Someone had just spoken to him. He looked up.
‘What?’ he barked.
‘I enquired if her ladyship is well, your grace?’ said the butler, looking startled. ‘Are you feeling all right, your grace?’
‘What? Oh, yes. No. I’in fine. So is her ladyship, yes, thank you. I popped in before I went outside. Mrs Content is with her.
She says it won’t be for a while.’
‘I have advised the kitchen to have plenty of hot water ready, your grace, nevertheless,’ said Willikins, helping Vimes on with the gilty breastplate.
‘Yes. Why do they need all that water, do you think?’
‘I couldn’t say, your grace,’ said Willikins. ‘Probably best not to enquire.’
Vimes nodded. Sybil had already made it quite clear, with gentle tact, that he was not required on this particular case. It had been, he had to admit, a bit of a relief.
He handed Willikins the sprig of lilac. The butler took it without comment, inserted it into a little silver tube of water that
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would keep it fresh for hours, and fixed it on to one of the breastplate straps.
‘Time moves on, doesn’t it, your grace,’ he said, dusting him down with a small brush.
Vimes took out his watch. ‘It certainly does. Look, I’ll drop in at the Yard on my way to the palace, sign what needs signing, and I’ll be back as soon as possible, all right?’
Willikins gave him a look of almost unbutlery concern. ‘I’in sure her ladyship will be fine, your grace,’ he said. ‘Of course she is not, not-‘
‘young,’ said Vimes.
‘I would say she is richer in years than many other
primigravidae,’ said Willikins smoothly. ‘But she is a wellbuilt lady, if you don’t mind me saying so, and her family have traditionally had very little trouble in the childbirth department-‘
‘Trimi what?’
‘New mothers, your grace. I’in sure her ladyship would much rather know that you were running after miscreants than wearing a hole in the library carpet.’
‘I expect you’re right, Willikins. Er… oh, yes, there’s a young lady dogpaddling in the old cesspit, Willikins.’
‘Very good, your grace. I shall send the kitchen boy down there with a ladder directly. And a message to the Assassins’
Guild?’
‘Good idea. She’ll need clean clothes and a bath.’
‘I think, perhaps, the hose in the old scullery might be more appropriate, your grace? To start with, at least?’
‘Good point. See to it. And now I must be off.’
In the crowded main office of the Pseudopolis Yard Watch House, Sergeant Colon absentmindedly adjusted the sprig of lilac that he’d stuck into his helmet like a plume.
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‘They go very strange, Nobby,’ he said, leafing listlessly through the morning’s paperwork. ‘It’s a copper thing. Happened to me when I had kids. You get tough.’
‘What do you mean, tough?’ said Corporal Nobbs, possibly the best living demonstration that there was some smooth evolution between humans and animals.
‘Weell,’ said Colon, leaning back in his chair. ‘It’s like… well, when you’re our age…’ He looked at Nobby, and hesitated.
Nobby had been giving his age as ‘probably 34’ for years; the Nobbs family were not good at keeping count.
‘I mean, when a man reaches… a certain age,’ he tried again,
‘he knows the world is never going to be perfect. He’s got used to it being a bit, a bit…’
‘Manky?’ Nobby suggested. Tucked behind his ear, in the place usually reserved for his cigarette, was another wilting lilac flower.
‘Exactly,’ said Colon. ‘Like, it’s never going to be perfect, so you just do the best you can, right? But when there’s a kid on the way, well, suddenly a man sees it different. He thinks: my kid’s going to have to grow up in this mess. Time to clean it up. Time to make it a Better World. He gets a bit… keen. Full of ginger.
When he hears about Stronginthearm it’s going to be very hot around here for- ‘morning, Mister Vimes!’
‘Talking about me, eh?’ said Vimes, striding past them as they jerked to attention. He had not in fact heard any of the conversation, but Sergeant Colon’s face could be read like a book and Vimes had learned it by heart years ago.
‘Just wondering if the happy event-‘ Colon began, trailing after Vimes as he took the stairs two at a time.
‘It hasn’t,’ said Vimes shortly. He pushed open the door to his office, “morning, Carrot!’
Captain Carrot sprang to his feet and saluted. ‘ ‘morning, sir!
