Rule 34

and-hoodie stereotypes: One of them’s staring and muttering to his mate, who’s nodding and not looking at you. You’re acutely aware, of an instant, that you’re wearing the Gonet on your wrist. Conspicuous consumption indeed. Shit, part of you registers, the part of you that remembers your time at school and the special education your uncle Al gave you: The rest of you feels a pulse or squeeze of momentary happy anticipation of release, not unlike what you felt with the woman. Sex and violence are all cross-wired at a low level in the brain, anyway. That’s what they say.

You finish your glass, stand, and walk out of the bar with your back straight, not looking back. You slide the glasses into their case and pocket them. There’s some movement behind you. You turn a corner and cut uphill through a grey stone canyon between windowless buildings. It’s twilight now, and there’s movement behind you, a scuffing noise like a rat in a hurry and a breath of air as you spin round.

There’s only one of them and it’s Sweaty McTracksuit, and the back of your head is no longer in front of his fist when he tries to deck you. Instead, your left heel is stamping on his right instep, you’ve got a lock on his arm, and you’re twisting as he drops the home-fabbed knuckle-duster that probably came off one of your clients’ machines and claws at your eyes with his left hand.

A second later, you’ve faceplanted him on a paving stone. Quick scan: Two’s company. For a moment, you wonder if the enemy sent him, but no—he’s just a fucking low-life mugger who’s taken you for a tourist, gone after your watch and your wallet. You can’t be having that. So you kick him sharply in the ribs, pick up the ultrahard plastic knuckles while he’s struggling to draw breath, hold down his right hand against the concrete, and use them to ensure he’ll never play Guitar Hero again.

Ants. I am surrounded by fucking ants. Can’t they get anything right? Even a fucking mugging?

Evidently not. It looks like Peter Manuel will have to teach the burghers of Edinburgh a lesson.

A lesson they won’t soon forget.

LIZ: Bereavement Counselling

Mr. Hussein is pretty much right at the bottom of the list of all the people you ever expected to be doing the Victim Response Officer tap-dance for. It is, in fact, typical of how fucked-up this week has become that you find yourself sitting knee to knee with him over a cup of tea, commiserating (for tenuous values of commiseration).

Anwar is as bent as a three-euro note: just bright enough to think he’s smarter than everyone around him, just stupid enough not to realize that they’ve got his number. He’s a walking poster-boy for the Dunning-Kruger Effect: If he says he’s going straight, it probably means one of his idiot friends told him shoplifting is legal. However, his lack of insight is a two-edged sword; it’s glaringly obvious that he’s worried sick about his cousin, who is lying dead in an upstairs bedroom while the SOCO team pin down the scene, but he’s too dumb to actually help you. So you’re supposed to treat him like any other victim . . . or potential source of material evidence in what is rapidly shaping up to be the mass-murder enquiry of the century. Hence the house- work questions.

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