Rule 34 - Charles Stross [81]
“There is something wrong about this,” Kemal tells you, just as one of the uniforms walks over. “It’s more recent, and besides, there is violent human agency—”
“Inspector?”
You squint at the constable. It’s Mary Maguire, with the real-lifecrime hobby: She’s looking worried about something. “Yes?”
“I’ve got a call from the West End control desk: Someone wants an inspector on scene, and for some reason they put it through here and, uh, Inspector Mac’s up to his eye-balls, can you take it?”
Several thoughts come to mind, the first of which is You have got to be kidding, but it would never do to say that. It would put you firmly in not-a-team-player territory, which is not what you want to do if you aspire to ever go back to CID work. And precisely who do you think you are kidding about that? So you bite everything back and nod. “Transfer it.”
A moment later, you hear a still, small voice (with a pronounced Ayreshire accent) in your right ear. “Inspector? Control room here. We have a call from Sergeant MacBride for a DI to provide oversight on a scene in Polwarth, and the house is flagged in CopSpace with a prior you were involved with. BOOTS pulled your name out of the hat with a flag for another suspicious death that might bear on Operation Babylon.”
Your eye-balls track to the translucent sign hovering above the investigation wiki: Oh Jesus, not again. “I’ll be right over, send me the case work flow,” you say. Then you catch Kemal’s eye. “Come along. Apparently we’ve got another one.”
ANWAR: Running Scared
It’s going to be alright; it is not the time for you to meet your Maker yet.
The dead-eyed man with the American accent has gone away, leaving you shaking and throwing up in the toilet. You should have expected this, you tell yourself, as your stomach clenches with the aftershocks of icy terror: It was too good to be true. He has placed his mark on you. You have an inkling that no amount of soap and water will wash this stain from your soul, the knowledge that you are taking Colonel Datka’s money on behalf of men like this.
Hard men you can deal with. You met plenty of them in Saughton and learned to hide your contempt. Underneath it all they were pitiable, as Imam Hafiz would put it: stupid, ignorant, and prejudiced, unable to use the brains that Allah, the merciful, the compassionate, gave them. Prone to fits of rage and frustration at the cards fate had dealt them, rather than holding them close and working out how best to play their hand. There were the violent cases, and the idiot drug users, and the ones who sat in their cells all day rocking from side to side as they listened to invisible voices—and while you hated and feared them for what they might do to you, you could also bring yourself to look down on them. You were only inside because of a spot of bad luck, and once you got out again, you’d be able to pick yourself up and get back on your feet. They had no legs to stand on, no foundation of support in society—
Colonel Datka’s man is not one of their kind.
After his departure, after you finish throwing up, you go back to your cosy little office niche. But it’s not so cosy now that the outside world has smashed the window and climbed in, ransacked the drawers and stirred everything around like a burglar. So you step outside for a few minutes, hands shaking, and look at the clouds scudding past overhead like the ghostly shadows of highland sheep. The sunlight on your hands and face is warming, but it doesn’t melt the frost coating your heart. What is the tariff for aiding and abetting, anyway? Ownership of material likely to be of use in the commission of certain offences . . .
It could be worse. Could be fucking Al-Muhajiroun, revenant Talib headcases or something.