Discworld 39 - Snuff

by Terry Pratchett

  “No, don’t speak, I haven’t finished. Nevertheless, I am informed that you did say to your companion that you were supposed to leave just blood, and not, as you put it, ‘guts all over the place,’ whereupon he forced you to put them back into the cadaver and hide it further down the hill in some gorse bushes. No, I said don’t talk! In your pocket you had a pork pie, which you’d brought from home, and three dollars in cash, which was your payment for this little errand.

  “After that you and Stratford walked back some distance to your horses, which you had temporarily stabled in the tumbledown old barn on the other side of the village. The horses were a chestnut mare and a gray gelding, both of them broken down by ill use. In fact, the gelding threw a shoe as you were leaving, and you had to stop your companion from killing it there and then. Oh, and the witness told me that you were naked to the waist when you left, since your shirt was soaked with blood and you left it in the barn after an argument with Stratford. I’ll recover it when we get back. Your friend told you to take your trousers off as well, but you declined; however, I noted splashes of blood on them earlier. I don’t want to go to the expense of sending a rider back to the city, where my Igor will ascertain whether the blood is human, goblin or turkey. I said don’t speak, didn’t I? I haven’t mentioned some of the other conversation between you and Mr. Stratford, because Feeney here is listening, and you should be relieved about that; gossip can be so cruel.

  “And now Mr. Flutter, I’m going to stop talking and upon doing so I would like the first words you utter to be—pay attention—‘I want to turn King’s evidence.’ Yes, I know we don’t have kings anymore, but nobody has amended the law. You are a little shit, but I’m reluctantly persuaded that you were dragged into something beyond your control and worse than you could have imagined. The good news is that Lord Vetinari will almost certainly take my advice and you will live. Remember: ‘I want to turn King’s evidence,’ that’s what I want to hear, Mr. Flutter, otherwise I’ll go for a walk and Mr. Willikins will comb his hair.”

  Flutter, who had listened to most of this with his eyes shut, blurted out the words so fast that Vimes had to ask him to repeat them more slowly. When he had finished he was allowed to go to the privy, with Willikins waiting outside, cleaning his nails with his knife, and Feeney was sent to feed the frantic turkeys.

  For his part, Vimes entered one of the stinking sheds and prodded around in the dirty straw for what he knew would be there. He was not disappointed. Sufficiently close to, the smell of tobacco was just discernible above the stifling stink of turkey. He rolled a barrel out, found Feeney and said, “I think this is full of tobacco and so I’m intending to take it as evidence. Your job right now is to scout out a jemmy for me and somebody known to you as a decent upstanding citizen, insofar as there might be one around this place.”

  “Well, there’s Dave who runs the Dog and Badger,” Feeney volunteered.

  “And he is an upstanding citizen?” said Vimes.

  “I have seen him sitting down,” said Feeney, “but he knows the score, if you get my meaning.”

  Vimes nodded and waited a few minutes before Feeney returned with a crowbar, a bandy-legged man and a small tail of people who, for the moment, until proved otherwise, had to be counted as “innocent bystanders.”

  They gathered around as Vimes prepared to open the barrel. He announced, “Pay attention, gentlemen. I believe this barrel contains contraband goods.” He rolled up his sleeves—“You see that I have nothing up my sleeves, but a crowbar in my hand”—and with some effort on his part the lid of the barrel came off, and the smell of tobacco was overpowering. And some of the bystanders decided it was now time to take the wonderful opportunity for a quick nonchalant walk.

  Vimes pulled out bale after bale of brown leaves bound with cotton. “Can’t take too much on the coach,” he said, “but if Mr. Dave here will, as an upstanding member of the community, sign to say that he saw me pull these from a sealed barrel, then you, Mr. Feeney, will take a brief statement and we can all go about our business.”

  Feeney beamed. “Oh, very well spotted, commander! I reckon you could hide anything in this stink, eh?” After a moment he looked at Vimes and said, “Commander?”

  Vimes appeared to look through him and said, “You’re going to go far, Chief Constable Upshot. Let’s empty the whole barrel, shall we?”

