Halting State

SUE: Gaining Access

It’s Monday morning, and you are semi-officially PO’d.

Thursday was bad enough—you didn’t wrap up until Liz Kavanaugh and her firm were well installed, grilling the MOPs one-on-one. Before you clocked off, Liz took you aside for a little off-line time. “Sergeant Smith? Mind if I call you Sue?”

You nodded cautiously, because you always found it hard to tell where Inspector Kavanaugh was coming from. (She looks like she’s heading for politician-land, with her law degree and tailored suits, but what she wants along the way—who knows? She’s still a bloody sharp cop.) Whatever, pissing her off was a very low priority on your check-list, and if she wanted to be friendly, that was fine.

“Nice to know.” She smiled briefly, more of a twitch than anything else. “I’m short-handed, and you were first on scene, so you’re already up to speed. I’ve got a feeling that there’s a lot more to this than meets the eye because I’m getting a ton of static already. Holyrood is really rattled, and a whole bunch of interested parties are about to descend on this bunch. And I’m going to lose Sergeant Hay and DC Parker to the Pilton murder enquiry tomorrow. So if you’ve got nothing more urgent to do”—which translates from inspector-speak into this is your number one priority as of now, sunshine—“I’m going to ask you to stick around for the time being.”

To which all you could do was shrug and say, “Could you clear it through Mac first, Inspector? He’s my skipper, an’ I wouldn’t want him to think I was deserting the ship.”

Kavanaugh nodded briskly and book-marked your request, and that was your Friday case-load blown out the water, not to mention your monthly clean-up rate: Jimmy Hastie would just have to wait until someone else could collar the little gobshite for something. But at least you wouldn’t have to tell the skipper yourself.

Friday was worse than you expected. You turned up at nine o’clock sharp, frazzled from a breakfast argument with Mary over who was going to fetch Davey after school—with the wee scally himself making a bid for beer money by offering to take himself down to Water World if only you’d give him the readies—only to find that Mac might have detached you, but he was hanging on to Bob. So you headed over to the bunkerful of crazies on your lonesome, only to find a very inspectorly Liz Kavanaugh briefing a reporter from the Herald outside the bunker doors, and a couple of suits from X Division skulking around out back for a quick fag. They were very old boy’s club, and you barely got the time of day from them: arseholes. So you went inside and buckled down to interviewing the help, except you couldn’t get a handle on whatever it was they were speaking: It sounded like English—they were all southern transplants—but the words didn’t make any sense. After the third shot at getting Sam Couper to explain how he knew the Orcs were Pakistani Orcs (and not, say, Japanese Orcs, or your more reliably radge subspecies from Dalhousie), and getting a different reply each time—culminating in your having to ask him how to spell “multiswarmcast minimum-latency routing”—you excused yourself and went to find the inspector.

“I don’t understand these folks’ tongue, Liz. They’re space aliens from the planet IT industry. Maybe someone from ICE can talk techie to them? It’s like the joke about the post-modernist gangster who makes you an offer ye canna understand. More to the point, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking for, an’ that’s a wee bit of a handicap. I mean, with your average wee ned, it’s pretty clear what’s gan on, what mischief they’re up to, but this shower don’t tick like that. Can you not give me some guidance?”

Kavanaugh fixed you with a baby-blue gaze so pointed you could have booked her for carrying a sharpie: “You’re recording everything, aren’t you? I know you’re not a specialist. They know that, too. Just do the interviews, and someone who knows what to look for will go over them later. We’ll get a full gesture and voice stress breakdown, not just what they’re mouthing off, and if we’re lucky, someone will get over-confident and forget they’re not just talking to you. Understand? Once we know who’s not telling us everything, we can roll it up from there.”

You nodded. Not that understanding made it fun, but at least you weren’t wasting your time. “Okay, I got that. You figure it’s an inside job, and maybe we can flush our bird by playing dumb.”

“You mean, if it’s an inside job.” The inspector’s façade cracked for a moment: She looked tired. “Of course, it might not be. In which case we’re in a deep pile of dogshit, and it’s going to take SOCA to dig us out of it. Have you got everyone pencilled in on your list yet?”

You zoomed a GANT chart you’d been working on and zapped it in front of her: “I’ve not met this Nigel MacDonald yet. He wasn’t in yesterday, and he isn’t here today. Works from home, according to Richardson. Some kind of programmer. I phoned his number, but he isn’t answering.”

