Mention of the Morningside Cannibals has the desired effect: Doc winces visibly. “Aye well, Liz, that’s as may be, but let’s not pile up speculative obstacles before we get to them?” He leans forward. “It sounds to me like Dodgy Dickie has got your number: Best not fight him in public. Leave him to me. I’ll have a wee chat with Jackie Somerville and shake some resources loose from her department in return for your loan.” He fixes you with a gimlet stare. “Just promise me you didna fix this up to weasel your way back onto a CID case?”
You shake your head vigorously. “Boss, would I do a thing like that?” You catch his expression: “That’s live-rail territory. With respect, sir, if I wanted to apply for a transfer back to CID, you’d hear about it before it happened, and I’d be doing it with your say-so or not at all. Anything else would be grossly unprofessional conduct detrimental to the smooth running of the chain of command. Not to mention a real own-goal, career-wise. Right?”
A long pause, then Doc nods. “Exactly so, Inspector. I’m glad we understand each other.”
“So am I. Sir.”
“Get out of my office.” He waves genially to defuse the curt dismissal. “Leave Dickie to me; just be sure to set your house in order before you go haring off in all directions, and keep me fully informed. Dismissed.”
You get the hell out of Doc’s office, and you’re halfway back to the ICIU before you pause to wonder whether you’re being set up, or whether this really is your route back into CID after your long exile on the Rule 34 Squad.
Moxie is waiting for you in your office and, for a miracle, he’s brought you a mug of latte just the way you like it. He’s wearing an appropriately sheepish expression, which finally makes your mind up for you. “Chill, Moxie. I’m not happy, but it’s not your fault. Next time try to give me some more warning, okay?”
He looks relieved. “I wanted to, skipper, but Chief Inspector MacLeish scheduled you for the briefing before I could get to you.”
Before he could get to you through regular channels, he means, but you don’t pursue the point. “I’ve just had a little chat with Chief Inspector Dixon. He’s going to try and square things with the deputy superintendent to get some backup in here. But in the meantime, it looks like Dickie’s little empire-building gambit is working. I’m going to be very scarce around here for the rest of the month, or until Dickie gets his man. So how about we go over what you’ve got on your desk, what I’ve got on mine that’s going to be added to your case-load while I’m gone, and what extra resources you need to keep your head above water in the meantime. Yes?”
Dawning horror steals across Moxie’s face. “Whu—you’re leaving me in charge?”
“Up to a point. I’ll still be around, but only for about an hour a day.” (Rule #1: always budget 50 per cent more time for your people than you tell them you’ve got.) “Think hard before you escalate. Speedy’s off today: I’ll be repeating this chat with him when he’s back in. You’re going to have to co-ordinate with him directly, not through me. Meanwhile, your case-load: Show it to me.”
For about the next hour, Moxie subjects you to his team’s current case-load in all its mind-numbingly recondite, not to mention perverse, detail.
Publicity surrounding the Morningside Cannibals has led to a spate of copy-cat offences against sanity, some of them literally so (as in: There are folks dining on cloned haunch of pedigree Siamese tonight). There’s an anonymous perp randomly posting upskirt videos on neighbourhood blogs, captured by a microcam strapped to one of the too-tame squirrels in the Botanic Gardens. Moxie’s looking for the fabber source of some disturbingly simple meth-lab-in-a-brick chemistry kits that are circulating among the usual numpties in Lochend, and there’s the regular slew of urban-legend queries from the more gullible elements of CID to field. There’s the hentai fan base to keep an eye on, with their current interest in Hitler Yaoi and holocaust tentacle porn—still illegal in Germany, which is giving rise to cross-jurisdictional headaches—and their ongoing attempt to exhaustively explore the M girls N cups polynomial space in NP time, as a computer geek of your acquaintance once put it.
(You’re not quite sure what the NP time bit means, but the combination of cheap machinima tools and lots of unemployed games programmers have turned Edinburgh into a hot-bed of photorealistic fetish video production even though it’s technically illegal. The burden of evidence is higher under Scottish law, so despite having tougher porn laws than England, the smart shocksite developers have all moved north, while their development tools and websites have migrated into the Russian blacknet cloud. Fighting it is an unwinnable battle, so your job is merely to flag up anything involving real-live actors—especially minors—and try to avoid unwittingly popularizing the stuff via the Streisand Effect.)
At the end of the hour you’re just about reeling from the deluge, but you’ve given Moxie a framework for prioritizing his jobs over the next week, not to mention your home and personal mobile numbers and strict instructions to call you immediately if anything really fucked comes up. You can see he’s getting psyched up, ready and prepared to perform triage on Tubgirl should the need make itself known—right up until the moment your mobie rings.
You answer it. It’s Dodgy Dickie. Shit. “Wait one,” you mouth at Moxie. “Yes?”
MacLeish looks like his ulcer’s playing up again. “Inspector? Are you up to speed on the international angle yet?”
You bite back your instant reaction: “I’m in the process of clearing my desk and handing off all current ICIU operations to a subordinate. It’s going to take me another half-hour today, and a couple of hours tomorrow when my relief sergeant is in the shop. So your answer is a conditional ‘no,’ sir. Has something come up?”
“You bet it has, and it’s touching down at Turnhouse in an hour. We’ve got an investigator from Europol flying in to poke his nose where it doesn’t belong. I want you to meet him and keep him the hell off my back. Is that understood?”
Your instant impulse is to tell Dickie to fuck right off, but the prospect of subsequently explaining your language to a disciplinary tribunal is not attractive. “I understand you consider my management of a secure hand-off of my departmental responsibilities is less important than what is basically a baby-sitting job, sir. I’m going to comply with your request, but not at the cost of making a hash of a bunch of other, admittedly lower-priority, investigations that are already in progress. I’ll take care of the busybodies, but you don’t tell me how to run my unit. Am I clear?”
For a moment, Dickie looks as if he’s about to blow a gasket, but then he nods, jerkily. “Perfectly.”
“Good.” You hang up, and check your desktop. Sure enough, there’s a stack of busybody IMs that have come in while you were briefing Moxie, insistently asking for you and demanding that you do this, do that, hither and yon. Dickie’s management style is to shoot at the monkey’s feet, make the monkey dance. Especially when the monkey was, ten years ago, number one in his graduating class, and as recently as five years ago, the number-one candidate for the post he’s currently occupying. You rub your eyes. “I’m too old for this shit,” you hear yourself say.