Nightside 11 - A Hard Days Knight

ambitious.”
    “I would have got round to it,” I said. “I’ve been a bit ... distracted.”
    Julien studied me thoughtfully over the rim of his champagne glass. “There’s something different about you though I can’t put my finger on it.... Either way, it will have to wait. There’s trouble down at the Mammon Emporium. The biggest mall in the Nightside is in very great danger of going off bang. But first, John, I have to ask you ... Did you really have to kill Walker?”
    “Yes,” I said. “It was necessary. He’d gone too far into the dark.”
    Julien clearly heard something in my voice because he put his glass down on the bar and leaned forward on his bar-stool. “I never did understand what he saw in you, or you in him. You seemed to work well enough together, when you weren’t trying to kill each other. He respected you. I know that.”
    “I respected him,” I said. “Best enemy I ever had.”
    “He was more than that.”
    “Of course. He was Walker.”
    “Well,” said Julien, “he was dying, after all, and not in a good way. I suppose you could call his death a mercy killing.”
    “No,” I said. “I don’t think you could call it that.”
    He waited expectantly, but I had nothing more to say. Let Walker take his secrets with him, the good and the bad. In the end, Julien nodded and picked up his glass again, which had mysteriously refilled itself with more pink champagne. One of the perks of Club membership.
    “I’ll send some of my people to collect the body.”
    “There is no body,” I said.
    Julien raised an elegant eyebrow. “Hard core, John.”
    “Where are the rest of the new Authorities?” I said. Not because I gave a damn but because I felt like changing the subject.
    “They’re ... not entirely comfortable with you yet,” said Julien. “My colleagues are currently upstairs, arguing over whether or not to accept you as our new representative. Walker wanted you, and I recommended you, but ...”
    “Yes,” I said. “But.”
    I remembered meeting these people before, in a devastated future Nightside, where they were the last human survivors, and my devoted Enemies. Doing their best to kill me in their past before I could bring about the terrible future they were living in. Time travel can really mess with your head. Just say no.
    Julien suddenly recognised the gold pocket-watch I was still holding in my hand. “How did you get that?”
    “Walker left it to me in his will.”
    “We haven’t even found his will yet!”
    I shrugged. “Details, details ...”
    Julien sighed. “And you wonder why nobody trusts you ...”
    “No, I don’t. I don’t give a damn. However,” I said, changing the subject again by brute force, “if I’m going to work for the Authorities, shouldn’t I have an official job title? Something big and dramatic, to strike terror into the hearts of evildoers?”
    “You do have a title,” said Julien. “Walker.”
    “What?”
    “You didn’t really think that was his name, did you? I don’t think anyone ever knew what his real name was, the one he used in the outside world, when he went home to his family. Henry was real enough, I think. He always looked like a Henry to me. He used it often enough, and he seemed comfortable with it. Especially with his closest friends, like the Collector, and your father. But I couldn’t even say for sure whether they ever knew his real surname. To know the true name of a thing is to have power over it, and Henry would never have allowed that. No; he was Walker, like all his predecessors in the job.”
    “Then Hadleigh Oblivion was a Walker, too?” I said, trying to get my head round the idea.
    “Before he went so thoroughly off message, and disappeared into the Deep School, in search of mysteries, and ended up the Detective Inspectre. Whatever the hell that is, and I have a horrible suspicion I’m not going to like it when I find out ... There have been any number of Walkers, down the years, representing the Authorities as their Voice in the Nightside.”
    I scowled at Julien. “Why didn’t I know this?”
    “You could have asked. It wasn’t exactly a state secret.”
    I decided to change the subject again. “Where’s Hadleigh now?”
    “I’d feel a lot more secure if I knew the answer to that one. No doubt he’s out and about in the Nightside, walking up and down in it and disapproving of things in horrible ways. I keep waiting for the other incendiary to drop. Whatever mysteries