“Well. If I were you, I’d go round and bang on his door.” She grinned. “Rattle some cages. Within reason,” she added hastily.

Within reason.

Which was the rub: Way back when you were doing a social psych module for your degree in police studies, you went through a period when you used to try and nail every damn category of offender to one of the steps of Maslow’s pyramid of needs. Take your common-or-garden ned (or chav, if they’re from south of the border): You know what motivates them. It’s basic stuff, a couple of steps up the hierarchy—beer and sex, mostly, and maybe the need to have a bigger boom box in their tinny wee shitebox of a jacked-up hatchback. Fitba’s a bit too intellectual for that bunch, except for the tribal element. And neds are the bread and butter of community policing: domestics and public order offences and drugs plus the odd bit of petty theft. Pencil that in as physiological/safety stuff, with a dusting of sex on top. So you got a certain kind of crime that fit their needs, and a certain type of motivation, and figuring out how to join up the dots was mostly quite straightforward.

Whereas…

Where the hell did stock options fit in hierarchy theory? Or designing a better fire elemental? It was all right off the map, tap-dancing on the self-actualization pinnacle of the hierarchy. Your neds wanted to eat, get drunk, or fuck, and the bad things they could do were quite predictable—but the double-domes in the bunker were all at the top of the food-chain already—they either didn’t need or didn’t want that stuff. Forget boom boxes for the motor, half the staff drove Mercs or Maseratis, and the other half didn’t drive at all, probably thought it was a Crime against Gaia. What recondite shit could they get up to in pursuit of self-actualization? Especially in a business that made money, near as you can tell, by refereeing a game?

It’s enough to make an honest cop’s head hurt.

Being politely thick at the gearheads was getting to you, so after lunch you got in the car and trundled over to Mr. MacDonald’s house, which turned out to be a top-floor flat in Bruntsfield, just off the Links. Which would have made for a nice side trip, but by the time you’d found somewhere to park and then climbed four flights of stone steps—like most of Edinburgh, the tenement he’d chosen to live in predated the invention of the steam engine, never mind lifts—you were deeply unamused to find yourself facing a locked oak door with a discreetly reinforced frame and an unanswered doorbell.

Standing on the wicker door-mat, you speculated for a few moments: Maybe the sly bugger’s legged it to Dubai to spend his ill-gotten gains? (Assuming for a moment that the ill-gotten gains existed—you weren’t too clear on that.) You glanced up. There was the usual skylight over the stairwell, but you were buggered if you were about to go shinnying up on the roof, twenty metres up, just to try and sneak a peek through the shutters. If Liz wants me to break my neck, she can write me a memo. Instead, you put in a request for a UAV overflight and some pix: lowest priority so it wouldn’t come off your budget, just something to add to the task list of the next one of the force’s spy planes to overfly the neighbourhood. You tagged the flat as NOT RESPONSIVE TO OFFICER in CopSpace, time-stamped it, scribbled out a paper police access form, and jammed it through the letter-box, then headed back to the bunker, so you could spend the rest of your afternoon being talked down to by nerds.

At least you got Saturday and Sunday off for your sins.

Which brings you around to the here and now of Monday morning, and the team meeting Liz has called while you’re sipping your latte in Starbucks (as usual). Mac released you to her almost by return of IM, so now you’re stuck working with the old-school suits from X Division, not to mention a new boss who’s too smart by half. Wonderful…

“I think we’ve got preliminary coverage of all the parties on the scene of crime. Not that it makes much sense to talk about the scene as such, but Grant tells me the imaging is complete, so we’ve got an evidence sandbox with a complete snapshot of Hayek Associates’ IT set-up as of Thursday evening, with traffic inputs since then.” The inspector shrugs elegantly. You’re not sure whose office she’s sitting in with her cam, but it’s plusher than yours. “Now for the follow-up.” She pauses and looks straight at the phonecam, for all the world as if she’s reading from a teleprompter. “Mark, if I read my tea leaves correctly, we’re going to get a shitload of interested parties descending on the scene today, from insurers and underwriters on down. I want a complete visitor log and report on what they want with the target. Maybe we’ll get something back from shit-storm analysis this time.”

Mark—Sergeant Burroughs—grunts something semi-audible.

