The City & the City Read Free Page A

could fuck up a full stop at the end of a sentence.” Perhaps she was new to the life. Maybe if we’d found her a week later her hair would have been electric blonde.
    These regions by the river are intricate, many buildings a centuryor several centuries old. The tram took its tracks through byways where Besźel, at least half of everything we passed, seemed to lean in and loom over us. We wobbled and slowed, behind local cars and those elsewhere, came to a crosshatching where the Besź buildings were antique shops. That trade had been doing well, as well as anything did in the city for some years, hand-downs polished and spruced as people emptied their apartments of heirlooms for a few Besźmarques.
    Some editorialists were optimists. While their leaders roared as relentlessly at each other as they ever had in the Cityhouse, many of the new breed of all parties were working together to put Besźel first. Each drip of foreign investment—and to everyone’s surprise there were drips—brought forth encomia. Even a couple of high-tech companies had recently moved in, though it was hard to believe it was in response to Besźel’s fatuous recent self-description as “Silicon Estuary.”
    I got off by the statue of King Val. Downtown was busy: I stop-started, excusing myself to citizens and local tourists, unseeing others with care, till I reached the blocky concrete of ECS Centre. Two groups of tourists were being shepherded by Besź guides. I stood on the steps and looked down UropaStrász. It took me several tries to get a signal.
    “Corwi?”
    “Boss?”
    “You know that area: is there any chance we’re looking at breach?”
    There were seconds of silence.
    “Doesn’t seem likely. That area’s mostly pretty total. And Pocost Village, that whole project, certainly is.”
    “Some of GunterStrász, though …”
    “Yeah but. The closest crosshatching is hundreds of metres away. They couldn’t have …” It would have been an extraordinary risk on the part of the murderer or murderers. “I reckon we can assume,” she said.
    “Alright. Let me know how you get on. I’ll check in soon.”
    ***
    I HAD PAPERWORK ON OTHER CASES that I opened, establishing them a while in holding patterns like circling aircraft. A woman beaten to death by her boyfriend, who had managed to evade us so far, despite tracers on his name and his prints at the airport. Styelim was an old man who had surprised an addict breaking and entering, been hit once, fatally, with the spanner he himself had been wielding. That case would not close. A young man called Avid Avid, left bleeding from the head after taking a kerb-kiss from a racist, “Ébru Filth” written on the wall above him. For that I was coordinating with a colleague from Special Division, Shenvoi, who had, since some time before Avid’s murder, been undercover in Besźel’s far right.
    Ramira Yaszek called while I ate lunch at my desk. “Just done questioning those kids, sir.”
    “And?”
    “You should be glad they don’t know their rights better, because if they did Naustin’d be facing charges now.” I rubbed my eyes and swallowed my mouthful.
    “What did he do?”
    “Barichi’s mate Sergev was lippy, so Naustin asked him the bareknuckle question across the mouth, said he was the prime suspect.” I swore. “It wasn’t that hard, and at least it made it easier for me to gudcop.” We had stolen gudcop and b adcop from English, verbed them. Naustin was one of those who’d switch to hard questioning too easily. There are some suspects that methodology works on, who need to fall down stairs during an interrogation, but a sulky teenage chewer is not one.
    “Anyway, no harm done,” Yaszek said. “Their stories tally. They’re out, the four of them, in that bunch of trees. Bit of naughty naughty probably. They were there for a couple of hours at least. At some point during that time—and don’t ask for anything more exact because you aren’t going to get it