Rule 34

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.”

You run down. Not that you’re giving her more than the most superficial gloss on how Tariq set up the tagging system and real-time chat to show the old farts a very skewed view of the system; or the block-booked hotel rooms that users can sublet by the hour (at a 500–per cent mark-up for Tariq), or the proximity-matching service for halal doggers—pay your money, enter your preferences, go to this hotel room at that time and a suitable partner will be waiting for you—but Inspector Butthurt isn’t an idiot.

She nods thoughtfully. “Nobody gets killed because of a dating website. What do you suspect, my friend?”

She’s pushing your buttons but letting some morsels slip. The deadening fear is back: The man with the empty eyes, his luggage in your attic. The Gnome’s outrageous proposition. Tariq’s memory stick. “I suspect—I don’t know anything for a fact—Tariq was into other stuff, too.”

“Other stuff? Like what you were arrested for last time?”

Your mouth is dry. You nod. “I’m out of that, I swear. I’ve got a wife and kids to look after. And this.” You twitch your phone, which chooses that moment to vibrate again. It’s less intrusive than the old leg-tags, but no less an imposition. “And a respectable job.”

“A job?” She raises an eyebrow.

“Yes.” You need to rub her nose in it, make her recognize that you’re a man of consequence these days. “I handle the consular affairs in Scotland of the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan. I have diplomatic connections now, you know! I am required to be a man of utmost respect. And so Tariq knows he must leave me out of his madcap schemes.”

“Wow.” It’s the nearest thing to an admission of surprise you’ve ever heard from Inspector Butthurt. So worldly cynical is she (from dealing with the scum of the earth on a shift-work basis) that it is clearly a test of her self-control. A lesser inspector would be shouting their disbelief in your ear. “Does your probation officer know about this?”

“Of course he does!” you splutter. She shakes her head, and a very curious expression steals across her face. Respect or what? “You can confirm my credentials with the Foreign Office,” you add haughtily.

“Ah, that won’t be necessary.” It’s glassy-eyed disbelief, you decide, twitching your security blanket of smugness closer. At last you’ve broken through her shell of assumed white English privilege. But she doesn’t let the moment last. “Back to Tariq. What else can you tell me about him?”

“He was always too smart for his own good.” You realize abruptly that you’re never going to see him again, never engage in his line of crazy banter, never have to shrug off his sly importuning to get you on board one of his scams. The icy lid on your bottomless well of grief shatters, and you sniff, blinking back tears. You’re unsure whether you cry for Tariq or yourself.

Kavanaugh touches your shoulder: You flinch. “Better answer your call,” she says, rising. “I’ll be back in a minute. Don’t go away.” And she leaves you alone to face Bibi, who is making urgent demands for reassurance you can’t deliver.

TOYMAKER: Fucktoy