LIZ: Red Pill,
Blue Pill
It’s a slow Tuesday
afternoon, and you’re coming to the end of your shift on the West
End control desk when Sergeant McDougall IMs you: INSPECTOR WANTED ON FATACC SCENE.
“Jesus fucking
Christ,” you subvocalize, careful not to let it out aloud—the
transcription software responds erratically to scatology, never
mind eschatology—and wave two fingers at Mac’s icon. You can’t
think of a reasonable excuse to dump it on D. I. Chu’s shoulders
when he comes on shift, so that’s you on the spot: you with your
shift-end paper-work looming, an evening’s appointment with the
hair salon, and your dodgy gastric reflux.
You push back your
chair, stretch, and wait while Mac’s icon pulses, then expands.
“Jase. Talk to me.”
“Aye, mam. I’m on
Dean Park Mews, attendin’ an accidental death, no witnesses.
Constable Berman was first responder, an’ she called me in.” Jase
pauses for a moment. There’s something odd about his voice, and
there’s no video. “Victim’s cleaner was first on the scene, she had
a wee panic, then called 112. Berman’s got her sittin’ doon with a
cuppa in the living room while I log the scene.”
What he isn’t saying
is probably more important than what he is, but in these
goldfish-bowl days, no cop in their right mind is going to say
anything prejudicial over an evidence channel. “No ambulance?” You
prod. “Have you opened an HSE ticket already?”
“Ye ken a goner when
ye see wan.” McDougall’s Loanhead accent comes out to play when
he’s a tad stressed. “I didna want to spread this’un around,
skipper, but it’s a two-wetsuit job. I don’ like to bug you, but I
need a second opinion . . .”
Wow, that’s something
out of the ordinary. A two-wetsuit job
means kinky beyond the call of duty.
You look at the map and see his push-pin. It’s easy walking
distance, but you might as well bag a ride if there’s one in the
shed. “I was about to go off shift. If you can hold it together for
ten minutes, I’ll be along.”
“Aye,
ma’am.”
You glance sideways
across the desk. Sergeant Elvis—not his name, but the duck’s arse
fits his hair-style—is either grooving to his iPod or he’s
really customized his haptic interface.
You wave at him, and he looks up. “I’ve got to head out, got a
call,” you say, poking the red-glowing hover-fly case number across
the desktop in his direction. He nods, catches it, and drags it
down to his dock. “I’m off duty in ten, so you’re holding the fort.
Ping me if anything comes up.”
Elvis bobs his head,
then does something complex with his hands. “Yessir, ma’am. I’ll
take care of things, you watch me.” Then he drops back into his
cocoon of augmented reality. You can see him muttering under his
breath, crooning lyrics to a musically themed interface. You sigh,
then reach up, tear down the control room, wad it up into a ball of
imaginary paper, and shove it across to sit in his desk. There’s a
whole lot more to shift-end handover than that, but something tells
you that McDougall’s case is going to take priority. And it’s down
to the front desk to cadge a ride.
It’s an accident of
fate that put you on the spot when Mac’s call came in; fate and
personnel allocation policy, actually: all that, and politics
beside.
You don’t usually sit
in on the West End control centre, directing constables to
shoplifting scenes and chasing hit-and-run cyclists. Nominally
you’re in charge of the Rule 34 Squad: the booby-prize they gave
you for backing the wrong side in a political bun-fight five years
ago.
But policing is just
as prone to management fads as any other profession, and it’s
Policy this decade that all officers below the rank of chief
inspector must put in a certain number of Core Community Policing
hours on an annual basis, just to keep them in touch with Social
Standards (whatever they are) and Mission-Oriented Focus Retention
(whatever that is). Detective inspector is, as far as Policy is
concerned, still a line rank rather than management.
And so you have to
drag yourself away from your office for eight hours a month to
supervise the kicking of litter-lout ass from the airconditioned
comfort of a control room on the third floor of Fettes Avenue
Police HQ. It could be worse: At least they don’t expect you to
pound the pavement in person. Except Jason McDougall has called you
out to do some rare on-site supervision on—
A two-wetsuit
job.
