more.”
“Ah,” said Cathy, nodding wisely. “Conflict of interest.”
“More like I won’t have the time,” I said. “There’s a lot to do when you’re Walker.”
“John Taylor, the last honest man in the Nightside, is now the Man,” said Cathy. “Can’t say I saw that one coming.”
“Same here,” I said. “Or I’d have run extremely fast in the opposite direction. But, better me than someone else who couldn’t be trusted or depended on in a crisis; so I have to do it. If I’d have known my conscience was going to cause me so much trouble, I’d have had it surgically removed long ago. But my time as a PI is definitely over, so I won’t need this office any more. You’re going to have to close it down, Cathy.”
“Oh, is that all? I’ve known that was on the cards ever since I heard you were going to be the next Walker! Don’t worry, boss; I’ve got it all under control.” She stopped and looked at me thoughtfully. “I suppose you’ll have a new office, as Walker?”
“The position does come with a lot of support,” I said carefully. “Most of which I can’t talk about.”
“Not even to me?”
“What you don’t know, someone else can’t make you tell them,” I said. “It’s that sort of job.”
“I suppose it must be a lonely sort of job, being Walker,” said Cathy. “You can’t trust anyone.”
I made myself smile easily. “Situation entirely normal, for the Nightside.”
Cathy fixed me with an almost accusing look. “Is Suzie really pregnant?”
“Yes,” I said.
“How the hell did that happen?”
“Well, if you don’t know by now, Cathy . . .”
“But I thought . . . she couldn’t bear to be touched, by anyone!”
“That used to be true,” I said. “But miracles do happen, sometimes, in the Nightside.”
“Damn, boss,” said Cathy. “You really can do anything.”
“No,” I said. “She did it all herself. She’s always been a lot stronger than most people realise. And I . . . have always been so very proud of her.”
“But . . . do you really feel the need to get married, boss? In this day and age? You don’t have to get married just because she’s up the stick.”
“It seems like the right thing to do,” I said. “And doing the right thing seems more important now than ever. Given who and what I’ve become. But I’m not marrying her just because . . . That gave me the impetus to do what I always wanted to do. I love her. She loves me. Nothing else matters.”
“You soft and soppy sentimental old thing, you,” said Cathy.
“How do you feel about our getting married?” I said.
“Oh, I love weddings!” Cathy said cheerfully. “I cry buckets.”
“Alex usually cries, too,” I said. “In memory of his own.”
Cathy looked at me. “You knew his ex-wife. What was she like?”
“She lacked patience. And a sense of humour. And she slept with everything that breathed and a few that didn’t.”
“Did she every try it on with you?” said Cathy.
“Fortunately, I’d left the Nightside by then,” I said.
“After Suzie shot you in the back.”
“She was only trying to get my attention.”
“I’m going to be doing a lot of baby-sitting, aren’t I?” said Cathy. “Auntie Cathy! I love it! And Uncle Alex! Oh, he’s going to absolutely hate that!”
I looked around the office. “What are you going to do with all this . . . stuff?”
“I’ve already made arrangements, boss. The really good stuff goes with me, and what I can’t sell I’ll chuck in the nearest Timeslip, so it can be someone else’s problem.”
“Okay,” I said. “Down to business. Cathy, I want you to find me one last case, as a private investigator. Nothing too big or too complicated because I want it all over and done with before I get married tomorrow. But something really good, to go out on.”
And then I stopped, as a thought occurred to me. I looked around the office. “How much am I paying for all this?”
“You never wanted to know before,” said Cathy, which I couldn’t help noticing wasn’t really an answer.
“I wasn’t getting married before,” I said. “Everyone’s been telling me that can be very expensive.”
“Relax, boss. Let’s say that thanks to the expert way I have been managing your finances and investments all these years, you can afford it.”
“I’m solvent?” I said. “When did that happen?”
“You never did have a head for figures,” said Cathy, shaking her head sadly.
“Am I rich?”
“Well, by the Nightside’s standards, you are comfortably well off.”
“Damn,” I said. “I really must run out and buy something expensive, on principle. It’s been years since I indulged myself.”
“Not what I heard . . .”
“What?”
“Nothing, boss!”
Cathy fired up the various computers and monitor screens built into the surface of her desk and made a point of studying them carefully. She gestured meaningfully at the piled-up paper in the trays, marked In, Out, Urgent, and Pay Now. I grabbed a few handfuls and sorted through them while Cathy called up all the most recent e-mails. People still write a lot of letters in the Nightside, sent by personal messenger, because paper can’t be hacked. My office has also been known to receive communications from any number of alternate futures. Usually marked Not To Be Opened Till . . . I sorted those out and placed them carefully to one side. Never trust messages from the Future; they always have their own agenda.
“That’s nothing,” said Cathy, noting my interest. “Sometimes things appear here in the office, arriving out of nowhere by supernatural methods. I only ever open those wearing my special protective mittens. And there’s always the ravens, of course.”
I looked at the handful of ravens, gathered together on a wooden perch at the far end of the office, patiently waiting their turn to deliver their magically imposed messages.
“I don’t know how they get in, boss,” said Cathy. “Especially considering this office doesn’t have a window. I never ask them what their messages are because then they’d disappear back to whoever sent them. And I’m not doing anything for anyone who’d treat living creatures that cruelly. So I let them hang around here until their messages are safely out-of-date, then I find them good homes.”
“You soft and soppy sentimental thing, you,” I said.
“And the ones I can’t find homes for I make into pies.”
I said nothing. Often, I find that’s the safest course. I concentrated on sorting through my papers while Cathy worked her way through the e-mails.
“I have programs in the computer to weed out the time-wasters along with the spam,” Cathy said finally. “But sometimes messages by-pass the system completely and drop onto my desk out of nowhere, punching their way right through the office’s protections and defences. I always treat those messages very respectfully because anyone with that kind of power wouldn’t be bothering us unless it was something really urgent.”
“Hold everything,” I said. “I just noticed that you’re using a whole new computer system. Whatever happened to that silver sphere thing, holding rogue AIs from the Future?”
“Oh them . . . They went home again, a few months back,” said Cathy. “They were basically data junkies. At first they were as happy as pigs in shit because they thought they’d never run out of fresh new data to investigate and correlate, but eventually even they had enough. They announced one day that the Nightside was too weird, even for them, and it made their heads hurt. And since they didn’t have heads, they were going home. And off they went. To wherever or whenever they came from. The computers built into my desk now are state-of-the-art thinking things that fell off the back of a Timeslip. And no, you really don’t want to know how much I paid for them. Before they were fitted into my desk, they looked like Robby the Robot’s head, if its designer had been having a very bad day while out of his head on really dodgy blotter acid. Sometimes it thinks so fast it gives me the answer
