A Voss and Pike Casefile: The Early Days
Section 45: Paper First
You laid the paper out in order: the register, the licence, the summons, the pass log, the lever. A policy's first life is a paper trail, and it tells the truth about a decision long before anyone admits to having made one. The room absorbed it with a bureaucrat's stillness, which is the stillest kind there is.
"Nobody here decided to kill a woman," you said. "Somebody decided what counted as a problem. The rest followed."
You opened with the paper trail - the decisions, in the order they were made.