He lit a match on a hippo's toenail and cupped his hand around it to shield his cigar from the damp.

These murders, now. No one would care if the Watch didn't care. Two old men, murdered on the same day. Nothing stolen... He corrected himself: nothing apparently stolen. Of course, the thing about things that were stolen was that the bloody things weren't there. They almost certainly hadn't been fooling around with other people's wives. They probably couldn't remember what fooling around was. One spent his time among old religious books; the other, for gods' sakes, was an authority on the aggressive uses of baking.

People would probably say they had lived blameless lives.

But Vimes was a policeman. No one lived a completely blameless life. It might be just possible, by lying very still in a cellar somewhere, to get through a day without committing a crime. But only just. And, even then, you were probably guilty of loitering.

Anyway, Angua seemed to have taken this case personally. She always had a soft spot for the underdog.

So did Vimes. You had to. Not because they were pure or noble, because they weren't. You had to be on the side of underdogs because they weren't overdogs.

Everyone in this city looked after themselves. That's what the guilds were for. People banded together against other people. The guild looked after you from the cradle to the grave or, in the case of the Assassins, to other people's graves. They even maintained the law, or at least they had done, after a fashion. Thieving without a licence was punishable by death for the first offence.[11] The Thieves' Guild saw to that. The arrangement sounded unreal, but it worked.

It worked like a machine. That was fine except for the occasional people who got crushed in the wheels.

The damp cobbles felt reassuringly real under his soles.

Gods, he'd missed this. He'd patrolled alone in the old days. When there was just him, and the stones glistened around 3am, it all seemed to make sense somehow—

He stopped.

Around him, the world became a crystal of horror, the special horror that has nothing to do with fangs or ichor or ghosts but has everything to do with the familiar becoming unfamiliar.

Something fundamental was wrong.

It took a few dreadful seconds for his mind to supply the details of what his subconscious had noticed. There had been five statues along the parapet on this side.

But there should have been four.

He turned very slowly and walked back to the last one. It was a hippo, all right.

So was the next one. There was graffiti on it. Nothing supernatural had 'Zaz Ys A Wonker' scrawled on it.

It seemed to him that it didn't take quite so long to get to the next one, and when he looked at it ...

Two red points of light flared in the fog above him.

Something big and dark leapt down, knocked him to the ground and disappeared into the gloom.

Vimes struggled to his feet, shook his head and set off after it. No thought was involved. It is the ancient instinct of terriers and policemen to chase anything that runs away.

As he ran he felt automatically for his bell, which would summon other Watchmen, but the Commander of the Watch didn't carry a bell. Commanders of the Watch were on their own.

In Vimes's squalid office Captain Carrot stared at a piece of paper:

Repairs to Guttering, Watch House, Pseudopolis Yard. New downpipe, 35° Micklewhite bend, four right-angled trusses, labour and making good. $16.35p.

There were more like them, including Constable Downspout's pigeon bill. He knew Sergeant Colon objected to the idea of a policeman being paid in pigeons, but Constable Downspout was a gargoyle and gargoyles had no concept of money. But they knew a pigeon when they ate it.

Still, things were improving. When Carrot had arrived the entire Watch's petty cash had been kept on a shelf in a tin marked 'Stronginthearm's Armour Polish for Gleaming Cohorts' and, if money was needed for anything, all you had had to do was go and find Nobby and force him to give it back.

Then there was the letter from a resident in Park Lane, one of the most select addresses in the city:

Commander Vimes,

The Night Watch patrol in this street appears to be made up entirely of dwarfs. I have nothing against dwarfs amongst their own kind, at least they are not trolls, but one hears stories and I have daughters in the house. I demand that this situation is remedied instantly otherwise I shall have no option but to take up the matter with Lord Vetinari, who is a personal friend.

I am, sir, your obt. servant,

Joshua H. Catterail

This was police work, was it? He wondered if Mr Vimes were trying to tell him something. There were other letters. The Community Co-ordinator of Equal Heights for Dwarfs was demanding that dwarfs in the Watch be allowed to carry an axe rather than the traditional sword, and should be sent to investigate only those crimes committed by tall people. The Thieves' Guild was complaining that Commander Vimes had said publicly that most thefts were committed by thieves.

You'd need the wisdom of King Isiahdanu to tackle them, and these were only today's letters.

He picked up the next one and read: 'Translation of text found in Fr. Tubelcek's mouth. Why? SV.'

Carrot dutifully read the translation.

'In his mouth? Someone tried to put words in his mouth?' said Carrot, to the silent room.

He shivered, but not because of the cold that came from fear. Vimes's office was always cold. Vimes was an outdoors person. Fog was dancing in the open window, little fingers of it drifting in the light.

The next paper down the heap was a copy of Cheery's iconograph. Carrot stared at the two blurred red eyes.

'Captain Carrot?'

He half-turned his head, but kept looking at the picture. 'Yes, Fred?'

'We've got the murderer! We've got 'im!'

'Is he a golem?'

'How did you know that?'

The tincture of night began to suffuse the soup of the afternoon.

Lord Vetinari considered the sentence, and found it good. He liked 'tincture' particularly. Tincture. Tincture. It was a distinguished word, and pleasantly countered by the flatness of 'soup'. The soup of the afternoon. Yes. In which may well be found the croutons of teatime.

He was aware that he was a little light-headed. He'd never have thought a sentence like that in a normal frame of mind.

In the fog outside the window, just visible by the candlelight, he saw the crouching shape of Constable Downspout.

A gargoyle, eh? He'd wondered why the Watch was indented for five pigeons a week on its wages bill. A gargoyle in the Watch, whose job it was to watch. That would be Captain Carrot's idea.

Lord Vetinari got up carefully from the bed and closed the shutters. He walked slowly to his writing table, pulled his journal out of its drawer, then tugged out a wad of manuscript and unstoppered the ink bottle.

Now then, where had he got to?