Back in the naughty
noughties a fifty-one-year-old Baptist minister was found dead in
his Alabama home wearing not one but two wet suits and sundry bits of exotic rubber
underwear, with a dildo up his arse. (The cover-up of the
doubly-covered-up deceased finally fell before a Freedom of
Information Act request.)
It’s not as if its
like isnae well-known in Edinburgh, city of grey stone propriety
and ministers stern and saturnine (with the most surprising personal habits). But propriety—and the
exigencies of service under the mob of puritanical arseholes
currently in the ascendant in Holyrood—dictates discretion. If Jase
is calling it openly, it’s got to be pretty blatant. Excessively blatant. Tabloid grade,
even.
Which
means—
Enough of that. Let’s
see if we can blag a ride, shall we?
“Afternoon,
Inspector. What can I do for ye?”
You smile stiffly at
the auxiliary behind the transport desk: “I’m looking for a ride.
What have you got?”
He thinks for a
moment. “Two wheels, or four?”
“Two will do. Not a
bike, though.” You’re wearing a charcoal grey skirt suit and the
police bikes are all standard hybrids, no step-through frames. It’s
not dignified, and in these straitened times, your career needs all
the dignity it can get. “Any segways?”
“Oh aye, mam, I can
certainly do one of those for ye!” His
face clears, and he beckons you round the counter and into the
shed.
A couple of minutes
later you’re standing on top of a Lothian and Borders Police
segway, the breeze blowing your hair back as you dodge the decaying
speed pillows on the driveway leading past the stables to the main
road. You’d prefer a car, but your team’s carbon quota is low, and
you’d rather save it for real emergencies. Meanwhile, you take the
path at a walk, trying not to lean forward too far.
Police segways come
with blues and twos, Taser racks and overdrive: But if you go above
walking pace, they invariably lean forward until you resemble a
character in an old Roadrunner cartoon. Looking like Wile E. Coyote
is undignified, which is not a good way to impress the senior
management whether or not you’re angling for promotion, especially
in the current political climate. (Not that you are angling for promotion, but . . . politics.) So you ride sedately towards Comely Bank
Road, and the twitching curtains and discreet perversions of
Stockbridge.
Crime and
architecture are intimately related. In the case of the red stone
tenements and Victorian villas of Morningside, it’s mostly theft
from cars and burglary from the aforementioned posh digs. You’re
still logged in as you ride past the permanent log-jam of
residents’ Chelsea Tractors—those such as live here can afford to
fill up their hybrid SUVs, despite the ongoing fuel crunch—and the
eccentric and colourful boutique shops. You roll round a tight
corner and up an avenue of big stone houses with tiny wee gardens
fronting the road until you reach the address Sergeant McDougall
gave you.
Here’s your first
surprise: It’s not a tenement or a villa—it’s a whole town house,
three stories high and not split for multiple occupancy. It’s got
to be worth something north of half a million, which in these
deflationary times is more than you’ll likely earn in the rest of
your working life. And then there’s your next surprise: When you
glance at it in CopSpace, there’s a big twirling red flag over it,
and you recognize the name of the owner. Shit.
CopSpace—the
augmented-reality interface to all the accumulated policing and
intelligence databases around which your job revolves—rots the
brain, corroding the ability to rote-memorize every villain’s face
and backstory. But you know this guy of old: He’s one of the rare
memorable cases.
You ride up to the
front door-step and park. The door is standing ajar—Jase is clearly
expecting company. “Police,” you call inside, scanning the scene.
High hall ceiling, solid oak doors to either side, traditional
whitewashed walls and cornice-work and maroon ceiling. Someone’s
restored this town house to its early-nineteenth-century splendour,
leaving only a handful of recessed LED spots and covered mains
sockets to remind you which century you’re standing
in.
A constable sticks
her head around the door at the end of the hall. “Ma’am?” CopSpace
overlays her with a name and number: BERMAN, MARGARET, PC 1022.
