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:
You walk towards the door, talking. “Let’s seal the room. Jase, I want you to call Sergeant”—
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
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—
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
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 . . .
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
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
