"Don't you just hate locked-room murder mysteries?"

     We're standing outside an average house in an average street, the neat semidetached kingdom of your average citizen. According to our records his name is Gene Merlane and he hasn't set foot outside his front door in five years. The front door in question is painted purple, a bad sign. I read a study on that once, the links between personality and choice of colour used on the forward reality portal/interface; black for born leaders of men, red for extroverts, blue for conformists, yellow for the sunny and carefree, grey for habitual bores, green for sensitive souls who love nature, are kind to small, furry animals and enjoy romantic, candle-lit dinners, and purple for psychopaths. Okay, so it was the April 1st issue of the journal, but even a spoof theory can have some merit. My own front door, by the way, like that of the author's, is green.

     "They don't exist outside of fiction." Afton replies. "And we don't know for certain that Mr Merlane is dead."

     She's like that, Afton - Detective-Inspector A. Afton Lamont - prosaic and down-to earth. I'm the one given to flights of fancy, the mystic, the stranger in a strange land. I'm called Jerome.

     Officer Janine Benoit is waiting for us, accompanied by one of the department's constructs. They can build you constructs in any shape you like, hardware brains in flesh-and-blood bodies; ours are humanoid, huge, muscular giants taller than I am, with gentle, child-like faces, vacant eyes and hands that can crumple armour-plate. They scare the hell out of me. We've been called here by Merlane's friends - not the people who live on this street, who are accustomed to never seeing their reclusive neighbour, but the folk he communicates with on the Net. Over the past two days the station's link-site has received more than three hundred items of e-mail from forty different worlds, all expressing concern over the safety of five people who live at this address. It seemed we might have a massacre or at very least, a mass kidnapping on our hands, until we discovered that all five names belong to Gene Merlane, all facets of his on-line personality.

     "Inspector Lamont." Benoit dips her head in greeting. She looks anxious - she's only been on the force for eight months. "This house is like a fortress, ma'am, all the windows sealed, all the blinds down and the doors locked and bolted. I've leaned on the bell and thumped on both doors, but nobody answers."

     "Is there an alarm system?"

     "Yes, and quite a sophisticated one." she frowns. "It told me, quite politely, to go away."

     "Jerome, can you handle it?"

     "Once we're inside and find the controls, I can run an override and turn it off." I extract my magic box from my pocket, keying it for code search/shutdown mode. I call the tricksy little device Pandora - its no bigger than a standard holo-screen remote and probably smarter than I am. "Good enough?"

     Afton nods. "Break down the door."

     Benoit touches the construct on the arm and looks up into its innocent, smiling face. "Sean, please open this door."

     It stands still for a moment, scanning the problem, then slams the purple portal dead-centre with the heel of one enormous hand. There's a volley of sharp, tearing sounds as loud as gunshots as locks, hinges and bolts fracture, then the door falls slowly inwards, crashing to the floor of the hallway. As the noise dies away there's a forlorn silence, as if the alarm system can't quite believe what's happened, then the siren goes off and a measured, calm voice warns 'Security breach - burglary in progress', the words repeating over and over. I find the control box in the hall and Pandora disables it within ten seconds - told you she was smart.

     "Sean, please wait here and let nobody in." Benoit says, from behind me. "Use minimal force."

     Afton steps over the fallen door and enters the first room. A parlour, empty and dusty, it looks to have seen little use. We ignore the stairs for the moment and enter the room at the back of the house. This is obviously where Merlane spends most of his time - there's a couch and one armchair, a holo-screen, an audio-player and discs in a neat, alphabetical stack, and set in the window, a desk with a computer system sprawling over its entire surface and hanging over its edges. The brain is up and running, its screen filled with iridescent fractals in a constantly-shifting pattern. In front of it is a high-backed chair complete with an occupant - I can see the crown of a head covered with wavy red hair.

     "Mr Merlane?" Afton asks. "It's the police, Mr Merlane."

     No reply. She walks up to the desk and horror dawns in her face, so I join her quickly and see why. The person in the chair is a woman, young, slim and rating between six and seven on a ten-point scale of prettiness. She has long, unruly red hair, a turned-up nose and cute freckles. Her hands are resting on the keyboard, pale and frozen. She's dead, killed by whatever made the neat, round hole in the centre of her forehead. There's no sign of any weapon.

     "Dear God!" Afton swallows hard. "Is this Gene Merlane?"

     "The e-mail referred to Merlane by five different names, but it isn't uncommon to run multiple personae on the Net - some people get a kick out of pretending to be something they're not. It also isn't uncommon to lie about yourself, subtracting age or switching sex."

     "Officer Benoit, we need a forensic team - call it in, please." Afton glances at me. "I'm going to need every last scrap of data we can wring out of that bloody computer. Can you make it talk to us, Jerome?"

     "Not me. I may be a tek-wiz, but I'm best with small, dumb machines. That's not orthodox kit - I'd say that Genie here altered and modified it herself." I shrug. "It'll take an expert to handle the data-search on that beastie."

     Afton sighs. "Okay, we'll get us an expert. Now, make yourself useful and take a holo of the crime scene."

     I'm just about finished when Forensics arrive, but then I have an actress who never fluffs her lines or argues with her director. You can tell it's a quiet day down at the station - we get a team of six, headed by Ivory, the Chief Pathologist himself. His habitual irritation fades when he sees our corpse.

     "This is a pretty one." he gains a rapt expression, the look of a man appreciating an exquisite porcelain tea-cup and saucer, or a pearlescent Art Deco glass bowl. "I'd have to say though, that in my professional opinion, this isn't a man."

     "See, Jerome, you shouldn't believe the rumours." Afton says, perfectly straight-faced. "He can tell the difference."