Halting State (5 page)

You’ve been on scene for an hour already, your stress levels are rising, and it’s taken you this long to figure out just one thing: You’re going to be late for your evidence ’cast thanks to Wayne Richardson, Marketing Director and Prize Twat, who sits wittering and wringing his hands on the other side of his desk while you try to figure out how to investigate a crime that was committed by a radge bunch o’ faeries in a place that doesn’t exist. Your smartphone’s nagging you about hitting your transferrable overtime limit, and you’ve already blown your quota for time off in lieu this month; if this goes on you’re gonnae have to put it on unpaid hours and file for a time credit from Human Resources. It’s even threatening to snitch to the Occupational Health Department that your Work/Life Balance is out of kilter: If this goes on, it’ll be off to the compulsory Yoga and Aromatherapy classes with Stress Management for you. Inspector Mac will gently chide you in that calm and measured tone of voice that’s fifty times worse than being screamed at by a tanked-up ned: politely enquiring why you didn’t talk the idiot into going straight to SOCA instead of dropping his pants on your desk (and Mac’s by proxy). And speaking of neds, that’s exactly what there’s going to be one more of back on the streets if the sheriff fails to see your testimony in their browser when they come to that case.

Congratulations. You’ve got the investigation from hell to add to your desk load: one that’s probably going to run and run for weeks and months, suck in scarce resources from all over, and likely as not will never deliver a clean-up because the festering cunts who go in for high-order stock scams and use botnets in Pakistan can also afford silver-tongued barristers. So your clean-up metric is about to take a nose-dive in the shitter, and all because Wayne Richardson, Marketing Director, panicked and phoned 211 instead of listening to his boss and emailing his company lawyers.

Things are just about coming together in an investigatory sort of way. You’ve borrowed the MD’s office, and they’ve hooked you up with access outwith the corporate DMZ so you can talk to the station again. Along with the formal caution, you tipped them the nod that they’ll get their shinies back after the ICE take a gander at them, which may take some time, so they should kick back and relax. With any luck, that should stop them from getting all upset while the Information Crime Executive play with their toys. (You wouldn’t bother except they’re Victims, and Victims of Class at that, and the Victim’s Charter Ombudsman can have your guts for downpipes if you piss them off: So don’t do that, alright?) You’ve called the said scene-of-crime boys and told them to get their arses down here, and you’ve uploaded that first barking boardroom scene up to the station server, and you’ve tasked Bob with getting statements, fingerprints, and DNA swabs from the other witnesses.

You’re getting ready to take a deposition from Wayne Richardson, Prize Twat, and you’re beginning to feel like it’s all under control, when your phone rings. It’s on voice-only and with a sinking feeling you see it’s the skipper. “I ken I’m late, sir, but there’s nothing to be done about it, this one’s doing my head in. If you’ve been following it…?”

“Aye well, I have that, Sue.” Mac sounds unnaturally phlegmatic about the whole business. “It’s not your fault you’re running late. How many statements have you got lined up?”

You take a deep breath. “There’s eight o’ them in the shop, and another who works from home. They’re trying to call him in but he isna answering his phone or IM. There was no signal down here ’til I got them to give me a line, so I went manual at first. I’ve sent you the boardroom shoot, that’s our formal complaint. I was about to have a talk with Mr. Richardson from Marketing, to get the statements going. The alleged crime…I’ve just uploaded a copy o’ their video grab; I figure it speaks for itself. I’ve called ICE in, but they’re swearing blind about how the crime happened on a bunch of mobile phones all over the planet, so I figure we’re just going to have to hope there’s some evidence for them to find when they lift their laptops. Just getting a straight story about what it is these folks do for a living is giving me a migraine. Anyway, even with Bob helping, interviewing this shower is going to take me a couple of days, and I’m not afrit to say, I’m in over my head, sir.”

Which is the honest truth. Collaring neds for breaking and entering is one thing, managing the gay community outreach program and training constables is another, but international cybercrime in a nuclear bunker under Drum Brae is
right
off the map. It’s not something they teach you how to tackle in the coursework for the sergeant’s exam. You don’t mean it to come out sounding like a whining plea for help, but it does: “What do you want me to do next?”

