A little group of journalists was gathering at the edges of the open land. Petrus Something-or-other, Valdir Mohli, a young guy called Rackhaus, a few others.

“Inspector!” “Inspector Borlú!” Even: “Tyador!”

Most of the press had always been polite, and amenable to my suggestions about what they withhold. In the last few years, new, more salacious and aggressive papers had started, inspired and in some cases controlled by British or North American owners. It had been inevitable, and in truth our established local outlets were staid to dull. What was troubling was less the trend to sensation, nor even the irritating behaviour of the new press’s young writers, but more their tendency to dutifully follow a script written before they were born. Rackhaus, who wrote for a weekly called Rejal! , for example. Surely when he bothered me for facts he knew I would not give him, surely when he attempted to bribe junior officers, and sometimes succeeded, he did not have to say, as he tended to: “The public has a right to know!”

I did not even understand him the first time he said it. In Besź the word “right” is polysemic enough to evade the peremptory meaning he intended. I had to mentally translate into English, in which I am passably fluent, to make sense of the phrase. His fidelity to the cliché transcended the necessity to communicate. Perhaps he would not be content until I snarled and called him a vulture, a ghoul.

“You know what I’m going to say,” I told them. The stretched tape separated us. “There’ll be a press conference this afternoon, at ECS Centre.”

“What time?” My photograph was being taken.

“You’ll be informed, Petrus.”

Rackhaus said something that I ignored. As I turned, I saw past the edges of the estate to the end of GunterStrász, between the dirty brick buildings. Trash moved in the wind. It might be anywhere. An elderly woman was walking slowly away from me in a shambling sway. She turned her head and looked at me. I was struck by her motion, and I met her eyes. I wondered if she wanted to tell me something. In my glance I took in her clothes, her way of walking, of holding herself, and looking.

With a hard start, I realised that she was not on GunterStrász at all, and that I should not have seen her.

Immediately and flustered I looked away, and she did the same, with the same speed. I raised my head, towards an aircraft on its final descent. When after some seconds I looked back up, unnoticing the old woman stepping heavily away, I looked carefully instead of at her in her foreign street at the facades of the nearby and local GunterStrász, that depressed zone.

Chapter Two

I HAD A CONSTABLE DROP ME north of Lestov, near the bridge. I did not know the area well. I’d been to the island, of course, visited the ruins, when I was a schoolboy and occasionally since, but my rat-runs were elsewhere. Signs showing directions to local destinations were bolted to the outsides of pastry bakers and little workshops, and I followed them to a tram stop in a pretty square. I waited between a care-home marked with an hourglass logo, and a spice shop, the air around it cinnamon scented.

When the tram came, tinnily belling, shaking in its ruts, I did not sit, though the carriage was half-empty. I knew we would pick up passengers as we went north to Besźel centre. I stood close to the window and saw right out into the city, into these unfamiliar streets.

The woman, her ungainly huddle below that old mattress, sniffed by scavengers. I phoned Naustin on my cell.

“Is the mattress being tested for trace?”

“Should be, sir.”

“Check. If the techs are on it we’re fine, but Briamiv and his buddy 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 century or 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 badcop  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 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.”