Sergeant Detritus’s honest brow furrowed with the effort of thought. ‘Could be a … could be dere’s a footprint outside der window,’ he said. ‘Dat’s always a Clue wort’ lookin’ for.’
Vimes sighed. Detritus, despite a room-temperature IQ, made a good copper and a damn good sergeant. He had that special type of stupidity that was hard to fool. But the only thing more difficult than getting him to grasp an idea was getting him to let go of it.[8]
‘Detritus,’ he said, as kindly as possible. ‘There’s a thirty-foot drop into the river outside the window. There won’t be’ He paused. This was the river Ankh, after all. ‘Any footprints’d be bound to have oozed back by now,’ he corrected himself. ‘Almost certainly.’
He looked outside, though, just in case. The river gurgled and sucked below him. There were no footprints, even on its famously crusted surface. But there was another smear of dirt on the window-sill.
Vimes scratched some up, and sniffed at it.
‘Looks like some more white clay,’ he said.
He couldn’t think of any white clay around the city. Once you got outside the walls it was thick black loam all the way to the Ramtops. A man walking across it would be two inches taller by the time he got to the other side of a field.
‘White clay,’ he said. ‘Where the hell is white-clay country round here?’
‘It a mystery,’ said Detritus.
Vimes grinned mirthlessly. It was a mystery. And he didn’t like mysteries. Mysteries had a way of getting bigger if you didn’t solve them quickly. Mysteries pupped.
Mere murders happened all the time. And usually even Detritus could solve them. When a distraught woman was standing over a fallen husband holding a right-angled poker and crying ‘He never should’ve said that about our Neville!’ there was only a limited amount you could do to spin out the case beyond the next coffee break. And when various men or parts thereof were hanging from or nailed to various fixtures in the Mended Drum on a Saturday night, and the other clientele were all looking innocent, you didn’t need even a Detritic intelligence to work out what had been happening.
He looked down at the late Father Tubelcek. It was amazing he’d bled so much, with his pipe-cleaner arms and toast-rack chest. He certainly wouldn’t have been able to put up much of a fight.
Vimes leaned down and gently raised one of the corpse’s eyelids. A milky blue eye with a black centre looked back at him from wherever the old priest was now.
A religious old man who lived in a couple of little poky rooms and obviously didn’t go out much, from the smell. What kind of threat could he . . . ?
Constable Visit poked his head around the door. ‘There’s a dwarf down here with no eyebrows and a frizzled beard says you told him to come, sir,’ he said. ‘And some citizens say Father Tubelcek is their priest and they want to bury him decently.’
‘Ah, that’ll be Littlebottom. Send him up,’ said Vimes, straightening. Tell the others they’ll have to wait.’
Littlebottom climbed the stairs, took in the scene, and managed to reach the window in time to be sick.
‘Better now?’ said Vimes eventually,
‘Er . . . yes. I hope so.’
Ill leave you to it, then.’
‘Er. . . what exactly did you want me to do?’ said Littlebottom, but Vimes was already half-way down the stairs.
Angua growled. It was the signal to Carrot that he could open his eyes again.
Women, as Colon had remarked to Carrot once when he thought the lad needed advice, could be funny about little things. Maybe they didn’t like to be seen without their make-up on, or insisted on buying smaller suitcases than men even though they always took more clothes. In Angua’s case she didn’t like to be seen en route from human to werewolf shape, or vice versa. It was just something she had a thing about, she said. Carrot could see her in either shape but not in the various ones she occupied on the way through, in case he never wanted to see her again.
Through werewolf eyes the world was different.
For one thing, it was in black-and-white. At least, that small part of it which as a human she’d thought of as ‘vision’ was monochrome – but who cared that vision had to take a back seat when smell drove instead, laughing and sticking its arm out of the window and making rude gestures at all the other senses? Afterwards, she always remembered the odours as colours and sounds. Blood was rich brown and deep bass, stale bread was a surprisingly tinkly bright blue, and every human being was a four-dimensional kaleidoscopic symphony. For nasal vision meant seeing through time as well as space: a man could stand still for a minute and, an hour later, there he’d still be, to the nose, his odours barely faded.
She prowled the aisles of the Dwarf Bread Museum, muzzle to the ground. Then she went out into the alley for a while and tried there too.
After five minutes she padded back to Carrot and gave him the signal again.
When he re-opened his eyes she was pulling her shirt on over her head. That was one thing where humans had the edge. You couldn’t beat a pair of hands.
‘I thought you’d be down the street and following someone,’ he said.
‘Follow who?’ said Angua.
‘Pardon?’
‘I can smell him, and you, and the bread, and that’s it.’
‘Nothing else?’
‘Dirt. Dust. The usual stuff. Oh, there are some old traces, days old. I know you were in here last week, for example. There are lots of smells. Grease, meat, pine resin for some reason, old food . . . but I’ll swear no living thing’s been in here in the last day or so but him and us.’
‘But you told me everyone leaves a trail.’
‘They do.’
Carrot looked down at the late curator. However you phrased it, however broadly you applied your definitions, he definitely couldn’t have committed suicide. Not with a loaf of bread.
‘Vampires?’ said Carrot. ‘They can fly . . .’
Angua sighed. ‘Carrot, I could tell if a vampire had been in here in the last month.’
‘There’s almost half a dollar in pennies in the drawer,’ said Carrot. ‘Anyway, a thief would be here for the Battle Bread, wouldn’t they? It is a very valuable cultural artefact.’
‘Has the poor man got any relatives?’ said Angua.
‘He’s got an elderly sister, I believe. I come in once a month just to have a chat. He lets me handle the exhibits, you know.’
‘That must be fun,’ said Angua, before she could stop herself.
‘It’s very . . . satisfying, yes,’ said Carrot solemnly. ‘It reminds me of home.’
Angua sighed and stepped into the room behind the little museum. It was like the back rooms of museums everywhere, full of junk and things there is no room for on the shelves and also items of doubtful provenance, such as coins dated ’52 BC’. There were some benches with shards of dwarf bread on them, a tidy tool rack with various sizes of kneading hammer, and papers all over the place. Against one wall, and occupying a large part of the room, was an oven.
‘He researches old recipes,’ said Carrot, who seemed to feel he had to promote the old man’s expertise even in death.
Angua opened the oven door. Warmth spilled out into the room. ‘Hell of a bake oven,’ she said. ‘What’re these things?’
‘Ah … I see he’s been making drop scones,’ said Carrot. ‘Quite deadly at short range.’
She shut the door. ‘Let’s get back to the Yard and they can send someone out to’
Angua stopped.
These were always the dangerous moments, just after a shape-change this close to full moon. It wasn’t so bad when she was a wolf. She was still as intelligent, or at least she felt as intelligent, although life was a lot simpler and so she was probably just extremely intelligent for a wolf. It was when she became a human again that things were difficult. For a few minutes, until the morphic field fully reasserted itself, all her senses were still keen; smells were still incredibly strong, and her ears could hear sounds way outside the stunted human range. And she could think more about the things she experienced. A wolf could sniff a lamp-post and know that old Bonzo had been past yesterday, and was feeling a bit under the weather, and was still being fed tripe by his owner, but a human mind could actually think about the whys and wherefores.
‘There is something else,’ she said, and breathed in gently. ‘Faint. Not a living thing. But. . . can’t you smell it? Something like dirt, but not quite. It’s kind of… yellow-orange . . .’