Rule 34 - Charles Stross [136]
“Tell everyone what?”
But you’re talking to a receding back, hunched under the weight of too much baggage. You blink against the daylight, mouth hanging open, unable to grasp what’s happening. There’s a sour taste in your mouth and a ringing in your ears, and a terrible tension in your head: the injustice of it all! If you were a real man of your father’s generation, you’d chase after her and drag her back and thrash her soundly. (If you were a real man of your father’s generation she’d call Social Services on you.) Where’s the honour in this? What does she think you have done, to be so offended?
The bucket. The suitcase. Oh God.
The front door slams closed behind you as you scamper for the staircase as if all the hounds of hell are chasing you. (She’s been upstairs. And it’s not the bucket.) You pull down the loft ladder and scramble up it, gasping for breath, surface in the attic like a mole in a lawn suddenly come face-to-face with a roller.
The bucket is where you left it, but Peter Manuel’s suitcase sits open on the floor, in the middle of the puddle of daylight admitted by the dormer window. Bibi must have forced the lock, you realize. A small, pale-skinned arm rests just over the zippered rim, as if a wee bairn is sleeping inside. Then the arm twitches, flailing for a grip.
A little girl, about three years younger than Farida, sits up in the suitcase. Blonde tousled hair and button nose: blue eyes and puppy fat. But there’s something wrong with her. Her face is expressionless and paralyzed, her mouth gaping so wide you think for a horrid moment that her jaw is dislocated—her skin doesn’t seem to fit properly. And she’s naked. Naked, and in a suitcase.
Then she looks at you with undead eyes and speaks without moving her mouth:
“Will you fuck me, Daddy? I want you. I’ve been so lonely without you . . .”
LIZ: Dominoes Fall
You don’t normally come out of an interview with a material witness blinking at the light and wondering which way up your world goes; twice in twenty-four hours is something of a personal record. Nevertheless, you take one look at Kemal’s face and feel a twinge of recognition. You step aside for a stranger entering the building as the grimy glass door swings shut behind you, distracted by the need to marshal your thoughts. “Did you get anything out of that?” you ask.
Kemal shakes his head, not in negation but in weary acknowledgment. “The future is here today, unevenly distributed,” he misquotes. “I do not think the doctor is a murderer. Not a knowing one, of course.”
You keep your thoughts to yourself for a moment as you look around for the car. It’s missing. “Hold on.” You ping the front desk back at head office: “Where’s our ride?”
Sniffy McSluggard takes her own sweet time getting back to you: “CID telled it it was needed elsewhere, Inspector. You’ll be wanting to charge for a bus ride.”
Which is just bloody typical. “Come on,” you tell Kemal, and head down Buccleugh Street towards the short-cut through to South Clerk Street. “What makes you think the doctor’s in the clear?”
“I do not think he’s innocent,” Kemal admits. “His speech stress is uneven. He hides something, yes. And the spam connection, and the, the cognitive engine, the use of distributed networks—that is significant. But I don’t think he’s a killer.”
“Why not?” you needle.
“He is a coward.” Kemal pauses next to a rack of council recycling bins. “That is a technical term,” he adds. “He is a thinking man and an overplanner. He anticipates hazards before they emerge, and avoids them. Risk-averse.”
“That’s how I pegged him,” you aver. So why did Dodgy Dickie want you to interview him? “I think we should do some more digging. If someone is using ATHENA to locate targets, that would fit . . .” You trail off. There’s that