Feet of Clay

'''The-Infidel-With-Explanatory-Pamphlets[7]''

'I was just about to say it, Constable,' said Vimes. 'Well?'

'It's an ancient Klatchian script,' said Constable Visit. 'One of the desert tribes called the Cenotines, sir. They had a sophisticated but fundamentally flawed …'

'Yes, yes, yes,' said Vimes, who could recognize the verbal foot getting ready to stick itself in the aural door. 'But do you know what it means?'

'I could find out, sir.'

'Good.'

'Incidentally, were you able by any chance to find time to have a look at those leaflets I gave you the other day, sir?'

'Been very busy!' said Vimes automatically.

'Not to worry, sir,' said Visit, and smiled the wan smile of those doing good against great odds. 'When you've got a moment will be fine.'

The old books that had been knocked from the shelves had spilled their pages everywhere. There were splashes of blood on many of them.

'Some of these look religious,' Vimes said. 'You might find something.' He turned. 'Detritus, have a look round, will you?'

Detritus paused in the act of laboriously drawing a chalk outline around the body. 'Yessir. What for, sir?'

'Anything you find.'

'Right, sir.'

With a grunt, Vimes hunkered down and prodded at a grey smear on the floor. 'Dirt,' he said.

'You get dat on floors, sir,' said Detritus, helpfully.

'Except this is off-white. We're on black loam,' said Vimes.

'Ah,' said Sergeant Detritus. 'A Clue.'

'Could be just dirt, of course.'

There was something else. Someone had made an attempt to tidy up the books. They'd stacked several dozen of them in one neat towering pile, one book wide, largest books on the bottom, all the edges squared up with geometrical precision.

'Now that I don't understand,' said Vimes. 'There's a fight. The old man is viciously attacked. Then someone — maybe it was him, dying, maybe it was the murderer — writes something down using the poor man's own blood. And rolls it up neatly and pops it into his mouth like a sweetie. Then he does die and someone shuts his eyes and makes him tidy and piles these books up neatly and … does what? Walks out into the seething hurly-burly that is Ankh-Morpork?'

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.'

‘I’ll 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?'