Discworld 39 - Snuff

by Terry Pratchett

  “Why?” said Vimes, mystified. It was reasonably comfortable in the lockup. Granted, the pigs had left a fragrant memory behind them, but for a boy from Ankh-Morpork this counted as fresh air. Feeney sat down beside him on a well-scrubbed bench. “Well, sir, when my granddad was young, Lord Ramkin gave him a whole half-dollar for opening a gate, just to let the hunt go by. According to my dad, he said, ‘no canting hypocrite going on about the rights of man ever gave me as much as a quarter-farthing so I say here’s to Lord Ramkin, who gave me a whole half-dollar when he was as pissed as a fart, and never asked for it back when he were sober. That’s what I call a gentleman.’ ”

  Vimes squirmed inside, knowing that the supposedly generous old drunkard would have had more money than you could ever imagine, and here was a working man pathetically grateful for a handout from the old piss-artist. He snarled in his soul to a man long dead. But the part of him that had been married to Sybil for years whispered, But he didn’t have to give the man anything, and in those days a whole half-dollar was probably more money than the old man could imagine! Once Sybil, in one of their very infrequent arguments, had surprised him by blurting out, “Well, Sam, my family got its start in life, its grub stake if you like, by piracy. You should like that, Sam! Good honest manual labor! And look what it led to! The trouble with you, Sam Vimes, is that you’re determined to be your very own class enemy.”

  “Is there something wrong, commander?” said Feeney.

  “Everything,” said Vimes. “For one thing, no policeman swears allegiance to the civil power, he swears allegiance to the law. Oh, politicians can change the law, and if the copper doesn’t like it then he can quit, but while he is in the job it’s up to him to act in accordance with the law as laid down.” He leaned his back against the stone wall. “You do not swear to obey magistrates! I’d like to see what it was that you signed—” Vimes stopped talking because the little metal plate in the lockup door slid open to reveal Feeney’s mother, looking very nervous.

  “I’ve made Bang Suck Duck, Feeney, with swede and chips, and there’s enough for the duke as well, if he would be so condescending as to accept it?”

  Vimes leaned forward and whispered, “Does she know you’ve arrested me?”

  Feeney shuddered. “No, and, sir, please, please don’t tell her, because I think she’d never let me into the house ever again.”

  Vimes walked over to the door and said to the slot, “I shall be honored by your hospitality, Mistress Upshot.”

  There was a nervous giggle from the other side of the slot, and Feeney’s mother managed to say, “I’m sorry to say we have no silver plates, your highness!”

  At home Vimes and Sybil ate off serviceable earthenware, cheap, practical and easy to keep clean. He said aloud, “I’m sorry you don’t have any silver plates, too, Mistress Upshot, and I’ll have a set sent to you directly.”

  There was something like a scuffle from the other side of the slot, at the same time as Feeney said, “I beg your pardon? Have you gone mad, sir?”

  Well, that would help, Vimes thought. “We’ve got hundreds of damn silver plates up at the Hall, my lad. Bloody useless, they make the food cold and they turn black as soon as your back is turned. We appear to be overrun with silver spoons, too. I’ll see what we’ve got.”

  “You can’t do that, sir! She gets scared of having valuables in the house!”

  “Do you have much theft hereabouts, chief constable?” said Vimes, emphasizing the last two words.

  Mr. Feeney opened the door of the lockup and picked up his mother, who had apparently been stunned by the possibility of owning silver plates, brushed her down and said over her shoulder, “No, sir, the reason being no one has anything to steal. My mum always told me money can’t buy you happiness, sir.”

  Yes, Vimes thought, so did my ma, but she was glad enough when I gave her my first wages, because it meant we could have a meal with meat in it, even if we didn’t know what kind of meat it was. That’s happiness, isn’t it? Blimey, the lies we tell ourselves … .

  When a blushing Mistress Upshot had gone to fetch the meal, Vimes said, “Between ourselves, chief constable, do you believe that I’m guilty of murder?”

  “No, sir!” said Feeney instantly.

  “You said that very quickly, young man. Are you going to say that it’s copper’s instinct? Because I get the impression you ain’t been a copper long and haven’t had much to do. I’m no expert, but I don’t reckon pigs try lying to you very much either.”

  Feeney took a deep breath. “Well, sir,” he said calmly, “my granddad was a wily old bird and he could read people like books. He used to walk me around the area introducing me to people, sir, and then as they strolled along he’d tell me their stories, like the one about the man who’d been caught in flagrante delicto with a common barnyard fowl … .”

  Vimes listened openmouthed as the pink, well-scrubbed face talked about the gentle, fragrant landscape as if it was populated by devils from the most insidious pit. He unrolled a crime sheet that badly needed the laundry: no major murders, just nastiness, silliness and all the crimes of human ignorance and stupidity. Of course, where there were people there was crime. It just seemed out of place in the slow world of big spaces and singing birds. And yet he’d smelled it as soon as he was here and now he was in the middle of it.

