Snuff

Vimes died … The sun dropped out of the sky, giant lizards took over the world, the stars exploded and went out and all hope vanished with a gurgle into the sink-trap of oblivion, and gas filled the firmament and combusted and behold there was a new heaven, one careful owner, and a new disc, and lo, and possibly verily, life crawled out of the sea, or possibly didn’t because it had been made by the gods – that was really up to the bystander – and lizards turned into less scaly lizards, or possibly did not, and lizards turned into birds, and worms turned into butterflies, and a species of apple turned into bananas, and possibly a kind of monkey fell out of a tree and realized that life was better when you didn’t have to spend your time hanging on to something, and, in only a few million years, evolved trousers and ornamental stripy hats and lastly the game of crockett and there, magically reincarnated, was Vimes, a little dizzy, standing on the village green looking into the smiling countenance of an enthusiast.

He managed to say, ‘Well, that’s amazing, thank you so very much. I look forward to enjoying the game.’ At which point, he thought, a brisk walk home might be in order, only to be foiled by a regrettably familiar voice behind him saying, ‘You, I say you, yes, you! Aren’t you Vimes?’

It was Lord Rust, usually of Ankh-Morpork, and a fierce old warhorse, without whose unique grasp of strategy and tactics several wars would not have been so bloodily won. Now he was in a wheelchair, a newfangled variety pushed by a man whose life was, knowing his lordship, quite probably unbearable.

But hatred tends not to have a long half-life and in recent years Vimes had regarded the man as now no more than a titled idiot, rendered helpless by age, yet still possessed of an annoying horsy voice that, suitably harnessed, might be used to saw down trees. Lord Rust was not a problem any more. There were surely only a few more years to go before he would rust in peace. And somewhere in his knobbly heart Vimes still retained a slight admiration for the cantankerous old butcher, with his evergreen self-esteem and absolute readiness not to change his mind about anything at all. The old boy had reacted to the fact that Vimes, the hated policeman, was now a duke, and therefore a lot more nobby than he was, by simply assuming that this could not possibly be true, and therefore totally ignoring it. Lord Rust, in Vimes’s book, was a dangerous buffoon but, and here was the difficult bit, an incredibly, if suicidally, brave one. This would have been absolutely ticketyboo were it not for the suicides of those poor fools who followed him into battle.

Witnesses had said that it was uncanny: Rust would gallop into the jaws of death at the head of his men and was never seen to flinch, yet arrows and morningstars always missed him while invariably hitting the men right behind him. Bystanders – or rather people peering at the battle from behind comfortingly large rocks – had testified to this. Perhaps he was capable of ignoring, too, the arrows meant for him. But age could not be so easily upstaged, and the old man, while no less arrogant, had a sunken look.

Rust, most unusually, smiled at Vimes and said, ‘First time I’ve ever seen you down here, Vimes. Is Sybil going back to her roots, what?’

‘She wants Young Sam to get some mud on his boots, Rust.’

‘Well done her, what! It’ll do the boy good and make a man of him, what!’

Vimes never understood where the explosive whats came from. After all, he thought, what’s the point of just barking out ‘What!’ for absolutely no discernible reason? And as for ‘What what!’, well, what was that all about? Why what? Whats seemed to be tent-pegs hammered into the conversation, but what the hells for, what?

‘So not down here on any official business, then, what?’

Vimes’s mind spun so quickly that Rust should have heard the wheels go round. It analysed the tone of voice, the look of the man, that slight, ever so slight but nevertheless perceptible hint of a hope that the answer would be ‘no’, and presented him with a suggestion that it might not be a bad idea to drop a tiny kitten among the pigeons.

He laughed. ‘Well, Rust, Sybil has been banging on about coming down here since Young Sam was born, and this year she put her foot down and I suppose an order from his wife must be considered official, when!’ Vimes saw the man who pushed the enormous wheelchair trying to conceal a smile, especially when Rust responded with a baffled ‘What?’

Vimes decided not to go with ‘Where’ and instead said, in an offhand way, ‘Well, you know how it is, Lord Rust. A policeman will find a crime anywhere if he decides to look hard enough.’

Lord Rust’s smile remained, but it had congealed slightly as he said, ‘I should listen to the advice of your good lady, Vimes. I don’t think you’ll find anything worth your mettle down here!’ There was no ‘what’ to follow, and the lack of it was somehow an emphasis.

It was often a good idea, Vimes had always found, to give the silly bits of the brain something to do, so that they did not interfere with the important ones which had a proper job to fulfil. So he watched his first game of crockett for a full half-hour before an internal alarm told him that shortly he should be back at the Hall in time to read to Young Sam – something that with any luck did not have poo mentioned on every page – and tuck him into bed before dinner.

His prompt arrival got a nod of approval from Sybil, who gingerly handed him a new book to read to Young Sam.

Vimes looked at the cover. The title was The World of Poo. When his wife was out of eyeshot he carefully leafed through it. Well, okay, you had to accept that the world had moved on and these days fairy stories were probably not going to be about twinkly little things with wings. As he turned page after page, it dawned on him that whoever had written this book, they certainly knew what would make kids like Young Sam laugh until they were nearly sick. The bit about sailing down the river almost made him smile. But interspersed with the scatology was actually quite interesting stuff about septic tanks and dunnakin divers and gongfermors and how dog muck helped make the very best leather, and other things that you never thought you would need to know, but once heard somehow lodged in your mind.

Apparently it was by the author of Wee and if Young Sam had one vote for the best book ever written, then it would go to Wee. His enthusiasm was perhaps fanned all the more because a rare imp of mischief in Vimes led him to do all the necessary straining noises.

Later, over dinner, Sybil quizzed him about his afternoon. She was particularly interested when he mentioned stopping by to watch the crockett.

‘Oh, they still play it? That’s wonderful! How did it go?’

Vimes put down his knife and fork and stared thoughtfully at the ceiling for a moment or two, then said, ‘Well, I was talking to Lord Rust for some of the time, and I had to leave, of course, because of Young Sam, but fortune favoured the priests, when their striker managed to tump a couple of the farmers by a crafty use of the hamper. There were several appeals to the hat man about this, because he broke his mallet in so doing, and in my opinion the hat man’s decision was entirely correct, especially since the farmers had played a hawk manoeuvre.’ He took a