LIZ:
Bereavement Counselling
Mr. Hussein is pretty
much right at the bottom of the list of all the people you ever
expected to be doing the Victim Response Officer tap-dance for. It
is, in fact, typical of how fucked-up this week has become that you
find yourself sitting knee to knee with him over a cup of tea,
commiserating (for tenuous values of commiseration).
Anwar is as bent as a
three-euro note: just bright enough to think he’s smarter than
everyone around him, just stupid enough not to realize that they’ve
got his number. He’s a walking poster-boy for the Dunning-Kruger
Effect: If he says he’s going straight, it probably means one of
his idiot friends told him shoplifting is legal. However, his lack
of insight is a two-edged sword; it’s glaringly obvious that he’s
worried sick about his cousin, who is lying dead in an upstairs
bedroom while the SOCO team pin down the scene, but he’s too dumb
to actually help you. So you’re
supposed to treat him like any other victim . . . or potential
source of material evidence in what is rapidly shaping up to be the
mass-murder enquiry of the century. Hence the house-work
questions.
It only takes you
five minutes to figure out that he is not, in fact, a killer. You
don’t even need the speech-stress analyser; he’s not dissembling,
his story lines up, and his probationware-riddled phone places him
on the far side of town at the time. Everything so far checks out,
and if the public CCTV confirms his movements, he’s definitely off
the hook. Anyway, he’s not smart enough to have done something like
this.
Right now he’s a bit
of a mess: not quite a blubbery mass, but obviously very upset. And
he’s beginning to push you for details. “I don’t understand. What
has happened to my cousin? Why are you here? Who did it?
What did they do? Have you arrested
anyone?”
“I don’t know,” you
tell him, honestly enough. It’s not as if you can give him
information that might compromise an ongoing investigation, but
even if that was not the case, the scene upstairs is more than
slightly mad. “Listen, I’m going to check with my colleagues. I
don’t want to say anything until I know what I’m allowed to say,
but I’ll be right back. Drink your tea—I won’t be five
minutes.”
You rise and step out
into the hall, pull the door closed, and nod at the PC on duty, who
steps sideways to cover the door.
You go upstairs.
Kemal is standing on the landing outside the bathroom—why is it the fucking bathroom again?—airboarding
notes. He shakes his head when he sees you. “You’ve seen it. What
do you think?” you ask him.
Behind his
Eurocop-standard specs, Kemal’s eyes are tired. “Was the Blair
murder scene like this?” he asks.
“I don’t know.
Haven’t examined this one yet.” But you’ve got a good idea what to
expect. Otherwise, why the IM asking you to ask Mr. Hussein about
domestic appliances?
You knock on the
bathroom door, ignoring the yellow warning icons buzzing around it
like angry hornets. “Hello inside?”
The door doesn’t
open, but a chat window drops front and centre. SGT MADDOX, SOC: WHATSUP?
“Sitrep,” you
call.
You hear a muffled
voice: “Just a mo.” Then a huge and grisly multimedia dump with
about six gigabytes of metadata hanging off it drops across your
view like a luminous crime-fighting jellyfish. In the middle
there’s a doorway-framed view of the bathroom. You zoom on it: It’s
live; someone’s had the good taste to hang a webcam from the hook
on the back of the door, so you’ve got the equivalent of X-ray
specs.
Your view is
partially obstructed by Maddox and her co-workers, who are dancing
the dance of the forensic bunnymen within a much smaller stage than
that afforded by the bad-taste palace of the late Michael Blair—but
the focus of their attention is broadly similar. No dead Warsaw
Pact dictator’s colonic irrigation machine here, just a vacant-eyed
skinny guy slumped half-out of the bath . . . but what in James
Dyson’s name is the vacuum bot doing?