Medium build, blond highlights, and hazel-nut eyes behind her
specs. “Sergeant McDougall’s in the bathroom upstairs: I’m taking a
statement from the witness. Are you here to take over?” She sounds
anxious, which is never a good sign in Lothian and Borders’
finest.
You do a three-sixty
as Sergeant McDougall comes to the top of the stairs: “Aye,
skipper?” He leans over the banister. “You’ll be wanting to see
what’s up here . . .”
“Wait one,” you tell
Berman. Then you take the stairs as fast as you can.
Little details stick
in your mind. The picture rails in the hall (from which hang
boringly framed prints depicting the city as it might once have
looked), the discreet motion detectors and camera nodes in the
corners of the hall ceiling. The house smells clean, sterile, as if
it’s been mothballed and bubble-wrapped. Jase takes a step back and
gestures across the landing at an open door through which enough
afternoon daylight filters that you can see his expression. You
whip your specs off, and after a momentary pause, he follows suit.
“Give me just the executive summary,” you tell him.
McDougall nods
tiredly. Thirtyish, sandy-haired, and built like a rugby prop, he
could be your classic recruiter’s model for community policing.
“Off the record,” he says—on the
record, in the event one of your head cams is still snooping, or
the householder’s ambient lifelogging, or a passing newsrag
surveillance drone, or God: But at least it serves notice of intent
to invoke the Privacy Act—“This’n’s a stoater, boss. But it looks
like ’e did it to ’isself, to a first approximation.”
You take a deep
breath and nod. “Okay, let’s take a look.” You clip your specs back
on and follow Jase into the bathroom of the late Michael Blair,
esq., also known as Prisoner 972284.
The first thing you
clock is that the bathroom’s about the size of an aircraft hangar.
Slate tile floor, chrome fittings and fixtures, expensive
curved-glass shower with a bar-stool and some kind of funky robot
arm to scoosh the water-jet right up your fanny—like an expensive
private surgery rather than a temple of hygiene. About the
stainless steel manacles bolted to the wall and floor inside the
shower cubicle we’ll say no more. It is apparent that for every
euro the late Michael Blair, esq., spent on his front hall, he
spent ten on the bathroom. But that’s just the beginning, because
beyond the shower and the imported Japanese toilet seat with the
control panel and heated bumrest, there stands a splendid ceramic
pedestal of a sink—one could reasonably accuse the late Mr. Blair
of mistaking overblown excess for good taste—and then a steep
descent into lunacy.
Mikey, as you knew
him before he became (the former) Prisoner 972284, is lying foetal
on the floor in front of some kind of antique machine the size of a
washer/dryer. It’s clearly a plumbing appliance of some kind,
enamelled in pale green trimmed with chrome, sprouting pipes capped
with metal gauges and thumb-wheels that are tarnished down to their
brass cores, the metal flowers of a modernist ecosystem. The
letters CCCP and a red enamel star
feature prominently on what passes for a control panel. Mikey is
connected to the aforementioned plumbing appliance by a sinuous,
braided-metal pipe leading to a chromed tube, which is plugged
straight into his—
Jesus. It is a two-wetsuit
job.
You glance at Jase.
“Tell me you haven’t touched anything?”
He nods, then adds,
“I canna speak for the cleaner, ma’am.”
“Okay,
logged.”
You walk around the
corpse carefully, scanning with your specs and muttering a
continuous commentary of voice tags for the scene stream. Michael
Blair, esq.—age 49, weight 98 kilos, height 182 centimetres, brown
hair (thinning on top, number two cut rather than comb-over)—has
clearly been dead for a few hours, going by his body temperature.
Middle-aged man, dead on bathroom floor: face bluish, eyes bulging
like he’s had an aortic aneurysm. That stuff’s modal for
Morningside. It’s the other circumstances that are the
issue.
