Night Watch

man!”
    “I mean, sir, perhaps you put it in a desk drawer? Or the safe, perhaps?”
    “Certainly not! I sometimes put it in the safe on weekends, but I’m…sure I didn’t do that last night.”
    Vimes noted the note of uncertainty. He was doing a bad thing, he knew. Tilden was nearly seventy. At a time like that, a man learned to treat his memory as only a rough guide to events.
    “I find, sir, that when a busy man has a lot on his plate, he can do things that subsequently slip his mind,” he said. I know I do, he added to himself. I could put my house keys down in a bare room and not find them thirty seconds later.
    “We’ve all been under a lot of pressure lately,” he added, knowing that Tilden frequently fell asleep during the afternoon until Snouty coughed very loudly outside the door before taking him his cocoa.
    “Well, that’s true,” said Tilden, turning desperate eyes to him. “All this curfew business. Very…unsettling. Forget my own head if it wasn’t nailed on, what?”
    He turned and looked at the green safe.
    “Only had it a couple of months,” he muttered. “I suppose I…look the other way, will you, Sergeant? May as well sort this out…”
    Vimes obligingly turned his back. There was some clicking, and a creak, and then an intake of breath.
    Tilden got to his feet, holding the silver inkstand.
    “I believe I’ve made a fool of myself, Sergeant,” he said.
    No, I’ve made a fool of you, thought Vimes, fervently wishing he hadn’t. I’d intended to drop it in Coates’s locker, but I couldn’t…
    …not after what I found in there.
    “Tell you what, sir,” he volunteered, “we could say it was a kind of test.”
    “I don’t tell lies as a rule, Keel!” said the captain, but added, “I appreciate the suggestion, nevertheless. Anyway, I know I’m not as young as I was. Perhaps it’s time to retire.” He sighed. “I have to say, I’ve been considering it for some time.”
    “Oh, don’t talk like that, sir,” said Vimes far more jovially than he felt. “I can’t see you retiring.”
    “Yes, I suppose I should see things through,” Tilden mumbled, walking back to his desk. “Do you know, Sergeant, that some of the men think you are a spy?”
    “Who for?” said Vimes, reflecting that Snouty delivered more than cocoa.
    “Lord Winder, I assume,” said Tilden.
    “Well, we all work for him, sir. But I don’t report to anyone but you, if that’s any help.”
    Tilden looked up at him and shook his head sadly. “Spy or not, Keel, I don’t mind telling you that some of the orders we’ve been getting lately have…not been thought out properly, in my opinion, what?”
    He gave Vimes a glare as if defying him to produce the red-hot thumbscrews there and then.
    Vimes could see how much the admission that abduction and torture and conspiracy to criminalize honest citizens might not be acceptable government policy was costing the old man. Tilden hadn’t been brought up to think like that. He’d ridden off under the flag of Ankh-Morpork to fight the Cheese-Eaters of Quirm, or Johnny Klatchian, or whatever enemies had been selected by those higher up the chain of command with never a second thought about the rightness of the cause, because that sort of thinking could slow a soldier down.
    Tilden had grown up knowing that the people at the top were right. That was why they were at the top. He didn’t have the mental vocabulary to think like a traitor, because only traitors thought like that.
    “Haven’t been here long enough to comment, sir,” said Vimes. “Don’t know how you do things here.”
    “Not like we used to,” mumbled Tilden.
    “Just as you say, sir.”
    “Snouty says you know your way around remarkably well, Sergeant. For someone new to the city.”
    That was a comment with a hook on the end, but Tilden was an inexperienced angler.
    “One nick is pretty much like any other, sir,” said Vimes. “And, of course, I’ve visited the city before.”
    “Of course. Of course. Well…thank you, Sergeant. If you could, er, explain things to the men? I’d be grateful…”
    “Yes, sir. Of course.”
    Vimes shut the door carefully behind him and went down the steps two at a time.
    The squad below had barely moved. He clapped his hands like a schoolteacher.
    “C’mon, c’mon, you’ve got patrols to go to! Get moving! Not you, Sergeant Knock—a word in the yard, please!”
    Vimes didn’t bother to wait to see if the man would follow him. He