"Paul McAuley - Whole Wide World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

patch of wasteground, stabbed in the heart or shot in the head.
I ran easily and sweetly, my T-shirt sticking and unsticking to my sweaty back, my feet
cased in Nike Victory 9s that, sprung with argon pockets and flexing sheaths of smart
elastomers, could probably have run better by themselves.
I had no trouble finding the address Pete Reid had given me. It was halfway down a
narrow street jammed up with police vehicles — three patrol cars, a Transit van, a couple
of unmarked Ford Scorpios, a sleek silver Saab. Two men in black trousers and buttoned-
up white shirts leaned against a black van, quietly smoking. The van's motor ticked over;
the metal box of a refrigeration unit outlet clung to its roof.
I didn't have to be a detective to know that this was not a routine shout.
A WPC was squatting down to talk to an old woman in widow's weeds who sat in the back
seat of a squad car. A young constable in a short-sleeved shirt was stretching blue and
white tape from a drainpipe to the lamp-post in front of a three-storey house which was
squeezed between a wreck of a building with an abandoned office-supply shop at street
level and boarded windows above, and the blackened shell of a late 1990s flat conversion
I'd seen burning on the first night of the InfoWar. Two narrow doors bracketed a plate-
glass window protected by security bars; the sticker of a security firm in one corner, a sign


file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/McAuley,%20Paul%20-%20Whole%20Wide%20World.html (6 of 287)10-12-2006 21:55:03
California Gold by John Jakes


in retro-style computer type, Mobo Technology, hung above a row of dead ferns in plastic
pots. The metal box of a CCTV camera was perched on a bracket above the right-hand
door.
A squad car pulled up behind me. I showed the driver my warrant card.
'I was told just to drop this,' he said, meaning the evidence kit on the back seat of his car.
He had put on his cap when lad climbed out of the car; now he took it off and blotted
sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand.
'You'll have to wait,' I said. 'There'll be something to take back to T12.'
A hard-faced WPC came out of the left-hand door and had a word with the two men by the
van: the coroner's appointed undertakers. They dropped their cigarettes and ground them
under their polished black brogues, opened the back door of the black van and pulled out a
stretcher with an unfolding wheeled frame and went inside. I leaned against the squad car,
sweat drying in my hair, my skin giving up volumes of heat to the hot air. I badly needed a
cigarette, but as part of my new discipline I had left my tabs in the flat, and the driver
didn't smoke.
'What's this all about?' he said.
'We don't need to know.'
'A suspicious death, it looks like.'
He was very young, eager to impress.
'We're cogs in the machine,' I told him. 'We don't need to know anything. Kick back and
enjoy the sunshine.'
At last, the undertakers manoeuvred the loaded stretcher out of the narrow door. The
young constable lifted the crime-scene tape for them with a ceremonial flourish. I grabbed
the kit, showed my warrant card to the constable, went in. Someone in plainclothes was
talking with a uniform on the stairs at the end of the narrow corridor. He broke off his
conversation to challenge me. A tall man at least ten years younger than me, unforgiving
blue eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses, thinning blond hair brushed straight back. He was