Snuff

by Terry Pratchett

  “Anything between a clump of trees and a small wood. Technically, sir, the one at the top of Hangman’s Hill is a beech hanger. That just means, well, a small beech wood on top of a hill. You remember Mad Jack Ramkin? The bloke that got it made thirty feet higher at great expense? He had the beech trees planted on the top.”

  Vimes liked the crunching of the gravel; it would mask the sound of their conversation. “I talked to the blacksmith with, I would swear, no one else in earshot. But this is the country, yes, Willikins?”

  “There was a man setting rabbit snares in the hedge behind you,” said Willikins. “Perfectly normal activity, although to my mind he took too long over it.”

  They crunched onward for a while, and Vimes said, “Tell me, Willikins. If a man had arranged to meet another man at midnight in a place with a name like Dead Man’s Copse, on Hangman’s Hill, what would you consider to be his most sensible course of action, given that his wife had forbidden him to bring weapons to his country house?”

  Willikins nodded. “Why, sir, given your maxim that everything is a weapon if you choose to think of it as such, I would advise said man to see whether he has a compatriot what has, for example, acquired the keys to a cabinet that contains a number of superbly made carving knives, ideal for close fighting; and I personally would include a side order of cheesewire, sir, in conformance with my belief that the only important thing in a fight to the death is that the death should not be yours.”

  “Can’t carry cheesewire, man! Not the Commander of the Watch!”

  “Quite so, commander, and may I therefore advise your brass knuckles—the gentleman’s alternative? I know you never travel without them, sir. There’s some vicious people around and I know you have to be among them.”

  “Look, Willikins, I don’t like to involve you in all this. It’s only a hunch, after all.”

  Willikins waved this away. “You wouldn’t keep me out of it for a big clock, sir, because all this is tickling my fancy as well. I shall lay out a selection of cutting edges for you in your dressing room, sir, and I myself will go up to the copse half an hour before you’re due to be there, with my trusty bow and an assortment of favorite playthings. It’s nearly a full moon, clear skies, there’ll be shadows everywhere, and I’ll be standing in the darkest one of them.”

  Vimes looked at him for a moment and said, “Could I please amend that suggestion? Could you not be there in the second darkest shadow one hour before midnight, to see who steps into the darkest shadow?”

  “Ah yes, that’s why you command the watch, sir,” said Willikins, and to Vimes’s shock there was a hint of a tear in the man’s voice. “You’re listening to the street, aren’t you, sir, yes?”

  Vimes shrugged. “No streets here, Willikins!”

  Willikins shook his head. “Once a street boy always a street boy, sir. It comes with us, in the pinch. Mothers go, fathers go—if we ever knew who they were—but the Street, well, the Street looks after us. In the pinch it keeps us alive.”

  Willikins darted ahead of Vimes and rang the doorbell, so that the footman had the door open by the time Vimes came up the steps. “You’ve got just enough time to listen to Young Sam read to you, sir,” Willikins added, making his way up the stairs. “Wonderful thing, reading, I wish I’d learned it when I was a kid. Her ladyship will be in her dressing room and guests will be arriving in about half an hour. Must go, sir. I’ve got to teach that fat toad of a butler his manners, sir.”

  Vimes winced. “You’re not allowed to strangle butlers, Willikins. I’m sure I read it in a book of etiquette.”

  Willikins gave him a look of mock offense. “No garrotting will be involved, sir,” Willikins went on, opening the door to Vimes’s dressing room, “but he is a snob of the first water. Never did meet a butler who wasn’t. I just have to give him an orientation lesson.”

  “Well, he is the butler, and this is his house,” said Vimes.

  “No, sir, it’s your house, and since I am your personal manservant I, by the irrevocable laws of the servants’ hall, outrank every one of the lazy buggers! I’ll show them how we do things in the real world, sir, don’t you worry—”

  He was interrupted by a heavy knock at the door, followed by a determined rattling of the doorknob. Willikins opened the door and Young Sam stomped in and announced, “Reading!”

  Vimes picked up his son and sat him on a chair. “How was your afternoon, my lad?”

