The City & the City - China Mieville [49]
He tapped one of the pieces of mail or junk on his desk, threw it to me. A videocassette. He pointed me to the TV/VCR in the corner of his office. The image came up, a poor sepia-tinted and static-flecked thing. There was no sound. Cars puttered diagonally across the screen, in not-heavy but steady traffic, above a time-and-date stamp, between pillars and the walls of buildings.
“What am I looking at?” I worked out the date—the small hours, a couple of weeks ago. The night before Mahalia Geary’s body was found. “What am I looking at?”
The few vehicles sped up, beetled with tremendous jerky business. Gadlem waved his hand in bad-tempered play, conducting the fast-forwarding image with the remote control as if it were a baton. He sped through minutes of tape.
“Where is this? This picture is shit.”
“It’s a lot less shit than if it was one of ours, which is rather the point. Here we are,” he said. “Deep of the night. Where are we, Borlú? Detect, detective. Watch the right.”
A red car passed, a grey car, an old truck, then—“Hello! Voilà!” shouted Gadlem—a dirty white van. It crawled from the lower right to the upper left of the picture toward some tunnel, paused perhaps at an unseen traffic signal, and passed out of the screen and out of sight.
I looked at him for an answer. “Mark the stains,” he said. He was fast-forwarding, making little cars dance again. “They’ve trimmed us a bit. An hour and change later. Hello!” He pressed play and one, two, three other vehicles, then the white van—it must be the same one—reappeared, moving in the opposite direction, back the way it came. This time the angle of the little camera captured its front plates.
It went by too quick for me to see. I pressed the buttons on the built-in VCR, hurtling the van backwards into my line of sight, then bringing it a few metres forward, pausing it. It was no DVD, this, the paused image was a fug of ghost lines and crackles, the stuttering van not really still but trembling like some troubled electron between two locations. I could not read the number plate clearly, but in most of its places what I saw seemed to be one of a couple of possibilities—a vye or a bye, zsec or kho, a 7 or a 1, and so on. I took out my notebook and flicked through it.
“There he goes,” murmured Gadlem. “He’s onto something. He has something, ladies and gentlemen.” Back through pages and days. I stopped. “A lightbulb, I see it, it’s straining to come on, to glow illumination across the situation …”
“Fuck,” I said.
“Indeed fuck.”
“It is. That’s Khurusch’s van.”
“It is, as you say, the van of Mikyael Khurusch.” The vehicle in which Mahalia’s body had been taken, and from which it had been dumped. I looked at the time on the image. As I looked at it onscreen it almost certainly contained dead Mahalia. “Jesus. Who found this? What is it?” I said. Gadlem sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Wait, wait.” I held up my hand. I looked at the letter from the Oversight Committee, which Gadlem was using to fan his face. “That’s the corner of Copula Hall,” I said. “God damn it. That’s Copula Hall. And this is Khurusch’s van going out of Besźel into Ul Qoma and coming back in again. Legally.”
“Bing,” said Gadlem, like a tired game-show buzzer. “Bing bing bloody bing.”
AS PART, WE WERE TOLD—and to which, I told Gadlem, we would return—of the background investigations pursuant to any invocation of Breach, CCTV footage of the night in question had been investigated. That was unconvincing. This had looked so clear a case of breach no one had any reason to pore so hard through hours of tape. And besides, the antique cameras in the Besź side of Copula Hall would not give clear enough pictures to identify the vehicle—these were from outside, from a bank’s private security system, that some investigator