trixie or Nine, Langford raised an eyebrow and exited the house. Sensing that he'd take the place of Langford in the firing line if he remained any longer, Boris smiled a half smile before following in his subordinate's footsteps. He heard Trixie firmly shut and lock the door behind him as he stood in the cool air. Breathing out deeply he closed his eyes and lifted his head - taking a breath in before letting it out again, lowering his head and opening his eyes to look at Langford who was standing a little way off, trying to distract himself by looking at his boots and measuring their shininess against one another. After a minute he looked up from his occupation and walked towards Boris, clouds of their breath mingling together as they stood in close proximity.

"Look," Langford began, bracing himself for potential backlash for what he wanted to say, "You get off. You've had one shitter of a day and you've overstretched yourself. I'll take your watch tonight and you can owe me for another time."

"This was meant to be your night off." Boris reminded him.

Langford shrugged, "Yeah well, given the circumstances there are more pressing matters to be attended to than my night off and my dirty maggies. Speaking of pressing matters, I know one way of getting some answers about what young Morgan might be up to."

"Enlighten me."

Langford tried to ignore the cautious edge to Boris' voice, "Well lets put it this way, I'm going to pick Olaf up and take him to see our two little canaries and see if I can make them sing."

Uncertain of Langford's chances of success in his plan, Boris watched him stride away before turning and walking back to his house. He would have protested more strongly about Langford's abandonment of his well deserved and long overdue night off but he couldn't argue that his experiences of the day had drained him, none more so than the attack from Ché. Lifting his hand to his neck he touched it, his skin painfully tender at even the lightest touch and the muscles beneath feeling tight and unyielding. He had chosen not to retaliate, accepting what had happened as an understandable reaction to seeing someone associated with one who had caused a great deal of trouble and destroyed the trust of many. He couldn't blame Ché, had things been the other way around he could imagine he would have reacted in much the same way though it struck him that the outcome could well have been the same.

As he unlocked his front door he felt something else pull at his state of conscious thought, a stab of sympathy for Robyn. The perceptible tremor still running through her body from her own harrowing experience, her skin so pale and sense of calm so delicate. She had sought comfort from him once again when Ché had rescued her from the tunnel, he could still feel the tightness of her hold on him as she cried. He'd held her as tightly back, frightened almost that he'd hurt her but realising that it was what she needed. More than once he had missed the presence of the arm he had lost but not more so he found than when he wanted to be able to comfort her properly, to give her the maximum feeling of security. But she had not wanted for his other arm after her fight with Robbie. Quite the opposite. He remembered her words and the comfort she had drawn from him simply being there, his own feeling of purpose that she had produced with the simplest of comments.

Back in the Network's base, Langford strolled into the office and grabbed the bag with Olaf's head in off the desk before turning and leaving again. Walking out of the base and across town to the police station he knocked heavily on the door, more for the sense of protocol than expecting an answer. Knowing not to wait too long he pulled open the wooden door and walked inside, studying his surroundings and the usual assortment of 'police officers' leaning half asleep on their desks or fully asleep draped over them.

If anything in Lazytown lived up to its name, its police force certainly did. It was a shambolic set up that put all other forces to shame. Its very existence confused many for the sheer lack of action undertaken by those that resided in the police station and rarely left it except to visit Stingy's shop and buy enough supplies to carry them through their all-year-round hibernation. Even then, it was well known that even that was unlikely to happen, more often than not they'd be able to scrape enough effort together to pick up the phone and ring an order through for Stingy to deliver - orders that were seldom paid on time.

Looking around him, Langford despaired at the disgraceful state of the building's interior. Its exterior was maintained by outside contractors but inside it was a sight to be sorry for. Nothing looked as though it had been cleaned for years, cobwebs hung largely in every corner and there were stains on the carpet Langford didn't even want to begin to guess at the origin of. Paint was peeling from the walls and many of the lights in the ceiling were without working bulbs, at least in the parts of the station that had a ceiling. The first time he'd come here he'd walked out and walked back in again at least six times, unable to believe that what he was seeing was real. It was only when the Mayor, embarrassed by his own police force, admitted that his eyes weren't deceiving him that he truly believed it. For quite a while after his initial shock had faded he'd wondered if the 'police officers' weren't simply moveable mannequins that were lifelike in every way but a brief and perhaps more one sided than two conversation with one of them blew that illusion out of the water.

Though he was sure that mannequins would do more than the so called police force.

The only good thing about the police station and the lazy fools in it, Langford surmised, were the cells. If nothing else the police station gave them a facility in which to house people such as those he was on his way to question. As much as he hoped the constant presence of people within the station would prevent escape or other incidents he knew all too well that their reliability, or lack of therein, had been proven most definitely when Elias had managed to break into a cell, knock Boris and Kit out and murder Lily's lacklustre lackey Larry without a single person knowing or doing anything about it until after the event. Not to mention that Elias had been free to leave the station - the only indication that anything had happened the alarm that had rung out at the breaching of the fire exit and that had caught the attention of the passing Network officers on patrol.

'Bloody pathetic,' Langford thought as he entered the corridor leading into the cells without a single person acknowledging, noticing or challenging him. 'Maybe I should help myself into their weapons locker and fire off a few rounds, see if that gets their attention. Although I sincerely doubt it'll do anything, from the state of things in here I'd wonder if any of their weapons actually worked if they'd bothered to get any at all.'

Removing the anarchic thoughts he was playing with from his mind, Langford pulled the key for the cell he wanted from the board on the wall and whistled as he approached it. Even if he wasn't going to act on his impulse to test the alertness of the sleepy inhabitants of the station he was still going to have fun anyway.