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Has Lady-‘
‘No, Carrot. She has not. What’s been happening overnight?’
Carrot’s gaze went to the sprig of lilac, and back to Vimes’s face. ‘Nothing good, sir,’ he said. ‘Another officer killed.’
Vimes stopped dead. ‘Who?’ he demanded.
‘Sergeant Stronginthearm, sir. Killed in Treacle Mine Road.
Carcer again.’
Vimes glanced at his watch. They had ten minutes to get to the palace. But time suddenly wasn’t important any more.
He sat down at his desk. ‘Witnesses?’
‘Three this time, sir.’
‘That many?’
‘All dwarfs. Stronginthearm wasn’t even on duty, sir. He’d signed off and was picking up a rat pie and chips from a shop and walked out straight into Carcer. The devil stabbed him in the neck and ran for it. He must’ve thought we’d found him.’
‘We’ve been looking for the man for weeksl And he bumped into poor old Stronginthearm when all the dwarf was thinking of was his breakfast? Is Angua on the trail?’
‘Up to a point, sir,’ said Carrot awkwardly.
‘Why only up to a point?’
‘He – well, we assume it was Carcer – dropped an aniseed bomb in Sator Square. Almost pure oil.’
Vimes sighed. It was amazing how people adapted. The
Watch had a werewolf. That news had got around, in an
underground kind of way. And so the criminals had evolved to survive in a society where the law had a very sensitive nose.
Scent bombs were the solution. They didn’t have to be that dramatic. You just dropped a little flask of pure peppermint or aniseed in the street where a lot of people would walk over it, and suddenly Sergeant Angua was facing a hundred, a thousand
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crisscrossing trails, and went to bed with a terrible headache.
He listened glumly as Carrot reported on men brought off leave or put on double shift, on informers pumped, pigeons stooled, grasses rustled, fingers held to the wind, ears put on the street. And he knew how little it all added up to. They still had fewer than a hundred men in the Watch, and that was including the canteen lady. There were a million people in the city, and a billion places to hide. Ankh-Morpork was built of boltholes.
Besides, Carcer was a nightmare.
Vimes was used to the other kinds of nut jobs, the ones that acted quite normally right up to the point where they hauled off and smashed someone with a poker for blowing their nose noisily. But Carcer was different. He was in two minds, but instead of them being in conflict, they were in competition. He had a demon on both shoulders, urging one another on.
And yet… he smiled all the time, in a cheerful chirpy sort of way, and he acted like the kind of rascal who made a dodgy living selling gold watches that go green after a week. And he appeared to be convinced, utterly convinced, that he never did anything really wrong. He’d stand there amid the carnage, blood on his hands and stolen jewellery in his pocket, and with an expression of injured innocence declare, ‘Me? What did I do?’
And it was believable right up until you looked hard into those cheeky, smiling eyes, and saw, deep down, the demons looking back.
… but you mustn’t spend too much time looking at those eyes, because that’d mean you’d taken your eyes off his hands, and by now one of them held a knife.
It was hard for the average copper to deal with people like that. They expected people, when heavily outnumbered, to give in or try to deal or at least just stop moving. They didn’t expect people to kill for a fivedollar watch. (A hundred dollar watch, now, that’d be different. This was Ankh-Morpork, after all.)
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‘Was Stronginthearm married?’ he said.
‘No, sir. Lived in New Cobblers with his parents.’
Parents, thought Vimes. That made it worse.
‘Anyone been to tell them?’ he asked. ‘And don’t say it was Nobby. We don’t want any repeat of that “bet you a dollar you’re the widow Jackson” nonsense.’
‘I went, sir. As soon as we got the news.’
‘Thank you. They took it badly?’
‘They took it… solemnly, sir.’
Vimes groaned. He could imagine the expressions.
‘I’ll write them the official letter,’ he said, pulling open his desk. ‘Get someone to take it round, will you? And say I’ll be over later. Perhaps this isn’t the time to-‘ No, hold on, they were dwarfs, dwarfs weren’t bashful about money. ‘Forget that – say we’ll have all the details of his pension and so on. Died on duty, too. Well, near enough. That’s extra. It all adds up.’ He rummaged in his cupboards. ‘Where’s his file?’