  “You get a tingle,” said Feeney. “That’s what my dad told me. He said watch, listen and keep your eye on every man. There never was a good policeman who didn’t have a slice of villain somewhere in him, and this will call to you. It will say ‘This man has something to hide,’ or ‘This man is far more frightened than he should be’ or ‘This man is acting too cocky by half because underneath he’s a bag of nerves.’ It will call to you.”

  Vimes opted for admiration rather than shock, but not too much admiration. “Well, Mr. Feeney, I reckon your grandfather and your dad got it right. So I’m sending the right signals, am I?”

  “No, sir, none at all, sir. My granddad and my dad could go like that sometimes. Totally blank. It makes people nervous.” Feeney cocked his head on one side and said, “Just a moment, sir, I think we have a little problem … .”

  The door to the lockup clanged open as Chief Constable Upshot skidded around to the rear of the squat little building. Something yelped and squealed and then Vimes, sitting peacefully inside, suddenly had goblins on his lap. In fact it was only one goblin, but one goblin is more than sufficient at close quarters. There was the smell, to begin with, and not to end with either, because it appeared to permeate the world. Yet it wasn’t the stink—although heavens knew that they stank with all the stinks an organic creature could generate—no, anyone who walked the streets of Ankh-Morpork was more or less immune to stinks, and indeed there was now a flourishing, if that was the word, hobby of stink-collecting,** and Dave, of Dave’s Pin and Stamp Emporium, was extending the sign over his shop again. You couldn’t bottle (or whatever it was the collectors did) the intrinsic smell of a goblin because it wasn’t so much a stink as a sensation, the sensation in fact that your dental enamel was being evaporated and any armor you might have was rusting at some speed. Vimes punched at the thing but it hung on with arms and legs together, screaming in what was theoretically a voice, that sounded like a bag of walnuts being jumped on. And yet it wasn’t attacking—unless you considered the biologic
al warfare. It clung with its legs and waved its arms, and Vimes just managed to stop Feeney braining it with his official truncheon, because, once you paid attention, the goblin was using words, and the words were: Ice! Ice! We want just ice! Demand! Demand just ice! Right? Just ice!

  Feeney, on the other hand, was shouting, “Stinky, you little devil, I told you what I’d do to you if ever I saw you stealing the pigswill again!” He looked at Vimes as if for support. “They can give you horrible diseases, sir!”

  “Will you stop dancing around with that damn weapon, boy!” Vimes looked down at the goblin now struggling in his grasp, and said, “As for you, you little bugger, stop your racket!”

  The little room went silent, apart from the dying strains of “They eat their own babies!” from Feeney and “Just ice!” from the goblin, simply and accurately named as “Stinky.”

  Not panicking now, the goblin pointed a claw at Vimes’s left wrist, looked him in the face, and said, “Just ice?” It was a plea. The claw tugged at his leg. “Just ice?” The creature hobbled to the door and looked up at the glowering chief constable and then turned to Vimes with an expression that bored into the man’s face and said very deliberately, “Just ice? Mr. Po-leess-maan?”

  Vimes pulled out his snuffbox. You could say this for the brown stuff: all that ceremony you went through before you took a pinch gave you rather more thinking time than lighting a cigar. It also got people’s attention. He said, “Well now, chief constable, here is somebody asking you for justice. What are you going to do about it?”

  Feeney looked uncertain, and took refuge in a certainty. “It’s a stinking goblin!”

  “Do you often see them around the lockup?” said Vimes, keeping his tone mild.

  “Only Stinky,” said Feeney, glowering at the goblin, who stuck out his worm-like tongue. “He’s always hanging around. The rest of them know what happens if they’re caught thieving around here!”

  Vimes glanced down at the goblin and recognized a badly set broken leg when he saw one. He turned the snuffbox over and over in his hands, and did not look at the young man. “But surely a policeman wonders what has happened for a wretched thing like this to walk right up to the law and risk being maimed … again?”

  It was a leap in the dark, but, hell, he had leapt so often that the dark was a trampoline.

  His arm itched. He tried to ignore it, but just for a moment there was a dripping cave in front of him, and no other thought except of terrible endless vengeance. He blinked and the goblin was tugging at his sleeve again and Feeney was getting angry.

  “I didn’t do that! I didn’t see it done!”

  “But you know it happens, yes?” And again Vimes remembered the darkness and the thirst for vengeance, in fact vengeance itself made sapient and hungry. And the little bugger had touched him on that arm. It all came back, and he wished that it hadn’t, because while all coppers must have a bit of villain in them, no copper should walk around with a piece of demon as a tattoo.

  Feeney had lost his anger now, because he was frightened. “Bishop Scour says they’re demonic and insolent creations made as a mockery of mankind,” he said.

  “I don’t know about any bishops,” said Vimes, “but something is going on here and I can feel the tingle, felt it on the day I came here, and it’s tingling on my land. Listen to me, chief constable. When you apprehend the suspect you should take the trouble to ask them if they did it, and if they say no you must ask them if they can prove their innocence. Got it? You’re supposed to ask. Understand? And my answers are, in order, hell no and hell yes!”

