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I took the paper from Nether's hand and read the article quickly. It looked like a stock item: another police success in rounding up a criminal gang engaged in illegal imports from the surface. A surprise raid; a win for our boys in blue; many Goblins arrested. No mention of the obligatory "Criminal Mastermind" or "Racketeer Bosses" was apparent in the newsprint, so presumably they had only netted a few of the small fry and the big fish had escaped their snares once again. I tossed the paper back onto the table casually and glared pointedly at Nether. He looked calmly back at me. "There's less of this kind of thing these days, isn't there?" he said, smirking very slightly. This kind of policing work had bored me, even when I actually was a policeman. All guns and guts. Oh, there was a certain amount of intelligence gathered, a certain piecing together of the evidence. Kindergarten stuff. The actual raid itself was usually of the "all guns blazing" nature: trigger-happy cops and equally uninhibited perps desperately trying to annihilate each other. But Nether's question set me thinking along another tack entirely. Either the cops had got better in policing the black-market conduits between the surface world and the Lower Realms, or the criminals had got much smarter in orchestrating their import/export business operations: both equally implausible scenarios as far as I was concerned. It was true, nevertheless; there were very few reports of this kind these days. I couldn't recall when I had last spotted an outing for that particular flavour of newspaper boilerplate. "Did you have something to do with this raid?" I demanded. "No, I didn't," he replied, suddenly sounding irritated and sullen, "And, frankly, I wish it were otherwise." There was some game, some hidden play going on here. I was too tired, or too stupid to identify exactly what it was. "So what is going on?" I retorted sharply. Nether declined to answer my question, for reasons I would only work out much later. "Look," he said, a touch of steel appearing in his voice, "Your job is to find out what happened to Rosie. And I'd advise you in the strongest possible terms not to enquire too deeply about what I've had been doing recently. It's none of your business." "Why ever not?" I exclaimed, taken aback. My brother took a few dirty bills from an inside pocket and tossed them on the table. "That, dear boy," Nether said, standing up and gathering his newspaper from the table, "is not a question I am prepared to answer."
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Part 47