Charles Stross - Rule 34

It only takes you five minutes to figure out that he is not, in fact, a killer. You don’t even need the speech-stress analyser; he’s not dissembling, his story lines up, and his probationware-riddled phone places him on the far side of town at the time. Everything so far checks out, and if the public CCTV confirms his movements, he’s definitely off the hook. Anyway, he’s not smart enough to have done something like this.

Right now he’s a bit of a mess: not quite a blubbery mass, but obviously very upset. And he’s beginning to push you for details. “I don’t understand. What has happened to my cousin? Why are you here? Who did it? What did they do? Have you arrested anyone?”

“I don’t know,” you tell him, honestly enough. It’s not as if you can give him information that might compromise an ongoing investigation, but even if that was not the case, the scene upstairs is more than slightly mad. “Listen, I’m going to check with my colleagues. I don’t want to say anything until I know what I’m allowed to say, but I’ll be right back. Drink your tea—I won’t be five minutes.”

You rise and step out into the hall, pull the door closed, and nod at the PC on duty, who steps sideways to cover the door.

You go upstairs. Kemal is standing on the landing outside the bathroom— why is it the fucking bathroom again?—airboarding notes. He shakes his head when he sees you. “You’ve seen it. What do you think?” you ask him.

Behind his Eurocop-standard specs, Kemal’s eyes are tired. “Was the Blair murder scene like this?” he asks.

“I don’t know. Haven’t examined this one yet.” But you’ve got a good idea what to expect. Otherwise, why the IM asking you to ask Mr. Hussein about domestic appliances?

You knock on the bathroom door, ignoring the yellow warning icons buzzing around it like angry hornets. “Hello inside?”

The door doesn’t open, but a chat window drops front and centre. SGT MADDOX, SOC: WHATSUP?

“Sitrep,” you call.

You hear a muffled voice: “Just a mo.” Then a huge and grisly multimedia dump with about six gigabytes of metadata hanging off it drops across your view like a luminous crime-fighting jellyfish. In the middle there’s a doorway-framed view of the bathroom. You zoom on it: It’s live; someone’s had the good taste to hang a webcam from the hook on the back of the door, so you’ve got the equivalent of X-ray specs.

Your view is partially obstructed by Maddox and her co-workers, who are dancing the dance of the forensic bunnymen within a much smaller stage than that afforded by the bad-taste palace of the late Michael Blair—but the focus of their attention is broadly similar. No dead Warsaw Pact dictator’s colonic irrigation machine here, just a vacant-eyed skinny guy slumped half-out of the bath… but what in James Dyson’s name is the vacuum bot doing?

You don’t have one of the things—your wee flat’s too small to need it—but you get the picture: It’s supposed to bumble around the house sucking on the rugs and scaring the cat, periodically retreating to its wall wart to recharge and hork up a cricket-ball-sized sphere of compacted fluff and household dirt. This is an upmarket jobbie, with two sets of wheels so it can walk up stairs and a couple of extension hoses so it can stick its knobbly nose into crevices where the sun don’t shine. It features an especially big battery—which is currently one hundred–per cent discharged, having shorted out through the bathwater in which the very dead Tariq is marinating.

There’s a big evidence bag laid out beside the robot. And you don’t need to be a technical genius to figure that cracking this case hinges on fingering whoever fitted a live wire down its snout and programmed it to go drinkies while Tariq was in the tub.

If someone’s tampering with domestic appliances with murder in mind, the blogosphere is going to have a cow and a half. But that’s the least of your worries right now.

You turn to Kemal. “You got that?” you ask redundantly.

“Was the other case like this?” he repeats.

“A bit.” Shit, who are you trying to kid? You surrender to the inevitable and place the call. “Chief Inspector?”

Dodgy Dickie grunts. “What’s up?”

“I’m afraid we’ve definitely got another one.” You’re registered on scene here, so you can add him to the access list. “Moderately bent business man in Bruntsfield, dead in the bathtub where his vacuum cleaner decided to electrocute him. I’ve got his cousin downstairs—former client of mine, not currently under suspicion—sweating bullets and trying not to incriminate the deceased. The MO is a dead ringer for Babylon.” That the deceased was in the loop on repairing broken appliances—see also: back-street fabbers—you leave for later. It’s certainly a suggestive avenue for enquiries.

Mac’s initial response is unprintable. Then, “Hold the fort, I’ll be reet round. This client of yours—dinna let him leave.” He hangs up immediately, and his contact status, hanging in the corner of your vision, changes to mobile.

Dickie is showing worrying signs of succumbing to hands-on mode, the besetting cognitive error of any senior officer confronted by too much data—the illusion that if they just take hands-on control in the field, they can make everything come up roses. It leads to brigadiers focussing on a single infantry squad, and chief inspectors interviewing suspects instead of concentrating on running the hundred-headed murder team. (And, of course, if you try to point this out to him… just don’t go there.)

You hot-shoe it downstairs and back to the living room, which is becoming hard to get to—the hall is filling up with uniforms, stomping on each other’s German-Army-surplus paratroop boots and trying to make themselves useful. You really want an opportunity to get Kemal alone and pump him, or failing that, to get Mr. Hussein to spill the beans on his cousin (assuming there are any beans to spill). But once Dickie arrives…

“Anwar.”

He’s sitting in the armchair, shoulders slumped beneath the weight of an invisible storm-cloud. And he looks guilty , which will never do.

“In a few minutes, my boss on this investigation is going to arrive. He’ll want to ask you a few questions.”

Dickie is very old-school, inclined to go off like a shaped charge in the direction of the first plausible suspect who comes to his attention. This is not unreasonable: 90 per cent of the time, it’s the right thing to do in an investigation, because 90 per cent of the time, the first plausible suspect is the right one. But you will eat your warrant card if Anwar is smart enough to arrange a scene like the one in the bathroom upstairs—much less to have orchestrated Mikey Blair’s demise.

In the absence of a better target, Dickie’s nostrils will start twitching in exactly the wrong direction, and he’ll get all distracted and focussed on the nearest Saughton graduate because it’s easier than acknowledging how non-linear this investigation is going. And you don’t want him to do that because, despite the ongoing bad blood between you, you are horribly aware that there’s a repeat killer at large, and it would really suck if Dickie got hung up on Anwar, leaving the killer free to strike again.

“I am not officially cautioning you, and you are not under arrest, my friend. But it would be really helpful if you could tell me anything you know about any criminal activities your cousin was engaged in.”

The slumped shoulders rise infinitesimally, then fall again. Oh, it’s like that, is it?

You take your glasses off and, very deliberately, slide them into your pocket. “Anwar.” You pause. (What you’re about to say might break your career, if it comes out in the wash. If you’ve got any career left to break, that is.) “This is a murder investigation. Intelligence goes in , it doesn’t come out . As long as you don’t cough to any arrestable offences, we have no reason to lay a finger on you. And I can guarantee that anything you say that isn’t a confession about an arrestable offence won’t reach your probation officer’s ears if that’s what you’re worried about. Maintaining security on a murder investigation is much more important to us than telling your social worker whether you’ve been saying your prayers before bed. So I’m going to ask you again: Do you know anything that we should know, to help us find your cousin’s killer?”