Mikey is mostly
naked. You suppose “mostly” is the most appropriate term, because
he is wearing certain items that could pass for “clothed” in an SM
club with a really strict dress code: black bondage tape around
wrists and ankles, suspender belt and fishnets, and a ball gag. His
veined cock is purple and engorged, as hard as a truncheon. That,
and the hose up his arse and the puddle of ming he’s leaking, tell
you all you need to know. Which is this: You’re going to miss your
after-work hairdresser’s appointment.
“Call SOC. I want a
full scene work-up. I want that thing”—you gesture at the Cold-War-era bathroom
nightmare—“taken in as evidence. The fluid, whatever, get it to
forensics for a full report: Ten to one there’s something dodgy in
it.” You look him in the eye. “Sorry, Jase, but we’re gannae be
working late on this.”
“Aw shite,
Liz.”
Aw shite indeed: With a sinking feeling, you
realize what’s up. Jase was hoping you’d take it off his plate,
eager-beaver ready to grab an opportunity to prove your chops in
front of head office so he can go home to his end-of-shift
paper-work and wind down. Well, it’s not going to happen quite like
that. You are going to take it off his
plate—as duty DI, it’s your job. But that’s not the end of the
game.
“You’ve got to ask
where all this”—your gesture takes in the town house around
you—“came from. And I find the circumstances of his death highly
suggestive. Until we can rule out foul play, I’m tagging this as
probable culpable homicide, and until CID move in and take over,
you’re on the team. At least one other person was involved—unless
you think he trussed himself up then slipped and fell on that
gadget—and I want to ask them some questions.”
“Reet, reet.” He
takes your point. Sighing lugubriously, he pulls out his phone and
prepares to take notes. “You said he’s got form?”
You nod. “The
conviction’s spent: You won’t see it in CopSpace without criminal
intelligence permissions. He did five years in Bar-L and forfeiture
of proceeds of crime to the tune of 2 million euros, if I remember
the facts correctly. Illegal online advertising and sale of
unlicensed pharmaceuticals. That was about six years ago, and he
went down for non-violent, and I don’t think he’s currently a
person of interest.” You pause. “The housekeeper found him, right?
And the security contractors—”
“’ E’s with Group
Four. I served ’em a disclosure notice, and they coughed to one
visitor in the past two hours—the cleaner.”
“Two
hours?”
“Aye, they was
swithering on aboot privacy and confidentiality an’ swore blind
they couldna give me oot more’n that.” He looks at you hopefully.
“Unless you want to escalate . . . ?”
“You bet I will.”
Getting data out of sources like home-monitoring services gets
easier with seniority: The quid pro quo is that you need to show
reasonable cause. Luckily cause doesn’t get much more reasonable
than a culpable homicide investigation. You glance at Mikey again.
Poor bastard. Well, maybe not. He went
down as a non-violent offender but did his time under Rule 45, like
he was a kiddie-fiddler or a snitch or something similar. For good
reason: Something similar is exactly
what he was.
You walk towards the
door, talking. “Let’s seal the room. Jase, I want you to call
Sergeant”—Elvis, your memory
prompts—“Sorensen, and tell him we’ve got a probable culpable
homicide I want to hand off to the X Division duty officer. Next,
call SOC, and tell them we’ve got a
job. I’m going downstairs to talk to Mags and the witness. If you
get any serious pushback or queries from up the greasy pole, point
them at me, but for the next fifteen minutes, I want you to run
interference.”
The next fifteen
minutes is likely to be your entire quota of face time with the
witness before a blizzard of virtual paper-work descends on your
head—that’s why you’re leaning on Jase. And you really want a
chance to get your head around what’s going on here, before the
regulars from X Division—the Criminal Investigation Department, as
opposed to your own toytown fiefdom (which is laughably a
subsidiary of theirs, hence the “D” in front of your “I”)—take the
stiff with the stiffy off your plate.
It’s a dead certainty
that when the shit hits the fan, this case is going to go
political. You’re going to have Press Relations and Health and
Safety crawling all over you simply because it happened on your
watch, and you were the up-and-coming officer who put Mikey in
pokey back when you had a career ladder to climb. Not to mention
the fact that something has twitched your non-legally-admissible
sixth sense about this whole scene: You’ve got a nasty feeling that
this might go beyond a mere manslaughter charge.
