Angua watched until the man had disappeared in the shadows, but her thoughts were elsewhere.
-----
She had gone to see the first of the Donkey's victims the day before Constable Visit had unwittingly come up with the idea for a decoy set-up. At the time, it was the only victim that had recovered enough to be able to talk to anyone, and she had gone there with a cold sense of dread in her guts.
Commander Vimes had sent her, and she had a pretty good idea why. Just about the only one in the Watch apart from Carrot who could gain their trust, Angua had the advantage of being able to talk to the girls on a different level.
At least, that was what she had hoped for. When Angua arrived at the doctor's house there were other girls there as well, but Vimes, who seemed to know the doctor, had seen to it that she was taken in via a side-entrance where no one would spot her visit.
She was brought into a quiet room facing a small garden, where the only piece of furniture was a bed. In it was a young woman, who stared vacantly out the window, but her eyes and mind seemed focused on a point far beyond the lilac tree outside. She didn't look at Angua or acknowledge her presence in any other was as she entered through the doorway.
Angua could see straight away that she would never be able to depend upon her looks ever again17. The doctor, an old man with a kind face and knowledgeable eyes, had told her to expect the worst, but she wasn't prepared for this. Even werewolves didn't do this to people.
-----
The man slid from one shadow to the next, doubling back, feeling the familiar mixture of lust and hatred grow as he made his way through the narrow streets of the Flesh Pots.
He hadn't sated his needs for a long time now. Too long, he knew. Soon he would have to choose another one of the fallen ones to enlighten, but not yet. Not until he had taught the insolent Watch about the Creature of the One God.
He felt in his pocket for the reassuring outline of the donkey tail in its bag. Hah! The papers talked about "the Donkey" as if that was significant. The lesser beings didn't understand, couldn't possibly conceive the true nature of the Creature.
But he knew, and he would show them the way to atonement. This one would make a perfect example. Now all he had to do was wait until they could be alone.
-----
In a different part of town, another man hurried purposefully through the darkness of the spring night.
Fred Colon hadn't argued when his commanding officer had told him what to do. He had seen the knuckle colour of the Vimes-o-meter, and knew that if he would have uttered another word there would have been Hells to pay.
He had hurried out of Pseudopolis Yard, yanking his breastplate into place as he left the Watch house. His helmet was left behind somewhere, but that didn't matter much when all he had to do was run an errand such as this. If he hurried he could be over by Fan Tan Alley in little over fifteen minutes.
There was just one thing he had to take care of first.
-----
"Nobby!"
The call caught him unawares. The Donkey wasn't the only one who had had to reign in his desires these last couple of weeks. Corporal Nobbs had had to learn how to curb his urge for nicotine, for instance, since it didn't do to light up a fag end if he was to remain unnoticed in his shadowy doorway. He had done this by mentally shutting out the rest of the world for long periods of time, a technique that had worked well, since Angua didn't rely on him anyway.
But now she was striding over to his hideout with a look on her face that made him scramble to attention. Nobby was jittery at any rate, since he had failed completely to come to terms with his superior officer's skimpy attire over the last couple of weeks, and things weren't made any easier by the way outlying regions of Angua moved when she was walking fast.
His nicotine habit had a way of bypassing his brain at times like these, and this latest development had him reaching behind his ear for a dog-end with slightly shaky hands without him even noticing.
"Nobby! Come on out of there! I've had enough of this!"
"W . . . Why's that, Sarge?" he managed, whilst his hands, still unheeded, were struggling with the matches.
"Why? I'll tell you why!"
Angua was struggling to keep her temper under control, Nobby could see, and that wasn't something you'd like to see in a werewolf, no matter how friendly and vegetarian she was under normal circumstances. He tried backing away from her, but only managed to bang his head on the long disused torch-holder.
"Because we've been doing this for two weeks now, and have absolutely nothing to show for it! Because there is nothing we can do to help the girls if we continue like this!"
Angua was venting her frustration on Nobby, and she knew it, but after two weeks of standing around in the cold, being accosted by self-proclaimed Casanundas18, she had had more than enough. She composed herself once more, trying to find a reason to stay on in this hellhole.
Again, she thought back to her meeting with the girl.
-----
Angua hadn't said anything at first, but had stood quietly and looked out the window for what had seemed like an eternity, but probably wasn't more than a minute. When her acute hearing picked up that the girl's heart beat was fastening, she had willed herself not to turn around until the girl actually spoke to her of her own accord. When her voice came, it was slow and filled with pain, rasping and unclear, due to her lack of teeth.
"I wanna . . . thee 'im take . . . a dirt nap."
Angua turned around and looked the girl in the eye. Her name was Vaselina, she knew, and she was probably twenty-five. It was hard to know, since the Guild of Seamstresses sometimes took on babies that were left on their doorstep, and Vaselina had been just such a girl.
Being a guild girl meant that you were given a place to live and food to eat, not to mention a much sought-after education, and if you chose to do so – and most of them did – you could remain with the guild for life and make a good living that way18.
"I . . . wann' 'im . . . to die . . ."
Angua hadn't known what to say. The fact of the matter was that if the Watch got to the Donkey first he was going to stand trial, and the Lawyer's Guild were known to be able to get anyone off the hook who could afford it. At the very worst he would end up in the Tanty, and that wasn't much of a punishment20.
Angua had left the room with a bitter taste in her mouth.
-----
The nights were still cold, as if winter was still fighting although its troops were being forced to retreat, so sergeant Colon had brought his own secret weapon to the battle. In one hand he carried a dozen donuts fresh from an all-night bakery on Sheer Street, right across the road from the Beggars' Guild.
