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 (If only half the tags weren’t out-of-date, and the other half was free of errors…)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
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.
“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,
“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: “
“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,
“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