Mikey was a spammer
with a specialty in off-licence medication. And right now you’d bet
your cold overdue dinner that, when Forensics return that work-up
on the enema fluid from the colonic irrigation machine, it’ll turn
out to be laced with something like Viagra.
Shock, disgust, and
depression.
You are indeed late
home for your tea, as it happens—and never mind the other
appointment. Michael Blair, esq., has shafted you from beyond
the—well, not the grave, at least not yet: But you don’t need to
mix the metaphor to drink the cocktail, however bitter. So you’re
having a bad hair day at the office tomorrow, and never mind the
overtime.
Doubtless Jase is
going home to his wife and the bairns, muttering under his breath
about yet another overtime claim thanks to the ballbreaking
politically oriented inspector who disnae ken her career’s over
yet; or maybe not. (He’s still young: born to a couple of ravers
after the summer of love, come of age just in time to meet
Depression 2.0 head-on. They’re a very different breed from the
old-timers.) And on second thoughts, maybe he’s a wee bit smug as
well—being first on scene at a job like this will probably keep him
in free drinks for years to come.
But in the final
analysis your hair-do and his dinner don’t signify. They’re
unimportant compared to the business at hand, a suspicious death
that’s going to make newsfeeds all over the blogosphere. Your job
right now is to nail down the scene ready for CID to take over.
There’s a lot to do, starting with initializing the various
databases and expert systems that will track and guide the
investigation—HOLMES for evidence and case management, BOOTS for
personnel assignment, VICTOR for intelligence oversight—calling in
the support units, preventing further contamination of the
evidence, and acting as firstresponse supervisor. And so you do
that.
You go down to the
kitchen—sterile, ultra-modern, overflowing with gizmos from the
very expensive bread-maker (beeping forlornly for attention) to the
cultured meat extruder (currently manufacturing chicken
sans egg)—where you listen to the
housekeeper; Mrs. Sameena Begum, middle-aged and plump and very
upset, wringing her hands in the well-appointed kitchen:
In all my years I have never seen
anything like it. You nod
sympathetically and try to draw out useful observations, but alas,
she isn’t exactly CID material.
After ten minutes and
fifty seconds, Jase can no longer draw off the incoming flak and
begins forwarding incoming calls. You make your excuses, send PC
Berman to sit with her, then go outside and start processing a
seemingly endless series of sitrep requests from up and down the
food-chain.
An eternity later,
Detective Chief Inspector MacLeish from CID turns up. Dickie’s
followed by a vanload of blue-overalled SOCOs and a couple of
freelance video bloggers. After another half-hour of debriefing,
you finally get to dump your lifelog to the evidence servers, hand
over the first-responder baton, finish your end-of-shift wiki
updates and hand-offs, and head for home. (The segway, released
from duty, will trundle back to the station on its
own.)
The pavement smells
of feral honeysuckle, grass, and illegal dog shit. You notice
cracked concrete slabs underfoot, stone walls to either side.
Traffic is light this evening, but you have to step aside a couple
of times to dodge kamikaze Edinburgh cyclists on the pavement—no
lights, helmets, or heed for pedestrians. It’s almost enough to
make you pull your specs on and tag them for Traffic—almost. But you’re off duty, and there’s a rule for
that: a sanity clause they added to Best Practice guidelines some
years ago that says you’re encouraged to stop being a cop the
moment you log out.
They brought that
particular guide-line in to try and do something about the alarming
rise in burn-out cases that came with CopSpace and the other
reality-augmentation initiatives of the Revolution in Policing
Affairs that they declared a decade ago. It doesn’t always
work—didn’t save your civil partnership in the end—but you’ve seen
what happens to your colleagues who fail to ring-fence their
professional lives. That way lies madness.