Inspector McGregor, bless him, isn’t old-school and doesn’t believe in hanging his officers out to dry. “Ach, well, you’ve made a good start simply by hanging in there and taking names.” He pauses for a moment, then his voice deepens slightly, his tone confiding. “I just got word from Division that they’ve had a notification of serious financial crime served by a bunch of solicitors working for a shower called Tiger Investments in London. Meanwhile, a different firm working for Hayek Associates PLC—who would be your mob, I’m thinking—are yammering on the phone about hacking and insider trading, so it looks like the shite’s already hit the fan, and everyone’s lawyering up for a pie fight. Consider yourself lucky the
Scotsman
hasn’t already sent a news crew. Anyhoo, Liz Kavanaugh and her firm are on their way over as soon as they can extricate themselves from a meeting, so look busy and secure the area. All you need to do is stop anyone leaving, log any traffic, start the interviews, and hold the fort until she takes over, and you’re out of there with full marks. Are you okay with that?”

You breathe a sigh of relief. Detective Inspector Kavanaugh is a high-flyer who’s got her teeth well into the local heavies; let her break her skull on this one. “Aye, that’s doable, sir. But, about the Hastie case—”

“That’s your wee ned, is he not?”

You feel a stab of gratitude that he picked up on it: “The very same, sir.”

“I’ll get on to the Sheriff’s court and try to buy us a week. If they’re not having it, and you’re still tied up I’ll send someone round to record you on-site, but I’m not taking you off the SOC until X Division have got their feet on the ground. Is that alright by you?”

“Aye. Sir.” You breathe another sigh of relief. You’ll probably be late coming off shift, and you’re going to spend a good part of Friday hanging around here—you know
all
about those X Division high-flyers and their meetings—but that’s the least of your worries right now, and what with the paperwork this is going to generate, you’ll make it up in desk time over the next week. “I’ll get right to it.”

“Bye.” He ends the call, and you open the door. The pacing stops suddenly: Wayne nearly jumps out of his expensively manicured skin as he notices you.

“Mr. Richardson? If I can have a few minutes of your time?” You smile politely, not showing him your teeth.

“Um, I was about to call our US office, fill them in on the picture—”

It’s two hours to shift end and it’s Mary’s night off, which means she’ll be annoyed if you’re not home in time to keep Davey under control when the wee pest gets home from school.
If? When.
You can just see this one running and running, so you drop the velvet glove treatment for a moment: “This is police business, Mr. Richardson. I want to take a formal statement from you
right now.
Your colleagues can wait.”

“Uh…” He’s doing the fluttering thing again. “Alright.” He shuffles towards the office as if he thinks you’re going to arrest him. Which isn’t actually on the agenda yet, but…

You point him at the visitor’s chair. “Look. Sit there. Yes, like that.” You put your phone on the desk and aim it at him. “This is a phone, okay, I know it looks clunky an’ old-fashioned, that’s because it’s shielded, ye ken? I want you to look at this camera. Alright, what’s going to happen is this. First, I’m going to officially caution you. This is routine, and it doesn’t mean I’m going to charge you with anything, but a crime has been committed here, and you’re on the scene, so it’s routine to caution everyone. Then I’m going to formally ID you, and we’ll have a little chat, which will be logged under rules of evidence. At the end of this session, I’ll email ye the raw file. About three days later you’ll get a transcript in the email. What you do is you sign it in ink and bring it to the station within seven days, with your ID card, where we take a saliva sample, register it, and it goes into the file as evidence. That’s so it can be brought up in court.”

He frowns, looking worried.

“What?”

“What if, uh, what if the transcript’s wrong? Or something?”

You can’t help yourself: You snort. “The transcribers can be pish, sometimes, I’ll give ye that, it’s what you get when you farm out half the office jobs to Lagos and the other half to a buggy AI, but you’re allowed to correct it before you sign it. It’s
your
statement to
us
, ye ken. Just don’t spread it around.”

(You don’t feel the need to remind him that failure to sign and return the affidavit within 7 (seven) working days is a summary offence under the Criminal Justice Reform (Scotland) Act (2012), failure to present a valid biometric ID card is a more serious offence under the Identity Cards Act (2006), and fiddling with the statement may be an offence under the Criminal Law (Consolidation) (Scotland) Act (1995). Because, well, as a law-abiding citizen it’s his job to know these things, and you’ve a not-quite-teenage son to be riding herd on besides.)

