Snuff

by Terry Pratchett

  They walked with care across the stinking yard and Vimes took up station around the back, where an interesting thought occurred to him and he made a mental note. He then leaned against the dirty wall of the house a little bit away from the back door, took a pinch of snuff to clear the air of turkey and gave one faint whistle.

  “Open up in the name of the law! You are surrounded! You have one minute to open the door! I mean it! Open the door! This is the police!”

  Leaning cosily against the wall, Vimes grudgingly rated that as pretty good for a beginner, with one point taken off for adding “I mean it,” then, as a man flew out of the back door, he stuck out his boot.

  “Good morning, sir. My name is Commander Vimes! I hope you’re in a position to remember yours!”

  In the sheds the turkeys were going insane, causing a slight rise in the smell. The man struggled to his feet, looking around desperately.

  “Oh, yes, you could run, yes, you could do that,” said Vimes in a conversational tone of voice, “but it might be thought by others that this might indicate that you knew you had some reason to run. Now, personally, I would agree that anyone stopped by a copper should run like buggery, innocent or not, on first principles. Besides, we get so fat these days that we need the exercise. But do run if you want to, Mr. Flutter, because I can run too, and very fast.”

  By now Flutter was smiling the smile of a man who thinks that this copper is not very smart.

  “I bet you don’t have a magistrate’s warrant, do ya’?”

  “Well now, Mr. Flutter, why might you think that, eh? Perhaps you think the magistrates might not issue a warrant to arrest you, yes? By the way, thank you for showing me where the tobacco barrels are stored. Your cooperation will be taken into consideration.”

  Some days are bad days, like when you stare right down into the mangled corpse of a young woman, and then you get good days, when the suspect’s darting eyes flashing across the yard show you exactly where the loot is hidden.

  “I shall, of course, mention your cooperation to the authorities and, of course, in the local pub as well, ah, yes.”

  And now Mr. Flutter was relishing the thought of being seen as some kind of grass, so stupidly he went for, “I never told you anything about any tobacco, and you know it, copper!”

  At this point Feeney stepped around the corner with his fearsome club raised and a look of almost comical aggression on his face. “You want me to give him the old one-two, commander, just say the word, guv!”

  Vimes rolled his eyes in mock despair. “No need for that, Feeney, no need for that, just when Mr. Flutter here is so anxious to talk to us, understand?”

  Flutter decided that the way forward was an appeal to Feeney. “Look, Feeney, you know me—”

  He got that far and no further because Feeney said, “It’s Constable Upshot to you, Flutter. My dad had you up before the beaks two dozen times, you know. He used to call you the bluebottle on account of whenever there was a load of shit going down he’d find you flapping about in it. And he told me to watch you, which is what I am doing right now, in fact.” He glanced at Vimes, who gave him an encouraging nod and then said, “You see my problem, Mr. Flutter, we’re not here to talk about contraband tobacco, okay? Now, I never saw myself as a revenuer, not a popular profession. I’m a copper pure and simple, right, and in my hand I have this man what is only doing a favor to his employer by storing a few barrels of tobacco in his shed, but on the other hand, well, if I found a murderer in the other hand, why, gods bless you, I might totally forget all about the first hand…Don’t ask me to draw you a picture, Flutter, because my hands are full.”

  Flutter looked aghast. “This is about that goblin, right? Look, it wasn’t me! Okay, I’m a bit of a naughty boy, I put my hand up to that, but I ain’t like him! I’m a scallywag, not a damn murderer!”

  Vimes looked at Feeney. Some people could be said to be as pleased as punch. Feeney could be said to look as pleased as Punch, Judy, the dog Toby, the crocodile and, above all, the policeman, all rolled in together. Vimes raised his eyebrows in new interrogation, and Feeney said, “I believe him, chief. He hasn’t got it in him, I swear. The best he could manage would be knocking over an old lady for her purse, and even then she’d probably have to be blind too.”

  “There, you see!” said Flutter triumphantly. “I’m not really a bad person!”

