“Just imagine, Boss, if we had a sort of a calculator, where, instead of it just doing sums, we could get it to make a list of similar occurrences of particular crimes. From that list, giving dates and times and other - what can we call it? - variables, we could get the machine to show us similarities and differences, so we can get to patterns really quickly. And maybe then we’ll understand better what’s connected and what isn’t.
” Don’t you think that would be great?”
It's 1974. Detective Inspector Fatima Dieng has been in Shechester, the largest city in the northwest of England, for some time. She is feeling very frustrated. If it’s not the job, it’s the family.
Things had been so much easier in that sleepy little West Country town where she, her husband, Adama, and their daughter, Hadidjatou, used to live, and where she had charge of a small, relatively smoothly functioning police station. Life had indeed been better in Silbury.
Now her daughter was at university, and her husband just moped around the house all day without a job, without friends, and resentful of the antisocial hours that Fatima, no longer in uniform, has to keep.
At work, in fact, things are really no better. The Shechester and Pepford Criminal Investigation Department has been split into a number of teams, each competing with the others for points awarded on successful conclusion of cases, leading to both the prospect of career advancement and the pick of juicier, higher profile cases in the future.
Fatima’s team is the most racially diverse in all of Shechester and Pepford CID, not to mention the most talented and innovative, as one would expect, given Fatima’s own superior leadership capabilities. They are called upon to investigate some extremely complex cases, many of them having some connection to security threats posed by civil strife in Northern Ireland spilling over into many parts of the rest of the United Queendom.
But, much like one of the local football teams, Shechester United, the team languishes at the bottom of the CID league table, largely due to running interference from Fatima’s superior officers and so-called colleagues in other teams.
It all comes to a point where her very own future as a police officer looks to be in jeopardy.
“All of her training - she had spent her national service with Army Intelligence - told her that the best interrogator is the one that listens, the one that invites her adversary to fill the silences she has created by resisting almost every temptation to speak. Certainly sometimes a degree of menace needed to be created, but even that was best understated, certainly not debased through the use of any physical force. Your adversary must tell you what she is inwardly compelled to say, the truth, not what you, the interrogator, want to hear, which is not the whole truth, only your corrupted version of it.”
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