  He didn’t know where the thought had come from. Maybe from first principles. If you were going to smuggle, where would you stop? What would your market be? How would you get the best price per pound of product carried? He pulled and pulled at the bundles, and one, almost at the bottom of the barrel, was noticeably heavier than the others. Trying to keep his expression unchanged, he handed the heavy bundle to Feeney and said, “I’d be grateful if you and Mr. Dave would open this bundle and tell me what you see inside.” He sat down on the barrel and took a pinch of snuff while behind him he heard the rustling, and then Feeney said, “Well, commander, what this appears to be—”

  Vimes held up a hand. “Does it look like stone dust to you, Feeney?”

  “Yes, but—”

  Vimes held up his hand again. “Does it appear to have little red and blue flecks in it when you hold it to the light?”

  Sometimes the ancestral copper in Feeney picked up the vibration. “Yes, Commander Vimes!”

  “Then it’s a good job for you and your friend Dave”—Vimes glanced at the said Dave for the second time and decided to give him the benefit of the doubt—“that the two of you are not trolls, because if you were you’d be stone dead, as it were, right now. The stuff you are holding is Crystal Slam, I’d bet my badge on it. Troll kids use it as a drug, do you know that? They take a hit as small as your little pinky and think they can walk through walls, which they invariably do, too, and when they’ve done it a few times more they drop down dead. It’s illegal everywhere in the world, and very difficult to make because the smell when they’re boiling it up is unmistakable; you get a lot of sparks too. Selling it is a hanging offense in Ankh-Morpork, Uberwald and every troll city. Diamond King of Trolls gives a very handsome bounty to anyone who presents him with evidence of manufacture.”

  Vimes looked hopefully at the aforesaid Dave, just in case the man would take the bait. No, he thought, they wouldn’t do it round here. All this tobacco must come from somewhere hot, and that means a long way away.

  Gingerly, they broke open other barrels and found plenty of tobacco and several packs of very high-class cigars, one or two of which Vimes put in his breast pocket for detailed forensic examination later, and, somewhere at the bottom of every barrel, there were neat packets of Crystal Slam, Slunkie, Slab, Slice and Slap, all of them very nasty—although Slap was generally considered to be a recreational drug, at least if your idea of recreation was waking up in the gutter not knowing whose head you had on.

  As many samples as possible were piled into the coach and Vimes only stopped when it started to creak. The other barrels were piled up and, at Vimes’s instigation, a very proud Chief Constable Upshot set fire to them. When the controlled drugs caught alight there was a brief display of pyrotechnics and Vimes thought to himself that this was only the start of the fireworks.

  As people came running out to see what was happening, Vimes reassured them of his bonafides and explained that Mr. Flutter would be away for a while, and could somebody please look after the birds. The responses he got made it clear that the neighborhood considered a world without Mr. Flutter and his stinking turkeys would be a much better world, so the last thing that Vimes did was to open the sheds and let the wretched creatures take their chances.

  As a last little bright idea, Vimes beckoned to the nervous Dave and said, “Diamond King of Trolls will be very appreciative of this day’s work. Of course, as serving officers we wouldn’t be able to take any remuneration … ”

  “We wouldn’t?” said Feeney hopelessly.r />
  Vimes ignored this and continued, “I will, however, see to it that your help today is suitably rewarded.” The publican’s face lit up. Something about the words diamond and rewarded in the same sentence does that to a face.

  They traveled with the creaking coach doors locked, but with a window slightly open because Mr. Flutter was currently not somebody you would wish to be in any confined space with: he appeared to be sweating turkeys.

  King’s evidence! That was a result! Flutter hadn’t thought about arguing, and Vimes had seen his expression as the Summoning Dark’s statement was presented to him. Vimes had noticed every wince and shiver of recollection that, taken together, added up to rights well banged. King’s evidence! Any man would opt for that to save his skin, or maybe for a better class of cell. You took King’s evidence to save your miserable hide and it might indeed do so, but at a price, and that price was death by hanging if you lied. It was one of the absolutes: lying when you had turned King’s evidence was the lie of lies. You had lied to the judge, you had lied to the King, you had lied to society, you had lied to the world, and thus the cheerful Mr. Trooper would welcome you to the gallows, and shake your hand to show you there were no hard feelings, and shortly afterward would pull the lever that would drop you from the world you had betrayed, and stop …halfway down.

