‘Well done, Vimes. Am I right in thinking that all my guards are non-human? They all seem to be dwarfs and trolls.’ ‘Safest way, sir.’
‘You’ve thought of everything, Vimes.’ ‘Hope so, sir.’
‘Thank you, Vimes.’ Vetinari sat up and took a mass of papers off the bedside table. ‘And now, don’t let me detain you.’ Vimes’s mouth dropped open. Vetinari looked up. ‘Was there anything else, Commander?’
‘Well … I suppose not, sir. I suppose I’d just better run along, eh?’
‘If you wouldn’t mind. And I’m sure a lot of paperwork has accumulated in my office, so if you’d send someone to fetch it, I would be obliged.’
Vimes shut the door behind him, a little harder than necessary. Gods, it made him livid, the way Vetinari turned him on and off like a switch – and had as much natural gratitude as an alligator. The Patrician relied on Vimes doing his job, knew he’d do his job, and that was the extent of his thought on the matter. Well, one day, Vimes would . . . would . . .
. . . would bloody well do his job, of course, because he didn’t know how to do anything else. But realizing that made it all the worse.
Outside the palace the fog was thick and yellow. Vimes nodded to the guards on the door, and looked out at the clinging, swirling clouds.
It was almost a straight line to the Watch House in Pseudopolis Yard. And the fog had brought early night to the city. Not many people were on the streets; they stayed indoors, barring the windows against the damp shreds that seemed to leak in everywhere.
Yes . . . empty streets, a chilly night, dampness in the air …
Only one thing was needed to make it perfect. He sent the sedan men on home and walked back to one of the guards. ‘You’re Constable Lucker, aren’t you?’
‘Yessir, Sir Samuel.’
‘What size boots do you take?’
Lucker looked panicky.’What, sir?’
‘It’s a simple question, man!’
‘Seven and a halfs, sir.’
‘From old Plugger in New Cobblers? The cheap ones?’
‘Yessir!’
‘Can’t have a man guarding the palace in cardboard boots!’ said Vimes, with mock cheerfulness. ‘Off with them, Constable. You can have mine. They’ve still got wyvern – well, whatever it is wyverns do – on them, but they’ll fit you. Don’t stand there with your mouth open. Give me your boots, man. You can keep mine.’ Vimes added: ‘I’ve got lots.’
The constable watched in frightened astonishment as Vimes pulled on the cheap pair and stood upright, stamping a few times with his eyes shut. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I’m in front of the palace, right?’
‘Er … yes, sir. You’ve just come out of it, sir. It’s this big building here.’
‘Ah,’ said Vimes brightly, ‘but I’d know I was here, even if I hadn’t!’
‘Er . . .’
‘It’s the flagstones,’ said Vimes. ‘They’re an unusual size and slightly dished in the middle. Hadn’t you noticed? Your feet, lad! That’s what you’ll have to learn to think with!’
The bemused constable watched him disappear into the fog, stamping happily.
Corporal the Right Honourable the Earl of Ankh Nobby Nobbs pushed open the Watch-House door and staggered inside.
Sergeant Colon looked up from the desk, and gasped. ‘You okay, Nobby?’ he said, hurrying around to support the swaying figure. ‘It’s terrible, Fred. Terrible!’ ‘Here, take a seat. You’re all pale.’
‘I’ve been elevated, Fred!’ moaned Nobby.
‘Nasty! Did you see who did it?’
Nobby wordlessly handed him the scroll Dragon King of Arms had pressed into his hand, and flopped back. He took a tiny length of home-made cigarette from behind his ear and lit it with a shaking hand. ‘I dunno, I’m sure,’ he said. ‘You do your best, you keep your head down, you don’t make any trouble, and then something like this happens to you.’
Colon read the scroll slowly, his lips moving when he came to difficult words like ‘and’ and ‘the’. ‘Nobby, you’ve read this? It says you’re a lord!’
‘The old man said they’d have to do a lot of checking up but he thought it was pretty clear what with the ring and all. Fred, what am I gonna do?’
‘Sit back and eat off ermine plates, I should think!’
That’s just it, Fred. There’s no money. No big house. No land. Not a brass farthing!’
‘What, nothing?’
‘Not a dried pea, Fred.’
