he turned on you, still holding his knife, described to me as a machete, so swiftly that you urinated into your boots.
‘No, don’t speak, I haven’t finished. Nevertheless, I am informed that you did say to your companion that you were supposed to leave just blood, and not, as you put it, “guts all over the place”, whereupon he forced you to put them back into the cadaver and hide it further down the hill in some gorse bushes. No, I said don’t talk! In your pocket you had a pork pie, which you’d brought from home, and three dollars in cash, which was your payment for this little errand.
‘After that you and Stratford walked back some distance to your horses, which you had temporarily stabled in the tumbledown old barn on the other side of the village. The horses were a chestnut mare and a grey gelding, both of them broken down by ill use. In fact, the gelding threw a shoe as you were leaving, and you had to stop your companion from killing it there and then. Oh, and the witness told me that you were naked to the waist when you left, since your shirt was soaked with blood and you left it in the barn after an argument with Stratford. I’ll recover it when we get back. Your friend told you to take your trousers off as well, but you declined; however, I noted splashes of blood on them earlier. I don’t want to go to the expense of sending a rider back to the city, where my Igor will ascertain whether the blood is human, goblin or turkey. I said don’t speak, didn’t I? I haven’t mentioned some of the other conversation between you and Mister Stratford, because Feeney here is listening, and you should be relieved about that; gossip can be so cruel.
‘And now Mister Flutter, I’m going to stop talking and upon doing so I would like the first words you utter to be – pay attention – “I want to turn King’s evidence”. Yes, I know we don’t have kings any more, but nobody has amended the law. You are a little shit, but I’m reluctantly persuaded that you were dragged into something beyond your control and worse than you could have imagined. The good news is that Lord Vetinari will almost certainly take my advice and you will live. Remember: “I want to turn King’s evidence”, that’s what I want to hear, Mister Flutter, otherwise I’ll go for a walk and Mister Willikins will comb his hair.’
Flutter, who had listened to most of this with his eyes shut, blurted out the words so fast that Vimes had to ask him to repeat them more slowly. When he had finished he was allowed to go to the privy, with Willikins waiting outside, cleaning his nails with his knife, and Feeney was sent to feed the frantic turkeys.
For his part, Vimes entered one of the stinking sheds and prodded around in the dirty straw for what he knew would be there. He was not disappointed. Sufficiently close to, the smell of tobacco was just discernible above the stifling stink of turkey. He rolled a barrel out, found Feeney and said, ‘I think this is full of tobacco and so I’m intending to take it as evidence. Your job right now is to scout out a jemmy for me and somebody known to you as a decent upstanding citizen, insofar as there might be one around this place.’
‘Well, there’s Dave who runs the Dog and Badger,’ Feeney volunteered.
‘And he is an upstanding citizen?’ said Vimes.
‘I have seen him sitting down,’ said Feeney, ‘but he knows the score, if you get my meaning.’
Vimes nodded and waited a few minutes before Feeney returned with a crowbar, a bandy-legged man and a small tail of people who, for the moment, until proved otherwise, had to be counted as ‘innocent bystanders’.
They gathered around as Vimes prepared to open the barrel. He announced, ‘Pay attention, gentlemen. I believe this barrel contains contraband goods.’ He rolled up his sleeves – ‘You see that I have nothing up my sleeves, but a crowbar in my hand’ – and with some effort on his part the lid of the barrel came off, and the smell of tobacco was overpowering. And some of the bystanders decided it was now time to take the wonderful opportunity for a quick nonchalant walk.
Vimes pulled out bale after bale of brown leaves bound with cotton. ‘Can’t take too much on the coach,’ he said, ‘but if Mister Dave here will, as an upstanding member of the community, sign to say that he saw me pull these from a sealed barrel, then you, Mister Feeney, will take a brief statement and we can all go about our business.’
Feeney beamed. ‘Oh, very well spotted, commander! I reckon you could hide anything in this stink, eh?’ After a moment he looked at Vimes and said, ‘Commander?’
Vimes appeared to look through him and said, ‘You’re going to go far, Chief Constable Upshot. Let’s empty the whole barrel, shall we?’
He didn’t know where the thought had come from. Maybe from first principles. If you were going to smuggle, where would you stop? What would your market be? How would you get the best price per pound of product carried? He pulled and pulled at the bundles, and one, almost at the bottom of the barrel, was noticeably heavier than the others. Trying to keep his expression unchanged, he handed the heavy bundle to Feeney and said, ‘I’d be grateful if you and Mister Dave would open this bundle and tell me what you see inside.’
He sat down on the barrel and took a pinch of snuff while behind him he heard the rustling, and then Feeney said, ‘Well, commander, what this appears to be—’
Vimes held up a hand. ‘Does it look like stone dust to you, Feeney?’
‘Yes, but—’
Vimes held up his hand again. ‘Does it appear to have little red and blue flecks in it when you hold it to the light?’
Sometimes the ancestral copper in Feeney picked up the vibration. ‘Yes, Commander Vimes!’
‘Then it’s a good job for you and your friend Dave’ – Vimes glanced at the said Dave for the second time and decided to give him the benefit of the doubt – ‘that the two of you are not trolls, because if you were you’d be stone dead, as it were, right now. The stuff you are holding is
Vimes looked hopefully at the aforesaid Dave, just in case the man would take the bait. No, he thought, they wouldn’t do it round here. All this tobacco must come from somewhere hot, and that means a long way away.
Gingerly, they broke open other barrels and found plenty of tobacco and several packs of very high-class cigars, one or two of which Vimes put in his breast pocket for detailed forensic examination later, and, somewhere at the bottom of every barrel, there were neat packets of Crystal Slam, Slunkie, Slab, Slice and Slap, all of them very nasty – although Slap was generally considered to be a recreational drug, at least if your idea of recreation was waking up in the gutter not knowing whose head you had on.
