Rule 34 - Charles Stross [137]
Back on South Clerk Street you hijack a microbus with the aid of your company debit card and bid handsomely to divert it halfway to Dean Village. There’s some jerk on the top deck who counterbids and it ends up ramping to twenty euros, but fuck it—two DIs, on a murder investigation: Doc will square it for you. You walk the last stretch and are back at HQ by eleven.
The MacDonald interview has preceded you—uploaded in real time, it made it into the BABYLON intel feed and promptly bamboozled everyone on the team who was paying attention. As you walk through the shielded doors, a blizzard of virtual Post-it notes descends on you, terminating in a terse SEE ME, signed DCI MacLeish. It’s like being back in grammar school again. You give Kemal the eye-ball. “Got to run, make yourself at home in ICIU.”
You barely walk through the door to D31 before Dickie is on your case. Face like thunder, beetling brows, he rushes you. “This way,” he growls, striding towards a confessional cubicle—beige fabric walls, antisound damper poised overhead like a metal mantis. He barely waits to get into the cone of silence before he launches on you. “I don’t know what you fucking think you’re doing, Kavanaugh, snooping around on your off shift and sticking your nose in—”
“Hey, what the fuck are you—”
“No, don’t you start! I should take this up the chain reet now. You’re a loose cannon. This report on the Straight woman is the final straw—”
You snap. “Fuck off.”
“Whit?”
His expression is a picture in peach, slowly ripening towards plum. You ken you’ve got about five seconds before he really explodes, so you go for the throat “She came to me, sir. Because, you know, outside of work I have this thing called a life, and Dorothy is one of my friends. Friends, Dickie, you’ve heard of them? Jesus fucking Christ, have you never had a friend come to you with a question about the law? Come on. Tell me. Have you?”
“I’ve nivver had a so-called friend cough a fucking POI in a murder investigation in my lap!”
“Well neither have I, but there’s always a first time. And I bet you’ve never had a girl-friend cough to a date-rape situation either, have you? But that’s what friends are for.”
The “R” word gets his attention. “Rape, did you say?”
You make a cutting gesture: “I didna think there was a case to answer, or I’d have had her down the clinic before her feet touched the floor. Questionable sex, with a side order of sociopathic manipulation involved. Her word against his, no drugs or threats of violence, it gets murky fast. But no, sir. The reason I filed the report was this John Christie sock puppet is in play, and I figured you might want to talk to him. About what he was doing visiting our friend Mr. Blair. Ahem.” You don’t add, instead of adding two plus two to make 16.7 and threatening me with a disciplinary. That’s understood. But his expression begins to droop from bullish to sheepish, and the choleric colour is fading.
“Jesus, Liz.”
You’ve won, you see, but you’re still pissed off at him for losing his rag in the first place. Probably best to let him know about it, both barrels in the face: Dickie’s not terribly perceptive when it comes to subtleties of interpersonal relations. “We are on the same team, sir. I really do not appreciate this hard-on you’ve got for me. I am attempting to discharge my duty as efficiently as possible, and you keep dumping on me. When I stumbled over a lead by pure chance, I sent it your way because that’s the right thing to do: I do not expect to catch shit by return of email. If you’d be happier with me off the case, then just say so: I’ve got a patch of my own to cultivate. But some professional courtesy would be appreciated around here.”