Charles Stross - Rule 34

“ Tell everyone what ?”

But you’re talking to a receding back, hunched under the weight of too much baggage. You blink against the daylight, mouth hanging open, unable to grasp what’s happening. There’s a sour taste in your mouth and a ringing in your ears, and a terrible tension in your head: the injustice of it all! If you were a real man of your father’s generation, you’d chase after her and drag her back and thrash her soundly. (If you were a real man of your father’s generation she’d call Social Services on you.) Where’s the honour in this? What does she think you have done, to be so offended?

The bucket. The suitcase. Oh God.

The front door slams closed behind you as you scamper for the staircase as if all the hounds of hell are chasing you. (She’s been upstairs. And it’s not the bucket.) You pull down the loft ladder and scramble up it, gasping for breath, surface in the attic like a mole in a lawn suddenly come face-to-face with a roller.

The bucket is where you left it, but Peter Manuel’s suitcase sits open on the floor, in the middle of the puddle of daylight admitted by the dormer window. Bibi must have forced the lock, you realize. A small, pale-skinned arm rests just over the zippered rim, as if a wee bairn is sleeping inside. Then the arm twitches, flailing for a grip.

A little girl, about three years younger than Farida, sits up in the suitcase. Blonde tousled hair and button nose: blue eyes and puppy fat. But there’s something wrong with her. Her face is expressionless and paralyzed, her mouth gaping so wide you think for a horrid moment that her jaw is dislocated—her skin doesn’t seem to fit properly. And she’s naked. Naked, and in a suitcase.

Then she looks at you with undead eyes and speaks without moving her mouth:

“Will you fuck me, Daddy? I want you. I’ve been so lonely without you…”

You don’t normally come out of an interview with a material witness blinking at the light and wondering which way up your world goes; twice in twenty-four hours is something of a personal record. Nevertheless, you take one look at Kemal’s face and feel a twinge of recognition. You step aside for a stranger entering the building as the grimy glass door swings shut behind you, distracted by the need to marshal your thoughts. “Did you get anything out of that?” you ask.

Kemal shakes his head, not in negation but in weary acknowledgment. “The future is here today, unevenly distributed,” he misquotes. “I do not think the doctor is a murderer. Not a knowing one, of course.”

You keep your thoughts to yourself for a moment as you look around for the car. It’s missing. “Hold on.” You ping the front desk back at head office: “Where’s our ride?”

Sniffy McSluggard takes her own sweet time getting back to you: “CID telled it it was needed elsewhere, Inspector. You’ll be wanting to charge for a bus ride.”

Which is just bloody typical. “Come on,” you tell Kemal, and head down Buccleugh Street towards the short-cut through to South Clerk Street. “What makes you think the doctor’s in the clear?”

“I do not think he’s innocent ,” Kemal admits. “His speech stress is uneven. He hides something, yes. And the spam connection, and the, the cognitive engine, the use of distributed networks—that is significant. But I don’t think he’s a killer.”

“Why not?” you needle.

“He is a coward.” Kemal pauses next to a rack of council recycling bins. “That is a technical term,” he adds. “He is a thinking man and an overplanner. He anticipates hazards before they emerge, and avoids them. Risk-averse.”

“That’s how I pegged him,” you aver. So why did Dodgy Dickie want you to interview him? “I think we should do some more digging. If someone is using ATHENA to locate targets, that would fit…” You trail off. There’s that nagging sense of déjà vu. You know Dr. MacDonald from somewhere, you’re sure of it. One or other of the pubs and bars in the pink triangle? Or a Pride march in years past, when you were managing the Lothian and Borders booth? That’s as may be, but it’s not relevant to the case in hand. “Let’s find out who he talks to. Let’s see what Moxie can find out about his connections.”

Back on South Clerk Street you hijack a microbus with the aid of your company debit card and bid handsomely to divert it halfway to Dean Village. There’s some jerk on the top deck who counterbids and it ends up ramping to twenty euros, but fuck it—two DIs, on a murder investigation: Doc will square it for you. You walk the last stretch and are back at HQ by eleven.

The MacDonald interview has preceded you—uploaded in real time, it made it into the BABYLON intel feed and promptly bamboozled everyone on the team who was paying attention. As you walk through the shielded doors, a blizzard of virtual Post-it notes descends on you, terminating in a terse SEE ME, signed DCI MacLeish. It’s like being back in grammar school again. You give Kemal the eye-ball. “Got to run, make yourself at home in ICIU.”

You barely walk through the door to D31 before Dickie is on your case. Face like thunder, beetling brows, he rushes you. “This way,” he growls, striding towards a confessional cubicle—beige fabric walls, antisound damper poised overhead like a metal mantis. He barely waits to get into the cone of silence before he launches on you. “I don’t know what you fucking think you’re doing, Kavanaugh, snooping around on your off shift and sticking your nose in—”

“Hey, what the fuck are you—”

“No, don’t you start! I should take this up the chain reet now . You’re a loose cannon. This report on the Straight woman is the final straw—”

You snap. “Fuck off.”

“Whit?”

His expression is a picture in peach, slowly ripening towards plum. You ken you’ve got about five seconds before he really explodes, so you go for the throat “ She came to me , sir. Because, you know, outside of work I have this thing called a life , and Dorothy is one of my friends. Friends , Dickie, you’ve heard of them? Jesus fucking Christ, have you never had a friend come to you with a question about the law? Come on. Tell me. Have you? ”

“I’ve nivver had a so-called friend cough a fucking POI in a murder investigation in my lap!”

“Well neither have I , but there’s always a first time. And I bet you’ve never had a girl-friend cough to a date-rape situation either, have you? But that’s what friends are for.”

The “R” word gets his attention. “Rape, did you say?”

You make a cutting gesture: “I didna think there was a case to answer, or I’d have had her down the clinic before her feet touched the floor. Questionable sex, with a side order of sociopathic manipulation involved. Her word against his, no drugs or threats of violence, it gets murky fast. But no, sir. The reason I filed the report was this John Christie sock puppet is in play, and I figured you might want to talk to him . About what he was doing visiting our friend Mr. Blair. Ahem.” You don’t add, instead of adding two plus two to make 16.7 and threatening me with a disciplinary . That’s understood. But his expression begins to droop from bullish to sheepish, and the choleric colour is fading.

“Jesus, Liz.”

You’ve won, you see, but you’re still pissed off at him for losing his rag in the first place. Probably best to let him know about it, both barrels in the face: Dickie’s not terribly perceptive when it comes to subtleties of interpersonal relations. “We are on the same team , sir. I really do not appreciate this hard-on you’ve got for me. I am attempting to discharge my duty as efficiently as possible, and you keep dumping on me. When I stumbled over a lead by pure chance , I sent it your way because that’s the right thing to do: I do not expect to catch shit by return of email. If you’d be happier with me off the case, then just say so: I’ve got a patch of my own to cultivate. But some professional courtesy would be appreciated around here.”