Rule 34

bank frontages thrown up a couple of decades since and now half-boarded-over: Then at the big five-way intersection, it hangs a right, and your phone pleeps a set-down alert at you.

One hundred and twenty metres to destination. Fucking bus company. You start walking.

This part of town has an uneasy relationship with affluence. Besides the obligatory state-owned Tesco Local, there’s a weird mix of closed and barricaded shop-fronts, charity stores with windows stuffed full of last decade’s brown leather sofas, and imaginative little boutiques selling up-market tchotchkes. You pass a kebab shop and an Asian jewellery store before you reach the chocolatier and the usual anonymous black door beside it.

There is a buzzer. You mash your thumb on the button for flat 1F2 and wait. And wait. After a minute, you push it again and hold. Just your luck if Vivian’s chosen this lunch-time to go do her shopping. There’s no reply, but the door opens in your face; a young guy slithers past you, earbuds screwed in as tight as his closed face. You catch the door with your toe and a moment later you’re on your way upstairs.

The tenement stairwell is grey and dusty, worn flagstones and black-enamelled cast-iron handrails leading up into the gloom. On the first-floor landing you find three heavy-looking doorways. The tarnished brass name-plate saying CROLLA ASSOCIATES tells you all you need to know, and you push the doorbell beside it. There is, as you expected, no response. You stand, holding your breath.

Well, you’ve come all this way: Why stop here?

There’s a multifunction pen in your pocket. It doesn’t look like anything special, but there are five cartridges and a bunch of complicated springs inside that barrel. And there’s a wallet in your other pocket, and along with the phone and driving license, it contains a couple of other cards. One of which might have raised an eyebrow if the Polis had Dumpster-dived your pockets and thought to peel away the laminated stickers to reveal the intricately etched sheet of fullerene-reinforced plastic within. But even then, it’s not obvious what the etching is, and you’ve got an explanation for how you came by it that would get you off the hook under most circumstances. Except these.

You take thirty seconds to twist and warp some springy bits of steel-tough plastic free from the card, another twenty seconds to swap them in place of the ball-point cartridge, and ten seconds to bump the lock. Then you step inside Vivian Crolla’s apartment.

You let the door slip shut behind you, and in that very instant you realize that something is irrevocably awry.

It’s never entirely quiet in a Scottish tenement flat. The floorboard-creaking footfalls of upstairs’ unseen neighbours. The drone of a news channel on next door’s PC. If the windows look out over the front, there’s the interminable road noise of a major thoroughfare (muted, now, by last-century standards, but still present). The faint susurration of Arctic methane flowing through the pipe to the fuel cell: the whir of the refrigerator in the kitchen.

The windows face out back, the neighbours are at work, and you can’t hear the fridge. Is that all? There’s a faint hissing from somewhere.

You glance up. The illumination filtering into the rectangular central hall comes through open doorways, and it has the numinous tint of daylight. You take your picklock card and use its edge to delicately swipe the light switch, leaving no prints.

“Vivian?” you call quietly.

There’s a strong floral stink in the flat, as from one of those fucking air fresheners women like to put in the bathroom to make out that they shit roses.

“Vivian?” you ask again, walking towards the living room. “I got your email. Vivian . . .”

There’s a scrap of paper on the floor. You frown and bend to pick it up. It’s white, overprinted in mostly green ink (with faint yellow and pink tints), approximately six centimetres by twelve in size. You remember its like from your childhood: It’s a foreign bank-note. “The Royal Bank of Scotland plc PROMISE TO PAY THE BEARER ON DEMAND ONE POUND STERLING, At their head office here in Edinburgh, by order of the board, 30th March 1999.”

Dead words. Dead currency. Dead bank. Broken promise.

Inside the austerely furnished living room, there lies a mattress. It has been cocooned in shrink-wrap plastic, sealed against the elements. The fragile husk of Vivian Crolla forms a mound under the polythene integument, like a pupa bonded to the surface of a leaf. She’s barely one metre fifty in her stockinged feet, grey-haired and thin, as if all the juices of a life unlived have been sucked out of her. She’s neatly dressed in a dark suit and pearl necklace, all present and correct but for a missing shoe and a premature death. There is a rip in the side of the shrink-wrap, a deep gash that plunges into the interior of the mattress, from which irredeemable green-ink promises bleed halfway across the carpet.

(Damn her, why couldn’t she have stuffed her mattress with fifty-euro notes instead of unrecyclable toilet paper? a corner of you thinks irreverently.)

You bend close to her and touch her shoulder through the plastic. She’s cold and stiff. Someone obviously shrink-wrapped her onto the mattress while she was unconscious or already dead. But who, and why? Rising, you stalk through the kitchen, her office, the bathroom. The stink in the bathroom is chokingly thick, almost unbreathable: The electronic air freshener is farting away like a cow with irritable-bowel syndrome.

You lick your dry lips. “This isn’t funny anymore,” you complain, an ironic metacommentary on your internal turmoil. Then the true state of jeopardy slams into you like a railway spike of purest distilled paranoia, and you see, with merciless clarity:

Someone has gotten inside your decision loop.

They’re a rival or an enemy. They’ve identified and killed your chosen COO and CFO, hours or days before you were ready to make them employment offers. They’re sending you a message: Get out of town. Get out of town now. Run away, little business man, while there’s still time.

You can’t get out of town, even if you want to. The Polis have got your DNA on file as belonging to John Christie, a contact of Mike Blair (deceased). You need to dance the John-Christie-is-an- innocent-bystander fandango until you can serve the paper-work to get your samples destroyed, or your usefulness to the Operation will be at an end: and with it, your career.

To make matters worse, you’re here now. Vivian Crolla isn’t going to vanish silently from Scottish society without anyone asking questions: Sooner or later, one of her business associates or relatives or nosy neighbours will crawl whimpering to the public servants, who will break down her door, pinch the bridge of their nose beneath suddenly watering eyes, and call for CID and forensics. And then it’ll be deja vu all over again, and you’d better hope you’re not shedding flakes of dead skin because if they get a sequence match linking you to both scenes—

You begin to sidle back towards the front door, shuddering beneath the livid caul of rage that has settled over your shoulders, all the while thinking:

Once is happenstance, but twice is enemy action.

Someone’s going to bleed for this. And it’s not going to be you.

LIZ: Snowballing Hell

Thursday morning dawns moist and miserable. You turn yourself out of bed, scramble two eggs, and remember to bag up the plastic waste for collection on your way out the door. Then—forty minutes before you’re due on shift—your phone pulls on its work personality and rings for you. It’s Moxie. This can only be trouble.

“Skipper?” He screws his face up like a hamster worried you’re going to steal his peanut: “You decent?”

You take your thumb off the camera. “I was about to head in. What’s come up?”

“I think you want to be here half an hour ago; it’s about that wave you were tracking with ICIS? I got a call from a lieutenant in the Dresden KRIPO; he’s trying to get in touch with you urgently about an investigation?” Moxie’s bamboozled befuddlement is not unreasonable—death in Deutschland isn’t a regular bullet point on your