‘Unmentionables’. They were the ones that listened in every shadow and watched at every window. That was how it seemed, anyway. They certainly were the ones who knocked on doors in the middle of the night.
Vimes stopped, in the dark. The cheap clothes were soaked through, the boots were flooded, rain was trickling off his chin and he was a long, long way from home. Yet, in a treacherous kind of way, this was home. He’d spent most of his days working nights. Walking through the wet streets of a sleeping city was his life.
The nature of the night changed, but the nature of the beast remained the same.
He reached into the ragged pocket and touched the badge again.
In the darkness where lamps were few and far between,
Vimes knocked on a door. A light was burning in one of the lower windows, so Lawn was presumably still awake.
After a while a very small panel slid back and he heard a voice say, ‘Oh… it’s you.’ There was a pause, followed by the sound of bolts being released.
The doctor opened the door. In one hand he held a very long syringe. Vimes found his gaze inexorably drawn to it. A bead of something purple dripped off the end and splashed on to the floor.
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‘What would you have done, injected me to death?’ he said.
‘This?’ Lawn looked at the instrument as if unaware that he’d been holding it. ‘Oh… just sorting out a little problem for someone. Patients turn up at all hours.’
‘I’ll bet they do. Er… Rosie said you had a spare room,’ said Vimes. ‘I can pay,’ he added quickly. ‘I’ve got a job. Five dollars a month? I won’t be needing it for long.’
‘Upstairs on the left,’ said Lawn, nodding. ‘We can talk about it in the morning.’
‘I’in not a criminal madman,’ said Vimes. He wondered why he said it, and then wondered who he was trying to reassure.
‘Never mind, you’ll soon fit in,’ said Lawn. There was a whimper from the door leading to the surgery.
‘The bed’s not aired but I doubt that you’ll care,’ he said. ‘And now, if you’ll excuse me…’
It wasn’t aired, and Vimes didn’t care. He didn’t even
remember getting into it.
He woke up once, in panic, and heard the sound of the big black wagon rattling down the street. And then it just, quite seamlessly, became part of the nightmare.
At ten o’clock in the morning Vimes found a cold cup of tea by his bed and a pile of clothes and armour on the floor outside the door. He drank the tea while he inspected the pile.
He’d read Snouty right. The man survived because he was a weathercock and kept an eye on which way the wind was
blowing, and right now the wind was blowing due Vimes. He’d even included fresh socks and drawers, which hadn’t been in the specification. It was a thoughtful touch. They probably hadn’t been paid for, of course. They had been ‘obtained’. This was the old Night Watch.
But, glory be, the breathy little crawler had scrounged something else, too. The three stripes for a sergeant had a little
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gold crown above them. Vimes instinctively disliked crowns, but this was one he was prepared to treasure.
He went downstairs, doing up his belt, and bumped into Lawn coming out of his surgery, wiping his hands on a cloth. The doctor smiled absently, then focused on the uniform. The smile did not so much fade as drain.
‘Shocked?’ said Vimes.
‘Surprised,’ said the doctor. ‘Rosie won’t be, I expect. I don’t do anything illegal, you know.’
‘Then you’ve got nothing to fear,’ said Vimes.
‘Really? That proves you’re not from round here,’ said Lawn.
‘Want some breakfast? There’s kidneys.’ This time it was Vimes’s smile that drained. ‘Lamb,’ the doctor added.
In the tiny kitchen he prised the lid off a tall stone jar and pulled out a can. Vapour poured off it.
‘Ice,’ he said. ‘Get it from over the road. Keeps food fresh.’
Vimes’s brow wrinkled. ‘Over the road? You mean the
mortuary?’
‘Don’t worry, it’s not been used,’ said Lawn, putting a pan on the stove. ‘Mr Garnish drops off a lump a few times a week, in payment for being cured of a rather similar medical condition.’
‘But mostly you work for the ladies of, shall we say,
negotiable affection?’ said Vimes. Lawn gave him a sharp look to see if he was joking, but Vimes’s expression hadn’t changed.
