Charles Stross - Rule 34

The door opens. The pair of snowmen on the front step—that’s your first impression—resolve into cops in white crime-scene overalls, humping battered flight cases full of gear. You’ve seen this shit on telly enough times to know what it means, but seeing it in Uncle Taleb’s house lends it an air of unreality. The wailing continues until you’re digging your fingernails into the frayed fabric of the armrests. You can barely hold yourself down in the seat. It’s as bad as the other day, when she had that funny turn, finding that customer—

Sweat like ice trickles down your back. “Who’s dead?” you demand, standing up.

“Sit down, my friend. Take it easy.” PC Bouncer lays a meaty hand on your shoulder. You tense, but you know better than to struggle. They’re trained like guard dogs, to react instinctively to challenges.

“I want to help,” you say. “That’s my wife’s mother in there.”

He shoves you back towards the armchair, gently but forcefully. “Who else might be here?” he asks, glancing over his shoulder to confirm that the bods in the bunny suits haven’t left the front door open.

“Her husband Taleb, Tariq, Parveen, and Fara—they’re my cousins—grandma, and if they’re visiting, there’s Uncle Akbar and his family—”

PC Bouncer is beginning to go as glassy-eyed as his portable panopticon of cameras and data specs. (White, Scottish: He probably counts his relatives on the fingers of one hand.) “Who would be at home during the day, my friend?”

He’s getting on your nerves. “You’re not my friend,” you say before you can stop yourself. “I’m sorry,” you add sullenly. “She needs help, listen to her…”

He began winding up when you snapped at him but makes a visible effort to keep his lid on. “Let’s try and keep this polite, shall we, sir. Deep breath, now. I’m going to ask you again: Who should we expect to find here during the daytime?”

Your mobie vibrates. It’s Bibi’s signature waggle. You keep a tight grip on it as you answer: “Sameena, sure. Taleb if it’s a Friday.” (Today is not a Friday.) “Tariq, he works from his lappie, so he’s home a lot—”

What emotional defences you managed to reassemble in the wake of the Toymaker’s visit collapse around you.

No point hiding: He saw your face. “Is it Tariq?” you ask, your voice going all wobbly. “Is he alright?”

You see at once from his face that your brother-in-law isn’t alright.

Nor will he be alright ever again.

Nor can all the king’s horses and all the king’s men put Tariq together again.

It’s very strange to be sitting side by side with Inspector Butthurt in your father-in-law’s chintz-infested living room, chatting over cups of knee-cap-balanced tea (brought for you, incongruously, by a crime-scene cop dressed from head to foot in white plastic).

“I’m sorry we keep running into each other under such unfortunate circumstances, Mr. Hussein. By the way, is that your official registered phone?”

“Yes—” You watch nervelessly as she touches it, blinks a virtual fly away from the corner of her eye, and nods confirmation of some arcane suspicion to herself. Her movements are swift and precise. She’s a tall woman; if she were a man, built to proportion, she’d be about the same height as Constable Bouncer (who is waiting outside)—a terrifying tower of muscular poise. Far scarier than the weedy Eurocop she came with, who is presumably in the kitchen right now, trying to get some sense out of Auntie.

“Well, that’s a relief. You came here directly from the East End, I see. I’m going to have to image your phone and follow up your cellproximity record to confirm what it says, but unless you’ve turned into some kind of criminal hacker master-mind in the last year it looks like you’ve got a watertight alibi.” The dryness of her tone gets your hackles halfway up before you manage to remind yourself what she is.

“Alibi for what ?”

“For—” For the first time she looks discommoded. Blinks again, evidently looking something up. “Sorry. Nobody told you?”

“Told me—”

“It’s your cousin, Tariq Shaikh Mohammed. He’s dead, I’m afraid.” She’s watching you. You nod, still not quite believing it. “We received a call from Sameena Begum—”

“My mother-in-law. His mother.”

“Oh dear.” She glances away. The wailing has gone, replaced by occasional sobbing. And tea, probably. They’ll have her in another room, you realize. To get her story, and mine. Before we talk.

“What happened? Was it an accident? Did somebody kill him?”

“Why do you suppose someone might have killed him?” She leans forward, and for a moment Inspector Butthurt is on your case, mercilessly digging. Your blood runs cold.

“I don’t suppose ,” you tell her. “I have no fucking idea , sorry, I don’t know. Young healthy man though, what’s going to happen to him? Tariq’s a—” You stop. “ Did someone kill him?”

Inspector Kavanaugh looks at you for a while. “It’s too early to say,” she says reluctantly. “Investigations are proceeding.”

And what the fuck does that mean? She’s talking in cop-speak, the mysterious language the filth use to smear their own version of events over the true story. Familiar from a thousand blog bulletins. You shake your head. “What does that mean? Is he dead, or not?”

She makes a small noise at the back of her throat. Muted impatience or the beginning of a chest infection. “A couple of questions if you don’t mind. By the way, did your cousin do any house-work? Cleaning, for instance?”

You stare at her in mute incomprehension. “House-work?”

“Dusting, washing up, vacuuming? That sort of thing?”

“Vacuuming?” You shake your head. “No, he’s not the kind. Well, he gets stuff fixed when it’s broken—I was going to ask him to sort out my wife’s onion chopper, she dropped it the other day—” You realize you’re rambling. So does Inspector Butthurt. She makes some kind of notation in her head-up memo, then changes the subject.

“Mr. Hussein, can you think of anyone who might have wanted your cousin dead?”

“I’m not sure,” you say numbly. “It’s not impossible. But Tariq was involved in stuff I don’t know about.” You take a deep breath, then hold up your mobie: “On probation, me. Keeping my nose clean. He knows it. Knew it. If he’s doing anything dodgy, he doesn’t want my snitchware anywhere near it.”

Which is one hundred–per cent true and will show up as such when the police evidence room speech-stress analysers comb over this part of Inspector Butthurt’s on-duty lifelog.

That’s the thing about talking to the police: You’ve got to tell them the truth, and nothing but the truth—just don’t tell them all of it. They’ve got speech-to-text software and natural language analysers, proximity- and probability-matching tools controlled by teleworkers in off-shore networks—a mechanical turk—to make tag clouds out of everything you say within earshot of one of their mikes. It may not be true AI, but it can flag up inconsistencies if you’re lying. They don’t need that shit for 90 per cent of the job, the routine public-order offences, drunk and disorderly, but you can bet your shirt that everything said within a hundred metres of a suspicious death gets chewed up by the mechanical turk…

“Go on,” she prompts.

“Tariq’s a smart boy. Runs a dating website: The spin for the old folks is that it’s a virtual dhallal, a marriage brokerage, with chat rooms so the boys and girls can get to talk to each other safely—but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that it’s a knocking shop as well. The parents can register user IDs and track their kids’ conversations, but there are some areas of the site that, well, they’re age-filtered: It’s the twenty-first century, innit? Oh, by ‘kids’ I mean it’s strictly over-eighteens only. Because it’s supposed to be about finding suitable partners for marriage, not one-night stands.”