Rule 34 hs-2 Read online

  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 Cl
ermiston 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.

  ANWAR: Job Interview

  Four weeks earlier:

  In the end, it all boils down to this: You’d do anything for your kids. Anything. So: Does this make you a bad da?

  That’s what Mr. Webber just pointed out to you—rubbed your nose in, more like—leaning forward in his squeaky office chair and wagging the crooked index finger of righteousness.

  “I say this more in sorrow than in anger, Anwar”—that’s how he eases himself into one of the little sermons he seems to get his jollies from. You’re the odd one out in his regular client case-load, coming from what they laughably mistake for a stable family background: You’re not exactly Normal for Neds. So he harbours high hopes of adding you to the twelve-month did-not-reoffend column on his departmental report, and consequently preaches at you during these regular scheduled self-criticism sessions. As if you didn’t get enough of that shite from Aunt Sameena already: You’ve already got it off by heart. So you nod apologetically, duck your head, and remember to make eye contact just like the NLP book says, exuding apologetic contrition and remorse until your probation officer drowns in it.

  But Mr. Webber—fat, fiftyish, with a framed row of sheepskins proclaiming his expertise in social work lined up on the wall behind him—might just have got your number down with a few digits more precision than you’d like to admit. And when he said, I know you want to give Naseem and Farida the best start in life you can afford, but have you thought about the kind of example you’re setting them?—it was a palpable strike, although the target it struck wasn’t perhaps quite the one Mr. Webber had in mind.

  He must have seen something in your expression that made him think he’d got through to you, so rather than flogging the dead horse some more, he shovelled you out of his office, with a stern admonition to send out more job applications and email a progress report to him next Thursday. He didn’t bother giving you the usual social-worker crap about seeking a stable life-style—he’s already clocked that you’ve got one, if not that it’s so stable you’re asphyxiating under the weight of it. (See: Not Normal for Neds, above.)

  And so you duck your head and tug your non-existent forelock and shuffle the hell out of the interview suite and away from the probation service’s sticky clutches—until your next appointment.

  It is three on a Thursday afternoon, and you’re out of your weekly probation interview early. You’ve got no job to go to, unless you count the skooshy piecework you’ve been doing on your cousin Tariq’s dating website—using his spare pad and paid for in cash, which you are careful to forget about when discussing income opportunities with Mr. Webber and his colleagues—and you’ve not got the guts to go home to Bibi and the weans in midafternoon and hang around while she cooks dinner in that eloquently expressive silence she’s so good at, which translates as When are you going to get a real job? It’s not like you’ve been out of Saughton long enough to get your legs back under the table anyway; and on top of that, you’re not supposed to use a network device without filling out a bunch of forms and letting Mr. Webber’s nice technical-support people bug it (which would tend to rule out your usual forms of employment, at least for the nonce).

  Which can mean only one thing: It’s pub time.

  To be a Muslim living in Scotland is to be confronted by an existential paradox, insofar as Scotland has pubs the way Alabama has Baptist churches. Everyone worships at the house of the tall fount, and it’s not just about drinking (although a lot of that goes on). Most of the best jobs you’ve ever had came from a late-night encounter at the pub—and paid work, too, for that matter. You’re not a good Muslim—in fact you’re a piss-poor one, as your criminal record can attest—but some residual sense of shame prompts you to try to keep the bad bits of your life well away from the family home. Compartmentalization, Mr. Webber would call it. Anyway, you figure that as long as you avoid the fermented fruit of the vine, you’re not entirely doing it wrong: The Prophet said nothing against Deuchars IPA, did he?

  The more devout and twitchy-curtained neighbours don’t know anything about your private life, and you want to keep it that way: Our neighbour Anwar, he’s a good family man, they say. And if you want the free baby-sitters and community bennies, you’d better keep it that way. So you are discreet: You avoid the local boozers and are at pains never to go home with beer or worse on your breath. Which is why you go about your business in a snug little pub that sits uphill from the top of Easter Road, close by the Royal Terrace Gardens, for a wee outing afterwards.

  Of course, going to the pub is not wholly risk-free. For starters there’s your phone, set to snitch on your location to the Polis—and if they call, you’d better be there to give them a voiceprint. (It’s not like you can leave it at home: You’ve done the custodial part of your sentence, but you’re still under a supervision order, and carrying a phone is part of the terms and conditions, just like wearing a leg tag used to be.)

