The Truth (Discworld 25)

Strange Smell of Peppermint

WATCH BAFFLED

'Baffled, am I?' said Vimes.

'If you are telling me that you are not, commander, I will be happy to make a note of the fa--'

'Leave that notebook alone!'

William looked surprised. The notebook was the cheapest kind, made of paper recycled so many times you could use it as a towel, but once again someone was glaring at it as if it was a weapon.

'I won't have you doing to me what you did to Slant,' said Vimes.

'Every word of that story is true, sir.'

'I'd bet on it. It sounds like his style.'

'Look, commander, if there's something wrong with my story, tell me what it is.'

Vimes sat back and waved his hands.

'Are you going to print everything you hear?' he said. 'Do you intend to run around my city like some loose... loose siege weapon? You sit there clutching your precious integrity like a teddy bear and you haven't the faintest idea, have you, not the faintest idea how hard you can make my job?'

'It's not against the law to--'

'Isn't it? Isn't it, though? In Ankh-Morpork? Stuff like this? It reads like Behaviour Likely to Cause a Breach of the Peace to me\'

'It might upset people, but this is important--'

'And what will you write next, I wonder?'

'I haven't printed that you have a werewolf employed in the Watch,' said William. He regretted it instantly, but Vimes was getting on his nerves.

'Where did you hear that?' said a quiet voice behind him. He turned in his chair. A fair-haired young woman in Watch uniform was leaning against the wall. She must have been there all the time.

'This is Sergeant Angua,' said Vimes. 'You can speak freely in front of her.' was a chair, knocked over.

There was a basket, kicked upside down in the corner of the room.

There was a short, evil-looking metal arrow sticking into the floor at an angle; it had a City Watch label tied to it now.

There was a dwarf. He-- no, William corrected himself, on seeing the heavy leather skirt and the slight raised heels to the iron boots - she was lying down on her stomach, picking at something on the floor with a pair of tweezers. It looked like a smashed jar.

She glanced up. 'Are you new? Where's your uniform?' she said.

'Well, er, I, er...'

She narrowed her eyes. 'You're not a watchman, are you? Does Mister Vimes know you're here?'

The way of the truthful-by-nature is as a bicycle race in a pair of sandpaper underpants, but William clung to an indisputable fact.

'I spoke to him just now,' he said.

But the dwarf wasn't Sergeant Detritus, and certainly not Corporal Nobbs.

'And he said you could come in here?' she demanded.

'Not exactly said--'