Night Watch

lot of people would walk over it, and suddenly Sergeant Angua was facing a hundred, a thousand crisscrossing trails, and went to bed with a nasty 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 bolt-holes. 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 of two minds, but instead of being in conflict, they were in competition. He had demons 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 jewelry 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 into those cheeky, smiling eyes, and saw, deep down, the demons looking back…
    …but don’t spend too much time looking at those eyes, because that’d mean you’ve taken your eyes off his hands, and by now one of them would hold 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 five-dollar watch (a hundred-dollar watch, now, that’d be different. This was Ankh-Morpork, after all).
    “Was Stronginthearm married?” Vimes 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 drawers. “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. That’s extra. It all adds up. That’ll be theirs.” He rummaged in his desk. “Where’s his file?”
    “Here, sir,” said Carrot, handing it over smoothly. “We are due at the Palace at ten, sir. Watch Committee. But I’m sure they’ll understand,” he added, seeing Vimes’s face. “I’ll go and clean out Stronginthearm’s locker, sir, and I expect the lads’ll have a whip-round for flowers and everything…”
    Vimes pondered over a sheet of headed paper after the captain had gone. A file, he had to refer to a damn file. But there were so many coppers these days…
    A whip-round for flowers. And a coffin. You look after your own. Sergeant Dickins had said that, a long time ago …
    He wasn’t good with words, least of all ones written down, but after a few glances at the file to refresh his memory, he wrote down the best he could think of.
    And they were all good words and, more or less, they were the right ones. Yet, in truth, Stronginthearm was just a decent dwarf who was paid to be a copper. He’d joined up because, these days, joining the Watch was quite a good career choice. The pay was good, there was a decent pension, there was a wonderful medical plan if you had the nerve to submit to Igor’s ministrations in the cellar, and, after a year or so, an Ankh-Morpork–trained copper could leave the city and get a job in the Watches of the other cities on the plain with instant promotion. That was happening all the time. Sammies, they were called, even in towns that had never heard of Sam Vimes. He was just a little proud of that. “They” meant watchmen