Feet of Clay

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.”
    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 his 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 CRIME IS SOLVED.
    Colon, once his lips had stopped moving, scurried behind the suddenly very flimsy defenses 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