The City & the City - China Mieville [55]
It was after the end of the working day when Corwi and I sat together in my office to work through it. It would be, as I warned her again, a long night.
“What’s Khurusch being held for?”
“At this stage Inappropriate Pass Storage and Failure to Report Crime. Depending on what we find tonight I might add Conspiracy to Murder, but I have a feeling—”
“You don’t think he’s in on whatever, do you?”
“He’s hardly a criminal genius, is he?”
“I’m not suggesting he planned anything, boss. Maybe even that he knew about anything. Specific. But you don’t think he knew who took his van? Or that they were going to do something?”
I wagged my head. “You didn’t see him.” I pulled the tape of his interrogations out of my pocket. “Take a listen if we have a bit of time.”
She drove my computer, pulling the information she had into various spreadsheets. She translated my muttered, vague ideas into charts. “This is called data mining.” She said the last words in English.
“Which of us is the canary?” I said. She did not answer. She only typed and drank thick coffee, “made fucking properly,” and muttered complaints about my software.
“So this is what we have.” It was past two. I kept looking out of my office window at the Besźel night. Corwi smoothed out the papers she had printed. Beyond the window were the faint hoots and quietened mutter of late traffic. I moved in my chair, needing a piss from caffeinated soda.
“Total number of vans reported stolen that night, thirteen.” She scanned through with her fingertip. “Of which three then turn up burnt out or vandalised in some form or other.”
“Joyriders.”
“Joyriders, yes. So ten.”
“How long before they were reported?”
“All but three, including the charmer in the cells, reported by the end of the following day.”
“Okay. Now where’s the one where you have … How many of these vans have Ul Qoma pass papers?”
She sifted. “Three.”
“That sounds high—three out of thirteen?”
“There are going to be way more for vans than for vehicles as a whole, because of all the import-export stuff.”
“Still though. What are the statistics for the cities as a whole?”
“What, of vans with passes? I can’t find it,” she said after a while of typing and staring at the screen. “I’m sure there must be a way to find out, but I can’t figure out a way to do it.”
“Okay, if we have time we’ll chase that. But I’m betting it’s less than three out of thirteen.”
“You could … It does sound high.”
“Alright, try this. Of those three with passes that got stolen, how many owners have previous warnings for condition-transgressions?”
She looked through papers and then at me. “All three of them. Shit. All three for inappropriate storage. Shit.”
“Right. That does sound unlikely, right? Statistically. What happened to the other two?”
“They were … Hold on. Belonged to Gorje Feder and Salya Ann Mahmud. Vans turned up the next morning. Dumped.”
“Anything taken?”
“Smashed up a bit, a few tapes, bit of change from Feder’s, an iPod from Mahmud’s.”
“Let me look at the times—there’s no way of proving which of these were stolen first, is there? Do we know if these other two still have their passes?”
“Never came up, but we could find out tomorrow.”
“Do if you can. But I’m going to bet they do. Where were the vans taken from?”
“Juslavsja, Brov Prosz, and Khurusch’s from Mashlin.”
“Where were they found?”
“Feder’s in … Brov Prosz. Jesus. Mahmud’s in Mashlin. Shit. Just off ProspekStrász.”
“That’s about four streets from Khurusch’s office.”
“Shit.” She sat back. “Talk this out, boss.”
“Of the three vans that get stolen that night that have visas, all have records for failing to take their paperwork out of their glove compartments.”
“The thief knew?”
“Someone