“Hurt the fucker! Hurt him!” said that one.
She knocked away Coti’s hat, grabbed his hair, and pulled his head back. Coti awaited the cut that would open his throat, but it never came.
“You know what a blade beetle is?” she asked him.
Coti managed to scream just before the blade went into his guts. He retched and choked at the feel of it cutting into him, the feel of it still there. The girl held up an empty handle before his face and when the man released him, Coti fell face down in the mud, clutching at the full wound in his belly. Why did they have to do it like that? They didn’t have to do it like that. The pain and horror of the knife wound in his guts were redoubled with a blade that remained inside, and began to make a nest there. C S Lumi had been working in his laboratory since dawn when his doorbell chimed. It was not that he was by nature an early riser, but that the privilege he had been granted brought with it a deep feeling of responsibility. He saved the information he had been collating, from his notescreen to his house computer, took a long contemplative look at the nautiloids feeding in their tank, then took off his lab coat and headed for the door. The Chief Constable stood waiting for him.
“Sorry to bother you so early, sir, but there has been a killing.” Lumi studied the constable’s leather uniform and thought how closely it made him resemble a Proctor. He thought how one day he might write a paper on the psychological effects of this.
“No bother, Brown, come in.”
Chief Constable Brown removed his leather helmet, wiped his feet on the door mat, and stepped into the hall to stand almost at attention. Lumi had no authority over the police, nor any position in local politics, but having been granted privilege by the Owner, he was looked upon with respect and deferred to by all.
“Was it anyone I know?” he asked.
“Unfortunately, yes, it was Coti, the board cutter.”
Lumi looked around in surprise as he pulled on his jacket. “Why would anyone want to kill him? Where did this happen, and how?”
“It happened very close to here, in the alley leading to the wood yard.” Brown paused, obviously uncomfortable. “We think he was killed with a blade-beetle.”
“Cromwell,” said Lumi, his expression grim.
“There is, of course, no proof of this. We are questioning his people, but they will all alibi each other.” Lumi snorted and picked up the bag containing his study kit. “Let’s go and have a look then.” Out on the boardwalk he gazed up at the clear sky, then down at the pools in the street. What a night for dying, and to die in such a way… Brown headed down the boardwalk to the street bridge, beyond which Lumi could see a crowd around a taped-off area. In the centre of this area lay a muddy shape. It had been done in the alley. Coti must have managed to crawl that far before the beetle reached a vital organ or he had collapsed from blood loss.
The crowd parted before Lumi then closed behind him as he ducked under the tape and squatted by the corpse. Coti was on his back, his face in death relaxed into a kind of idiocy that belied the agony he must have suffered. Lumi opened his kit, pulled on a pair of surgical gloves, then removed a long set of tongs and a reinforced plastic bag. He parted the wound with his fingers and pushed the tongs up the path of lacerated organs into the chest cavity. There was movement there and he closed the tongs on something hard and slick, and withdrew it from the body.
“Oh my god,” said someone in the crowd, turning and rapidly staggering away. The blade beetle was the length of a hand and shaped like an almond. Its legs were flat paddles and the edges of these and its wing cases, as Lumi well knew, were sharper than broken glass. It was an adult, he saw; there would be eggs in the body.
“We won’t learn much from this,” he said, inserting the feebly moving beetle into the bag and sealing it in.
“Check his clothing and so-forth then bring him over for autopsy. He’ll have to be burnt right after.” He glanced around at the Chief Constable, who was looking on white-faced, then he stood. “Let’s see where he was killed.”
Brown led Lumi down the alley, following the trail Coti had left, dragging himself through the mud. Grooves with red puddles in them.
“Stop.”
Brown looked around at Lumi in surprise.
Lumi tilted his head. “Do you hear it?”
The Chief Constable listened as well. “Something humming?”
“There,” said Lumi, pointing down into the mud. He stooped down and removed his tongs again, delved into the mud for a moment, then came up with a metal cylinder with flashing lights on it. He clicked a switch and the lights went out.
“That’s a board cutter,” the constable told him.
“I am aware of that. What it would be nice to know is if it has cut something.” Brown smiled.
“Evidence, hard physical evidence,” he said, then, as he hurried back out of the alley, “I’ll get my men.” When he returned, Lumi was scraping mortar from between the bricks of one wall and placing it in a bag.
“They tried to wash it off, but it soaked into the mortar. One of them was badly injured. Probably had something cut right off — there’s a fragment of bone here. Find someone badly injured and I’ll do a genetic cross-match, then you’ll likely have your killer, or be very close to him.”
“Sir!”
The shout came from the constable probing the mud at the end of the alley. Lumi looked down there and saw the crowd hurriedly dispersing.
“What is it, Walker?” asked Brown.
Walker did not reply. He hurriedly stepped back to the wall of the alley and stared out into the street. Suddenly a huge figure loomed there; eight feet tall and leathery skinned, long robes, a staff, a face visored with leathery skin, no eyes apparent, a grim slit of a mouth. A Proctor.
“Oh shit,” said Brown.
The Proctor strode down the alley, its staff punching holes in the mud. It halted when it was looming over them, regarding them with the featureless thrust of its head.
“Death,” it said, its voice flat and barren of anything human. Lumi stood up and sealed the plastic bag he had been filling.
“We are investigating it,” he said.
“Lumi,” said the Proctor, then abruptly turned away and strode out of the alley.
“What the hell?” said Brown.
“I don’t know.”
“But they never take an interest in local law.”
“I said I don’t know.”
Lumi gazed after the retreating Proctor. They enforced the laws of the Owner: No one to enter the restricted zones, no building in or corruption of the wilder zones, no more taken from them by a human than a human can carry without mechanical aid, and of course, the population stricture. It was this last that inspired terror of the Proctors. The population was set at two billion and must never go above that number. Whenever it did the Proctors turned killer. It did not matter who died just so long as the population number was brought down again. This was why it was law that every man and woman must be sterilized after engendering only two children. To flout this law was punishable by death. In Lumi’s opinion this was the right way of going about things. On Earth no such laws had been in existence, and the horror of what had resulted was still remembered.