Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

"No tape," she says, flattening her hands on the tabletop to either side of her cup and examining her nail cuticles. "Nothing. One second it's zero zero twenty-six, the next it's zero seven fourteen. Numbers to engrave in your heart. Dennis, our departmental geek, was most upset with MKSG-they're the public-private partners in the regional surveillance outsourcing sector."

"Zero zero twenty-six to zero seven fourteen," I echo as I jot them down on my palmtop. "MKSG. Right, that's helpful."

"It is?" She tilts her head sideways and stares at me like I'm a fly that's landed in her coffee.

"Yup." I nod, then tell myself that it'd be really stupid to wind her up without good reason. "Sorry. What I can tell you is, I'm as interested in anything that happened to the cameras as the cow. If you hear anything about them-especially about them being tampered with-I'd love to know. But in the meantime-Daisy. Do you know where she came from?"

"Yes." She doesn't crack a smile but her shoulders unwind slightly. "Actually, she's number two six three from Emmett-Moore Ltd, a dairy factory out near Dunstable. Or rather, she was two six three until three days ago. She was getting along a bit, so they sold her to a local slaughterhouse along with a job lot of seven other cows. I followed-up on the other seven and they'll be showing up in your McHappy McMeal some time next month. But not Daisy. Seems a passing farmer in a Range Rover with a wagon behind it dropped by and asked if he could buy her and cart her away for his local family butcher to deal with."

"Aha!"

"And if you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you." She takes a sip of her coffee, winces, and strafes it with sweeteners again. Responding on autopilot I try a mouthful of my own and burn my tongue. "Turns out that there's no such farmer Giles of Ham Farm, Bag End, The Shire, on record. Mind you, they had a camera on their stockyard and we nailed the Range Rover. It turned up abandoned the next day on the outskirts of Leighton Buzzard and it's flagged as stolen on HOLMES2. Right now it's sitting in the pound down the road; they smoked it for prints but it came up clean and we don't have enough money to send a SOCO and a forensics team to do a full workup on every stolen car we run across. However , if you twist my arm and promise me a budget and to go to the mat with my boss I'll see what I can lay on."

"That may not be necessary: we have ways and means. But can you get someone to drive me down there? I'll take some readings and get out of your face-except for the business with Daisy. How are you covering that?"

"Oh, we'll find something. Right now it's filed under 'F' for Fucking Fortean Freakery, but I was thinking of announcing it's just an old animal that had been dumped illegally by a farmer who didn't want to pay to have it slaughtered."

"That sounds about right." I nod slowly. "Now, I'd like to play a random word-association game with you. Okay? Ten seconds. When I say the words tell me what you think of. Right?"

She looks puzzled. "Is this-"

"Listen. Case-Nightmare-Green-Scorpion-Stare-Maginot-Blue-Stars. By the authority vested in me by the emissaries of Y'ghonzzh N'hai I have the power to bind and to release, and your tongue be tied of these matters of which we have spoken until you hear these words again: Case-Nightmare-Green-Scorpion-Stare-Maginot-Blue-Stars. Got that?"

She looks at me cross-eyed and mouths something, then looks increasingly angry until finally she gets it together to burst out with: "Hey, what is this shit?"

"Purely a precaution," I say, and she glares at me, gobbling for a moment while I finish my coffee until she figures out that she simply can't say a word about the subject. "Right," I say. "Now. You've got my permission to announce that the cow was dumped. You have my permission to talk freely to me, but to nobody else. Anyone asks any questions, refer them to me if they won't take no for an answer. This goes for your boss, too. Feel free to tell them that you can't tell them, nothing more."

"Wanker," she hisses, and if looks could kill I'd be a small pile of smouldering ashes on the interview room floor.

"Hey, I'm under a geas, too. If I don't spread it around my head will explode."

I don't know whether she believes me or not but she stops fighting it and nods tiredly. "Tell me what you want then get the hell out of my patch."

"I want a lift to the car pound. A chance to sit behind the wheel of that Range Rover. A book of poetry, a jug of wine, a date tree, and-sorry, wrong question. Can you manage it?"

She stands up. "I'll take you there myself," she says tersely. We go.

I GET TO ENDURE TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES OF VENOMOUS silence in the back seat of an unmarked patrol car driven by one Constable Routledge, with DI Sullivan in the front passenger seat treating me with the warmth due a serial killer, before we arrive at the pound. I'm beyond introspective self-loathing by now-you lose it fast in this line of work. Angleton will have my head for a key-ring fob if I don't take care to silence any possible leaks, and a tongue-twisting geas is more merciful than most of the other tools at my disposal-but I still feel like a shit. So it comes as a great relief to get out of the car and stretch my legs on the muddy gravel parking lot in the pouring rain.

"So where's the car?" I ask, innocently.

Josephine ignores me. "Bill, you want to head over to Bletchley Way and pick up Dougal's evidence bag for the Hayes case. Then come back to pick us up," she tells the driver. To the civilian security guard: "You, we're looking for BY 476 ERB. Came in yesterday, Range Rover. Where is it?"

The bored security goon leads us through the mud and a maze of cars with POLICE AWARE stickers glued to their windshields then gestures at a half-empty row. "That's it?" Josephine asks, and he passes her a set of keys. "Okay, you can piss off now." He takes one look at her face and beats a hasty retreat. I half-wish I could join him-whether she's a detective inspector or not, and therefore meant to be behaving with the gravitas of a senior officer in public, DI Sullivan looks to be in a mood to bite the heads off chickens. Or Laundry field agents, given half an excuse.

"Right, that's it," she says, holding out the keys and shaking them at me impatiently. "You're done, I take it, so I'll be pushing off. Case meeting to run, mystery shopping centre pisser to track down, and so on."

"Not so fast." I glance round. The pound is surrounded by a high wire fence and there's a decrepit Portakabin office out front by the gate: a camera sits on a motorised mount on a pole sticking up from the roof. "Who's on the other end of that thing?"

"The gate guard, probably," she says, following my finger. The camera is staring at the entrance, unmoving.

"Okay, why don't you open up the car." She blips the remote to unlock the door and I keep my eyes on the camera as she takes the handle and tugs. Could I be wrong? I wonder as the rain trickles down my neck. I shake myself when I notice her staring, then I pull out my palmtop, clamber up into the driver's seat, and balance the pocket computer on the steering wheel as I tap out a series of commands. What I see makes me shake my head. Whoever stole the car may have wiped for fingerprints but they didn't know much about paranormal concealment-they didn't use the shroud from a suicide, or get a paranoid schizophrenic to drive. The scanner is sensitive to heavy emotional echoes, and the hands I'm looking for are the most recent ones to have chilled from fright and fear of exposure. I log everything and put it away, and I'm about to open the glove locker when something makes me glance at the main road beyond the chainlink fence and-

"Watch out! Get down!" I jump out and go for the ground. Josephine is looking around so I reach out and yank her ankles out from under her. She yells, goes down hard on her backside, and tries to kick me, then there's a loud whump from behind me and a wave of heat like an open oven door. "Shit, fuck, shit-" I take a moment to realise the person cursing is me as I fumble at my throat for the bag and rip it open, desperately trying to grab the tiny claw and the disposable cigarette lighter at the same time. I flick the lighter wheel and right then something like a sledgehammer whacks into the inside of my right thigh.