Read Online The Babylon Rite by Tom Knox - Free Book Online

constable. Wife OK? Kids?’
    Their chat was desultory. Because Ibsen was still working through the logic in his mind. The laptop.
The laptop
. The sitting room with the big TV and speakers …
    ‘Ah, Larkham!’
    The detective sergeant had arrived, driving himself from New Scotland Yard. As Larkham stepped out of his car he held up a large clear plastic ziplocked bag containing a laptop.
    ‘Let’s go inside.’
    ‘Sir.’
    Another constable opened the door. Ibsen gazed around a marbled hallway which shone with the polished gleam of wealth.
    The victim’s father, the oligarch, was apparently staying in a hotel in town, having flown in from Moscow, shocked and grieving. The man was understandably avoiding all the horrible police work: the house had been gridded and marked and powdered to uninhabitability, and it stank of cyano fumes.
    They stepped into the sitting room.
    A young forensic photographer was just finishing her UV work on the carpets, seeking hidden blood stains. Nods were exchanged as she quit the room, leaving them alone, though the DCI could hear more forensics officers in the kitchen.
    ‘All right, put the laptop on the desk, where it was, and boot it up.’
    With carefully gloved hands Larkham turned the laptop on, and Ibsen bent close to the screen. He sought Kerensky’s last browsing history, for the night he had died. He searched and scrolled, and scrolled a little more. And stopped. ‘There. Look.’
    Larkham leaned, and looked. ‘Jesus. Porn sites! Hundreds of them.’
    ‘Not just that. Look at the timing. All through the evening, Larkham …’ Ibsen checked the times again. ‘All through the evening in question he did this, surfing porn. Gay porn by the look of it. Justusboys. Hungdaddy. Grindr. Then – look – here – at about eleven p.m. He clicked on—’ Ibsen moved closer to the screen, tapping keys with his gloved fingers. ‘Redtube. And it seems like … He watched a movie. Yes. He watched an online porn vid. This one.’
    Another key click.
    The two men watched the little video buffer into life on the laptop. An older man was seducing a younger man in a doctor’s room. It was a patient/doctor porn scenario, a young jock being stripped and ‘examined’. The actors proceeded to vigorous sex, laughing and panting.
    ‘Nice.’ Larkham blushed faintly. ‘So he liked gay porn so much he watched it from about four in the afternoon to eleven p.m. the night he died.’ The young sergeant frowned. ‘He liked it so much that after his killer had forced him to cut off his hand and feet and practically his damn head he dragged himself from the kitchen, to go and watch some more gay porn as he was dying, with the killer standing over him – there. One a.m.! He’s online again. Surfing! What the fuck?’
    ‘There was no killer.’ Ibsen shook his head. ‘See, here, the computer.’ A click of two keys minimized the porn video, and revealed the tray of icons at the bottom of the screen. ‘There’s a wi-fi connection, surely, with those huge speakers. Turn them on.’
    Obediently, Larkham crossed the room and found a remote. With his gloved left hand he pressed a button. A red light at the bottom of the wall-high speakers flicked green, and a wireless symbol turned orange. The faint yet unheard hum of large electrical appliances, switched on and waiting, somehow filled the room.
    ‘Now,’ said Ibsen, ‘let’s play the video he watched at one a.m., as he was lying on the floor, dying. Here it is … on Boundstuds.com. Big Daddy’s Dungeon Party. I’m guessing this is not Teletubbies.’
    The video buffered for two seconds, then burst noisily into life. The sound from the speakers was intensely loud. On the laptop screen a man in a leather coat, a leather mask and a leather jockstrap, was whipping a chained and naked young man, whipping him hard. The boy screamed. The man shouted abuse. The noise filled the entire house – and beyond.
    Ibsen turned the video off.
    Larkham was