  And then, of course, there were the troll drugs. The evidence of their existence worried Flutter so much that he invented new gods to swear to that he knew nothing about them. Vimes believed him. As far as Flutter was concerned, the barrels contained nothing more than tobacco. Good old tobacco, nothing harmful about tobacco, and smuggling it was, well, it really was like a game, everybody knew that. Nothing wrong with outsmarting the revenue, that was what the revenue was for! Vimes thought, isn’t that how I’ve always said it worked? Little crimes breeding big crimes. You smile at little crimes and then big crimes blow your head off.

  Flutter was sitting miserably on the opposite seat, possibly fearing being kicked to death by trolls, but then, as Vimes had noted, Flutter probably feared everybody. And so Vimes found it in his heart to offer him not so much a crumb as a bacon sandwich of good news. “You were in the company of a violent man, Ted. You thought you were just going to make life difficult for a copper, and suddenly you were an accessory of the first part to murder and, even if unwittingly, tangled up in extremely serious troll narcotics, the worst there is. But you’ve got into bad company, Ted, and I will say so in court.”

  Hope appeared in Flutter’s red-rimmed eyes, and he said, “That’s very kind of you, sir.” That was it. No swagger, no whining, just gratitude for mercies received and fervently hoped for.

  Vimes leaned forward and offered the bewildered man his snuffbox. Flutter took a large pinch and sniffed it up so hard that the inevitable sneeze tried to escape via his ears. Ignoring this, and the faint haze of brown in the air, Vimes leaned back and said cheerfully, “I’ll have a word with the screws in the Tanty, they always owe me anyway … ” Vimes looked at the hopeful face and thought, Blast it. I know they’re pretty crowded right now. A squirt like him would be on a hiding to nothing, whatever I do. Oh well. He carried on, “No, Mr. Flutter, tell you what I’ll do, at least we’ll put you in a cell in Pseudopolis Yard. How about that? It can be lonely in a cell all by yourself, but some might consider that a blessing, especially after fifteen minutes in some parts of the Tanty and, besides, my lads are fairly chatty when there’s not much happening. We also have a better class of rat, the straw is fresh and we don’t gob in your stirabout, and if you’re helpful and don’t keep people awake at night, then you’ll be as right as rain.”

  “You won’t have any trouble from me, commander!” The words came tumbling, frantic to be heard and terrified that they might not.

  “Glad to hear it, Ted,” said Vimes jovially. “I like a man who makes the right choices! Incidentally, Ted, who suggested you play the little trick on the hill?”

  “Honestly, sir, it was Stratford, sir. He said it would be a little joke. And I know what you’re going to ask me next, sir, and I asked him who was behind all this, because it worried me a bit, seeing as I mostly just breed turkeys and roll barrels around, you understand?” Flutter assumed the expression of a simple, honest working man. “He said that if he told me he’d have to kill me, and I said to him, I said, ‘Thank you all the same, Mr. Stratford, but I won’t put you to the trouble’ and kept my mouth shut, ’cos he had a funny look in his eye.” Flutter seemed to think for a moment and added, “He always has a funny look in his eye.”

  Vimes tried to pretend that this was of little interest. Like a man with a butterfly net, a killing jar and a passion to pin to a cork board the last of the very rare Lancre blue butterflies, that has just taken its repose on a thistle nearby, he tried to do nothing to make his quarry take flight.

  In an offhand way he said, “But you do know, don’t you, Ted? I mean, you’re smart, Ted, underneath it all. A lot of people would say that two planks are smarter than you, but frankly you can’t make a success of things in this old world without keeping your eyes open and your ears too, right?”

  But of course, who would tell anything important to a twerp like Flutter? He wasn’t even a henchman—you needed a certain amount of tactical thinking before you could properly hench—but henchmen hang about, and when they’re with someone as thick as Flutter they don’t always guard their tongues.

