Rule 34 - Charles Stross [2]
A two-wetsuit job.
Back in the naughty noughties a fifty-one-year-old Baptist minister was found dead in his Alabama home wearing not one but two wet suits and sundry bits of exotic rubber underwear, with a dildo up his arse. (The cover-up of the doubly-covered-up deceased finally fell before a Freedom of Information Act request.)
It’s not as if its like isnae well-known in Edinburgh, city of grey stone propriety and ministers stern and saturnine (with the most surprising personal habits). But propriety—and the exigencies of service under the mob of puritanical arseholes currently in the ascendant in Holyrood—dictates discretion. If Jase is calling it openly, it’s got to be pretty blatant. Excessively blatant. Tabloid grade, even.
Which means—
Enough of that. Let’s see if we can blag a ride, shall we?
“Afternoon, Inspector. What can I do for ye?”
You smile stiffly at the auxiliary behind the transport desk: “I’m looking for a ride. What have you got?”
He thinks for a moment. “Two wheels, or four?”
“Two will do. Not a bike, though.” You’re wearing a charcoal grey skirt suit and the police bikes are all standard hybrids, no step-through frames. It’s not dignified, and in these straitened times, your career needs all the dignity it can get. “Any segways?”
“Oh aye, mam, I can certainly do one of those for ye!” His face clears, and he beckons you round the counter and into the shed.
A couple of minutes later you’re standing on top of a Lothian and Borders Police segway, the breeze blowing your hair back as you dodge the decaying speed pillows on the driveway leading past the stables to the main road. You’d prefer a car, but your team’s carbon quota is low, and you’d rather save it for real emergencies. Meanwhile, you take the path at a walk, trying not to lean forward too far.
Police segways come with blues and twos, Taser racks and overdrive: But if you go above walking pace, they invariably lean forward until you resemble a character in an old Roadrunner cartoon. Looking like Wile E. Coyote is undignified, which is not a good way to impress the senior management whether or not you’re angling for promotion, especially in the current political climate. (Not that you are angling for promotion, but . . . politics.) So you ride sedately towards Comely Bank Road, and the twitching curtains and discreet perversions of Stockbridge.
Crime and architecture are intimately related. In the case of the red stone tenements and Victorian villas of Morningside, it’s mostly theft from cars and burglary from the aforementioned posh digs. You’re still logged in as you ride past the permanent log-jam of residents’ Chelsea Tractors—those such as live here can afford to fill up their hybrid SUVs, despite the ongoing fuel crunch—and the eccentric and colourful boutique shops. You roll round a tight corner and up an avenue of big stone houses with tiny wee gardens fronting the road until you reach the address Sergeant McDougall gave you.
Here’s your first surprise: It’s not a tenement or a villa—it’s a whole town house, three stories high and not split for multiple occupancy. It’s got to be worth something north of half a million, which in these deflationary times is more than you’ll likely earn in the rest of your working life. And then there’s your next surprise: When you glance at it in CopSpace, there’s a big twirling red flag over it, and you recognize the name of the owner. Shit.
CopSpace—the augmented-reality interface to all the accumulated policing and intelligence databases around which your job revolves—rots the brain, corroding the ability to rote-memorize every villain’s face and backstory. But you know this guy of old: He’s one of the rare memorable cases.
You ride up to the front door-step and park. The door is standing ajar—Jase