Charles Stross - Rule 34

You blink the overlay aside. “We should go and get you signed in,” you suggest. How should I know who they are? you wonder defensively. What kind of lunatic goes around shrink-wrapping people to bales of bank-notes? “Michael Blair was one of her customers.”

“Ah.” Kemal raises his tiny cup, pulls a face, and knocks back his ristretto in one. You eye your own cup: It’s half-full. Regretfully, you stand and turn your back on it. “Lead on,” he says.

Back at HQ, it’s as if a giant virtual boot has kicked over the anthill. You normally get plenty of passing trade at the station, but it’s mostly beat cops checking in petty shoplifters and such-like at this time of day. Two Bizarro-world murders in rapid succession—with rumours of a Eurotrash gangland connection—have got folks nervous. They remember the hideous mess five years ago when everything fell over, back to manual typewriters and anonymous prepay mobiles while the spooks ran around upgrading the security keys on all the nation’s key routers and praying that the hackers responsible weren’t fucking with the air traffic control system or the reactor complex at Torness. The atmosphere today’s a lot like that: Word has got around the canteen grape-vine that something really out of order is going on. And you’re getting the hairy eye-ball from all sides as soon as you walk up to the desk in reception and sign a visitor’s badge for Kemal.

You run him straight upstairs to CI Dixon’s office, where Doc’s secretary casually signs his ID onto the system—logging his biometrics solely on your say-so (talk about being granted a sufficiency of rope for a career asphyxiation!)—then you herd him along the corridor to IT Support, where a pathologically detached civilian contractor registers his phone and gets him logged into CopSpace. You’ve just short-circuited about two days of procedures specifically designed to prevent J. Random Unauthorized Person from getting into IT Support’s hair, but you’re in no mood to take shit right now. If Kemal’s right about the scale of what’s going on, Dickie needs to know the shape of the tiger he’s got by the tail. And so, less than two hours after you picked him up, you’re back in front of the door to briefing room D31.

“Inspector Kavanaugh.” Dickie looks up from the surface in the middle of the room. It’s displaying a 3D cutaway of a typical Edinburgh tenement, one-sixth of life-size, with SOCO annotations hazing the air above it as thickly as the cigarette smoke of an earlier generation. “This would be…”

“Inspector Kemal Aslan, on assignment to Europol Business Affairs in Brussels from Emniyet Genel Müdürlüğü in Ankara.”

Kemal clears his throat. “We have been monitoring an upswing in violent deaths of individuals engaged in the Internet fraud sector.” He meets Dickie MacLeish’s fiercely sceptical gaze: “Eight so far, across Europe, all within forty-eight hours. Nine, now.”

You tag-team with him, piling it up on MacLeish: “Inspector Aslan is ready to give you an overview of the larger picture whenever you’re ready. I checked him in with IT, he’s on the system. His auths from Europol check out.” (Which is an important point, as it’s not so long ago that a nutter with a cop fetish managed to fast-talk his way onto a prostitution sweep in Portobello.)

Kemal doesn’t switch target. “We believe there is a common mechanism behind the killings, although proving a culpable human perpetrator may be—”

He’s about to get stuck into his spiel when a uniform from CID shoulders his way into your circle and clears his throat apologetically. “Inspectors.” He nods at Dickie. “Skipper? Got a moment?”

“Aye?” Dickie cuts you dead of an instant. Kemal’s neck muscles tense at that, but he bites his tongue like he’s had lots of practice lately. You peer closer at the crime scene on the virtual dissecting table. It’s one of those upper stairwell flats with a windowless hall and rooms branching off it on all sides. There’s something in the living room, like a discarded square-cut sandwich—

“—The Blair scene yesterday, his ID was in the name of John, uh, Christie. It’s just that it rang a bell with Mary as she was compiling the daily for Oversight. She’s got a true-crime reading habit, and she looked him up online, and he’s a ringer, sir.”

“What kind of ringer?” Dickie’s diction is clipped. He looks like he’s going to blow a gasket: not unusual for him, but even so…

“John Reginald Halliday Christie—just like we logged on this guy’s driving license—was a serial killer, sir, the Notting Hill Strangler. Hanged for murder in 1953.” He pronounces that last with relish. (There are quite a few in this building who’d like to see those days of rope-burn closure back again.) “After he’d set up his neighbour, Timothy Evans, to take the drop for him.”

Dickie’s left eyelid is twitching: Your cheek is threatening to come out in sympathy. “You’re telling me that the civilian capture and release contact on the Blair house was using false ID in the name of a serial killer , and nobody clocked it?”

Constable Ballantyne shakes his head. “Constable Brown logged his ID and took a swab, sir—the driving license checked out with DVLA and the mug shot matched. It wasn’t false at that level—”

Now your cheek does twitch because this is the kind of shit that isn’t supposed to happen. The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency database backs onto the Identity and Passport Service’s database, and you can’t get a driving license without authenticating. Which means the joker who just horned in on your crime scene is walking around with a genuine identity record on the national system in the name of a long-ago-executed serial killer.

“—The birth date on his driving license, uh, Constable Brown didn’t clock it at the time: He was just checking that the name and face were valid. But in the database, it’s given as 15 July 1953—the day the real Christie was executed. I reviewed Ed’s helmet video, and the fly bastard sure doesn’t look seventy.”

He’s been rattling on into a growing circle of silence for almost thirty seconds, oblivious to the gigantic loaf he’s pinched in the middle of the investigation. It is becoming glaringly obvious that someone is deliberately fucking with the brains of Edinburgh’s finest, and wants you to know it. Dickie, no cool cucumber at the best of times, is giving you serious concern for his ticker. Half the uniforms in the room are desperately trying not to boggle (and failing). The other half aren’t even trying. A vein pulses weirdly in MacLeish’s forehead: Then a curious ripple in the hairy salt-and-pepper caterpillar that passes for his moustache presages six urgently grunted words, pulled from so deep in his abdomen that you’d think DC Ballantyne had just kneed him in the nuts:

“Whoever this fucker is, pull him .”

Then, as an aside, Dickie adds: “Find that swab and run it on the—no.” He nods formally at Kemal. “Put it on the wire to Europol and flag it as a suspect implicated in Inspector Aslan’s investigation. And run it on NDNAD. Then backtrace the driving license, find out who issued it, and open a new investigation: how this ringer got onto the IPS database. There’ll be a counterfeiting offence in there, probably more than one.” He knuckles his forehead as if squeezing out more charges, then glances at you and Kemal. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to update the super now.” His banked anger is still there: But it’s not pointed your way anymore. “What a pile of”—he claws at an invisible target—“shit.”

The silence dissolves in a buzz of crosstalk. Kicked anthills, indeed. This might be a breakthrough in the long run, but in the short term, it’s every case manager’s nightmare: to have a suspect walk right into the middle of the crime scene, bare their arse at the officers on the spot, and waltz out again. The prurient eyes of Edinburgh are upon you, and this is juicy enough that it’s not going to stay under wraps for long—it’s going to be top of every newscrawl within hours, and Dickie’s the one who’ll bear the brunt of the jokes and finger-pointing.