Snuff

troll with a headache.
    Then there was a truncheon. Vimes’s own truncheon, which his manservant had thoughtfully brought along. Of course, it had silverwork on it because it was the ceremonial truncheon of the Commander of the Watch, and wasn’t a weapon at all, oh dear me, no. On the other hand, Vimes knew himself not to be a cheesemonger and therefore it would be somewhat difficult to explain why he had a foot of cheesewire about his person. That was going to stay here, but he’d take the billhook. It was a pretty poor lookout if a man walking on his own land couldn’t take the opportunity to trim a branch or two. But what to make of the pile of bamboo which resolved itself into a breastplate of articulated sections and a most unfetching bamboo helmet? There was a small note on the bed. It said, in Willikins’ handwriting, “The gamekeeper’s friend, commander. Yours too!!!”
    Vimes grunted and hit the breastplate with his truncheon. It flexed like a living thing and the truncheon bounced across the room.
    Well, we live and learn, Vimes thought, or perhaps more importantly, we learn and live. He crept downstairs and let himself out into the night…which was a checkerboard of black and white. He’d forgotten that outside the city, where the smogs, smokes and steams rendered the world into a thousand shades of gray, out in places like this there was black and white, and, if you were looking for a metaphor, there was one, right there.
    He knew the way to the hill, you couldn’t miss it. The moon illuminated the way as if it had wanted to make things easier for him. Actual agriculture ran out around here. The fields gave way to furze, and to turf nibbled by rabbits into something resembling the baize of a snooker table…although given that rabbits did other things than just eat grass, he would play snooker with a lot of very small balls. Bunnies scattered as he climbed and he worried that he was making too much noise, but it was his land and therefore this was just a walk in the park. So he walked a little more jauntily, following what seemed to be the only path, and saw, in the moonlight, the gibbet.
    Well, he thought, it says Dead Man’s Copse on the map, doesn’t it? They used to do a lot of things like this in the old days, didn’t they? And the metal cage was just there to keep the corpses upright so that the ravens didn’t have to kneel. Good old-fashioned policing, you could call it, if you wanted to chill a spine or two. A pile of crumbling ancient bones at the foot of the gibbet testified to the old-fashioned policing at work.
    Vimes felt the stealthy movement of a knife on the hairs of his neck.
    A moment later Willikins got up off the ground and fastidiously brushed dirt from his clothing. “Oh, well done, sir!” he said, wheezing a little, owing to the shortness of breath. “I can see that I can’t put anything across you, commander.” He stopped, held his hand up to his nose and sniffed. “Blow me down, commander! There’s blood all over my clothes! You didn’t stick me, did you, sir? You just spun round and kicked me in the nuts, which I may say, sir, was done most expertly.”
    Vimes sniffed. You learned to smell blood. It smelled like metal. Now, people would say that metal doesn’t smell, it does, but it smells like blood.
    â€œYou got up here on time?” said Vimes.
    â€œYes, sir. Didn’t see a living soul.” Willikins knelt down. “Didn’t see a thing. Wouldn’t have seen the blood if you hadn’t kicked me into a puddle of it. It’s all over the place.”
    I wish I had Igor here, thought Vimes. These days he handed over the forensic to the experts. On the other hand, you acquired a forensics skill of your own and beyond the smell of blood he could smell butchery and unbelievable coincidence. Everybody sees everything in the countryside. Jefferson was going to meet Vimes, but here there was a definite shortage of Jefferson and no shortage whatsoever of blood while, at the same time, a noticeable absence of corpse. Vimes’ brain worked through things methodically. Of course, you took it for granted that if a citizen was surreptitiously going to tell a policeman a secret it was likely that somebody did not wish said citizen to say said thing. And if said citizen was found dead then said policeman, who had been seen to have a scrap with him earlier, might just