Rule 34 by Stross Charles

Author:Stross, Charles [Stross, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781101516645
Publisher: ACE
Published: 2011-07-04T22:00:00+00:00

Kemal doesn’t say another word as the car parks itself, but his expression says it all for him. “I need ten minutes to drop my bag,” he says, opening the car door.

“Of course.” You climb out of the Volvo and collect his wheelie-bag from the boot. The car beeps and shuts down behind you as you take the escalator up to the lobby. You install yourself in an understuffed leather sofa at one side as Kemal does his business with the self-service check-in, picks up a keycard, and is whisked upstairs to salaryman limbo.

Kemal gives you just enough time to do the necessary one-eighty reorientation and get your shit squared away. You’re just finishing up a memo to Doc—necessary clearances for Kemal—when he reappears. “That was fast.”

“I said I only needed time to drop my bag.” You could swear he looks wounded, but those big brown eyes of his make it his default state. “Are we going now?”

“In a moment.” You fold your desktop away into a corner of your left eye and lever yourself ungracefully out of the sofa. Then you dust yourself down. “There’s a passable coffee shop round the corner,” you tell him. “I think you and I ought to go there and discuss the, the spam thing over a latte. Before I take you round the shop and get you into the system.”

He gives you the hairy eye-ball. “What is there to discuss.” It’s not inflected as a question.

“We started out on the wrong foot.” You take a deep breath. “I apologize, for what it’s worth. I’ll give you a fair hearing. But you need to know what you’re walking into before you stick your nose round the incident-room door.”

Kemal exhales. “Politics?”

“You could say that.”

“I think a small espresso would be a good idea,” he concedes.

“In that case . . .”

You’re not entirely sure why the sudden turnaround with respect to Kemal, but there are several factors feeding in to it. It’s hard to stay furious at an abstract, and meeting him face-to-face you recognize only too clearly the stink of failure to launch. You may have been treading water for five years, but Kemal’s spent them sliding down the greasy pole. Stripped of the Eurocop arrogance and the entourage of Men in Black, he’s just a sad-faced little cop with a brief-case full of nightmares. And then there’s the matter in hand: Eight deaths.

You don’t owe Kemal the time of day, but it’d be grossly, unforgivably unprofessional to let your personal dislike get in the way of his investigation.

Sitting in the fake-eighties bachelor-pad bistro-hell coffee shop, you lay it all out for him. “You’re walking in on a high-profile murder investigation. Lead investigator is Detective Chief Inspector Dickie MacLeish; he and I have a history, and it’s not a good one. To be fair, he has a headache because firstly, Edinburgh usually gets maybe one murder a month, and secondly, the victim in this investigation had money and connections. He’s under the spotlight already, and adding a foreign connection is—”

CopSpace clears its throat discreetly.

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