Rule 34

More waiting:

What circumstances?

At this point you pause to authenticate Karl’s identity credentials. Karl Heyne is indeed an officer of some kind in the Kriminalpolizei in Dresden, according to your departmental authentication server. He is, in the loosest possible sense, one of your colleagues. But on the other hand—you check the department newsfeed for confirmation—Dickie has indeed escalated the case of the late Mr. Blair to Murder in the First Degree as of lunch- time, and the ironclad rule of criminal intelligence is: assimilate everything, disclose nothing. You think for another minute, then:

I am not principal investigator. Suggest you contact DCI MacLeish (profile attached) for further information. Tell him I noted circumstantial similarity.

(Bye.)

At which point you could wash your hands of the whole affair and consider your duty done—but that’s not enough, is it? You stare at Karl’s note for a full minute, letting it all percolate together, trying to quantify your sense of deja vu.

Item: $PERP is a spammer.

Item: $PERP is found dead, in a weird and improbable accident, at home.

Item: rogue domestic appliances are implicated.

Item: so are inappropriate intoxicating substances.

Naah, that never happens, not in real life, outside of the movies. Does it?

“Dickie will think I’m off my trolley,” you mutter to yourself. Then you pick up your phone, shake it, and speed-dial.

“Chief Inspector? If I can have a moment . . . ? Really? That’s too bad . . . Listen, I don’t want to add to your work-load, but I have a possible lead from—it’s a long shot—Germany. Yes, it’s intelligence-led. They’ve got a circumstantially similar case on their hands in the past twenty-four hours. No . . . Not exactly the same, but I spotted at least four points of similarity. So far, no, no, they’re still treating it as accidental-but-weird. No, I know. I told him I’m not the lead, gave him your details. Yes, I—I’m sorry, but in my judgement there’s something very fishy about it, and I think you need to talk to the man. No I—no. Look, you know what I do, don’t you? I’m here to watch for—well shit.”

You put the phone down carefully, in case it explodes. Or maybe in case you explode. Anger management is one of those compulsory people-skills hingmies they put you through on a regular basis; clearly Dickie’s overdue for his next refresher.

You can fully appreciate how busy he is, and how he’s got the brass breathing down his neck—Scotland as a nation gets about a hundred murders a year, but Edinburgh accounts for less than a tenth of that—and you know this is but a circumstantial what-the-fuck? indicator, most likely a coincidence. But there’s no call to bite your head off. If Dickie disnae want to carry it, he can always fob you off on one of his minions. There is absolutely no fucking call to swear at a fellow officer like that, much less a sometime classmate, and it is indicative of a distinct lack of respect and professionalism, and you have half a mind to—

No, scratch that. Leave the formal complaint for some other time, when he isn’t being shat on from above and trying to juggle a murder investigation and his regular case-load. Now is not the time to go nuclear, whether or not Dickie deserves it. You’ve had years of practice at swallowing this shit. Often as not, they don’t even realize they’re dishing it out: coming from a macho subculture, gobbling pints and proton-pump inhibitors to keep their stomachs from exploding with all the bile and suppressed rage that goes with the job—no. Just no. Bottle it up for later.

And speaking of bottling it, you put in three and a half hours of overtime yesterday, it’s forty minutes to end of shift right now, and if you don’t claw back some personal space, HR will notice and send you on a mandatory work/rest chakra-rebalancing course again (because the new-age hippie counselling shit is cheaper than paying for stress-related sick-leave).

Anyway, haven’t you got a date?

It’s time to go home and shower, then off to the wine bar to see what Dorothy wants—whether it’s you, or just a familiar face in a strange town. And to maybe bring down the wall and get comfortably numb for a few hours before you climb back into the broken hamster wheel of your career and scamper round again and again . . .

Maybe you didn’t know it at the time, but you and Dorothy have been friends for, oh, ever so long. Since maybe back before you were in primary two and Miss Simpson started in on the utterly bowdlerized sexed coursework, which was all they were allowed to hand out back then. Back in the early nineties, in the dog days of Section 28—the part of the Local Government Act that banned local councils and education authorities from admitting that homosexuality even existed, much less allowing teachers to tell isolated kids that being destined for the Adam and Steve alternative didn’t mean they were pariahs or perverts—back then, even aged eight, you’d figured out for yourself that this stuff was all wrong. You’ll never get me to do that with a boy. Well, maybe—but why bother? It’s an awful lot of hard work—and no little mess—for something that doesn’t look much like anything you’d call fun.

On the other hand, that was before you hit your teens—and ran into crushes and BFFs and all the weirdly incomprehensible playground politics that never really made sense to you. Because your crushes were all wrong, and you were afraid to talk about them: Is she a lesbo? was about the second worst thing they could say about anyone, and you knew that if you gave them even a hint about what you dreamed about, about what made you wake flushed and sweating in the small hours, it’d be the absolute end, utter humiliation for the rest of your life.

So you giggled along with them, and learned to lie, didn’t admit to watching and rewatching Xena on video until the tapes chewed themselves up, and made a point of going to church so that when you said you believed in no-sex-before-marriage, they believed you and forgot to ask the obvious follow-on question: So who’s the lucky boy, then? You even did the Alpha course when you were eighteen, and lied enthusiastically right up until the speaking in tongues bit (which caught in your throat).

But then it was time for university. Where you met your inner Dorothy and got to know her . . . quite well.

Learning who you are is something every teenager goes through: But if your identity isn’t an identikit match for any of the role models on offer, it can take quite a while and take you up some strange paths on the way. You figured out you wanted to be a cop quite early—maybe it was Uncle Bert’s fault (even though he never bothered taking the sergeant’s exam), and maybe it was connected to the hard-shell uniformed image: self-sufficient, justified, not taking shit from ignorant assholes. You wanted that, you wanted it badly, and you believed in rules and telling the truth and punishing bullies. But maybe there was something else going on as well, something you didn’t understand at the time.

When you got your A-level grades and that place at university and broke away from the home-town claustrophobia for the first time, you didn’t bother joining any wishy-washy clubs and societies: You signed up for Archery and SCUBA Diving rather than the Feminists Society or LGBT Soc. You did your drinking in a pub on the wrong side of the tracks, where you unconsciously felt safe, not realizing that you were missing out on all the torrid flesh-pots of academia; and it was from the local bears that you learned about gay culture at second hand. Learned their jokes, learned their slang, learned “friends of Dorothy” as archaic code for the love that dared not speak its name (once upon a time).

You never realized that the Feminists Society was the bed-hopping club of your dreams; or that if you’d hung out in the Student’s Union on campus, you could have had your pick from the conveyor-belt sushi buffet of dungaree-wearing baby dykes in LGBT Soc.

(At least, until they learned you were studying to be a cop.)

Mary was the turning point. Portsmouth, Pompey: a naval town, going back hundreds of years—and where you get warships, you get sailors. Some of whom—you can imagine Kylie in Lower Sixth hissing it in disbelief—were lesbians. Who did not hang out around the university campus