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Rain falling onto thick layers of accumulated dust had left the windows of the criminal investigations office so mottled that they were virtually opaque Beyond them, roofs could dimly be seen, huddled grimly beneath a lowering city sky When the Dongbu Police Station had first moved here, some two years before, the location had been nothing more than a hill on the city outskirts, in an area recently zoned for development Then houses had begun to spring up, and now the area was completely built up As he contemplated the brightly colored roofs, aligned in a variety of shapes that seemed to suggest their owners’ vain fondness for things western, or their pretentiousness, Sergeant Nam fell into the state of melancholy, as was nowadays almost habitual for him The fact that he owned no home of his own among all those many houses stretching before his eyes, where his wife and children might live and take their ease, kindled in him a deep sense of failure As he recalled the two little rented rooms he would return to after work, unless something unexpected occurred, Sergeant Nam reviewed glumly his career, over which a dark sense of impending failure loomed Nam Gyeongho was his name, born in 1945 His parents had been ordinary, run-of-the-mill folk but, since they had experienced the almost universal poverty of the 1950s, his childhood had been subject to the average degree of misery that other children of his age had had to endure His middle and high school years, spent in a small country town, had left no memories, sad or happy As he neared the end of his high-school education, there had arisen a growing lack of proportion between their limited financial resources and the enthusiasm for further education that his parents were beginning to manifest That finally took him away from their small town and turned him into a student enrolled in evening classes at a second-rate university in this city, for a course of study he had finally given up half way through