“Yes, I want a full background on everyone.” Kavanaugh raises her coffee mug (genuine ceramic, none of your recyclable cardboard nonsense). “You and Grant can go camp out in the bomb shelter this morning. I’ll be along later. Sergeant Smith.” (You stiffen unconsciously.) “It’s been forty-eight hours. Have we heard from your missing party?”

“No mam.” It’s out of your mouth before you realize it. “I emailed, phoned, IM’d, left a paper note, and banged on his door, if that’s what you’re asking. And I started the clock.”

“Well then.” She smiles. “He works from home, we have reason to believe he’s got material evidence relating to an ongoing investigation in his possession, and he isn’t answering the door after forty-eight hours. Meet me at the Meadowplace station in half an hour. It’s time to call in the ram team.”

Warrender Park Terrace. To your left, the Links, grassy meadow with cycle paths and ancient trees spreading their boughs over the parked cars. To your right, your typical Edinburgh tenement block; roughly carved stone blocks, rickety doors on the common stairwell shared by a dozen flats, and no sign of what’s going on behind those politely drawn slatted blinds and net curtains. It could conceal genteel working-class pensioner poverty, or a space-age bachelor pad. A loudly arguing family of five or a solitary bloater rotting in an armchair in front of a dusty TV.

CopSpace sheds some light on matters, of course. Blink and it descends in its full glory. Here’s the spiralling red diamond of a couple of ASBO cases on the footpath (orange jackets, blue probation service tags saying they’re collecting litter). There’s the green tree of signs sprouting over the doorway of number thirty-nine, each tag naming the legal tenants of a different flat. Get your dispatcher to drop you a ticket, and the signs open up to give you their full police and social services case files, where applicable. There’s a snowy blizzard of number plates sliding up and down Bruntsfield Place behind you, and the odd flashing green alert tag in the side roads. This is the twenty-first century, and all the terabytes of CopSpace have exploded out of the dusty manila files and into the real world, sprayed across it in a Technicolor mass of officious labelling and crime notices. If labelling the iniquities of the real world for all to see was enough to put an end to them, you could open CopSpace up as a public overlay and crime would vanish like a hang-over. (If only half the tags weren’t out-of-date, and the other half was free of errors…)

You park up behind the Tranny just as Kavanaugh and Sergeant Gavaghan are stretching their legs and the ram team are getting their kit-bags out. She nods at you, and Gavaghan makes eye contact. He’s okay, you’ve worked with him before. “Where is it?” asks the skipper.

“Up here.” You point. A couple of uniforms you don’t know start hauling their bags towards the steps. “Whoa, it’s the top-floor flat. Let me show you.” One of them mutters something under his breath. You pretend not to notice.

It’s a warm day, and the smell of cut grass and pollen from the horse chestnuts on the Links tickles your nose. By the time you reach the top of the stairs, you’re breathing a bit faster than you should be. You bend down and examine the letter-box. Your access form is still in place. More to the point, the Evening Post is jammed halfway through. The freesheet comes out on Thursdays, clinging grimly to its declining circulation. The inspector’s right behind you. You point at the letter box and she nods. “Not a good sign. Very well. Sergeant Gavaghan, would you like to inspect the premises before we go in?”

Gavaghan glances over his shoulder. “Jimmy, you got the X-ray specs?”

“Yes, sir.” Jim leans against the wall directly under the skylight and rummages around in his kit-bag. “X-ray specs coming right up.”

They’re not spectacles and they don’t run on X-rays, but the terahertz radar box can see through walls well enough to fit the bill. Bob switches it on, pointing it at the stone floor, and opens up a new layer in CopSpace. The skipper finger-types a label: MACDONALD RESIDENCE. “Let’s see what’s in there.”

Jim points his box at the door and fiddles with it. Then he starts swearing. “I’m not getting a signal, mam. Nothing at all.”

Kavanaugh raises an eyebrow. “Is it working? Give me a quick peek sideways.”

“Just a sec…” He takes the box off-line from CopSpace, then swings it round for a moment, to point at the neighbour’s door. “Yes, it’s working okay.” He points it back at the absent programmer’s front door. “If’n I didn’t know better, I’d figure there was shielding in there.”

Kavanaugh raises her eyebrow higher. You make eye contact. She’s smiling, but there’s no humour in it. “He’s sharp,” she remarks to nobody in particular. “That’s a distinct possibility. Put your box to sleep. We’re going to have to do this the old-fashioned way.”