  “Do you know,” said Young Sam, as if imparting the results of strict research, “cows do really big floppy poos, but sheep do small poos, like chocolates.”

  Vimes tried not to look at Willikins, who was shaking with suppressed laughter. He managed to keep his own expression solemn and said, “Well, of course, sheep are smaller.”

  Young Sam considered this. “Cow poos go flop,” he said. “It never said that in Where’s My Cow?” Young Sam’s voice betrayed a certain annoyance that this important information had been withheld. “Miss Felicity Beedle wouldn’t have left it out.”

  Vimes sighed. “I just bet she wouldn’t.”

  Willikins opened the door. “I’ll leave you gentlemen to it, then, and see you later, sir.”

  “Willikins?” said Vimes, just as the man had his hand on the doorknob. “You appear to think that my brass knuckles are inferior to yours. Is that so?”

  Willikins smiled. “You’ve never really agreed with the idea of the spiked ones, have you, sir?” He carefully shut the door behind him.

  Young Sam was already reading by himself these days, which was a great relief. Fortunately the works of Miss Felicity Beedle did not consist solely of exciting references to poo, in all its manifestations, but her output of small volumes for young children was both regular and highly popular, at least among the children. This was because she had researched her audience with care, and Young Sam had laughed his way through The Wee Wee Men, The War with the Snot Goblins, and Geoffrey and the Land of Poo. For boys of a certain age, they hit the squashy spot. At the moment he was giggling and choking his way through The Boy Who Didn’t Know How to Pick His Own Scabs, an absolute hoot for a boy just turned six. Sybil pointed out that the books were building Young Sam’s vocabulary, and not just about lavatorial matters, and it was indeed true that he was beginning, with encouragement, to read books in which nobody had a bowel movement at all. Which, when you came to think about it, was a mystery all by itself.

  Vimes carried his son to bed after ten minutes of enjoyable listening, and had managed to shave and get into the feared evening clothes a few moments before his wife knocked on the door. Separate dressing rooms and bathrooms, Vimes thought…if you had the money, there was no better way to keep a happy marriage happy. And in order to keep a happy marriage happy he allowed Sybil to bustle in, wearing, in fact, a bustle,* to adjust his shirt, tweak his collar and make him fit for company.

  And then she said, “I understand you gave the blacksmith a short lesson in unarmed combat, my dear…” The pause hung in the air like a silken noose.

  Vimes managed, “There’s something wrong here, I know it.”

  “I think so, too,” said Sybil.

  “You do?”

  “Yes, Sam, but this is not the time. We have guests arriving at any minute. If you could refrain from throwing any of them over your shoulder in between courses I would be grateful.” This was a terrific scolding by Sybil’s normally placid standards. Vimes did what any prudent husband would do, which was dynamically nothing. Suddenly all downstairs was full of voices and the noise of carriages crunching over the gravel. Sybil trimmed her sails and headed down to be the gracious hostess.

  Despite what his wife liked to imply, Vimes was rather good at dinners, having sat through innumerable civic affairs in Ankh-Morpork. The trick was to let the other diners do the talking while agreeing with them occasionally, giving himself time to think about other things.

  Sybil had made certain that this evening’s dinner was a light occasion. The guests were mostly people of a certai
n class who lived in the country but were not, as it were, of it. Retired warriors; a priest of Om; Miss Pickings, a spinster, together with her companion, a strict-looking lady with short hair and a man’s shirt and pocket watch; and, yes, Miss Felicity Beedle. Vimes thought he had put his foot in it when he said, “Oh yes, the poo lady,” but she burst out laughing and shook his hand, saying, “Don’t worry, your grace, I wash mine thoroughly after writing!” And it was a big laugh. She was a small woman with the strange aspect that you see in some people that causes them to appear to be subtly vibrating even when standing perfectly still. You felt that if some interior restraint suddenly broke, the pent-up energy released would catapult her through the nearest window.

