Snuff

‘I didn’t know a bloody goblin was killed, did I? So how would I know when it may or may not have happened? My advice, sir,’ said Jiminy, with the same coded inflection that Vimes had used, ‘would be to report the matter to the authorities in the morning. That would be young Upshot, calls himself a copper. Look, I came here to retire, Vimes, and staying alive is part of that. I do not poke my nose into that which does not concern me. And I know there’s a lot of things that you could do and I know you ain’t going to do them, but just so’s you don’t go home empty-handed, Jethro lives where all blacksmiths live, right in the centre of the village overlooking the green. He lives with his old mum, so I wouldn’t disturb her at this time of night. And now, gents, I’d better shut the pub. Don’t want to break the law.’

The panel slid back, and there was the sound of a bolt slotting into place. A moment later, to the time- honoured cry of ‘Ain’t you lot got no homes to go to?’, they heard the front door open and the lane filled with men trying to get their brains to go in the direction of their feet, or vice versa.

In the shadows of the pub’s back yard, which smelled of old barrels, Willikins said, ‘Would you like to take a bet on whether your blacksmith is tucked up in his bed tonight, sir?’

‘No,’ said Vimes, ‘but this stinks to me. I think I’ve got a murder, but I haven’t got a corpse, not all of it anyway,’ he said, as Willikins opened his mouth. He grunted. ‘For it to be definitely murder, Willikins, you need to be missing an important bit of you that you really need to stay alive, like your head. Okay, or like your blood, but it’s difficult to collect that in the dark, isn’t it?’

They set off, and Vimes said, ‘The one thing you can say about the dead is that they stay dead, well, generally speaking, and so … it’s been a long day, and that’s a long walk and old age is creeping on, okay?’

‘Not very noticeably from the outside, commander,’ said Willikins loyally.

The door was opened to them by a yawning night footman and as soon as he had retired Willikins produced from the pocket of his coat the reeking and severed goblin claw and placed it on the hall table.

‘Not much to a goblin once you get past the head, or so they say. See, there’s the ring on the finger. Definitely looks like stone. See the little blue bead? Pretty good workmanship for a goblin.’

‘Animals don’t wear jewellery,’ said Vimes. ‘You know, Willikins, I’ve said it before, you’d make a bloody good copper if it wasn’t for the fact that you’d make a bloody good assassin.’

Willikins grinned. ‘I did think about the assassins when I was a lad, sir, but unfortunately I was not of the right social class and, besides, they have rules.’ He helped Vimes out of his jacket and went on, ‘The street don’t have rules, commander, except one, which is “Survive”, and my dear old dad would probably turn in his grave if I even thought of being a copper.’

‘But I thought you never knew who your father was?’

‘Indeed, sir, that is the case, but one must consider the fact of heredity.’ Willikins produced a small brush and whisked a speck of dirt off the coat before putting it on a hanger, then went on, ‘I do feel the absence of a parent sometimes and I have wondered whether it might be a sensible idea to go along to the cemetery at Small Gods and shout out, “Dad, I’m going to be a copper,” and then see which gravestone revolved, sir.’

The man was still grinning. Vimes reflected, and not for the first time, that he had quite an unusual gentleman to be a gentleman’s gentleman, especially given that neither of them was a gentleman in the first place. ‘Willikins, and I mean this most sincerely, if I were you I’d go instead down to the Tanty and shout it out into the lime pit next to the gallows.’

Willikins’ grin widened. ‘Thank you, sir. I don’t have to tell you that that means a lot to me. If you would excuse me, sir, I’ll go and put my jacket in the incinerator before retiring.’

Sybil turned over and made a big warm noise when Vimes got into bed next to her. It had been a long day, and he dropped into that pink semi-conscious stupor that is even better than sleep, waking up slightly every hour when nobody rang a bell in the street below to say that all was well.

And he woke up again to hear the sound of heavy cart wheels rumbling over stones. Half asleep as Vimes was, suspicion woke him the rest of the way. Stones? It was all bloody gravel around the Hall. He opened a window and stared out into the moonlight. It was an echo bouncing off the hills. A few brain cells doing the night shift wondered what kind of agriculture had to be done at night. Did they grow mushrooms? Did turnips have to be brought in from the cold? Was that what they called crop rotation? These thoughts melted into his somnolent brain like little grains of sugar in a cup of tea, slithering and dripping from cell to synapse to neuro-transmitter until they arrived in the receptor marked ‘suspicion’, which if you saw a medical diagram of a policeman’s brain would probably be quite a visible lump, slightly larger than the lump marked ‘ability to understand long words’. He thought, Ah yes, contraband! and, feeling cheerful, and hopeful for the future, he gently closed the window and went back to bed.

The food at the Hall was copious and sumptuous and quite probably very nearly everything else ending in us. Vimes was old enough to know that the senior staff got to eat the leftovers and therefore made certain there would be leftovers. With this in mind he had a very large helping of haddock kedgeree and ate all four rashers of bacon on his plate. Sybil tut-tutted about this, and Vimes pointed out that he was on holiday, after all, and on holiday you did not do the things you did on other days, causing Sybil, with forensic accuracy, to point out that this should therefore include police work, should it not, but Vimes was ready, and said that of course he understood this, which was why he was going to take Young Sam for a walk down to the centre of the village to put his suspicions in the hands of the local policeman. Sybil said, ‘All right, then,’ in deliberate tones of disbelief, and he was to be sure to take Willikins with him.

This was another aspect of his wife that puzzled Vimes to the core. In the same way that Sybil thought that Nobby Nobbs, although a rough diamond, was a good watchman, she thought that Vimes was safer in the company of a man who never moved abroad without the weaponry of the street about his person, and who had once opened a beer bottle with somebody else’s teeth. This was true, but in some ways very disconcerting.

He heard the doorbell ring, heard the footman open the front door, heard a muffled conversation followed by somebody walking on the gravel path round to the back of the Hall. It wasn’t important, it was just ambience, and the sound of a footman coming into the room and whispering to Sybil fell into the same category.

He heard her say, ‘What? Oh well, I suppose you’d better show him in,’ then snapped to attention when she addressed him. ‘It’s the local policeman. Can you see him in the study? Policemen never wipe their feet properly, especially you, Sam.’

Vimes hadn’t seen the study yet. The Hall seemed never to run out of rooms. By dint of being pointed the way by a swivelling maid, he arrived in the study a few seconds before the local copper was shown in by a footman, who was making a face like a man having to handle a dead rat. At least, it was presumably the local copper; he looked like the local copper’s son. Seventeen years old, Vimes reckoned, and he smelled of pigs. He stood where the