The City & the City - China Mieville [1]
There was a wet mattress on its edge between two of the bins, by a spread of rusting iron pieces interwoven with discarded chains. “That was on her.” The constable who spoke was Lizbyet Corwi, a smart young woman I’d worked with a couple of times. “Couldn’t exactly say she was well hidden, but it sort of made her look like a pile of rubbish, I guess.” I could see a rough rectangle of darker earth surrounding the dead woman—the remains of the mattress-sheltered dew. Naustin was squatting by it, staring at the earth.
“The kids who found her tipped it half off,” Corwi said.
“How did they find her?”
Corwi pointed at the earth, at little scuffs of animal paws.
“Stopped her getting mauled. Ran like hell when they saw what it was, made the call. Our lot, when they arrived …” She glanced at two patrolmen I didn’t know.
“They moved it?”
She nodded. “See if she was still alive, they said.”
“What are their names?”
“Shushkil and Briamiv.”
“And these are the finders?” I nodded at the guarded kids. There were two girls, two guys. Midteens, cold, looking down.
“Yeah. Chewers.”
“Early morning pick-you-up?”
“That’s dedication, hm?” she said. “Maybe they’re up for junkies of the month or some shit. They got here a bit before seven. The skate pit’s organised that way, apparently. It’s only been built a couple of years, used to be nothing, but the locals’ve got their shift patterns down. Midnight to nine a.m., chewers only; nine to eleven, local gang plans the day; eleven to midnight, skateboards and rollerblades.”
“They carrying?”
“One of the boys has a little shiv, but really little. Couldn’t mug a milkrat with it—it’s a toy. And a chew each. That’s it.” She shrugged. “The dope wasn’t on them; we found it by the wall, but”—shrug—“they were the only ones around.”
She motioned over one of our colleagues and opened the bag he carried. Little bundles of resin-slathered grass. Feld is its street name—a tough crossbreed of Catha edulis spiked with tobacco and caffeine and stronger stuff, and fibreglass threads or similar to abrade the gums and get it into the blood. Its name is a trilingual pun: it’s khat where it’s grown, and the animal called “cat” in English is feld in our own language. I sniffed it and it was pretty low-grade stuff. I walked over to where the four teenagers shivered in their puffy jackets.
“’Sup, policeman?” said one boy in a Besź-accented approximation of hip-hop English. He looked up and met my eye, but he was pale. Neither he nor any of his companions looked well. From where they sat they could not have seen the dead woman, but they did not even look in her direction.
They must have known we’d find the feld, and that we’d know it was theirs. They could have said nothing, just run.
“I’m Inspector Borlú,” I said. “Extreme Crime Squad.”
I did not say I’m Tyador. A difficult age to question, this—too old for first names, euphemisms and toys, not yet old enough to be straightforward opponents in interviews, when at least the rules were clear. “What’s your name?” The boy hesitated, considered using whatever slang handle he’d granted himself, did not.
“Vilyem Barichi.”
“You found her?” He nodded, and his friends nodded after him. “Tell me.”
“We come here because, ’cause, and …” Vilyem waited, but I said nothing about his drugs. He looked down. “And we seen something under that mattress and we pulled it off.
“There was some …” His friends looked up as Vilyem hesitated, obviously superstitious.
“Wolves?” I said. They glanced at each other.
“Yeah man, some scabby little pack was nosing around there and …
“So we thought it…”
“How long after you got here?” I said.
Vilyem shrugged. “Don’t know. Couple hours?”
“Anyone else around?”
“Saw some guys over there a while back.”
“Dealers?” A shrug.
“And there was a van came up on the grass and come over here and went off again after a bit. We didn’t speak to no one.”
“When was the