  Miss Beedle prodded him in the stomach. “And you are the famous Commander Vimes. Come to arrest us all, have you?” Of course, you got this all the time if you didn’t stop Sybil accepting the invitation to yet another posh society do. But while Miss Beedle laughed, silence fell on the other guests like a cast-iron safe. They were scowling at Miss Beedle, and Miss Beedle was staring intently at Vimes, and Vimes knew that expression. It was the expression of somebody with a story to tell. Certainly this was no time to broach the subject, and so Vimes filed it under “interesting.”

  Whatever Vimes’s misgivings, Ramkin Hall did a damn good dinner and—and this was the important thing—the dictates of popular social intercourse decreed that Sybil had to allow a menu full of things that would not be permitted at home if Vimes had asked for them. It’s one thing to act as arbiter of your own husband’s tastes, but it is frowned on to do the same to your guests.

  Across the table from him a retired military man was being assured by his wife that he did not, contrary to what he himself believed, like potted shrimps. In vain the man protested weakly that he thought he did like potted shrimps, to get the gentle response, “You may like potted shrimps, Charles, but they do not like you.”

  Vimes felt for the man, who seemed puzzled at having developed enemies among the lower crustacea. “Well, er, does lobster like me, dear?” he said, in a voice that did not express much hope.

  “No, dear, it does not get on with you at all. Remember what happened at the Parsleys’ whist evening.”

  The man looked at the groaning sideboard and tried: “Do you think the scallops could get on with me for five minutes or so?”

  “Good heavens no, Charles.”

  He cast a glance at the sideboard again. “I expect the green salad is my bosom friend, though, isn’t it?”

  “Absolutely, dear!”

  “Yes, I thought so.”

  The man looked across at Vimes and gave him a hopeless grin followed by, “I am given to believe that you are a policeman, your grace. That right?”

  Vimes took proper stock of him for the first time: a whiskery old warrior, now out to grass—and that was probably all his wife was going to let him eat without an argument. He had burn scars on his face and hands and the accent of Pseudopolis. Easy. “You were with the Light Dragons, weren’t you, sir?”

  The old man looked pleased. “Well done, that man! Not many people remember us. Alas, I’m the only one left. Colonel Charles Augustus Makepeace—strange name for a military man, or perhaps not, I don’t know.” He sniffed. “We’re just a scorched page in the history of warfare. I dare say you haven’t read my memoirs, Twenty-four Years Without Eyebrows? No? Well, you are not alone in that, I have to say. Met your missus in those days. She told us it would be totally impossible to breed dragons stable enough for use in warfare. She was right, and no mistake. Of course, we went on trying, because that’s the military way!”

  “You mean, pile dreadful failure on top of failure?” said Vimes.

  The colonel laughed. “Well, it works sometimes! I still keep a few dragons, though. Wouldn’t be without ’em. A day without a singe is a day without sunshine. They’re a great saving in matches, and, of course, they keep undesirables away, too.”

  Vimes reacted like an angler who, after some time dozing by the water’s edge, felt that the fish were rising.

  “Oh, you don’t get many of them around here, surely?”

  “You think so? You don’t know the half of it, young man. I can tell you a few stories—” He stopped talking abruptly, and Vimes’s experience of husbandry told him that the man had just been kicked under the table by his wife, who did not look happy and, to judge by the lines on her face, probably never had. She leaned past her husband, who was now accepting another brandy from the waiter, and said, icily, “As a policeman, your grace, does your jurisdiction extend to the Shires?”

  Another ring in the water, thought the angler inside Vimes’s head. He said, “No, madam, my beat is Ankh-Morpork and some of the surrounding area. Traditionally, however, the policeman drags his jurisdiction with him if he is in hot pursuit in connection with crime committed within his domain. But, of course, Ankh-Morpork is a long way from here, and I doubt if I’d be able to run that far.” This got a laugh from the table in general and a thin-lipped smile from Mrs. Colonel.

  Play the fish, play the fish…“Nevertheless,” Vimes continued, “if I was to witness an arrestable offense here and now, I’d have the authority to make an arrest. Like a citizen’s arrest, but somewhat more professional, and after that I’d be required to turn the suspect over to the local force or other suitable authority, as I deemed fit.”