  Aloud he said, “It’s a shame really, Ted, you being the only one to get banged up for all this, seeing that all you really did was help out a mate for a couple of dollars and a pint, don’t you think? Terrible, ain’t it, that decent folk have to take the rap, yes? Especially when it’s a big rap.” He stopped talking and watched Flutter’s face.

  “Weeeell,” said Flutter, “one day when he was a bit excited he did say to me that Lord Rust depended on him, took him into his confidence and everything and made sure his pockets always jingled, but I reckoned that was nothing but boasting.”

  Vimes was impressed at his own patience and said, “Look, Ted, did you ever hear either of them talk about the goblin girl?”

  A horrible grin suffused the man’s face. “I could if you want me to, commander!”

  Vimes stared at Flutter for a moment and said, “Ted, I want to know things that you have either seen or heard. Not things you may have imagined and, and this is the important bit, Ted, not things made up to please me, right? Otherwise I won’t any longer be your friend … ” Vimes stopped to think for a moment. “Did you ever hear Lord Rust or Stratford say anything about the blacksmith?”

  It was an education watching the prisoner rack his brains. He looked like a big dog chewing a toffee. Apparently he found something because his next words were, “The blacksmith? I didn’t know that it was about the blacksmith. Yeah, when we were stacking in the yard young Lord Rust came up to Stratford and said something like, ‘Any news about our friend?’ and, well, Stratford said, ‘Don’t you worry sir, he’s going to see the Queen,’ and they both laughed, sir.” In the silence he said, “Are you all right, sir?”

  Vimes ignored this and said, “Have you any idea what he meant?”

  “Nosir,” said Flutter.

  “Is there anything called the Queen around here? Maybe a public house, perhaps? Maybe a riverboat?” Vimes thought, Yes, they all have strange names, there has to be a Queen among them.

  Once again the dog chewed the toffee. “Sorry, commander, I don’t really know anything about that. No boat on the river called the Queen.”

  Vimes left it at that. It was a result. Not the best result. Nothing that would satisfy Vetinari, but a hint at least of a minor conspiracy to send Jethro to somewhere he did not want to be. Vimes at least had to be satisfied.

  Vimes realized that Flutter was holding up his hand cautiously, like a child half-fearful of a reprimand from the teacher.

  “Yes, Ted?” he said wear
ily.

  The man lowered his hand. “Will I be able to find a god, sir?”

  “What? Find what god?”

  Flutter looked embarrassed but recovered manfully. “Well, sir, I’m hearing about people who go into prison and find a god, sir, and if you find a god then you get better treatment and maybe you get let out sooner, on account of praying, and I was wondering if I was in the Watch House that there might be more or less chance of god availability, if you get my drift. I don’t want to be a trouble, of course.”

  “Well, Ted, if there was any justice in the universe I think there would be quite a few gods in the Tanty, but if I were you and faced a choice between the possibility of heavenly intervention, and a definite three meals a day that haven’t been spat on and no big blokes snoring in your ear all night and the certain knowledge that if you have to go down on your knees then it will only be to pray, then I would say heaven can wait.”

  The sun was already well up now and Willikins was keeping them moving at a good pace. Vimes took notice of that fact. The Street was talking to him even if it was in fact nothing more than a wide lane. He nudged Feeney awake. “Soon be home now, lad, and I think Mr. Flutter can be housed in your lovely lockup, don’t you?”

  Flutter looked puzzled, and Vimes said, “Good grief, man. Surely you didn’t think I could rush you all the way to Ankh-Morpork in one go? As it is I’ll have to send someone to get someone else to come all the way down here with the hurry-up wagon! Don’t worry, the lockup is strong and cozy and made of stone, plus—and I’m led to believe that this is indeed a big plus, this—Mrs. Upshot will probably make you a delicious Bang Suck Muck Muck Dog, with carrots and garden peas. Speciality de Maisonette.”

  Rank has its privileges, Vimes thought, when he alighted near the old lockup a little later. “Chief Constable Upshot, please settle our prisoner down, see that he gets fed and watered and so on and so forth, okay, and, obviously, do the paperwork.”