  The little clawed hand scratched at Vimes’s shirt again. “Just ice?”

  Vimes thought, Oh well, I thought I’d been gentle with the lad up until now. “Chief constable, something is wrong, and you know that something is wrong, and you are all alone, so you’d better enlist the help of anyone you know that can be trusted. Such as me, for example, in which case I’ll be the suspect who, having been bailed on my own recognizance of one penny,” and here Vimes handed a partly corroded small copper disc to the astonished Feeney, “has been requested to help you with your inquiries, such as they are, and that will be all fine and dandy and in accordance with the standard work on police procedure, which, my lad, was written by me, and you had better believe it. I’m not the law, no policeman is the law. A policeman is just a man, but when he wakes up in the morning it is the law that is his alarm clock. I’ve been nice and kind to you up until now, but did you really think I was going to be spending the night in a pig pen? Time to be a real copper, lad. Do the right thing and fudge the paperwork afterward, like I do.”

  Vimes looked down at the persistent little goblin. “Okay, Stinky, lead the way.”

  “But my old mum is just coming out with your dinner, commander!” Feeney’s voice was a wail, and Vimes hesitated. It didn’t do to upset an old mum.

  It was time to let the duke out. Vimes never normally bowed to anybody, but he bowed to Mistress Upshot, who almost dropped her tray in ecstatic confusion. “I am mortified, my dear Mistress Upshot, to have to ask you to keep your Man Dog Suck Po warm for us for a little while, because your son here, a credit to his uniform and to his parents, has asked me to assist him in an errand of considerable importance, which can only be entrusted to a young man with integrity, as your lad here.”

  As the woman very nearly melted in pride and happiness Vimes pulled the young man away.

  “Sir, the dish was Bang Suck Duck, we only have Man Dog Suck Po on Sundays. With mashed carrots.”

  Vimes shook Mrs. Upshot warmly by the hand and said, “I look forward to tasting it later, my dear Mistress Upshot, but if you’ll excuse me, your son is a stickler for his police work, as I’m sure you know.”

  Colonel Charles Augustus Makepeace had long ago, with the expertise of a lifelong strategist, decided to let Letitia have her way in all things. It saved so much trouble and left him able to potter around in his garden, take care of his dragons and to occasionally go trout fishing, a pastime that he loved. He rented half a mile of stream, but was sadly now finding it difficult to keep running fast enough. Nowadays he spent a lot of time in his library, working on the second volume of his memoirs, keeping from under his wife’s feet and not getting involved.

  Until this moment he had been quite happy that she had the role of chairman of the magistrates because it kept her away from home for hours at a time. He had never been very much of a one for thinking in terms of good or bad and guilty or not guilty. He had learned to think in terms of us and them and dead and not dead.

  And therefore he wasn’t exactly listening to the group sitting around the long table at the other end of the library, talking in worried voices, but nevertheless he couldn’t help overhearing.

  She had signed that damned document! He ought to have tried to talk her out of it, but he knew where that would have ended. Commander Vimes! Okay, by all accounts the man was the sort to rush in, and maybe he did have a scrap with what’shisname the blacksmith, who wasn’t too bad a cove in his way, bit of a hothead of course but he’d made a damn good dragon prod only the other day at quite a reasonable price. Vimes? Not a killer, surely. That’s one thing you learned in the military. You don’t last long if you’re a killer. Killing as duty called was another thing entirely. Letitia had listened to that unspeakable lawyer and they had all agreed that it be
signed simply because that wretched Rust fella wanted it.

  He opened this month’s edition of Fang and Fire. Occasionally somebody lowered their voice, which you couldn’t help thinking was damn insulting, given that they were sitting in a chap’s library and especially when the chap hadn’t been consulted. But he didn’t protest. He had long ago learned not to protest, and so he kept his eyes focused on the pullout feature on flame-retardant incubators, holding it in front of him as if to ward off evil.

  However, among the words he didn’t hear were, “Of course, he only married her for her money, you know.” That was his wife’s voice. Then, “I heard she was desperate to find a husband.” The curiously sharp tone of that voice identified its owner as Miss Pickings, who, the colonel couldn’t help noting, as he stared grimly at a full-page advertisement for asbestos kennels, had clearly been in no hurry to find a husband herself.

  The colonel was, by inclination, a live-and-let-live personality and, frankly, if a gel wanted to go around with another gel who wears a shirt and tie, trains horses and has a face like a bulldog licking vinegar off a thistle, then it was entirely her business. After all, he told himself, what about old “Beefy” Jackson, eh? Wore a dress every night in the mess and rather flowery aftershave for a chap, but when the call to arms came he could fight like a bloody demon. Funny old world.

  He tried to find his place on the page again, but was interrupted by the Very Reverend Mouser. He never could get on with padres, couldn’t see the point. “I find it very suspicious that the Ramkin family have turned up here after so many years, don’t you? I keep reading about Vimes in the newspaper, not the kind of person you can imagine as simply taking a holiday.”

  “According to Gravid, he is known as Vetinari’s terrier,” said Letitia.