In the crowded main office of the Pseudopolis Yard Watch House, Sergeant Colon absentmindedly adjusted the sprig of lilac that he’d stuck into his helmet like a plume.
...
Tucked behind his [Nobby's] ear, in the place usually reserved for his cigarette, was another wilting lilac flower.
...
After the door had shut one of the watchmen looked up from the desk where he’d been wrestling with a report and the effort of writing down, as policemen do, what ought to have happened.
“Sarge?”
“Yes, Corporal Ping?”
“Why’re some of you wearing purple flowers, Sarge?”
There was a subtle change in the atmosphere, a suction of sound caused by many pairs of ears listening intently. All the officers in the room had stopped writing.
“I mean, I saw you and Reg and Nobby wearing ’em this time last year, and I wondered if we were all supposed to…” Ping faltered. Sergeant Colon’s normally amiable eyes had narrowed and the message they were sending was: you’re on thin ice, lad, and it’s starting to creak…
“I mean, my landlady’s got a garden and I could easily go and cut a—” Ping went on in an uncharacteristic attempt at suicide.
“You’d wear the lilac today, would you?” said Colon quietly.
“I just meant that if you wanted me to I could go and—”
“Were you there?” said Colon, getting to his feet so fast that his chair fell over.
“Steady, Fred,” murmured Nobby.
“I didn’t mean…” Ping began. “I mean…was I where, Sarge?”
Colon leaned on the desk, bringing his round red face an inch away from Ping’s nose.
“If you don’t know where there was, you weren’t there,” he said in the same quiet voice.
He stood up straight again.
“Now me an’ Nobby has got a job to do,” he said. “At ease, Ping. We are going out.”
“Er…”
This was not being a good day for Corporal Ping.
“Yes?” said Colon.
“Er…standing orders, Sarge…you’re the ranking officer, you see, and I’m orderly officer for the day, I wouldn’t ask otherwise but…if you’re going out, Sarge, you’ve got to tell me where you’re going. Just in case anyone has to contact you, see? I got to write it down in the book. In pen and everything,” he added.
“You know what day it is, Ping?” said Colon.
“Er…25th of May, Sarge.”
“And you know what that means, Ping?”
“Er…”
“It means,” said Nobby, “that anyone important enough to ask where we’re going—”
“—knows where we’ve gone,” said Fred Colon.
The door slammed behind them.
