Though he was towards the top of the police hierarchy, Vimes still always kept an eye out for excuses to go on patrol, especially at night. It wasn't that he liked tramping around Venture City at 3am during one of the city's rare rainstorms. It was a bloody miserable time to be about. But...

But some of the best days of his life had been in the middle of rainy nights. You stood behind a statue or something to get out of the wind so you could light a smoke, you hunched your shoulders just like so and your hat directed the rain down the back of your jacket, leaving you in a tiny little bubble of warmth and dryness. For just a few minutes, you could pretend that the world made some kind of sense and fade into the background. If you could manage it, you became part of the architecture.

When Vimes had been a younger officer, on a night like this, he had become so much a part of the background that a purse snatcher had ran around a corner and stopped standing right next to him to catch his breath. Vimes had grabbed him and whispered "You just got nicked, son." and the poor man had needed a change of underwear.

Tonight, it had been quiet so far. Vimes stood in the lee of a phone booth out by the docks where the rain wasn't quite so bad, hunched his shoulders like so, lit a cigarette, and waited, looking to see what kind of characters would come out in the dark.