‘I thought all the upper crust had pots of money.’
‘Well, I’m the crust on its uppers, Fred. I don’t know anything about lording! I don’t want to have to wear posh clothes and go to hunt balls and all that stuff.’
Sergeant Colon sat down beside him. ‘You never suspected you’d got any posh connections?’
‘Well . . . my cousin Vincent once got done for indecently assaulting the Duchess of Quirm’s housemaid . . .’
‘Chambermaid or scullery maid?’
‘Scullery maid, I think.’
‘Probably doesn’t count, then. Does anyone else know about this?’
‘Well, she did, and she went and told . . . ‘
‘I mean about your lordshipping. ‘
‘Only Mr Vimes.’
‘Well, there you are,’ said Sergeant Colon, handing him back the scroll. ‘You don’t have to tell anyone. Then you don’t have to go around wearing golden trousers, and you needn’t hunt balls unless you’ve lost ’em. You just sit there, and I’ll fetch you a cup of tea, how about that? We’ll see it through, don’t you worry. ‘
‘You’re a toff, Fred.’
‘That makes two of us, m’lord!’ Colon waggled his eyebrows. ‘Get it? Get it?’
‘Don’t, Fred,’ said Nobby wearily.
The Watch-House door opened.
Fog poured in like smoke. In the midst of it were two red eyes. The parting shreds revealed the massive figure of a golem.
‘Umpk,’ said Sergeant Colon.
The golem held up its slate:
I HAVE COME TO YOU.
‘Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve, er, yeah, I can see that,’ said Colon.
Dorfl turned the slate around. The other side read:
I GIVE MYSELF UP FOR MURDER. IT WAS I WHO KILLED THE OLD PRIEST. THE CASE IS SOLVED.
Colon, once his lips had stopped moving, scurried behind the suddenly very flimsy defences of his desk and scrabbled through the papers there.
‘You keep it covered, Nobby,’ he said, ‘Make sure it don’t run off.’
‘Why’s it going to run off?’ said Nobby.
Sergeant Colon found a relatively clean piece of paper.
‘Well, well, well, I, well, I guess I’d better . . . What’s your name?’
The golem wrote:
DORFL.
By the time he was on the Brass Bridge (medium-sized cobbles of the rounded sort they called ‘cat heads’, quite a few missing) Vimes was already beginning to wonder if he’d done the right thing.
Autumn fogs were always thick, but he’d never known it this bad. The pall muffled the sounds of the city and turned the brightest lights into dim glows, even though in theory the sun hadn’t set yet.
He walked along by the parapet. A squat, glistening shape loomed in the fog. It was one of the wooden hippos, some distant ancestor of Roderick or Keith. There were four on either side, all looking out towards the sea.
Vimes had walked past them thousands of times. They were old friends. He’d often stood in the lee of one on chilly nights, when he was looking for somewhere out of trouble.
That’s what it used to be like, wasn’t it? It hardly seemed that long ago. Just a handful of them in the Watch, staying out of trouble. And then Carrot had arrived, and suddenly the narrow circuit of their lives had opened up, and there were nearly thirty men (oh, including trolls and dwarfs and miscellaneous) in the Watch now, and they didn’t skulk around keeping out of trouble, they went looking for trouble, and they found it everywhere they looked. Funny, that. As Vetinari had pointed out in that way of his, the more policemen you had, the more crimes seemed to be committed. But the Watch was back and out there on the streets, and if they weren’t actually as good as Detritus at kicking arse they were definitely prodding buttock.
He lit a match on a hippo’s toenail and cupped his hand around it to shield his cigar from the damp.
These murders, now. No one would care if the Watch didn’t care. Two old men, murdered on the same day. Nothing stolen . . . He corrected himself: nothing apparently stolen. Of course, the thing about things that were stolen was that the bloody things weren’t there. They almost certainly hadn’t been fooling around with other people’s wives. They probably couldn’t remember what fooling around was. One spent his time among old religious books; the other, for gods’ sakes, was an authority on the aggressive uses of baking.
People would probably say they had lived blameless lives.
But Vimes was a policeman. No one lived a completely blameless life. It might be just possible, by lying very still in a cellar somewhere, to get through a day without committing a crime. But only just. And, even then, you were probably guilty of loitering.