  The clergyman, whom Vimes had noticed out of the corner of his eye, was taking an interest in this conversation and leaned forward to say, “As you deem fit, your grace?”

  “My grace would not come into it, sir. As a sworn member of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch it would be my bounden duty to ensure the safety of my suspect. Ideally I’d look for a lockup. We don’t have them in the city anymore, but I understand most rural areas still do, even if they only hold drunks and escaped pigs.”

  There was laughter, and Miss Beedle said, “We do have a village constable, your grace, and he keeps pigs in the lockup down by the old bridge!”

  She looked brightly at Vimes, whose expression was stony. He said, “Does he ever put people in there? Does he have a warrant card? Does he have a badge?”

  “Well, he puts the occasional drunk in there to sober up, and he says the pigs don’t seem to mind, but I have no idea what a warrant card is.”

  There was more laughter at this but it faded quickly, sucked into nowhere by Vimes’s implacable silence.

  Then he said, “I would not consider him to be a policeman, and until I found that he was working within a framework of proper law enforcement I would regard him not as a policeman by my standards but as a slightly bossy street cleaner. Of some use, but not a policeman.”

  “By your standards, your grace?” said the clergyman.

  “Yes, sir, by my standards. My decision. My responsibility. My experience. My arse if things go wrong.”

  “But, your grace, as you say, you are outside your jurisdiction here,” said Mrs. Colonel gently.

  Vimes could sense her husband’s nervousness, and it was certainly not to do with the food. The man was wishing heartily that he wasn’t there. It was funny how people always wanted to talk to policemen about crime, and never realize what strange little signals their anxieties betrayed.

  He turned to the man’s wife, smiled and said, “But as I’ve said, madam, if a copper comes across a flagrant crime his jurisdiction reaches out to him like an old friend. And do you mind if we change the subject? No offense meant to any of you ladies and gentlemen, but over the years I’ve noticed that bankers and military men and merchants all get a chance to eat their dinners at their leisure at affairs like this, while the poor old copper has to talk about police work, which is most of the time rather dull.” He smiled again to keep everything friendly, and went on, “Exceedingly dull around here, I would imagine. From my point of view, this place is as quiet as the…grave.” Score: one wince from the dear old colonel, and the priest looking down at his plate, although the latter shouldn’t be taken too seriousl
y, he thought, because you seldom saw a clergyman who couldn’t strike sparks with his knife and fork.

  Sybil, using her hostess voice, shattered the silence like an icebreaker. “I think it’s time for the main course,” she said, “which will be superb mutton avec no talking about police work at all. Honestly, if you get Sam going he’ll quote the laws and ordinances of Ankh-Morpork and force standing orders until you throw a cushion at him!”

  Well done, Vimes thought, at least I can now eat my dinner in peace. He relaxed as the conversation around him became less fraught and once again replete with the everyday gossip and grumblings about other people living in the area, the difficulties with servants, the prospects for the harvest and, oh yes, the trouble with goblins.

  Vimes paid attention then. Goblins. The City Watch appeared to contain at least one member of every known bipedal sapient species plus one Nobby Nobbs. It had become a tradition: if you could make it as a copper, then you could make it as a species. But nobody had ever once suggested that Vimes should employ a goblin, the simple reason being that they were universally known to be stinking, cannibalistic, vicious, untrustworthy bastards.

  Of course, everybody knew that dwarfs were a chiselling bunch who would swindle you if they could, and that trolls were little more than thugs, and the city’s one resident medusa would never look you in the face, and the vampires couldn’t be trusted, however much they smiled, and werewolves were only vampires who couldn’t fly, when you got right down to it, and the man next door was a real bastard who threw his rubbish over your wall and his wife was no better than she should be. But then again it took all sorts to make a world. It was not as if you were prejudiced because, after all, there had been an orc working at the university, but he liked his football, didn’t he just, and you could forgive anyone who could score from the center spot and, well, you took as you found…But not bloody goblins, thank you very much. People hounded them out if they came into the city and they tended to end up downriver, working for the likes of Harry King in the bone-grinding, leather-tanning and scrap-metal industries. A fair walk outside the city gates and so outside the law.