Rule 34

fit . . .” You trail off. There’s that nagging sense of deja 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.”

The red spots on his cheeks come back, but he visibly bites his lip—and nods. It’s just a quiver of acknowledgment, but it’s the real thing. Suck it up, asshole. To his credit, he nods again. “It would seem that I owe someone an apology,” he admits.

Don’t be too fast with that: You could poke somebody’s eye out. You confine your response to a minutely calculated nod. “About Dr. MacDonald—”

“No,” says Dickie, and something about his tone alerts you, puts you on notice that he’s forgotten for a moment that he hates you.

“No?”

“Summat you said.” He frowns frumiously, an expression that comes easily to the front of his wrinkled noggin. “Stumbled over a lead by pure chance. So you say. D’ye really think that’s plausible?”

“What are you implying?” Your hackles are still raised.

“I’m not implying . . . anything . . . about you. What I’m saying is, it’s a verra convenient coincidence. And if there’s one thing ye ken I dinna trust, it’s coincidences. And there’s too goddamn many of them in this ay mess.”

“Coin—” You stop. “Dr. MacDonald. His whole social-network-analysis thing?”

Dickie fixes you with one cold blue eye and nods slowly, beneath the cone of silence.

You begin to come down from the adrenaline spike of career-terminating rage when you arrive back at the door to the ICIU. Inside, all is as it should be: The ever-rotating pool of uniformed porn monkeys are whining for release from the vomitorium, Moxie is forted up in the second office behind a stack of giant monitors and discarded munchie boxes, and Kemal is propping up the wall behind him, looking bored behind his shades.

“Hey, skipper.” Moxie leers at you over a browser full of—you look away quickly. “What can I do you for?”

“Dr. Adam MacDonald, Ed Uni, CS department. What have we got on him?”

“How deep do you want to go?” Your ferret is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed: Moxie likes nothing better than a good chase.

“Public sources first? Nothing I have to sign for at this time.”

“Well.” Moxie twitches his fingers at a couple of tabs. “It’s funny you ask that, skipper. He’s got an article on wikipeople, you know? And the social networks, what’s not friends-locked. A couple of singlesign-ons will vouch for him, and he posts in chat rooms all over the place.” He pulls a face. “Nothing saucy—well, nothing much. He’s divorced, one ex-husband—he’s heterosexually challenged and hangs out in the usual places.”

Kemal is head down over a pad, evidently brainstorming something—you can see lots of mind-map bubbles floating in an ochre soup of murky possibilities. “Okay. Let me authorize a trawl of CopSpace links under BABYLON’s authority.” You don’t have the authority to pull up random citizen’s CopSpace records on your own, but MacDonald’s on BABYLON’s radar as a POI, and you’re on team as an inspector, so your signing authority will cover it. You lean over Moxie’s terminal and stick your thumbprint on the reader, as required. It’s very fast and streamlined these days, the hierarchical delegation of surveillance authority under RIPA statutes: police-intelligence access via social network. “Let’s see who the good doctor has been talking to lately . . .”

Kemal catches your eye. While Moxie is busy, you follow him outside into the bright sunlight. The drive is occupied; someone’s parked a bunch of the force’s riot barrier trailers there, lined up as if there’s an up-coming derby. “What is it?” you ask.

“Your boss must really hate you.” To your surprise, he pulls out a packet of cigarettes and glances around. “Do you mind?”

“Um . . .” You shake your head. “Yes, he does. Five years ago I was in line for the job he’s in now, and he knows it. I’m the skeleton in his closet.” Lothian and Borders is officially a non-smoking force, but Kemal’s just visiting, and you’re outside and more than ten metres from a doorway. “Is that legal?”

His cheek twitches in something like a smile. “I have given up giving up.”

You step sideways to stand up-wind of him: “Any thoughts?”

He gets the thing lit and inhales deeply, frowning. After he lets the smoke out, the set of his shoulders