‘Not just them,’ he said. ‘There are others.’
‘People who come in by the back door,’ said Vimes, looking around the little room. ‘People who for one reason or another don’t want to go to the… better known doctors?’
‘Or can’t afford them,’ said Lawn. ‘People who turn up with no identity. And you had a point… John?’
‘No, no, just asking,’ said Vimes, cursing himself for walking
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right into it. ‘I just wondered where you trained.’
‘Why?’
‘The kind of people who come in by the back door are the kind of people who want results, I imagine.’
‘Hah. Well, I trained in Klatch. They have some novel ideas about medicine over there. They think it’s a good idea to get patients better, for one thing,’ he turned over the kidneys with a fork. ‘Frankly, sergeant, I’in pretty much like you. We do what needs doing, we work in, er, unpopular areas and I suspect we both draw the line somewhere. I’in no butcher. Rosie says you aren’t. But you do the job that’s in front of you, or people die.’
‘I’ll remember that,’ said Vimes.
‘And when all’s said and done,’ said Lawn, ‘there are worse things to do in the world than take the pulse of women.’
After breakfast Sergeantat-Arms John Keel stepped out into the first day of the rest of his life.
He stood still for a moment, shut his eyes, and swivelled both feet like a man trying to stub out two cigarettes at once. A slow, broad smile spread across his face. Snouty had found just the right kind of boots. Willikins and Sybil between them conspired to prevent him wearing old, wellworn boots these da- those days, and stole them away in the night to have the soles repaired. It was good to feel the streets with dry feet again. And after a lifetime of walking them, he did feel the streets. There were the cobblestones: catheads, trollheads, loaves, short and long setts, rounders, Morpork Sixes, and the eightyseven types of paving brick, and the fourteen types of stone slab, and the twelve types of stone never intended for street slabs which had got used anyway, and had their own patterns of wear, and the rubbles and the gravels, and the repairs, and the thirteen different types of cellar cover and twenty types of drain lid-He bounced a little, like a man testing the hardness of something. ‘Elm Street,’ he said. He bounced again. ‘Junction
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with Twinkle. Yeah.’
He was back.
It wasn’t many steps to Treacle Mine Road, and as he turned towards the Watch House a flash of colour caught his eye.
And there it was, overhanging a garden wall. Lilac was
common in the city. It was vigorous and hard to kill and had to be. The flower buds were noticeably swelling.
He stood and stared, as a man might stare at an old battlefield.
… they rise hands up, hands up, hands up…
How did it go, now? Think of things happening one after the other. Don’t assume that you know what’s going to happen, because it might not. Be yourself.
And, because he was himself, he made a few little purchases in little shops in dark alleys, and went to work.
The Treacle Mine Road Night Watch House was generally
deserted around midday, but Vimes knew that Snouty, at least, would be there. He was a Persistent Floater, just like Nobby and Colon and Carrot and, when you got down to it, Vimes as well.
Being on duty was their default state of being. They hung around the Watch House even when off duty, because that’s where their lives took place. Being a copper wasn’t something you left hanging by the door when you went home.
But I promise I’ll learn how, thought Vimes. When I get back, it’ll all be different.
He went around the back and let himself in by the stable entrance. It wasn’t even locked. Black mark right there, lads.
The iron bulk of the hurryup wagon stood empty on the
cobbles.
Behind it was what they called, now, the stables. In fact, the stables were only the bottom floor of what would have been part of Ankh-Morpork’s industrial heritage, if anyone had ever thought of it like that. In practice they thought of it as junk that
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was too heavy to cart away. It was part of the winding gear from a treacle mine, long since abandoned. One of the original lifting buckets was still up there, glued to the floor by its last load of the heavy, sticky, unrefined treacle which, once set, was tougher than cement and more waterproof than tar. Vimes remembered, as a kid, begging chippings of pig treacle off the miners; one lump of that, oozing the sweetness of prehistoric sugar cane, could keep a boy’s mouth happily shut for a week.*