  Your phone copies them on everything you text or read online, and you heard rumours when you were inside—that the Polis spyware could recognize keywords like “hash” or “dosh.” You figure that’s just the kind of stupid shite paranoid jakies make up to explain why they got huckled for shoplifting on their second day out of prison—but you can’t prove it isn’t so, which is why you keep a dirty sock rolled over the phone’s lower half. (And your real phone is a pay-as-you-go you got Bibi to buy you “for the job hunting.”)

  But anyway: pub time.

  You’re in the back room, surfing on a pad borrowed from the bar as you work your way down your second pint, when the Gnome materializes at your left elbow with a pot of wheat beer and a gleam in his eye. “Good afternoon to you, Master Hussein! Mind if I join you?” The Gnome is a vernacular chameleon: Going by his current assumed accent—plummy upper-class twit—you figure he’s in an expansive mood.

  You nod warily. The Gnome is not your friend—he’s nobody’s friend but his own—but you understand him well enough, and he’s interesting company. You’ve even spent a couple of relaxing afternoons in his bed, although he’s not really your type. “Bent as a seven-bob note,” the Cardinal pronounced him when the subject of trust came up in conversation: “Yes, but he disnae get caught,” you pointed out. On paper, he’s a fine, upstanding member of the community; despite looking like the personification of Uncle Fester cosplay fandom, he even managed to get himself elected as town councillor in some deityforsaken hole in Galashiels. (Probably on the Hairy Twat vote. You can persuade the remaining students at Herriot-Watt’s out-of-town campus to vote for anything if you get them drunk enough, and there’s precious little else to do out there but drink.) “Have a seat.”

  The Gnome sighs appreciatively and smacks his lips, then sits in contemplation of his beer for a minute or two. “What brings you to my office today?”

  “The usual.” You frown. The Gnome claims to work for the university computer-science department, on some big make-work scheme called ATHENA, but he seems to spend most of his time in the back rooms of pubs: You figure he’s most likely working on his own side projects. (He maintains that nobody can earn a full-time living in academia anymore, and who’s to say he’s wrong?) “I’ve just had my weekly sermon, and I don’t need a second serving right now.”

  The Gnome chuckles, a quiet hiccuping noise like a vomiting cat. “I take your point.” He necks another mouthful of beer. “And is business good?”

  “Don’t be daft, Adam.” You switch off the pad. “I’ve only been out two months; my mobie’s running six different kinds of Polis spyware, and I can’t even surf for porn without official permission. What do you think business is like?”

  The Gnome looks duly thoughtful. “What you need is a line of work that is above reproach,
” he declares after a while. “A business that you can conduct from a cosy wee office, that is of such utter respectability that if they’re getting on your tits, you can complain about how shocked, shocked! you are, and they’ll back off.”

  “I couldna hack the law courseware you pointed me at,” you remind him. “And besides, I’ve got a record now.”

  He’s shaking his head. “No. No-no-no. I was thinking . . .” He cocks his head on one side, as he does when he’s hatching one of his malicious little schemes. “I was thinking, how would you like to be an honorary consul?”

  “A what?” Visions of a residence on Calton Road and a shiny black BMW hybrid with diplomatic plates clash confusingly with your gut-deep sense that such a scam is beyond even the admittedly impressive grifting capabilities of the Gnome. “Don’t be silly, I was born over here, I don’t even hold dual Pakistani citizenship—”

  “You don’t understand.” He takes your wrist. His fingers are clammy from his beer glass: “Let me explain. You don’t need to be a native. You just need to be a fine upstanding citizen with an office and enough time to attend to the needs of visiting nationals. The high heid yins all have proper embassies staffed by real diplomats, but there are plenty of small players . . . play-states, just like Scotland’s a play-state, hived off the old Union for the extra vote in the council of ministers in Brussels and some plausible deniability in the budget. The deal is, we find some nowhere country that can only afford a proper embassy in London or Brussels, if that. They issue you with a bunch of papers and an official phone, and you’re on call to help out when one of their people gets into a spot of bother over here. If you’re really lucky, they’ll pay you an honorarium and the office rent.” He winks; the effect is inexpressibly horrifying.