“Okay, I guess.” His shoulders droop. “Where do we begin?”

“Well. Now we’re on the record”—you pause to tell the button on the phone to save a time-stamp—“in your own words, would you mind explaining to me exactly what is it that your company does and what went wrong today?”

It’s a Friday morning in a North London suburb, and you haven’t won the lottery yet, and nobody’s drafted you for the King’s Musketeers, so it’s off to work you go. (Actually, you don’t buy lottery tickets in the first place. You ran the figures back when you were seventeen and, wishful thinking or no, you’re not
that
stupid. But that’s not the point, is it?) It’s a Friday morning, you’re on the job, and Chris left an email on your mobile about a 10
A.M
. crisis meeting.
Crisis, what crisis?
There was none on the horizon when you left work yesterday evening. Hopefully it’s just HMRC querying the executive bizjet account consolidation file again.

You check out your shoulder in the bathroom mirror. That’s quite some bruise Mike landed on you at the club. The pint and a half of Budvar in the Frog and Tourettes afterwards let you sleep without noticing it, but it’s stiffening up now, and you’re going to have to work that shoulder carefully for the next few days. So it’s the black blouse and the grey suit today. Which will need washing by the end of the week because the Tube seats are filthy these days. TfL can’t afford to clean them because they’re in crunch mode, buying their way out of their Infraco PPPs to avoid bankruptcy. The mess defederalization has left the country in has really come home to roost this decade: What the cooked books give, the cooked books taketh away. Isn’t that the way the world works?

Breakfast is a hastily munched Kellogg’s bar washed down with a glass of organic apple juice. You grab the latest copy of
Accounting, Auditing and Accountability
and stuff it in your briefcase, along with the usual: pen, iPod, your father’s antique pocket calculator, and a dog-eared copy of Tobler’s manual of sword-fighting that you borrowed from Matthew. You visit the bathroom briefly for a smear of lipstick and eyeliner, then you’re out the door.

Early May used to be the chilly tail-end of spring, according to Mum. And it certainly used to be cooler. Now the savage summer kicks in weeks earlier, and everyone who can afford it is fitting air-conditioning. (Which in turn is doing no good for the country’s ECB stability pact compliance—
no, cut that out! They’re not paying you to daydream fiscal policy risk analyses on the commute time, are they?
)

Harrow is its usual sweaty, smelly self, cramped and cluttered with cars that seem to get bigger every year, in a weird race with the price of petrol: Look who can afford to fill the bigger Chelsea tractor. It’s already five to eight, and the Tube’s in full-on rush hour mode. You manage to elbow your way into a carriage at West Harrow and, miracle of miracles, there’s a seat edge to perch on all the way to Baker Street (by which time the temperature has got to be pushing thirty degrees and there’s a solid wall of bodies between you and the door—good thing you’re not claustrophobic). Then it’s another half hour on the Hammersmith and City line, rattling and breathlessly hot all the way across London to Whitechapel, and finally fifteen minutes strap-hanging on the DLR south towards Wapping, through the weirdly cyberpunk landscape of geodesic glass dildo-shaped skyscrapers alternating with decaying left-over Olympic infrastructure and cookie-cutter housing developments. You’ve got it timed down to the nearest minute, and it still takes you ninety, minimum, to do the door-to-door. Count the working days lost—you spend fifteen hours a week commuting, seven hundred and fifty hours a year draining down the sump hole of the capital’s crap transport infrastructure. If you could afford to move east you would, but the bits you can afford are all doomed: You’ve seen the flood maps for the Thames Gateway suburbs and know which insurance firms are whistling past the graveyard…

Because you’re dead good at your job. Now if only you had a life, too, eh?

The office opens its doors and swallows you off the street. Once upon a time it started life as an unassuming Georgian town house; but today, the garden is overgrown with Foster Associates geodesics, the roof is covered in solar tiles, and the door scanned your RFIDs and worked out who you were while you were still halfway up the street. The HQ of Dietrich-Brunner Associates is probably worth more than some Third World countries. You hole up in the ladies’ for a minute to freshen up, then it’s up the lift to the third floor, where the junior associates swelter under the low eaves.

