Dragonfly
Episode 9 of the June Murders
While Collins and Sally were getting coffee, DCI Bale had phoned various colleagues at Scotland Yard. The Met had its own byzantine bureaucracy, much of it operating below the radar of the average detective. For instance, there was a unit for international cooperation, dealing with everything from extradition to joint investigation of global crimes like drugs and people smuggling. The unit had geographical divisions. Despite the so-called “special relationship,” the US section was notorious for being slow and frustrating. Since Brexit, the European section had acquired the same tendencies. And Bale had had to explain the June Sommers case and its needs to each section in turn. After an hour, he knew that the response from each would be a form to fill in. Police officers have always complained about the paperwork, he thought, and now in the computer age, the main solution is to put everything on-line. I still fill out forms, but I have less paper. Not the progress I was hoping for, he sneered to himself.
He did a lot of that lately, and he sensed it wasn’t healthy. In the vast canyon of dubious mental habits, sneering with others was just slightly less pathological than sneering to oneself. No sooner had he rung off than his phone rang. It was Forensics. They had got some preliminary findings. The postmortem revealed that the poison used to kill…
