The City & the City Read Free Page B

beyond ‘still dark’—one of the girls sees that van come up onto the grass to the skate park. She doesn’t think much of it because people do come up there all times of day and night to do business, to dump stuff, what have you. It drives around, up past the skate park, comes back. After a while it speeds off.”
    “Speeds?”
    I scribbled in my notebook, trying one-handedly to pull up my email on my PC. The connection broke more than once. Big attachments on an inadequate system.
    “Yeah. It was in a hurry and buggering its suspension. That’s how she noticed it was going.”
    “Description?”
    “‘Grey.’ She doesn’t know from vans.”
    “Get her looking at some pictures, see if we can ID the make.”
    “On it, sir. I’ll let you know. Later at least two other cars or vans come up for whatever reason, for business, according to Barichi.”
    “That could complicate tyre tracks.”
    “After an hour or whatever of groping, this girl mentions the van to the others and they go check it out, in case it was dumping. Says sometimes you get old stereos, shoes, books, all kinds of shit chucked out.”
    “And they find her.” Some of my messages had come through. There was one from one of the mectec photographers, and I opened it and began to scroll through his images.
    “They find her.”
    COMMISSAR GADLEM CALLED ME IN . His soft-spoken theatricality, his mannered gentleness, was unsubtle, but he had always let me do my thing. I sat while he tapped at his keyboard and swore. I could see what must be database passwords stuck on scraps of paper to the side of his screen.
    “So?” he said. “The housing estate?”
    “Yes.”
    “Where is it?”
    “South, suburbs. Young woman, stab wounds. Shukman’s got her.”
    “Prostitute?”
    “Could be.”
    “Could be,” he said, cupped his ear, “and yet. I can hear it. Well, onward, follow your nose. Tell if you ever feel like sharing the whys of that ‘and yet,’ won’t you? Who’s your sub?”
    “Naustin. And I’ve got a beat cop helping out. Corwi. Grade-one constable. Knows the area.”
    “That’s her beat?” I nodded. Close enough.
    “What else is open?”
    “On my desk?” I told him. The commissar nodded. Even with the others, he granted me the leeway to follow Fulana Detail.
    “ SO DID YOU SEE the whole business?”
    It was close to ten o’clock in the evening, more than forty hours since we had found the victim. Corwi drove—she made no effort to disguise her uniform, despite that we had an unmarked car-through the streets around GunterStrász. I had not been home until very late the previous night, and after a morning on my own in these same streets now I was there again.
    There were places of crosshatch in the larger streets and a few elsewhere, but that far out the bulk of the area was total. Few antique Besź stylings, few steep roofs or many-paned windows: these were hobbled factories and warehouses. A handful of decades old, often broken-glassed, at half capacity if open. Boarded facades. Grocery shops fronted with wire. Older fronts in tumbledown of classical Besź style. Some houses colonised and made chapels and drug houses: some burnt out and left as crude carbon renditions of themselves.
    The area was not crowded, but it was far from empty. Those who were out looked like landscape, like they were always there. There had been fewer that morning but not very markedly.
    “Did you see Shukman working on the body?”
    “No.” I was looking at what we passed, referring to my map. “I got there after he was done.”
    “Squeamish?” she said.
    “No.”
    “Well …” She smiled and turned the car. “You’d have to say that even if you were.”
    “True,” I said, though it was not.
    She pointed out what passed for landmarks. I did not tell her I had been in Kordvenna early in the day, sounding these places.
    Corwi did not try to disguise her police clothes because that way those who saw us, who might otherwise think we were