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days ago. Did you? Find it? Jesus. What was … Have you got it? Can I have it back? What happened?”
    I looked at Yaszek. She stood and whispered to me, sat again, and watched Khurusch.
    “Yes, that’s what this is about, Mikyael,” I said. “What did you think it was about? Actually no, don’t point at me, Mikyael, and shutyour mouth until I tell you; I don’t want to know. Here’s the thing, Mikyael. A man like yourself, a delivery man, needs a van. You haven’t reported yours as missing.” I looked down briefly at Yaszek, Are we sure? She nodded. “You’ve not reported it stolen. Now I can see that the loss of that piece of shit and I do stress piece of shit wouldn’t cut you up too badly, not on a human level. Nonetheless, I’m wondering, if it was stolen, I can’t see what would stop you alerting us and indeed your insurance. How can you do your job without it?”
    Khurusch shrugged.
    “I didn’t get it together. I was going to. I was busy …”
    “We know how busy you are, Mik, and still I ask, why didn’t you report it gone?”
    “I didn’t get it together. Really there’s nothing fucking dubious—”
    “For three days?”
    “Have you got it? What happened? It was used for something, wasn’t it? What was it used for?”
    “Do you know this woman? Where were you on Tuesday night, Mik?” He stared at the picture.
    “Jesus.” He went pale, he did. “Someone was killed? Jesus. Was she hit? Hit and run? Jesus.” He pulled out a dented PDA, then looked up without turning it on. “Tuesday? I was at a meeting. Tuesday night? Christ’s sake I was at a meeting.” He gave a nervous noise. “That was the night the goddamn van got stolen. I was at a meeting, and there’s twenty people can tell you the same.”
    “What meeting? Where?”
    “In Vyevus.”
    “How’d you get there, with no van?”
    “In my fucking car! No one’s stolen that. I was at Gamblers Anonymous.” I stared. “Fuck’s sake I go every week. Last four years.”
    “Since you were last in prison.”
    “ Yes since I was in fucking prison, Jesus, what do you think put me there?”
    “Assault.”
    “Yeah, I broke my fucking bookie’s nose because I was behind and he was threatening me. What do you care? I was in a room full of fucking people on Tuesday night.”
    “That’s, what, two hours at the most…”
    “Yeah and then afterwards at nine we went to the bar—it’s GA not AA—and I was there till after midnight, and I didn’t go home alone. There’s a woman in my group … They’ll all tell you.”
    He was wrong about that. Of the GA group of eighteen, eleven wouldn’t compromise their anonymity. The convenor, a wiry pony-tailed man who went by Zyet, “Bean,” would not give us their names. He was right not to do so. We could have forced him, but why? The seven who would come forward all verified Khurusch’s story.
    None was the woman he claimed to have gone home with, but several of them agreed that she existed. We could have found out, but again what would the point have been? The mectecs got excited when we found Khurusch’s DNA on Fulana, but it was a tiny number of his arm hairs on her skin: given how often he hauled things in and out of the vehicle, it proved nothing.
    “So why didn’t he tell anyone it was missing?”
    “He did,” Yaszek told me. “He just didn’t tell us. But I spoke to the secretary, Ljela Kitsov. He’s been pissing and moaning about it for the last couple of days.”
    “He just never got it together to tell us? What does he even do without it?”
    “Kitsov says he just piddles stuff up and down across the river. The occasional import, on a very small scale. Pops abroad and picks up stuff to resell: cheap clothes, dodgy CDs.”
    “Abroad where?”
    “Varna. Bucharest. Turkey sometimes. Ul Qoma, of course.”
    “So he’s just too dithery to report the theft?”
    “It does happen, boss.”
    Of course, and to his rage—despite having not reported it stolen, he was