Making his way through the outskirts of the Shades, he clutched the bag to his chest as a shield, as if to protect himself against the acres of nubile female flesh on display. Not that Colon was averse to female charms – he had been happily married for decades – but he was quite an old-fashioned man in some respects, and found it hard to know where to keep his eyes as various female voices made cat-calls and whistled after him.
He hadn't been brought up to deal with situations like this. Flustered like a slice of bacon in a frying pan, he hurried on through the narrow streets.
-----
Angua looked up again at the setting moon and reached a conclusion. There was no point in lying to yourself. She no longer believed that it was possible to catch the Donkey in this way, and even though she didn't exactly relish the thought of facing Vimes in the morning, it was still better than staying here for no reason whatsoever.
"Nobby, we're going home. We've deserved a good day's sleep."
"Yeah?" Nobby puffed nervously on his dog-end. "Mister Vimes'd go spare if he found out we bunked off, I reckon."
"It still beats standing around here, wouldn't you say, Nobby?"
"You'd take care of 'im then, Sarge?"
"Yes, Nobby, I promise I'll talk to Mister Vimes."
"Oh. Then what are we waiting for?"
-----
The man the papers were calling the Donkey was lying in wait in the shadows, patient like one of the big cats on the dry savannahs of Klatch, and, like them, unmoving apart from the involuntary twitch of the telltale tail.
He was prepared to wait as long as it took, because he knew that time was on his side. Sooner or later his pray would have to show, and when it did, the Creature of the One God would become the instrument of His wrath.
Aha! His work was upon him, for the One God had been graceful enough to grant him his reward immediately. Here came the lowly creature now. But there were others around, too. That wasn't good. He couldn't strike while there were people around. Only on his own with his victims could he commune with the One God.
He felt as if he was a rickety dinghy adrift on an ocean of hate, hate, hate towards all the insolent lesser beasts, but he would have to contain it within himself for a little longer, for the greater glory of His plan. He started to follow his pray, moving unseen through the labyrinth.
-----
Angua and Nobby made their way through the shadowy labyrinth of the Shades together the first couple of hundred yards until they came to a fork in the road. Here, Nobby had to turn left and walk through the Whore Pits towards the Yard and Angua would go to the right, cutting across Shamlegger Street and then straight on to her lodgings with Mrs. Cake's, where she had taken a room again for the duration of this job21.
They didn't speak much, just nodded to each other and went their separate ways. All that needed to be said had been said, and now all they could do was wait for the morning, when they would admit defeat.
Neither of them felt good about this, but Angua felt especially cheated. She had wanted to get this bastard so bad she could taste it, and that wasn't going to happen now. Perhaps she would see things differently in the morning, but right now she couldn't help but feel as if the universe was unfair to her personally, and she resented that.
She was so preoccupied with her gloomy thoughts that she didn't even notice the movement behind her as she trudged on.
-----
Nobby strolled through the Shades with an ease of mind that was new to him and quite unique. Normally, anyone who tried something like that was bound to end up face down in, or at least on, the river Ankh. But Nobby, too, had realised that dressed as he was there was a microscopic risk of anyone accosting him, and so he walked carelessly through the night, past groups of thugs and seamstresses, happily smoking his foul dog-end, only occasionally cursing when the veil threatened to catch fire.
It was a shame that they couldn't seem to find this weirdo, he thought. The man was madder than a whole bunch of alchemists, he reckoned, but then that in itself surely meant that it was only a matter of time before he made a mistake, and then the Watch would be on 'im like a tonne of bricks.
He walked on, a bandy-legged dervish with smoke rings in his wake, without ever noticing that he had attracted company.
-----
Sergeant Colon was close to Fan Tan Alley now, and he felt that a little reward was in order after having traversed the Shades so successfully. He had opened the paper bag and was just about to send the first one off to see its Baker when he became aware of a presence behind him.
"Sergeant Intestine, isn't it?" said the woman. She had a husky voice that would make an ordinary greeting overflow with sexual innuendo. It seemed to fuse several synapses in Sergeant Colon's brain.
"Colon," said Colon, reddening, and then, with desperately good manners, "Would you like a donut, ma'am?"
"Well now, Sergeant," said the woman, her voice like a whole plantation of syrupy maples, "I've been wined and dined many a-time, but I've never been donutted before."
She gave him a smile, batting her eyelids at him and making Colon blush harder still. His hand, still proffering the bag, began to shake as the lady touched his fingertips with his.
There was a bulge in the Trousers of Time, and for a moment the future was looking distinctly banana-shaped. Then things went decidedly pear-shaped.
-----
17 Unless she took up with a freak show, a treacherous voice had added in Angua's mind.
18 The Disc's supposedly second greatest lover, who had done wonders for the ladder-making industry
19 It also meant being given a name that was in some way associated with the seamstresses' line of work. In this, at least, Vaselina was fortunate compared with her sisters Fockette and Buggary.
20 The Tanty was the city's main prison, where petty criminals were thrown together with the scum of the disc, thus making it an ideal recruiting spot for the Guild of Thieves, who were known to even organise evening courses for the inmates.
21 She had told Carrot about the need to be on her own even when she was off-duty, if she was to be able to keep up the pretence of being a seamstress, and he had been very understanding about it. That had infuriated her, but maybe it was for the best, considering. Where Nobby slept at night wasn't that important, since she felt sure that no one would follow him home.