Charles Stross - The Fuller Memorandum

“What happened here, officer?” she asks quietly, holding the card where he can’t help but see it.

He doesn’t stand a chance. “Who, uh, oh dear…” He shakes his head. “Ma’am. Murder scene. You can’t go, I mean, you shouldn’t…”

“Who’s in charge here?” she enquires. “Where can I find them?”

“That’d be DI Wolfe, from MIT 4. He’s set up shop round the back-that way, that alley there-who should I say-”

“In the name of national security, I command and require you to forget me,” she says, slipping the card away and turning towards the alley that runs around to the back of the row of four shops. The constable’s eyes close momentarily; by the time he opens them again, the woman with the violin case is gone.

Ten minutes later, the back door to George Dower’s shop clicks open. Two figures step inside: a uniformed detective sergeant and the woman. Both of them wear disposable polythene slippers over their shoes; she still holds her violin case. “Don’t touch anything-tell me what you want to look at,” he says, pulling on a pair of disposable gloves. “What exactly are you after?”

“First of all, what state is his PC in?”

“It wasn’t stolen, so we bagged it.” The sergeant sounds sure of himself. “If you’re wanting to scrape the hard drive, we can have an image of it available in an hour or so.”

Mo cools slightly. If the killer left the PC behind, then there’s almost certainly nothing left on it but random garbage, an entropic mess that not even CESG will be able to unerase. “Any memory sticks? Small stuff? CD-Rs?”

“We bagged them, too.” The sergeant picks his way into Dower’s workshop, which still reeks of rosin and varnish. A row of disemboweled instruments hang from a rail overhead, like corpses in the dissectionist’s cold parlor. Those tools that are not in their places on the pegboard that covers one wall are laid out on the bench in parallel rows, neatly sorted by size. The metal parts gleam like surgical steel, polished and unnaturally bright.

“Any papers?”

The sergeant pauses beside a rolltop desk, itself an antique, Victorian or Edwardian. “Yes,” he says reluctantly. “They’re scheduled for pickup tomorrow so we can continue working on the contact list. Receipts, suppliers’ brochures, estimates, that sort of thing.”

“I’m looking for an appraisal of a customer’s instrument,” she tells him. “It will be dated yesterday or the day before, and it relates to a violin. It may be in an unmarked envelope, like this one.” She produces an envelope from her bag.

“Like that-” The officer’s eyes widen and his back straightens. “Would you happen to have any information about the killer?” he asks. “Because if so-”

Mo shakes her head. “I do not know who the killer is.” The sergeant stares at her, seeking eye contact. “The victim was commissioned to prepare a report for my department. He was due to post it on the evening when the incident occurred. It has not been delivered.”

“What was he meant to report on?”

Mo makes eye contact at last, and the detective sergeant recoils slightly from whatever he sees in her expression. “You have no need to know. If it appears that there is a connection between the report and the killing, my department will notify Inspector Wolfe immediately. Similarly, if the identity of the killer comes to our attention.” She doesn’t add, in such a way that we can disclose it without violating security protocol: that much is always understood to be a minor chord in the uneasy duet of spook and cop. “The report, however, is a classified document and should be treated as such.” And she raises her warrant card again.

The detective sergeant is clearly torn between the urgent desire to get her into an interview room and the equally urgent desire to get her the hell out of this shop, and away from what was until a few minutes ago a straightforward-if rather unusual-murder investigation; but being on the receiving end of a Laundry warrant card is an oh-shit moment. It begins with the phrase Her Britannic Majesty’s government commands and compels you to provide the bearer of this pass with all aid and assistance, written atop a design of such subtle and mind-numbing power that it makes the reader’s breath catch in his throat as suddenly as if trapped by a hangman’s noose. He can no more ignore it-and no more ignore her instructions-than he can ignore a gun pointed at his head.

“What do you want?” he finally asks.

“I want the contents of that report.” She lowers her card. “I suspect the killer doesn’t want me to have it. So if you find it, call me.” She produces a business card and he takes it. Then her roving gaze settles on the desk. “Oh, and one other thing. Are there any paper clips or staples in there? Because if so, I want them all.”

“Paper clips?”

“Yes, I want all the paper clips and staples in that desk.” Her cheek quirks. “Mr. Dower was the type to fasten a report together before folding it and putting it in an envelope. And where there’s a link, there’s a chain of evidence.”

THE AUDIT BOARD CHEWS ME UP AND SPITS ME OUT IN LESS than an hour. Light as thistledown and dry as a dead man’s tongue I walk through the door, past the seated witnesses-the blue-suiters are collecting Choudhury now, ushering him into the Presence-and drift on stumbling feet towards my office. Except I don’t get very far: instead I bump up against a blue translucent bubble that seems to have swallowed the corridor, and everything in it, just before Iris’s office door. The bubble is warm and rubbery and I have a feeling that it would be a very bad idea indeed to try and bull my way through it, so I turn round and go back the other way, towards the coffee station.

I’m just scooping brown powder into a filter cone (the jug was empty right when I most needed it, as usual) when Iris clears her throat behind me.

“I’ve been Audited,” I say, in answer to her silent question. “I don’t think it went badly, but I gather I’m not allowed back in my office just yet.”

“No one is,” she says, surprisingly calmly. “Are you making a fresh pot?”

“Sure.” I slide the basket back into the coffee maker and hit the brew button. Iris watches me silently.

“Um, as a matter of fact, you won’t be going back to work for a bit,” she says.

“I-what?” The coffee machine clears its throat behind me as I stare at her.

“The civilian FATACC incident when you were out at Cosford has been upgraded.” Her expression is apologetic. “Sorry doesn’t begin to cut it, I know, but the Incident Committee has escalated it to Internal Affairs and they actioned me to notify you that you’re being suspended on full pay pending a full hearing.”

“They’re what?” I hear my voice rise uncontrollably, cracked. But what about Angleton’s plan? “But it’s not a FATACC anymore-”

“Bob! Bob? Calm down. This isn’t the end of the world. I’m sure the hearing will exonerate you; they don’t want you in the office until it’s over. It’s just a routine precaution-Bob?”

She’s talking to my back-I’m halfway down the corridor by the time she says my name, then round the bend and halfway down the twist that takes me to the stairwell to Angleton’s office. Because (fuck Helen Langhorn and her KGB sleeper medals, part of me is swearing furiously) I know damn well that I’m going to be exonerated, because the victim wasn’t a victim: she was a hostile agent who poked her nose into an off-limits area at the wrong time. So the question is: Why now? And there’s only one species of answer that fits-

I take the stairs two at a time, thudding down them hard enough to raise dust from the elderly carpet, bouncing off the bannister rail and caroming up against the door. I raise my phone and squint through its magic-mirror eye, seeing that the wards are merely the usual ones, and then I twist the doorknob and push.