You don’t have one of
the things—your wee flat’s too small to need it—but you get the
picture: It’s supposed to bumble around the house sucking on the
rugs and scaring the cat, periodically retreating to its wall wart
to recharge and hork up a cricket-ball-sized sphere of compacted
fluff and household dirt. This is an upmarket jobbie, with two sets
of wheels so it can walk up stairs and a couple of extension hoses
so it can stick its knobbly nose into crevices where the sun don’t
shine. It features an especially big battery—which is currently one
hundred–per cent discharged, having shorted out through the
bathwater in which the very dead Tariq is marinating.
There’s a big
evidence bag laid out beside the robot. And you don’t need to be a
technical genius to figure that cracking this case hinges on
fingering whoever fitted a live wire down its snout and programmed
it to go drinkies while Tariq was in the tub.
If someone’s
tampering with domestic appliances with murder in mind, the
blogosphere is going to have a cow and a half. But that’s the least
of your worries right now.
You turn to Kemal.
“You got that?” you ask redundantly.
“Was the other case
like this?” he repeats.
“A bit.” Shit, who
are you trying to kid? You surrender to the inevitable and place
the call. “Chief Inspector?”
Dodgy Dickie grunts.
“What’s up?”
“I’m afraid we’ve
definitely got another one.” You’re registered on scene here, so
you can add him to the access list. “Moderately bent business man
in Bruntsfield, dead in the bathtub where his vacuum cleaner
decided to electrocute him. I’ve got his cousin downstairs—former
client of mine, not currently under suspicion—sweating bullets and
trying not to incriminate the deceased. The MO is a dead ringer for
Babylon.” That the deceased was in the loop on repairing broken
appliances—see also: back-street fabbers—you leave for later. It’s
certainly a suggestive avenue for enquiries.
Mac’s initial
response is unprintable. Then, “Hold the fort, I’ll be reet round.
This client of yours—dinna let him leave.” He hangs up immediately,
and his contact status, hanging in the corner of your vision,
changes to mobile.
Dickie is showing
worrying signs of succumbing to hands-on mode, the besetting
cognitive error of any senior officer confronted by too much
data—the illusion that if they just take hands-on control in the
field, they can make everything come up roses. It leads to
brigadiers focussing on a single infantry squad, and chief
inspectors interviewing suspects instead of concentrating on
running the hundred-headed murder team. (And, of course, if you try
to point this out to him . . . just don’t go there.)
You hot-shoe it
downstairs and back to the living room, which is becoming hard to
get to—the hall is filling up with uniforms, stomping on each
other’s German-Army-surplus paratroop boots and trying to make
themselves useful. You really want an opportunity to get Kemal
alone and pump him, or failing that, to get Mr. Hussein to spill
the beans on his cousin (assuming there are any beans to spill).
But once Dickie arrives . . .
“Anwar.”
He’s sitting in the
armchair, shoulders slumped beneath the weight of an invisible
storm-cloud. And he looks guilty, which
will never do.
“In a few minutes, my
boss on this investigation is going to arrive. He’ll want to ask
you a few questions.”
Dickie is very
old-school, inclined to go off like a shaped charge in the
direction of the first plausible suspect who comes to his
attention. This is not unreasonable: 90 per cent of the time, it’s
the right thing to do in an investigation, because 90 per cent of
the time, the first plausible suspect is the right one. But you
will eat your warrant card if Anwar is smart enough to arrange a
scene like the one in the bathroom upstairs—much less to have
orchestrated Mikey Blair’s demise.
In the absence of a
better target, Dickie’s nostrils will start twitching in exactly
the wrong direction, and he’ll get all distracted and focussed on
the nearest Saughton graduate because it’s easier than
acknowledging how non-linear this investigation is going. And you
don’t want him to do that because, despite the ongoing bad blood
between you, you are horribly aware that there’s a repeat killer at
large, and it would really suck if Dickie got hung up on Anwar,
leaving the killer free to strike again.
“I am not officially
cautioning you, and you are not under arrest, my friend. But it
would be really helpful if you could
tell me anything you know about any criminal activities your cousin
was engaged in.”
The slumped shoulders
rise infinitesimally, then fall again. Oh,
it’s like that, is it?
You take your glasses
off and, very deliberately, slide them into your pocket. “Anwar.”
You pause. (What you’re about to say might break your career, if it comes out in the
wash. If you’ve got any career left to break, that is.) “This is a
murder investigation. Intelligence goes in, it doesn’t come out. As long as you don’t cough to any arrestable
offences, we have no reason to lay a finger on you. And I can
guarantee that anything you say that isn’t a confession about an
arrestable offence won’t reach your probation officer’s ears if
that’s what you’re worried about. Maintaining security on a murder
investigation is much more important to us than telling your social
worker whether you’ve been saying your prayers before bed. So I’m
going to ask you again: Do you know anything that we should know, to help us find your cousin’s
killer?”
You put your glasses
back on. And while your head’s bowed, and you’re looking elsewhere,
Anwar opens up.
Two hours later
you’re missing your lunch break for the sake of clogging up the
meatspace incident room, laying it on the line for the peanut
gallery.
“Here’s our Anwar
Hussein. On probation, done time for identity theft and fraud—not
very smart. He’s a foot-soldier, not a general: retired
foot-soldier at that, or so he says. He gets a call from his wife,
who got it from the first bystander, Mrs. Begum, to go visit Mrs.
Begum and her son, the victim. He arrived on the scene after our
first responder and Sergeant MacBride. Because he’s on release, we
have his probationware record, and I can confirm that he’s been
nowhere near the scene of crime for two days. Subject to
confirmation by municipal CCTV, but it really doesn’t look like he
did it.
“However. Our Anwar is a bit of a wide boy, and his
first reaction was to clam up. I was eventually able to determine
that he’s got a guilty conscience over some work the victim had
asked him to do. There might be an issue of possible violation of
probation terms here, but Mr. Hussein is eager to assure us that he
hadn’t actually got round to doing anything illegal as
yet.”
There is much rolling
of eyes from the peanut gallery at this point, which you deliver
with ironic lack of emphasis—I didn’a
mean to put me hand through tha winda an’ take
tha wallet, it just sort of happened—so you feel the need to
clear your throat. “He coughed to it voluntarily, and more to the
point, he handed over the material which he claims his cousin Tariq
gave him to work on, along with the device. It’s downstairs in
Forensics being imaged right now. If he hasn’t touched it, then it
may give us some insight into the murderer’s motivation.”
Assuming there is a murderer, something in the back of your mind
nudges. Because if you were wrong about there being no such thing
as an artificial intelligence, things could get really embarrassing, couldn’t they?
DCI MacLeish—for he
is back from the Hussein residence—gives you the hairy eye-ball.
“What sort of business was Mr. Hussein involved in, do you
know?”
You stare right back
at him: “I arrested him three years ago in the course of an ongoing
investigation into an identity-fraud ring. He coughed to a variety
of charges, including spear phishing, ownership of stolen
authentication credentials, unauthorized access to personal account
details, and Internet-banking fraud. Came to court, entered a
guilty plea, two years in Saughton, cut on appeal to one plus one.
Interestingly , Anwar was the only body
we bagged on that case; I’m certain he wasn’t working alone, but
you know how these Internet cases are.” You tap your
forehead.
Dickie’s eyebrows
waggle, then he nods deeply, satisfied. (There is stuff you can say
and stuff you can’t say on the record—and everything that’s said anywhere in a police station
is recorded under rules of evidence these days—but waggling
eyebrows and forehead tapping don’t show up in the automatic
speech-to-text transcripts. What you just sent via monkeyspace,
bypassing CopSpace entirely, is that you know stuff but you don’t
want to contaminate the investigation by introducing hearsay or
out-of-band intelligence. And Dickie, for once, agrees with you: He
doesn’t want you screwing up his investigation
either.)
“Three victims so
far,” he rumbles. “Inspector Aslan, you have some
input?”
Kemal is fidgeting
with his glasses. “We have two more,” he says diffidently. “One in
Sofia, one in Trieste. That’s all in the past hour. Bringing the
running total to eleven.”
Dickie looks
simultaneously aghast and almost, in an odd way, hopeful: It’s a
clusterfuck, but it’s not his
clusterfuck, he’s merely holding up a small corner, a few fragments
of fatal fuckuppery. “Evidence.”
A uniform at the back
sticks up her hand. “Got one on the Crolla case,” she
offers.
“Go
ahead.”
“The warrant trawl of
the national network monitoring database flagged up some chat-room
transcripts. They match input from an avatar associated with an IP
address allocated to Vivian Crolla’s broadband connection. Assuming
it’s her, she had an, um, vivid fantasy life.”
Ears prick up all
round: Nothing gets your attention in a briefing like a drop of
special sauce on the great and the good. (Hot sauce,
even.)
“A number of
enquiries about, uh, bondage practices involving plastic wrap and
mattresses full of bank-notes.” Bless her, the freshfaced constable
is looking even more rosy-cheeked than usual. “The aforementioned
user posted a number of scenarios and, uh, there are some
downloads, too. Stories centred on being immobilized and restrained
while fully clothed, in proximity to large amounts of money. We’re
currently trying to track down some chat-room contacts . .
.”
It’s too much.
You hear whackier stories from the
twinks at CC’s every Saturday night you go clubbing, but a fair
proportion of the assembled officers are of a, shall we say,
small-c conservative upbringing. As for the rest, some of them
aren’t as hard-boiled as they’d like to think. Muttered disbelief
and the odd titter sweep the room.
“Silence!” roars
Dodgy Dickie, the veins on the side of his neck standing out.
“Ahem.” He sounds surprised at himself. “Sarah, if you’d like to
continue?”
“Uh, that’s all I’ve
really got right now, sir, until we question her known contacts.
Details in the case file . . .” She flips a reference into the
investigation space hovering above the big
conference-table.
“The Crolla
post-mortem examination report won’t be available until tomorrow,”
Dickie announces, “but we have a preliminary. According to the
pathologist, it looks like a massive allergic reaction while the
subject was restrained. Anaphylactic shock. They’re still looking
for the cause—whatever she was allergic to—but suggest it’s
something that was introduced into her apartment’s atmosphere while
she was immobilized: I gather Iain’s sent the empty air-freshener
cartridge in the bathroom for analysis . . .”
You tap Kemal on the
shoulder and jerk your head in the direction of the door. He blinks
at you, then nods.
Outside, you march
directly—or rather, via a bunch of scuffed and flicker-lit
corridors and stairs that resemble a giant hamster maze that’s gone
to seed—to your own office in the ICIU. Kemal tags along like your
guilty shadow.
“I seem to recall
there was a book about it, years ago,” you tell him as you take the
fire door into the car-park, then the back corridor past the Air
Farce control room—where the pilots sit in their twilit virtual
cockpits, alert and ready to dive their stealthed carbon-fibre
drones on the heads of any hapless dog-walker who forgets to scoop
up the poop their mutt’s just dropped on the Meadows—down past the
flammables store, and along the side of the old stables. “About a
guy who was into wrapping Roy Orbison in cling-film, uh, Saran
Wrap. My mum used it to show me why I should never go with
strangers. I had nightmares about kitchenware for
years.”
“You think . . . the
accountant . . .”
You pause on the
threshold of the ICIU suite. “I refuse to speculate: It’s
unprofessional, and besides, she might have had a perfectly innocent reason for owning a metric
shitload of cancelled bank-notes in an obsolete currency. Not that
you’d catch me shrink-wrapping myself
to a pile of used bank-notes: The stuff’s lousy with germs. People
sneeze on it.”
You take a tiny
pleasure from Kemal’s expression of cumulatively deepening
distaste.
“This is my office,
the ICIU. And here’s Detective Sergeant Cunningham. Moxie, this is
DI Aslan from Europol. He’s here to help us.” Kemal probably won’t spot the slight
emphasis on the penultimate word, but you can be sure Moxie
will—and the warning eye-flicker. Your attitude to Kemal has
changed somewhat since you departed to collect him this morning
(was it only five hours ago?), but Moxie isn’t Mr. Sensitive
McNewage and can’t be guaranteed to pick that up. You can quite
easily live without him unintentionally reopening
hostilities.
“Great, skipper, I
could use some help. It’s been one damn thing after another this
morning. I’ve got six pending RFIs from some big intelligence
investigation CID are running—”
Your heart sinks. “Is
it Operation Babylon?” you ask.
“How did you know?”
Moxie does his best hamster nose-rubbing imitation at
you.
“Meet Operation
Babylon’s Europol liaison.” You point at Kemal, who is looking
around with an expression that speaks volumes in monosyllables. His
gizz turns especially glassy as he spots Moxie’s animated
Goatsedance digiframe. (For which you make a mental note to bollock
him later: Visiting brass could get entirely the wrong idea.) “It’s a black hole,
Moxie, coming to swallow us. What have you got in your
queue?”
You settle Kemal down
with a seat and a pad, then spend the next ten minutes with Moxie
dissecting: a request for information about shrink-wrap fetish
clubs in Midlothian; demands that someone in IT Support decode the
charge sheet you filed against one Mr. Hussein, A., back in the day
(“Conspiracy to Bamboozle the Police,” suggests Moxie,
identity-theft charges being confusing to officers more normally
accustomed to breach-of-the-peace and public-order offences); an
urgent enquiry for a backgrounder on spam filters (you boost
that one to Priority A and sling it at
your own job queue); a query from the desk sergeant at Gayfield
Square as to whether he can arrest someone for running a home-brew
fabricator (that’ll be a “no,” then—not without probable cause, and
fuck knows how that one slipped into the Babylon queue); and a
query about identity theft and a person of interest claiming to be
Mikey Blair’s boy-friend who left a DNA sample and a junk identity
trail.
(Which is just
peachy, because if you dig anything up on the random Mr. Christie and
present it to Dickie, he really will
have a coronary on the briefing-room floor.)
Kemal clears his
throat.
“Yes?”
“I have an update
from the office. They have a causal chain for one of our
fatalities.”
You would expect the
man to look smug at this point, but he doesn’t: haunted, more like.
“What?”
Kemal shakes his
head. “Vito Morricone. Dead in Palermo. A yahoo-yahoo boy. He died
in a kitchen accident.”
Moxie shakes his
head. “A kitchen
accident?”
“Yes. He was
electrocuted by a deliberately miswired food processor.” (You
wince: You’ve had cooking incidents like that.) Kemal continues:
“It was a high-end machine, able to heat or chill as well as
mincing and mixing. Programmable, networked, you can leave cold
ingredients in it and switch it on before you leave work, even
change recipes remotely. His partner says that it broke eight
months ago, and Morricone took it to a back-street repair shop,
where they fixed it for him. The case is stainless steel. A
replacement part—” He shakes his head.
“What kind of
replacement?”
“The report does not
explain this thing. But the local investigators report that the
fixer bought the replacement-part design online from a cheap pirate
shop, not from the manufacturer’s website. It came with
installation instructions, which he followed. Once installed, the
machine could be remotely induced to short its input power supply
through the case.”
You give a low
whistle of appreciation: Moxie claps, slowly. “Murder. Smoking
gun.”
“Yes, but.” Kemal
looks troubled. “The fixer does not appear to know anything.
Who supplied the sabotaged component
design? And why? The investigating magistrate connected to the same
pirate design site and bought the same part: It is apparently
harmless. And who sent the signal to activate it? We don’t know
yet.”
“But it’s an
assassination? A well-planned one.” You snap your fingers. “Tariq
Hussein. The vacuum robot.” The IM you got while you were talking
to Anwar rises to the top of your mind. “Tariq got things
fixed. Anwar said something about a
kitchen appliance that’d broken. Huh.” You pull up a memo window.
“I want to know who fixed Tariq’s vacuum cleaner and when. Ask Mrs.
Hussein about it. And”—the penny drops—“Mr. Blair’s enema machine.
Who repaired it last?”
“Minute those to
BABYLON,” you tell Moxie. He nods and keyboards it into the
intelligence wiki, where some poor grunt will funnel it into Mac’s
inbound workstream and Mac (or one of his assistant managers) will
assign it a priority level and add it to some other detective’s
to-do list. Policing, as with all procedural jobs, expands to fill
all the time and consume all the resources available for it. And a
job like this one is too big to handle in a half-assed
manner.
It’s a point of pride
among the former nations of the United Kingdom that the murder
clear-up rate is in three sigmas territory, somewhere over 92 per
cent; but it takes bucketloads of manpower to get there, and
process-oriented management and intelligence-supported work flow
and human-resources tracking to keep the minimum investigative team
of fifty-plus detectives properly coordinated. Most of the public
still believe in Sherlock Holmes or Inspector Rebus, the lone
genius with an eye for clues: And it suits the brass to maintain
the illusion of inscrutable detective insight for political
reasons.
But the reality is
that behind the magic curtain, there’s a bunch of uniformed desk
pilots frantically shuffling terabytes of information, forensic
reports and mobile-phone-traffic metadata and public-webcam streams
and directed interviews, looking for patterns in the data deluge
spewing from the fire-hose. Indeed, a murder investigation is a lot
like a mechanical turk: a machine that resembles a marvellous piece
of artificial-intelligence software, oracular in its acuity, but
that under the hood turns out to be the work of huge numbers of
human piece-workers coordinating via network. Crowdsourcing by cop,
in other words.
(If you’re one of the
piece-workers in a mechanical turk—or one of the rewrite rules
inside Searle’s Chinese room—the overall pattern of the job may be
indiscernible, lost in an opaque blur of seemingly random subtasks.
And if you’re one of the detectives on a murder case, your
immediate job—determining who last repaired a defective vacuum
cleaner—may seem equally inexplicable. But there’s method in my
motion, as you’ll learn for yourself.)
You spend the next
two hours with Moxie, churning through queries from Operation
Babylon. Part-way through, Kemal disappears (to the toilet, you
think at first: then to the briefing room, you decide), returning
towards the end. You do lunch in the on-site canteen, communicating
in defensive monosyllables: After his contribution from Palermo, he
has nothing more to offer you. After lunch, you both attend the
afternoon briefing in D31; then you sort Kemal out with a tablet,
and he turns out to be surprisingly useful at handling those
low-level queries you delegate to him. You update the ICIU shift
roster for the next week and attend to another heap of inbound
administrivia, before finally clocking off your shift and going
home via the hair salon.
Home in your wee
flat, you kick your shoes off and hang your jacket, visit the
bathroom, and take a good close look at your new
hair-do.
It’s always hard to
tell for sure at the hairdresser’s, but here you can take your time
and not worry about being unduly critical in front of the perfectly
coiffured girl with the scissors and the long memory for casual
insults from clients. You tilt your head and narrow your eyes and
after a minute, you decide that, yes, you can live with it. It’s
shorter, but more importantly, it’s regular. As business-like as your choice of
footwear. Rest easy: Nobody’s going to be passing sly remarks about
your hair-do or your sensible shoes in the canteen behind your
back. (Locker-room culture will never die: It just goes
underground, as you know to your cost.)
You have plenty of
time for a long comfortable lie in the bath followed by a TV
dinner. You plant yourself on the sofa under your tablet, surfing
the web while the vacuum sniffs and nudges around the corners of
the living-room carpet, as the evening grows old along with your
thoughts. Which, as usual, are increasingly bored and lonely.
Burn-out is such an ugly turn of
phrase, and in any case, it doesn’t quite fit; it’s more like you
ran out of fuel halfway across the ocean, and you’re gliding now,
the site of your crash landing approaching implacably but still
hidden from you by the horizon of your retirement. That’s you in a
nutshell, drifting slowly down towards lonely old age, the fires of
ambition having flamed out years ago.
There was a time
when, after working hours, you’d be off to the gym or auditing a
distance-learning course or some other worthy pursuit. But these
days, it’s hard to see the point anymore.
The sad truth, which
only dawned on you after you were fifteen years down this path, is
that it doesn’t mean anything. Your
job, your vocation, your life’s calling—you’re like a priest who
awakens one day and realizes that his god has been replaced by a
cardboard cut-out, and he’s no longer able to ignore his own
disbelief. And, like the priest, you’ve sacrificed all hope of a
normal life on the altar of something you no longer believe
in.
Heaven knows, it’s
not as if the job doesn’t need doing. Fifteen years in the force
has taught you more about the stupid, petty, vicious idiocy of your
fellow humans than you ever wanted to know. (It’s also startled
you—very occasionally—with their generosity, intelligence, and
altruism. Very
occasionally.)
But policing, crime
prevention and detection, is a Red Queen’s race: You have to run as
fast as you possibly can just to stand still. You can collar
criminals until the cows come home, and there’ll still be a
never-ending supply of greedy fuckwits and chancers. It’s like
there’s a law of nature: Not only is the job never done, the job
can never be done.
And then you hit your
career derailment, passed over for promotion and sidelined into
running the ICIU. And that’s even worse. The movies playing inside people’s heads
every day are a million times nastier than what’s out on the
streets. Your colleagues have got no fucking idea what people day-dream and fantasize about:
It’s some kind of miracle you’re not dealing with a thousand
Hungerford massacres a day, going by what ICIU shows you. The sad
fact is, the actual crimes that are committed are a pale shadow of
the things people fantasize about. Even the poor-impulse-control
cases who clog up the holding cells at the sheriff’s court mostly
have some rudimentary inhibitions that hold chaos at bay, most of
the time.
But for the past
couple of years, it’s been sapping your will to live, never mind
your ability to believe in the job.
You’re just about
thinking about retreating to the bedroom—a lonely end to a boring
evening—when you get a text. It’s from Dorothy. How old-school, you think.
YOU HOME? she asks.
YES.
CAN I COME ROUND? She capitalizes and uses correct
written grammar, as formal as the way she dresses. NEED COMPANY.
Your heart flip-flops
at the promise of company. SURE, you
send, trying not to sound over-excitable, and tag it with your
address and directions. Check the time: It’s
ten thirty, for heaven’s sake. Doesn’t she have to go to
work tomorrow? Don’t you have to go to
work tomorrow? Your heart flip-flops again, and suddenly you feel
hot and bothered; but a cool, collected part of you asks,
Didn’t you have a date for Saturday?
Dorothy’s the planning kind. Why so
sudden?
BE
RIGHT ROUND, she texts again. NEED TO
TALK.
You shove your tablet
away hurriedly, start to run fingers through your hair, then stop.
You’re a mess, and there’s no time to do anything about it.
“Shit.”
Precisely eight
minutes and forty-two seconds later, the doorbell rings. It’s her,
as you knew it would be. Swearing quietly, you buzz her up. The
bed’s made, the sofa cushions are plumped, there’s coffee waiting
in the cafetière in the kitchen if you need it, fuck knows what
this is about but . . .
You open the door.
It’s Dorothy. She looks at you with red-rimmed eyes, steps forward
into your open arms—and begins to weep.