Chapter 3

III
Zzrh

Surprisingly, the coroner has delicate mandibles, and the proverbial legs up to here - both pairs. She's wearing a blood-spattered apron and her feelers are tied back, but she probably looks quite beautiful when she's not standing over the pale, sewn-up corpse of a human.

"Well," she says, "given that he was sitting down when he was shot, I have to say that the angle of the bullet only seems unusual for a few species in the city."

"Such as?" Zzrh asks her.

"It almost certainly wasn't a slime - too tall. Or a nematode - too short. Ultrason is unlikely, their arms don't work like that. Not a cat - too short, again. That's the best I can give you. It could easily have been human, apian, neurop, airphibian, lepido, vespulin… I'm not sure about quivers, there's not exactly much medical literature on them."

"Care to give me an estimate on the weapon?"

"You'll have to wait for the ballistics report."

"A guess?"

"A pistol, not anything too powerful. Fired within a metre or so."

Zzrh looks at the adjacent slabs. "What about these two?"

"Same story for the driver and… the other guy."

"The security guard."

"Really?" She seems to look at the cadaver with new eyes. "I didn't think winged apians did lowly jobs like that."

"This is Honeyjewel Place we're talking about," Zzrh says.

"True. Anything else you want to know?"

"Your phone number?"

She folds her arms. "I'm married."

"You're not wearing a ring."

"I don't want to lose it inside someone's dead body. Are you finished?"

He closes his notebook. "Thank you."

The coroner slides the corpse back into its freezer. "It's my job," she says wearily.

*

Zzg is waiting outside. She hands Zzrh a warm cup of coffee in a styrofoam cup. "Learn anything interesting?" she asks.

"Apparently," Zzrh replies, "they were shot."

She laughs.

They walk out onto the street. Wingless apians bustle hurriedly back and forth, squeezing in and out of the subsidiary tunnels, most of them heading deeper into Hive Central to start the day's work. As they pass Zzrh, many of them sneak peeks at the veined, transparent wings that protrude from the back of his suit jacket. He's used to it, but he does feel a slight urge to ask them what use they think they are with a beeswax ceiling so low over the street.

Zzg walks out into the road and opens the driver's side door of their unmarked police car.

As he gets in the passenger side, careful not to spill his coffee, Zzrh asks her, "Did you find out why he was parked down that alley?"

She fastens her seatbelt. "Apparently it was a security measure. They thought he'd be safer down there than out in the road."

Zzrh taps a lower mandible thoughtfully. He checks that the window is wound all the way up and then says, "Right, we're going to find out who knew that he'd be down that alley. Presumably they must have thought they were keeping it a secret, so there can't be that many. I want a list. We'll interview each of them and find out who was indiscrete and who had a motive and so on. We'll prioritise the humans, of course, but we can't make it look like we're prioritising the humans. We can expect the higher-ups to be keeping a close eye on us, and the media an even closer one. Everyone's just waiting for some racial tensions to boil over somewhere on this one. I don't want it to happen anywhere near either of us."

Zzg starts the car. "You're telling me."

*

Honeyjewel Place is tucked neatly into the second part of the river's double kink, on the north bank. Across the water from the Nematode Quarter, it's too narrow a promontory for Hive Central to have expanded onto it, and too far from the Human Quarter to have been colonised by mammals. Instead, it became a kind of Hive Central tourist's district, where humans and quivers come to absorb some apian culture without actually having to rub shoulders with the workers.

It's posh as nobody's business, and beautiful to look at. Pure apian architecture, beautifully sculpted beeswax, but made to resemble human open-air streets and blocky human buildings. Kind of like the real skyscrapers in the Human Quarter, only much smaller and nicer. Of course, they say that you're never more than three metres from a mammal, even in Hive Central, and a few real human buildings are dotted around, such as the pretentiously historic hotel where Ogive was murdered.

Zzrh thinks it looks pretty ugly really. Ancient stone, cut from the ground and left to fade and crack. No constant reapplication of natural wax; just a big lump of ancient matter left to crumble. So very oppressively mammalian.

They park round the back and speak to the same guy they did the first time, standing half in and half out of the back door, in between two overflowing dumpsters. He's a particularly soft-bodied looking human, rolls of fat almost completely obscuring his internal skeleton, his wet, squidgy eyes taking in wingless Zzg with an insincere regard.

"You're right," he says, directing his comments to Zzrh even though Zzg is more fluent in Umani. "We did hope that it was a secret. Someone must have been indiscrete. I hope that you won't make too big a deal of this…"

"It is a big deal," Zzrh says, pulling out a cigarette. "It got Mec Ogive killed. But we're not interested in it for any reason other than we think that it might help us find his killer. We're not looking to get you in any trouble, so please just be honest with us."

He's hardly got the cigarette between his mandibles before the man has lit it for him. Don't let anyone tell you that humans can't do the service industry, Zzrh thinks to himself.

"Whatever the circumstances," the man says, "we are always happy to co-operate with the police. There were very few people in the hotel staff who knew about Mr Ogive's plans. Myself, my superiors and several of the security guards. Come inside and I'll compile a list. Would you like tea? Coffee? Honey?"

"No, thank you."

They step into a hard-floored, sterile looking hallway and end up in the barren, corporate-postered employee break room. The human already in there quickly shoves her doughnut into her soft mouthparts and scampers off.

The fat human starts scribbling names on a piece of headed notepaper. "The police were in charge of security on the road," he adds cautiously, "and I believe they also knew."

"Add them to the list then," Zzg says with soft sarcasm.

Beneath the dozen or so human and apian names on the paper, the man adds, 'The Police,' then hands it to Zzrh who folds it up and tucks it into his inside jacket pocket.

Zzrh gives the man a nod of thanks. "You've been a great help."

He turns to go, but the man stops him suddenly. "Oh! One other thing! One of our security guards didn't turn up for work today. I thought he might need time off to cope with the stress of the murder, so I was going to mark it as paid sick leave, but it seems that his absence actually began last night, before Mr Ogive was killed. I haven't had a chance to review the security tapes or anything - perhaps it was just a mistake and he really was here. But I thought you should know. I trust all of my staff, of course, but, it just seemed…"

Zzg finishes the sentence for him: "Suspicious."

"Yes," he admits.

"Is he on the list you gave me?" Zzrh asks.

"No."

"But it's not inconceivable that he found out about where Mr Ogive's car was?"

"I wouldn't say inconceivable, no."

"Write down his name and address. A photo would be nice as well, so we can have someone look for him on our copy of your security tapes. We'll let you know if you need to update your records. In the meantime, my partner and I will pay him a visit and see what he has to say."