Night Watch - Terry Pratchett [53]
“I think it’s quite possible no one else makes pies like you do, Mr. Dibbler,” he said, licking his fingers in case he might want to shake hands with someone later on.
“You ate it all?” said Dibbler.
“Was that wrong?” said Vimes.
And now relief rose off the man like smoke off a greenwood fire.
“What? No! That’s fine! Jolly good! Want another one to help it down? Half-price?”
“No, no, one is more than enough,” said Vimes, backing away.
“You finished every bit?” said Dibbler.
“That was right, wasn’t it?” said Vimes.
“Oh, yeah. Sure. Obviously!”
“Got to be going,” said Vimes, moving on down the lane. “I’ll look forward to seeing you again when I’ve got less appetite.”
He waited until he was well out of sight before taking a few random turns in the network of alleys. Then he stepped into the shadow of a deep doorway and felt in his mouth for the piece of pie that had seemed curiously unchewable even by pie standards.
Usually, if you found something more-than-usually hard or crunchy in one of Dibbler’s Famous Pork Pies, the trick was either to swallow it and hope for the best or spit it out with your eyes closed. But Vimes felt around between gum and cheek and fished out a folded piece of paper, stained with unknowable juices.
He unfolded it. In smudged pencil, but still readable, it read: Morphic Street, 9 o’clock tonight. Password: swordfish.
Swordfish? Every password was “swordfish”! Whenever anyone tried to think of a word that no one would ever guess, they always chose “swordfish.” It was just one of those strange quirks of the human mind.
That explained the guilt, anyway. A plot. Another damn plot, in a city full of plots. Did he need to know about plots? Anyway, he knew about this one. Morphic Street. The famous Morphic Street Conspiracy. Ha.
He pushed the greasy scrap into a pocket and then hesitated.
Someone was being quiet. Overlaid on the distant street noises was a sort of hollow in the sounds, filled by careful breathing. And the hairs on the back of his neck were standing up.
Quietly, he pulled the blackjack out of his rear pocket.
Now, what were the options? He was a copper, and someone was creeping up on him. If they weren’t a copper, then they were in the wrong (because he was a copper). If they were a copper, too, then they were one of Swing’s crew and therefore in the wrong (because he was a better copper than them, and so were things floating in gutters), and therefore delivering a swift bucketful of darkness had no obvious downside.
On the other hand, thieves, assassins, and Swing’s men, by all accounts, did a lot of creeping up on people and were probably pretty good at it, whereas the person tracking him was keeping their back so close to the wall he could hear the scraping. That meant they were probably just a member of the public with something on their mind, and he was not inclined to add several ounces of lead shot simply for that reason (because he’d like to believe he wasn’t that sort of copper).
He settled for stepping out into the alley and saying “Yeah?”
A boy stared up at him. It had to be a boy. Nature would not have been so cruel as to do that to a girl. No single feature in itself was worse than passably ugly, but the combination was greater than the sum of the parts. There was also the smell. It wasn’t bad, as such. It just wasn’t entirely human. There was something feral about it.
“Er…” said the pinched-up face, “Look, tell you what, mister, you tell me where you’re going and I’ll stop following you, have we got a deal? Cost you no more’n a penny and that’s a special price. Some people pay me a lot more’n that to stop following ’em.”
Vimes continued to stare. The creature was wearing an oversized evening-dress jacket, shiny with grease and greenish with age, and a top hat that must once have been trodden on by a horse. But the bits that were visible between the two were regrettably familiar.
“Oh, no…” he moaned. “No, no, no…”
“You all right, mister?”
“No, no, no…oh, ye gods, it had to happen, didn’t it…”
“You want I should go’n fetch Mossy,