Rule 34 - Charles Stross [80]
Dickie’s left eyelid is twitching: Your cheek is threatening to come out in sympathy. “You’re telling me that the civilian capture and release contact on the Blair house was using false ID in the name of a serial killer, and nobody clocked it?”
Constable Ballantyne shakes his head. “Constable Brown logged his ID and took a swab, sir—the driving license checked out with DVLA and the mug shot matched. It wasn’t false at that level—”
Now your cheek does twitch because this is the kind of shit that isn’t supposed to happen. The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency database backs onto the Identity and Passport Service’s database, and you can’t get a driving license without authenticating. Which means the joker who just horned in on your crime scene is walking around with a genuine identity record on the national system in the name of a long-ago-executed serial killer.
“—The birth date on his driving license, uh, Constable Brown didn’t clock it at the time: He was just checking that the name and face were valid. But in the database, it’s given as 15 July 1953—the day the real Christie was executed. I reviewed Ed’s helmet video, and the fly bastard sure doesn’t look seventy.”
He’s been rattling on into a growing circle of silence for almost thirty seconds, oblivious to the gigantic loaf he’s pinched in the middle of the investigation. It is becoming glaringly obvious that someone is deliberately fucking with the brains of Edinburgh’s finest, and wants you to know it. Dickie, no cool cucumber at the best of times, is giving you serious concern for his ticker. Half the uniforms in the room are desperately trying not to boggle (and failing). The other half aren’t even trying. A vein pulses weirdly in MacLeish’s forehead: Then a curious ripple in the hairy salt-and-pepper caterpillar that passes for his moustache presages six urgently grunted words, pulled from so deep in his abdomen that you’d think DC Ballantyne had just kneed him in the nuts:
“Whoever this fucker is, pull him.”
Then, as an aside, Dickie adds: “Find that swab and run it on the—no.” He nods formally at Kemal. “Put it on the wire to Europol and flag it as a suspect implicated in Inspector Aslan’s investigation. And run it on NDNAD. Then backtrace the driving license, find out who issued it, and open a new investigation: how this ringer got onto the IPS database. There’ll be a counterfeiting offence in there, probably more than one.” He knuckles his forehead as if squeezing out more charges, then glances at you and Kemal. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to update the super now.” His banked anger is still there: But it’s not pointed your way anymore. “What a pile of”—he claws at an invisible target—“shit.”
The silence dissolves in a buzz of crosstalk. Kicked anthills, indeed. This might be a breakthrough in the long run, but in the short term, it’s every case manager’s nightmare: to have a suspect walk right into the middle of the crime scene, bare their arse at the officers on the spot, and waltz out again. The prurient eyes of Edinburgh are upon you, and this is juicy enough that it’s not going to stay under wraps for long—it’s going to be top of every newscrawl within hours, and Dickie’s the one who’ll bear the brunt of the jokes and finger-pointing.
Deprived of responsibility for the moment, you take the opportunity to walk around the table, showing Kemal how the investigation is set up—every police force does things differently. He nods appreciatively and asks sensible questions as you discreetly bring yourself up to speed. The Crolla scene is just as bizarre as the Blair bathroom. Here: a mattress stuffed with long-withdrawn one-pound notes that were cancelled more than a decade ago, even before the Euro switch-over. There: