Looking Good Dead

Rye was sitting at his desk in the High Tech Crime Unit, still working on Tom Bryce’s computer, when his direct line rang. He picked up the receiver. ‘Jon Rye,’ he said.
    ‘Hello. It’s Tom Bryce. I’m actually in your building, up in the CCTV room . . . Just wondered if – if my computer was ready. I – could pop down . . . collect. I – I need to do some work tonight. I – I have – have to prepare for a very big meeting tomorrow. How are you doing?’
    You sound terrible. You need to do some work, and I need to go home and salvage my marriage , Jon Rye thought. There was only himself and Andy Gidney, a short distance across the room from him, still there in the department late on this Sunday afternoon. Were the two of them sad or what?
    Gidney, his iPod plugged as ever into his ears, was hunched over his keyboard, his desk littered with empty Coke cans and plastic coffee cups from the vending machines, clicking relentlessly away, working on cracking the code he had been trying to crack all week.
    Rye worried about the geek – he seemed a lost soul. At least when Rye left the building, he had a home to go to. Maybe Nadine was sour sometimes, but there would be a meal on the table, the kids to talk to. Some kind of normality. What was Gidney’s normality?
    Mind you, he wondered, what was anyone’s normality in here? Including his own? Most of their working weeks consisted of looking at porn on seized computers. And the vast majority of it was not your average titillating-but-cosy Playboy centrefold stuff; it was middle-aged men with children as young as two years old. Something he would never, not in a trillion years, really comprehend. How did that stuff turn people on? How could people do that with innocent children? How could a forty-year-old man sodomize a small child? And then live with the knowledge of what he had done?
    The answer, sadly, was too easily and too often.
    He knew exactly what he would have done if he’d caught someonemeddling with his children when they had been young. It would have involved a razor blade and a blowtorch.
    There was a sudden jangle of weird electronic noises which was becoming irritatingly familiar to Rye. Gidney’s mobile phone. The geek removed an iPod earpiece and answered the phone in a flat tone, devoid of any emotion. ‘Oh hi,’ he said.
    Rye knew roughly where Gidney lived – up off The Level, somewhere towards the racecourse, in a bedsit. It was an area of densely packed Victorian and Edwardian terraced houses, originally built as artisan dwellings, now largely monopolized by students and young singles. What did the geek go home to – if and when he ever did go home? A tin of beans on a single hob? Another computer screen? The Guardian newspaper – which he always carried under his arm into work but never seemed to read – and a pile of techie magazines?
    ‘I need about another half-hour,’ Rye said to Tom Bryce. ‘You could wait, or would you like me to drop it back to you on my way home?’
    ‘Yes. I – I have the children – I need to get back. Thank you,’ Bryce said. ‘If you could drop it back I’d appreciate that.’
    ‘OK, I have your address. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’ He checked his watch, wanting to make sure he left enough time to get home for the one television programme of the week he was addicted to, the motoring programme, Top Gear . Although it was some years since he had been a traffic cop he was still an unreconstructed petrol-head.
    As he replaced the receiver, he saw Gidney, wearing his anorak and carrying his small rucksack, heading out of the door. No goodbye. God, he was always the same – no social graces at all!
    It took Rye longer than he had planned to finish his examination, and he realized, just a little guiltily, that it was now over an hour and a half since he had spoken to Tom Bryce. He finally closed the man’s laptop and was about to stand up when the phone rang.
    It was an operator from the call handling centre in a building at Malling House, the police headquarters, where non-emergency calls from the general public were handled. ‘Is that the High Tech Crime Unit?’ the operator said.
    Rye took a deep breath, resisting the temptation to tell the man he had the wrong number. ‘Sergeant Rye speaking.’
    ‘I have a caller who’s complaining that someone is using his wireless internet connection without his permission.’
    ‘Oh perrrlease?’ Rye said, nearly exploding – he really