A Voss and Pike Casefile: The First Case
Section 45: The Easiest Name
"Jonah Pike," you said, and watched something in his face close that you would spend the rest of your career learning to recognise half a second sooner.
"Course," he said, quietly, not even surprised. He didn't argue. He'd known you for exactly nine days, and some part of him had apparently already worked out that this was always a possibility, the moment anyone senior needed a name that wasn't their own colleague's.
There was no real evidence - only the oldest reflex in any institution, reaching for the temporary summer worker before the tenured professor. The accusation collapsed within the hour, but Jonah didn't stay to hear Rook apologise for it. He'd already left the theatre by the time the doors opened.
Sociological note: the very mechanism this entire series will go on to examine, caught here at its origin point - the reflex to suspect the least protected person in the room first, applied by the woman who will spend the rest of her career learning, case by case, to resist it. She did not resist it this time.