After you drop your briefcase you head straight for the coffee station. It’s turning half nine, and there’s a queue of thirsty associates, ordered by pecking order, waiting for Jessica or Esmé or whoever it is from Admin to quit fiddling with the cartridge and get out the way. A bunch of the associates are glassed-up and fiddling with spreadsheets or in ludic colloquia, but you didn’t think to strap your office to your face before you headed for your fix, which leaves you open to the kind of petty irritation that comes with being forced to stand and queue with no distractions. Your spirits droop: Then they droop further when you notice Adam Elliot (or he notices you). He’s the wrong kind of distraction. But something tells you that a couple of the other associates are logging everything. Certainly Margaret Harrison, up front in the queue, has her associate partner specs on but isn’t doing the in-meeting hand-dance. So maybe he’ll keep his needling to himself for once.

“Hi, Xena!” he chirps, “Killed any commuters today?” You try to ignore him: Being rude wouldn’t be constructive, and
constructive
counts for a lot around here. Adam fancies himself as a big swinging dick in risk analytics: Leave out the “big” and “swinging” and he’s right. But he won’t let go. “How did your quest turn out?”

You know there’s no advantage to be gained by murdering idiots—it doesn’t teach the idiot anything and it might give onlookers the idea that you take them seriously—but you haven’t had your double ristretto yet, so you muster up the coldest stare you can find and say as steadily as you can: “My private life is none of your business, Adam.” A minor imp of the perverse prompts you to add, “If you keep passing unwelcome comments, I’m going to have to consider logging these incidents for future action.”

“Hey, that’s not nice! I’m only kidding.” He turns passive-aggressive puppy-dog eyes on you. “You know it’s just fun, don’t you?”

“Why should she know that?” Margaret interrupts sharply. That gets his attention: She’s fortyish, formidable, and probably due to make full partner any month now. She sounds annoyed. “Go pick on someone your own size, Mr. Elliot. Or at least someone with a compatible sense of humour.”

“But I was just—”

“Making an idiot of yourself in front of the peanut gallery. Do yourself a favour? Find yourself something constructive to do with your time.” You cross your arms, and Adam slinks away empty-handed. If you ever decide to go postal in the workplace, you’ll be sure to start by showing him your first-class letter-opener: In the meantime, though, Margaret deserves some thanks. “What was that about?” she asks you.

You feel your cheeks heating. “Adam’s got some ideas about me, and he likes to needle.”

“Really?” She raises an eyebrow. “I’d never have guessed. What about, exactly? I may be able to help.”

Oh bugger.
This is exactly what you didn’t want to happen, but there’s no polite way to put her off. “In my
copious free time
”—you make sure the ironic emphasis is obvious: if there’s one thing that shows disloyalty to the partnership, it’s spending your energy outside of work on something that
isn’t constructive
—“I have a hobby. I used to be into gaming, but I drifted sideways into historic re-enactment.”

“Gaming?” She raises an eyebrow. “Historic re-enactment?”

“Live-action real-time role-playing. Then sideways into mediaeval German sword-fighting,” you clarify. This is the point at which most people’s eyes glaze over, which is the reaction you’re hoping for. But Margaret doesn’t take the offered bait.

“Gaming? That’s interesting. Would you have played”—she pauses to twitch at a user interface that’s invisible to you—“Dungeons and Dragons at some point?”

Whoops.
“Not really. I was heavily involved in
SPOOKS
at one time, but…” The woman from Admin finishes fiddling, there’s a clunk and clatter from the machine, and the queue moves forward. Margaret seems to have sacrificed her place at the head just so she can interrogate you. “It tried to eat my life, so I cut right back.”

“That’s useful to know.”

“It’s old news!” The queue moves forward in lockstep again as Eddie from Phone Support gets into place with a cup holder for the black gang downstairs.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound patronizing, I really meant it may be useful—are you on the facial Chris called?”

You nod.

“Good, I thought so. Look, all I know is that it has something to do with the Tiger Investments account. Chris said to be on the lookout for gamers because we’ll need them, God only knows why. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why your name came up.”

“Looking for gamers?”
For the Tiger Investments account?
Even through the haze of embarrassment—that bastard Adam
has
been talking behind the bike shed—it sounds bizarre. “That’s what the crisis group call is about?”

The queue ratchets forward again, bringing her to the front. She smiles patronizingly. “Look, terribly sorry, must fly. See you in half an hour?”

You force a brittle smile in return. You’ve got a feeling you’re going to need that caffeine.