(Besides, it’s one of
the ticky-boxes they grade you on in Learning and
Development/Personal Welfare/Information Trauma Avoidance. How well
you let go and connect back with what the folks writing the exams
laughably call the real world. And if
you fail, they’ll downgrade you on Emotional Intelligence or some
other bullshit non-performance metric, and make you jump through
some more training hoops. The beatings will continue until morale
improves.)
It hasn’t always been
thus. Back before the 1990s, policing used to be an art, not a
science, floundering around in the opaque darkness of the
pre-networked world. Police officers were a breed apart—the few,
the proud, defenders of law and order fighting vainly to hold back
a sea of filth lapping at the feet of a blind society. Or so the
consensus ran in the cosy after-hours pub lock-in, as the old guard
reinforced their paranoid outlook with a pie and a pint and stories
of the good old days. As often as not a career on the beat was the
postscript to a career in the army, numbing the old combat nerves .
. . them and us with a vengeance, and
devil take the hindmost.
It all changed around
the time you were in secondary school; a deluge of new legislation,
public enquiries, overturned convictions, and ugly miscarriages of
justice exposed the inadequacies of the old system. A new
government and then a new culture of intelligence-driven policing,
health and safety guide-lines, and process quality assurance
arrived, promising to turn the police into a shiny new engine of
social cohesion. That was the police force you’d studied for and
then signed up to join—modern, rational, planned, there to provide
benign oversight of an informed and enabled citizenry rather than a
pasture for old war-horses.
And then the Internet
happened: and the panopticon society, cameras everywhere and
augmented-reality tools gobbling up your peripheral vision and
greedily indexing your every spoken word on duty. Globalization and
EU harmonization and Depression 2.0 and Policing 3.0 and another
huge change of government; then semi-independence and another change of government, slogans like
Reality-Based Policing gaining traction, and then Standards-Based
Autonomous Policing—back to the few, the proud, doing it their own
way (with permanent surveillance to log their actions, just in case
some jakey on the receiving end of an informal gubbing is
also lifelogging on his mobie, and runs
screeching about police brutality to the nearest ambulance
chaser).
Sometime in the past
few years you learned a dirty little secret about yourself: that
the too-tight spring that powered your climb through the ranks has
broken, and you just don’t care anymore.
Let’s have a look at
you, shall we? Detective Inspector Liz Kavanaugh, age 38. Born in
Newcastle, went to a decent state grammar school: university for a
BSc in Crime and Criminology in Portsmouth, then graduate entry
into Lothian and Borders Police on Accelerated Promotion Scheme for
Graduates, aged 22. Passed your Diploma in Police Service
Leadership and Management, aged 25. Passed sergeant’s exam, aged
27. MSc in Policing, Policy, and Leadership, aged 29. Moved
sideways into X Division, Criminal Investigations, as detective
sergeant, aged 29. Aged 31: passed inspector’s exam, promotion to
Detective Inspector. Clearly a high-flyer! And then . .
.
If it had all gone
according to your career plan—the Gantt chart you drew by hand and
taped to your bedroom wall back when you were nineteen and burning
to escape—you’d be a chief inspector by now, raising your game to
aim for the heady heights of superintendent and the sunlit uplands
of deputy chief constable beyond. But no plan of battle survives
contact with the enemy, and time is the ultimate opponent. In the
case of your career, two decades have conducted as efficient a
demolition of your youthful goals as any artillery
barrage.
It turns out you left
something rather important off your career plan: for example,
there’s no ticky-box on the diagram for HAVING A LIFE—TASK
COMPLETED. And so you kept putting it off, and de-prioritized it,
and put it off again until the law of conservation of shit-stirring
dragged it front and centre and lamped you upside yer heid, as your
clients might put it.
Which is why you’re
walking to the main road where you will bid for a microbus to carry
you to the wee flat in Clermiston which you and Babs bought on your
Key Worker Mortgage . . . where you can hole up for the evening,
eat a microwave meal, and stare at the walls until you fall asleep.
And tomorrow you’ll do it all over again.
Keep taking the happy
pills, Liz. It’s better than the alternative.