Kemal clears his throat.
“Yes?”
“I have an update from the office. They have a causal chain for one of our fatalities.”
You would expect the man to look smug at this point, but he doesn’t: haunted, more like. “What?”
Kemal shakes his head. “Vito Morricone. Dead in Palermo. A yahoo-yahoo boy. He died in a kitchen accident.”
Moxie shakes his head. “A kitchen accident?”
“Yes. He was electrocuted by a deliberately miswired food processor.” (You wince: You’ve had cooking incidents like that.) Kemal continues: “It was a high-end machine, able to heat or chill as well as mincing and mixing. Programmable, networked, you can leave cold ingredients in it and switch it on before you leave work, even change recipes remotely. His partner says that it broke eight months ago, and Morricone took it to a back-street repair shop, where they fixed it for him. The case is stainless steel. A replacement part—” He shakes his head.
“What kind of replacement?”
“The report does not explain this thing. But the local investigators report that the fixer bought the replacement-part design online from a cheap pirate shop, not from the manufacturer’s website. It came with installation instructions, which he followed. Once installed, the machine could be remotely induced to short its input power supply through the case.”
You give a low whistle of appreciation: Moxie claps, slowly. “Murder. Smoking gun.”
“Yes, but.” Kemal looks troubled. “The fixer does not appear to know anything. Who supplied the sabotaged component design? And why? The investigating magistrate connected to the same pirate design site and bought the same part: It is apparently harmless. And who sent the signal to activate it? We don’t know yet.”
“But it’s an assassination? A well-planned one.” You snap your fingers. “Tariq Hussein. The vacuum robot.” The IM you got while you were talking to Anwar rises to the top of your mind. “Tariq got things fixed. Anwar said something about a kitchen appliance that’d broken. Huh.” You pull up a memo window. “I want to know who fixed Tariq’s vacuum cleaner and when. Ask Mrs. Hussein about it. And”—the penny drops—“Mr. Blair’s enema machine. Who repaired it last?”
“Minute those to BABYLON,” you tell Moxie. He nods and keyboards it into the intelligence wiki, where some poor grunt will funnel it into Mac’s inbound workstream and Mac (or one of his assistant managers) will assign it a priority level and add it to some other detective’s to-do list. Policing, as with all procedural jobs, expands to fill all the time and consume all the resources available for it. And a job like this one is too big to handle in a half-assed manner.
It’s a point of pride among the former nations of the United Kingdom that the murder clear-up rate is in three sigmas territory, somewhere over 92 per cent; but it takes bucketloads of manpower to get there, and process-oriented management and intelligence-supported work flow and human-resources tracking to keep the minimum investigative team of fifty-plus detectives properly coordinated. Most of the public still believe in Sherlock Holmes or Inspector Rebus, the lone genius with an eye for clues: And it suits the brass to maintain the illusion of inscrutable detective insight for political reasons.
But the reality is that behind the magic curtain, there’s a bunch of uniformed desk pilots frantically shuffling terabytes of information, forensic reports and mobile-phone-traffic metadata and public-webcam streams and directed interviews, looking for patterns in the data deluge spewing from the fire-hose. Indeed, a murder investigation is a lot like a mechanical turk: a machine that resembles a marvellous piece of artificial-intelligence software, oracular in its acuity, but that under the hood turns out to be the work of huge numbers of human piece-workers coordinating via network. Crowdsourcing by cop, in other words.
(If you’re one of the piece-workers in a mechanical turk—or one of the rewrite rules inside Searle’s Chinese room—the overall pattern of the job may be indiscernible, lost in an opaque blur of seemingly random subtasks. And if you’re one of the detectives on a murder case, your immediate job—determining who last repaired a defective vacuum cleaner—may seem equally inexplicable. But there’s method in my motion, as you’ll learn for yourself.)
You spend the next two hours with Moxie, churning through queries from Operation Babylon. Part-way through, Kemal disappears (to the toilet, you think at first: then to the briefing room, you decide), returning towards the end. You do lunch in the on-site canteen, communicating in defensive monosyllables: After his contribution from Palermo, he has nothing more to offer you. After lunch, you both attend the afternoon briefing in D31; then you sort Kemal out with a tablet, and he turns out to be surprisingly useful at handling those low-level queries you delegate to him. You update the ICIU shift roster for the next week and attend to another heap of inbound administrivia, before finally clocking off your shift and going home via the hair salon.
Home in your wee flat, you kick your shoes off and hang your jacket, visit the bathroom, and take a good close look at your new hair-do.
It’s always hard to tell for sure at the hairdresser’s, but here you can take your time and not worry about being unduly critical in front of the perfectly coiffured girl with the scissors and the long memory for casual insults from clients. You tilt your head and narrow your eyes and after a minute, you decide that, yes, you can live with it. It’s shorter, but more importantly, it’s regular. As business-like as your choice of footwear. Rest easy: Nobody’s going to be passing sly remarks about your hair-do or your sensible shoes in the canteen behind your back. (Locker-room culture will never die: It just goes underground, as you know to your cost.)
You have plenty of time for a long comfortable lie in the bath followed by a TV dinner. You plant yourself on the sofa under your tablet, surfing the web while the vacuum sniffs and nudges around the corners of the living-room carpet, as the evening grows old along with your thoughts. Which, as usual, are increasingly bored and lonely. Burn-out is such an ugly turn of phrase, and in any case, it doesn’t quite fit; it’s more like you ran out of fuel halfway across the ocean, and you’re gliding now, the site of your crash landing approaching implacably but still hidden from you by the horizon of your retirement. That’s you in a nutshell, drifting slowly down towards lonely old age, the fires of ambition having flamed out years ago.
There was a time when, after working hours, you’d be off to the gym or auditing a distance-learning course or some other worthy pursuit. But these days, it’s hard to see the point anymore.
The sad truth, which only dawned on you after you were fifteen years down this path, is that it doesn’t mean anything. Your job, your vocation, your life’s calling—you’re like a priest who awakens one day and realizes that his god has been replaced by a cardboard cut-out, and he’s no longer able to ignore his own disbelief. And, like the priest, you’ve sacrificed all hope of a normal life on the altar of something you no longer believe in.
Heaven knows, it’s not as if the job doesn’t need doing. Fifteen years in the force has taught you more about the stupid, petty, vicious idiocy of your fellow humans than you ever wanted to know. (It’s also startled you—very occasionally—with their generosity, intelligence, and altruism. Very occasionally.)