Rule 34 - Charles Stross [87]
No point hiding: He saw your face. “Is it Tariq?” you ask, your voice going all wobbly. “Is he alright?”
You see at once from his face that your brother-in-law isn’t alright.
Nor will he be alright ever again.
Nor can all the king’s horses and all the king’s men put Tariq together again.
It’s very strange to be sitting side by side with Inspector Butthurt in your father-in-law’s chintz-infested living room, chatting over cups of knee-cap-balanced tea (brought for you, incongruously, by a crime-scene cop dressed from head to foot in white plastic).
“I’m sorry we keep running into each other under such unfortunate circumstances, Mr. Hussein. By the way, is that your official registered phone?”
“Yes—” You watch nervelessly as she touches it, blinks a virtual fly away from the corner of her eye, and nods confirmation of some arcane suspicion to herself. Her movements are swift and precise. She’s a tall woman; if she were a man, built to proportion, she’d be about the same height as Constable Bouncer (who is waiting outside)—a terrifying tower of muscular poise. Far scarier than the weedy Eurocop she came with, who is presumably in the kitchen right now, trying to get some sense out of Auntie.
“Well, that’s a relief. You came here directly from the East End, I see. I’m going to have to image your phone and follow up your cellproximity record to confirm what it says, but unless you’ve turned into some kind of criminal hacker master-mind in the last year it looks like you’ve got a watertight alibi.” The dryness of her tone gets your hackles halfway up before you manage to remind yourself what she is.
“Alibi for what?”
“For—” For the first time she looks discommoded. Blinks again, evidently looking something up. “Sorry. Nobody told you?”
“Told me—”
“It’s your cousin, Tariq Shaikh Mohammed. He’s dead, I’m afraid.” She’s watching you. You nod, still not quite believing it. “We received a call from Sameena Begum—”
“My mother-in-law. His mother.”
“Oh dear.” She glances away. The wailing has gone, replaced by occasional sobbing. And tea, probably. They’ll have her in another room, you realize. To get her story, and mine. Before we talk.
“What happened? Was it an accident? Did somebody kill him?”
“Why do you suppose someone might have killed him?” She leans forward, and for a moment Inspector Butthurt is on your case, mercilessly digging. Your blood runs cold.
“I don’t suppose,” you tell her. “I have no fucking idea, sorry, I don’t know. Young healthy man though, what’s going to happen to him? Tariq’s a—” You stop. “Did someone kill him?”
Inspector Kavanaugh looks at you for a while. “It’s too early to say,” she says reluctantly. “Investigations are proceeding.”
And what the fuck does that mean? She’s talking in cop-speak, the mysterious language the filth use to smear their own version of events over the true story. Familiar from a thousand blog bulletins. You shake your head. “What does that mean? Is he dead, or not?”
She makes a small noise at the back of her throat. Muted impatience or the beginning of a chest infection. “A couple of questions if you don’t mind. By the way, did your cousin do any house-work? Cleaning, for instance?”
You stare at her in mute incomprehension. “House-work?”
“Dusting, washing up, vacuuming? That sort of thing?”
“Vacuuming?” You shake your head. “No, he’s not the kind. Well, he gets stuff fixed when it’s broken—I was going to ask him to sort out my wife’s onion chopper, she dropped it the other day—” You realize you’re rambling. So does Inspector Butthurt. She makes some kind of notation in her head-up memo, then changes the subject.
“Mr. Hussein, can you think of anyone who might have wanted your cousin dead?”
“I’m not sure,” you say numbly. “It’s not impossible. But Tariq was involved in stuff I don’t know about.” You take a deep breath, then hold up your mobie: “On probation, me. Keeping my nose clean. He knows it. Knew it. If he’s doing anything dodgy, he doesn’t want my snitchware anywhere near it.”
Which is one hundred–per