Jim looks up at the ductwork where the electricity and gas pipes enter the flat. “Shite,” he says succinctly.

“Constable Rogers,” Gavaghan mutters, “the rams, please. Over-alls, everyone.” He turns away and starts talking to dispatch, asking them to find out who owns the utility feeds and get them shut off.

Rogers—and Jim—hand you a disposable overall, then get the door jacks and battering ram assembled. The latter is about a metre and a half long, and has a transparent face shield and sixteen evidence cameras hanging off it. While they’re doing that, Gavaghan drafts you to help with the duct tape and nylon sheeting, improvising a loose tent to cover the front door and keep particulates from escaping.

“Everyone record full lifelog, please,” says Kavanaugh, standing at the back of the cocoonlike white tunnel. Even wearing a blue polythene bag, she manages to look coolly managerial.

Jim glances at you as Rogers makes busy with the horizontal ram, jacking the uprights of the door-frame apart to help pop the lock’s tongue out of its groove. “You got your Girl Guides’ badge in battering rams?” he asks. Are you going to get in the way?

“Nah.” You shrug. “What you want me to do?”

“Get back and stand oot the way. We’ll take two practice swings first. Don’t get too close, I wouldna want to put you in hospital.”

“Okay.” You line up behind his back, looking at the door over his shoulder, through the thick Lexan shield.

“One—two—three!” The impact is jarring, but the door takes it. “Jesus,” Rogers mutters disgustedly. “Again! One—two—”

The door topples inwards with a loud crash. It’s one of those flats that has a windowless room for a hall, everything else opening off doorways to either side. This being the top floor, it has a skylight, and what light there is comes streaming through the open Varilux window and the door to the living room, which is ajar. The floor’s bare, and the walls are an odd golden colour, papered with a curious design.

For a moment you fixate on the step-ladder and the rope dangling through the skylight and think, Oh shit, he’s hanged hisself. Then you blink it into perspective as you follow the ram crew onto the top of the fallen door, and you realize there’s no body, and the rope is a bundle of cables that reach the floor, then trail into the living room. It’s a suicide scene without a suicide. Aw fuck, I should’ha gone up the roof after all, you think. You sniff suspiciously. The air smells musty, and there’s an unpleasantly familiar undernote to it.

“Samples!” calls Constable Rogers, and there’s a clicking noise up and down the ram as its forensic air samplers snap closed on a million microscopic dust particles floating in the air. Some of them are hooked up to the sniffer on his belt, and if anyone’s been smoking the whacky baccy, you’ll hear about it in a minute: others go to the real-time LCN profiler and its online link to the national DNA database. “Down ram!”

You step around the guys as they lower the heavy ram. Ahead of you, Gavaghan and his crew are opening doors and glancing inside. The inspector’s busy with a tripod and some kind of laser surveying tool. You put your best foot forward and shove the living-room door open, camera first.

It’s your typical tenement living room. Three-metre-high ceiling, fireplace, and a huge bay window with wooden shutters, from back when daylight was cheap and electric lights were unheard of. Some of these buildings are older than Texas. There’s a cheap sofa with too many cushions, and a big recliner, but that’s where the normality ends. Because what kind of weirdo fills their living room with office equipment, then trashes the place?

“Sue.” You nearly jump out of your skin at the inspector’s tone of voice: “If you don’t mind?”

“Sorry, I was just capturing the scene…”

She slides past you, shaking her head. “Spare me.” Then she gets an eyeball of the big office desk lying on its side and the PC with its guts spilled across the floor. “Log this to evidence, don’t touch anything—”

“Skipper?” It’s Gavaghan, calling through the hall, his voice hollow. “You’ll want to see this.”

“What. Now?” She’s out of the living room like a cat after a moth, and you trail along in her wake, cams still chowing down on every stray photon around you.

“Kitchen,” he calls. Flags are going up everywhere, ghostly signs tagged to doorways like BATHROOM and BEDROOM 2, and Liz dives towards KITCHEN. “Hold it!” There’s something in his voice that brings the inspector up sharply.

“How bad is it?”

“Need SOCO to tell us, skipper. It’s not like there’s a body or anything—”

“Then why are you—”

“We’re too late: It’s already been sanitized.”