  “No,” said Vimes, “you’re a veritable choirboy, Mr. Flutter, I can see that, and I’m rather religious too, and I like chapter and verse, but are you willing to swear that the individual known as Stratford knifed a goblin girl to death on Hangman’s Hill in the grounds of Ramkin Hall, three nights ago?”

  Flutter raised a finger. “Can I say that I told him to stop, and he laughed, and I didn’t know it was a girl neither—I mean, how can you tell?”

  Vimes’s face was deadpan. “Tell me, Ted, what would you have done if you had known? I’m intrigued.”

  Flutter looked down at his feet. “Well, I, well, well, I mean…not a girl, I mean…well, not a girl…I mean, that’s not right, know what I mean?”

  And you can find someone like this dangerous clown in nearly every neighborhood, Vimes thought. “Clearly chivalry is not dead, Mr. Flutter. Okay, Feeney, let’s carry on. Mr. Flutter, why were you on Hangman’s Hill on the aforesaid night?”

  “We were just having a walk,” said Flutter.

  Vimes’s face was again deadpan, so deadpan as to be mortified. “Of course you were, Mr. Flutter. Silly of me to ask the question, really. Constable Upshot, I can see Willikins over there having a smoke.” He pushed at the open door and dragged Flutter inside. “Does this building have a cellar?”

  Flutter was one step away from a toilet break, but nevertheless, being the kind of fool to dig himself in deeper, managed to sneer, “There might be. So what?”

  “Mr. Flutter, I have already told you that I’m a religious man, and since you would test the patience of a saint I need to spend a moment in quiet contemplation, understand? I’m sure you know that there’s always an easy way, and then again, there’s always the hard way. Currently, this is the easy way, but the hard way is also quite easy, in a manner of speaking. Before talking to you again I want to be alone with my thoughts. And it occurs to me, Mr. Flutter, that you might have some thoughts about, as it were, legging it, and so my colleague, Chief Constable Upshot, will guard the door and I shall send in my batman, Mr. Willikins, to keep you company.”

  Before Vimes was even able to tap on the window, the door opened and Willikins, immaculate as ever, stepped into the grubby room, all smart and crisp with shiny shoes and a hint of pomade on his hair. The three men then watched Vimes heave at a likely ring on the floor, which pulled back to reveal the trap door to a dark cellar and a ladder going down.

  Vimes said, “Constable Upshot, I need a little time to think in the darkness. I won’t be long.” He went down the ladder and pulled the trap door closed behind him.

  The darkness said, “Ah, commander, at long last. I suspect that you’re here to take a witness statement.”

  This is wrong, Vimes told himself. How can you take testimony from a demon, especially when it’s one of no fixed abode? But on the other hand, who needs a witness statement if you’ve got a confession?

  Up above, Ted Flutter’s eyes rolled this way and that as he analyzed the situation. Let’s see: we have one young twit who is playing at being a copper, and a snooty butler type, all pink and shiny. I reckon Mrs. Flutter’s little boy is out of here. At this point, at this very point, Willikins, without looking at Flutter, reached into his jacket and there was a slap as he laid down on the table in front of him a steel comb. It gleamed. And it gleamed even stronger in Flutter’s imagination. He took one look at Willikins’ expression, and Mrs. Flutter’s little boy decided he would sit very still until that nice Commander Vimes came back. Out of another pocket Willikins produced the sharpest-looking knife Flutter had ever seen and, without paying any attention whatsoever to Flutter, beg
an to clean his fingernails.

  In fact it was only a matter of seconds before the trap door was heaved back, and Vimes emerged, then nodded to Willikins, who secured the comb and walked out of the room without a word. Vimes regained the chair. “Mr. Flutter, I have a witness statement that puts you on Hangman’s Hill on the night in question with another man, said man being known as Stratford. The witness tells me that you said to him that you could have got hold of some turkey blood, but he said that there were rabbits all over the place and he never missed with his slingshot. At this point the witness says a young goblin girl came out of the bushes and your companion struck at her as she was begging for her life—and furiously, to the extent that you yourself told him, in your words, to leave off, upon which he turned on you, still holding his knife, described to me as a machete, so swiftly that you urinated into your boots.

  “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 bona fides 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.

  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.