Halting State

“No.” You take a deep breath and try to pull yourself together. “I’m okay.”

Hughes leads you back out through the short corridor and into his office, where Inspector Kavanaugh is waiting, with Elaine, whose expression of numb surprise you can feel mirrored on your own face.

“Well?” Asks Kavanaugh. She glances at Elaine warningly. “Would you please state for the record the name of the person in the observation room as it is known to you?”

“Certainly.” You lick your lips. And now for the surprise package. “He’s called Wayne, uh, Richmond? No, Richardson. And he was the Marketing Director at Hayek Associates.”

SUE: Civil Contingencies

Morning. It’s Mary’s day off work, and you’ve just about got the wild wee one into his school uniform and fed, and you are about to strap your kit on and hie thee to the cop shop when Davey’s phone rings. It’s a kiddie-phone, bright orange-and-black plastic bristling with gadgets, and he listens for a moment before handing it to you: “It’s for yiz, maw.”

“Who is it?” you ask, as you try to find a clear spot to dump your kit.

“It’s some wummun,” he says. Very helpful.

“Aw, fer crying out—” You dump your overladen webbing belt on the floor and make a grab for the phone. It’s probably some telesales bot—they’ve been pesting him lately—“Yes?”

“Sergeant?” Your back stiffens instinctively: You know that voice.

“Skipper?” You glance round, warily. Davey’s looking at you, round-eyed and mischievous like some kind of self-propelled phone tap. “Go comb your hair, Davey.”

Davey legs it. “What’s up, boss?”

Liz Kavanaugh is matter-of-fact. “We’ve got a big problem, Sue. First, I want you to switch your kit off and pull the batteries. You’re not wired yet, are you?”

“Jesus, skipper, that’s against—”

“Don’t I fucking know it!” she snarls, and your hair stands on end. “Sorry, Sergeant, I don’t want anyone else to get…Quick. Are you wired?”

“Not yet, I was just sorting out the wee one first. I’m not on shift for another forty minutes.”

“You’ll be putting in for overtime and expenses before today’s over, I’m afraid. Okay, here’s what I want you to do; you may want to make notes on paper, but do not, under any circumstances, put them into any kind of machine. First, I want you to get over to the nearest Tescos and buy six prepaid mobies, using your own credit card. We’ll put them through expenses later, so keep the paper receipt. Second, I want you to get over to Fettes Row. Get one of the phones registered and charged up, then find Detective Inspector Long, give him the phone, and tell him to phone me. The number I’m carrying today is—you’ve got a pen?”

She goes on like this for a couple of minutes as you frantically scribble on the guts of an organic Weetabix box. Finally: “Are there any questions, Sergeant?”

You don’t know where to begin. Are you off your meds, skipper? Would be a good starting place, if a wee bit tactless: Have you cleared this with the military? Might be another. Liz isn’t simply not going by the book, she’s just about throwing it in the shredder. Finally, you clear your throat. “Aye, skipper. Isn’t this a bit, kind of, irregular?”

The giggle that blasts out of Davey’s phone nearly makes you drop it in the cereal bowl. “You just noticed? How perceptive of you!” She takes a moment to collect herself. “Sorry, Sue, we’re a bit stressed around here right now. The situation is, ah, at least as serious as the possibilities I outlined to you yesterday. I have in my hand a written letter from the chief constable—typed on a manual typewriter—citing his orders from the minister of justice—which were handwritten—invoking the Civil Contingencies Act. It’s fall-out from yesterday. Have you got that? This time the shit’s really going to hit the fan…”

At the local Tesco you find yourself in the automatic checkout aisle behind two other officers who you know by sight. Your hand-baskets are full of mobies. You all carefully avoid making eye contact with one another, but you can’t help noticing that one of them is also stocking up on water bottles.

You’re not that slow on the uptake; before you left home you washed out your backpack hydration system, the one you use for football matches, and filled it with freshly filtered water: And you made sure to give Davey an extralarge packed lunch, and five times as much bus fare as he’s likely to need to get home. He’s wearing his good shoes and has a spare pair of socks and a dog-eared old A-Z in his pack with gran’s address and a couple of other safe houses marked in red crayon—just in case. Liz Kavanaugh seems to think it’s going to be manageable, but paper doesn’t fail when the critical infrastructure goes down. About the only reason you don’t crack and put the bairn on a train to see his uncle in Liverpool is the worry that it might break down or get lost in the middle of nowhere. Which might be worse. Wouldn’t it?

After you drop five of the six cheap mobies off with Inspector Long, he gives you two more anonymous cereal-packet phones to carry, along with a long handwritten list of phone numbers and names. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out it’s a skeletal org chart, division heads and support units etched in hard black pencil. So you go downstairs and draw out a car—unsurprisingly, almost everything with wheels that turn is already on the road, somewhere—then head over to Meadowplace Road to find the inspector.

What you find at the station is something like an ants’ nest that’s been doused in paraffin but not yet set alight. There’s a frazzled constable on the front desk, and he’s splitting his time between turning MOPs away —“come back tomorrow, we’re too busy to take complaints right now” (which is just not how it’s done)—and grilling every uniform who comes in late. He sees you immediately. “Sergeant Smith? You got any numbers for me, miss?”

You plonk your ad hoc phone book on the blotter in front of him. “Is this what you’re after? I cannae let you keep it—it’s for Inspector Kavanaugh.”

“Just give me a minute…” He goes over it with a pen, copying lines into the gaps on his own list. “We’re not to use the photocopiers, the chief said. Not till they’ve been vetted by ICE.”

You take a deep breath. Well, if that’s how it is…“There’s a team meeting on the Hayek Associates job. You know where it is? I’m due there.”

“Room 204.” He glances up. “I havenae seen the inspector yet, miss. You go up there, and I’ll send someone up with yer list when I’m through with it.”

You thank him and head for the staircase. On your way through the office you notice that the monitors are all turned to face the walls and there’s an unusual clattering, thudding noise—someone’s wheeched out a metal box with a keyboard on the front of it and they’re banging the keys like they’re wee trip-hammers. There’s a sheet of paper sticking out the top, and it vibrates whenever they hit it: a typewriter? Phones are ringing everywhere, the bleeping of cheap no-name mobies, and there’s a big red plastic thing with a rotary dial on the front on the duty sergeant’s desk, like something out of an Agatha Christie video. Jesus, you think, if we’re knocked back into the twentieth century, how’re we going to know what to charge the customers with? It’s a scary thought: The succession of criminal justice acts that the old British government passed, and then the revised justice acts since independence, replaced the old catch-all offences like “breach of the peace” with a huge array of very specific charges (“being aggressive in charge of a Segway or similar scooter after midnight in a residential area”), such that you really need the expert system on your phone to figure out precisely how to throw the charge book at them. Never mind the fact that the station doesn’t have a bloody paper ledger anymore and you can’t actually book a customer into the cells without a worki…

You slip in the back of room 204 and find it’s already crowded. You’ve seen the faces before, at last week’s video conference—this time they’re all present and correct and not wearing their goggles. Verity looks royally fucked-off about something or other, and the detective suits aren’t looking too happy either. And there are others present—what looks like the whole of the murder team from St. Leonard’s, who were working on the Pilton case, chasing Liz’s chimerical blacknet. Full house. Verity glares directly at you. “I believe you’ve got a phone for me, Sergeant?”