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Only they’re cats. They don’t need vaseline on the lens. Because they’re cats. They don’t have wrinkles. They’re cats.
    The rest of us, we carried on laughing at the clever, snarky meme about cunning evil cats who couldn’t write. But you’d notice the comments. ‘Aww cute!’ ‘LOL.’ ‘CUTE x100000!!!’ ‘sooo hugzy.’ ‘kitty.’ The people writing the comments were less clever than the cat.
    Here’s where lolcats broke. Because the way the site worked was that you took a picture of a cat, you slapped a caption on it and you sent it in. It sat in a slush pile of cats. And, if the people looking at the site went through the slush pile and liked it enough, it was promoted to the front page.
    In the early days, it worked like a charm. Some genuine genius found a picture of a cat sleeping purposefully on a television and called it ‘MONORAIL CAT.’ Someone else decided that a cat peering down from a loft door was ‘CEILING CAT.’
    Smart.
    Funny.
    Lol.
    But the pictures that were now coming in were just pictures of cute cats with captions saying how cute they were. Or CUTEZ. Or ADORABLEZ. Or, worst of all, ‘purrfect.’ I’m sure these came in in the early days. But they didn’t get voted up. Because the people looking at the site were, by and large, people who got the joke.
    The Turkish phrase for ‘foreigners’ translates as ‘Those Outside The Tent.’ But those outside the tent had pulled open the flaps and crowded in. Grinning inanely.
    For now a comedy site was being driven by people who didn’t quite get the joke. And weren’t funny.
    Friends was once the best programme on television. For a time, lolcats was the best thing on the internet. Then things changed. Other people got involved. People not like us.
    If you want to know how far things have gone, there’s now a payday loans company called Lolcat Loanz. Oh, yes. They’re on the list.
    The difference between lolcats and Friends is that it’s easy for us not to take the blame for Friends . All we did was watch it. We didn’t write the jokes. It’s not our fault (although it is) that it somehow wasn’t as funny anymore. We can blame the network.
    You cannot blame the internet for lolcats stopping being funny. You can only blame the people. The people who crowded into the tent and didn’t understand.

CHAPTER TWO
    THE CHARITY MUGGER
     
     
    I SAT UP long and late that night.
    I looked at a lot of cats.
    I’d killed someone—and I felt fine about it. Right up to the point that I got an email saying that someone knew I’d done it. We none of us ever grow up, really. We’re all still somewhere between twelve and fourteen. Some of us are more broken by the world, some of us less. But the big, key, important point is that we all of us like doing bad things so long as we can get away with them.
    For a glorious moment, I thought that I had. Killing is the one big thing that should be so difficult and so bad and so wrong. It should have been harder than it was.
    If killing Danielle had been easy, then getting away with it should have been just as easy. Especially because, and don’t get me wrong, I was cleverer than she was.
    But by the time I’d got home, got home and poured myself a congratulatory drink, someone had already got in touch to tell me I’d done it. Not even Hercule Poirot was that fast. The internet already knew I’d done it. Maybe yeah, somewhere, a cat in a dark room had nodded to itself as it had written that message. Maybe.
    I stared at that message. I wondered about it.
    I did not reply to it.
    One lesson in life I’ve learned is that, if you don’t like the look of an email, don’t reply to it. A colleague sends you an email that makes you angry? Just ignore it. A Facebook status makes you boil with rage? Ignore it. An online column makes you shake at its wrongness?
    One golden rule in the world: Never Hit ‘Reply.’
     
     
    A MESSAGE TURNS up accusing you of murder?
    Well obviously. I mean what reply