Charles Stross - Halting State

You explain the background, weird calls, and the photographs, and the police reports—and that last call. It’s not true that the inspector has a Botox-frozen face: It goes through quite a few expressions in just thirty seconds, running through a spectrum of surprise and outrage. But then she cuts you off with a brief gesture. “Later.” She glances at the door. “If you can identify the person in there, I’d be very grateful. But I—” The door opens and she swallows whatever she was about to come out with. Framed in the opening is a whey-faced Elaine, looking between you and the inspector as if she’s certain one of you killed Colonel Mustard in the Drawing Room with the Candlestick.

It’s your turn. Dr. Hughes beckons. “Just follow me,” he says, not unkindly. There’s a short corridor, then another door, and— a window running along one wall? “Take your time,” he says. “When you’ve seen enough, or if you feel at all unwell, we’ll go outside.” Which is all very easy to say, but you do feel unwell: It’s giving you a horrible sense of déjà vu, and not in a good way.

A light comes on in the room on the other side of the window. It’s small and bare, with tiled walls, and a trolley with a draped form.

You blink, trying to bring it into focus. He looks like he’s deeply asleep, what you can see of him: head and shoulders only. And something is very wrong indeed, you realize immediately. Your mouth is dry. You work your jaw, trying to get your salivary glands to lubricate your tongue. “I saw him yesterday,” you say, and you’re pretty sure you’re telling the truth. “That’s enough.”

“Thank you.” This time you see Hughes flip the switch. “Are you feeling alright?” he asks, solicitously. “The toilets are just round here—”

“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.”

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?”