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He shrugged. “You know where some are, SD. There’s no secret about lots of them. A few paces of back yard here, a deserted building there. The central five metres or so of Nuistu Park? Dissensus. Ul Qoma claims it; Besźel claims it. They’re effectively crosshatched or out of bounds in both cities while the bickering goes on. There’s just not that much exciting about them.”

“I’d like a list from you.”

“If you want, but you’ll get it quicker via your own department, and mine is probably twenty years out of date. They do get resolved, time to time, and new ones emerge. And then you might hear of the secret ones.”

“I’d like a list. Hang on, secret? If no one knows they’re disputed, how can they be?”

“Quite. They’re secretly disputed, SD Dhatt. You have to get your head into the right mindset for this foolishness.”

“Doctor Bowden …” I said. “Do you have any reason to think anyone might have anything against you?”

“Why?” He was very abruptly alarmed. “What have you heard?”

“Nothing, only …” I said, and paused. “There’s some speculation that someone is targeting people who’ve been investigating Orciny.” Dhatt made no move to interrupt me. “Perhaps you should be careful.”

“What? I don’t study Orciny, I haven’t for years …”

“As you say yourself, once you’ve started this stuff, Doctor… I’m afraid you’re the doyen whether you like it or not. Have you received anything that could be construed as a threat?”

“No …”

“You were burgled.” That was Dhatt. “A few weeks ago.” We both looked at him. Dhatt was unembarrassed by my surprise. Bowden’s mouth worked.

“But that was just a burglary,” he said. “Nothing was even taken …”

“Yes, because they must’ve got startled—that was what we said at the time,” Dhatt said. “Could be it was never their intent to take anything.”

Bowden, and more surreptitiously I, looked around the room, as if some malevolent gris-gris or electronic ear or painted threat might jump suddenly to light.

“SD, Inspector, this is utterly absurd; there is no Orciny …”

“But,” Dhatt said, “there are such things as nutters.”

“Some of whom,” I said, “for whatever reason are interested in some of the ideas being explored by yourself and Miss Rodriguez, Miss Geary …”

“I don’t think either of them were exploring ideas …”

“Whatever,” Dhatt said. “The point is they got someone’s attention. No, we’re not sure why, or even if there is a why.”

Bowden was staring absolutely aghast.

Chapter Sixteen

DHATT TOOK THE LIST Bowden gave him and sent an underling to supplement it, sent officers to the itemised lots, derelict buildings, patches of kerb and little promenade spaces on the river’s shore, to scuff stones and probe at the edges of disputed, functionally crosshatched patches. I spoke to Corwi again that night—she made a joke about hoping this was a secure line—but we were unable to say anything useful to each other.

Professor Nancy had sent a printout of Mahalia’s chapters to the hotel. There were two more or less finished, two somewhat sketchy. I stopped reading them after not very long, looked instead at the photocopies of her annotated textbooks. There was a vivid disparity between the sedate, somewhat dull tone of the former, and the exclamation points and scribbled interjections of the latter, Mahalia arguing with her earlier selves and with the main text. The marginalia were incomparably the more interesting, to the extent that you could make any sense of them. I put them down eventually for Bowden’s book.

Between the City and the City was tendentious. You could see it. There are secrets in Besźel and in Ul Qoma, secrets everyone knows about: it was unnecessary to posit secret secrets. Still, the old stories, the mosaics and bas-reliefs, the artefacts the book referred to were in some cases astonishing—beautiful and startling. Young Bowden’s readings of some still-unsolved mysteries of Precursor or Pre-Cleavage age works were ingenious and even convincing. He had an elegantly argued claim that the incomprehensible mechanisms euphemistically