UK police are trialling a computer system that can piece together what might have happened at a crime scene. The idea is that the system, called VALCRI, will be able to do the laborious parts of a crime analyst's job in seconds, freeing them to focus on the case, while also provoking new lines of enquiry and possible narratives that may have been missed. "Everyone thinks policing is about connecting the dots, but that's the easy bit," says William Wong, who leads the project at Middlesex University London. "The hard part is working out which dots need to be connected." VALCRI's main job is to help generate plausible ideas about how, when and why a crime was committed as well as who did it.