Rule 34 by Charles Stross Read Free Book Online Page A

Firth and fills the streets with a humid Whitechapel haze, misting your specs and clogging your lungs like a stifling blanket.
    You find yourself thinking about work over breakfast (a couple of cereal bars and a half litre of apple juice). Work is both a relief and a distraction; it beats sitting and staring at the walls, aimlessly surfing the net, or grocery shopping (all activities that leave you twitchy and numb, vulnerable to the little existential doubts that nibble at your will-power when you don’t have a focus). Besides, you’ve got a nice little bundle of puzzles on your desktop: your own investigation case-load plus trouble tickets escalated by your team because they’re not amenable to a five-minute clean-up. If you lose yourself in the in-tray, time passes that bit more quickly.
    So it is that after breakfast you pull on a clean suit, grab your bag, and head for the gym; and after a brisk half-hour work-out and a shower, you catch a microbus to the station. While you’re waiting at the bus-stop (expect five minutes between vehicles, according to the flickering sign—more like ten if you account for traffic jams) you put on your specs and log in to the daily news flow. Surprise—Dodgy Dickie MacLeish has got an ops room up and running for last night’s case, and he wants you to check in.
    Kibitzing on a Charlie Hotel investigation (Culpable Homicide, CH to its friends) is not exactly going to contribute to your own team-performance metrics, but it’s a higher-priority job than most, and it’s a whiff of the unusual: So you hurry on down to briefing room D31, grabbing a coffee on the way.
    Police briefing rooms haven’t changed much over the years. They retain the same scuffed white paint, checkerboard-fading LED panel lighting, and cheap furniture: the spoor of an institution focussed on results, not appearances. The centre of the room is dominated by a horseshoe of battered active surfaces for the collaborative push-pull noodling. CopSpace is crammed full of Post-its, work flows, time-line charts, and urgentproject waves. When you arrive, Dickie’s chatting to a knot of suits, but he clocks your availability sharpish and breaks off. “DI Kavanaugh.” He nods. “In bright and early, I see.” You register his glower but cut him some slack: File it under up all night with no sleep . The first law of detection is the longer you leave it, the harder it is to collar the culprit ; 80 per cent of cases are solved within forty-eight hours, after which the probability of a clear-up drops drastically—and Mac is well aware of this.
    “I was already past shift end when the call came in,” you reply automatically. “What’s turned up?”
    “I was hoping you could shed some light on the initial contact.” His manner’s abrupt. “The log here says first contact was Jase McDougall and PC Berman, sent to a priority 3 by Control responding to a call from a MOP, Mrs. Begum. The home help. You were in Control when the call came in—what did they tell you?”
    That one’s easy. “Nothing.” You take a cautious sip of your coffee and wince: It’s bogging. “That is, I didn’t take the call—I think you’ll find it was Sergeant”— Elvis —“Sorensen? When Jase called for supervision, I was coming to the end of my shift, so I decided to visit the site in person before heading home. When I got there, Jase told me that PC Berman took the initial contact and yanked his chain. When he got to the scene, he pulled me in. So I was the third on scene.”
    “And then you called me immediately.” Dickie nods, his expression grim. “May I ask why you didn’t file it as an accident?”
    “Sure.” Your cheek twitches: You take another mouthful of the bitter gunk from the bottom of the cafetière. “I’ve had dealings with Mr. Blair before—in fact, we go back a way. He’s a fine upstanding pillar of the underworld. If he’d fallen downstairs and clouted his head, I probably wouldn’t have rattled your