Snuff

spiritually and peripatetically lost. The fragrances of the hedgerows were somehow without body compared with the robust stinks of the city, and he had not the faintest idea what was rustling in the undergrowth. He recognized heifers and bullocks, because he often walked through the slaughterhouse district, but the ones out here weren’t bewildered by fear and stared at him carefully as he walked past as if they were calmly taking notes. Yes – that was it! The world was back to front! He was a copper, he had always been a copper, and he would die a copper. You never stopped being a copper, on the whole, and as a copper he walked around the city more or less invisible, except to those people who make it their business to spot coppers, and whose livelihood depends upon their spotting coppers before coppers spot them. Mostly you were part of the scenery, until the scream, the tinkle of broken glass and the sound of felonious footsteps brought you into focus.
    But here everything was watching him. Things darted away behind a hedge, flew up in panic or just rustled suspiciously in the undergrowth. He was the stranger, the interloper, not wanted here.
    He turned another corner, and there was the village. He had seen the chimneys some way off, but the lanes and footpaths crisscrossed one another in a tangle, repeated in the overflowing hedgerows and trees, that made tunnels of shade – which were welcome – and played merry hells with his sense of direction, which was not.
    He had lost all his bearings and was hot and bothered by the time he came out into a long dusty lane with thatched cottages on either side and halfway down a large building which had ‘pub’ written all over it, particularly by the three old men who were sitting on the bench outside it eyeing the approaching Vimes hopefully in case he was the kind of man who would buy another man a pint. They wore clothes that looked as if they had been nailed on. Then, when he got closer, one said something to the other two and they stood up as he passed, index fingers touching their hat brims. One of them said, ‘Garternoon, yer grace,’ a phrase which Vimes interpreted after a little thought. There was also a slight and meaningful tip of the empty tankards to indicate that they were, in fact, empty tankards and therefore an anomaly in need of rectification.
    Vimes knew what was expected of him. There wasn’t a pub in Ankh-Morpork which didn’t have the equivalent three old men sunning themselves outside and ever ready to talk to strangers about the good old days, i.e. when the tankards they were nursing still had beer in them. And the form was that you filled them up with cheap ale and got a ‘Well, thank you, kind sir’, and quite possibly little bubbles of information about who had been seen where doing what and with whom and when, all grist to the copper’s mill.
    But the expressions on these three changed when another of them whispered hurriedly to his cronies. They pushed themselves back on the wooden seat as if trying to make themselves inconspicuous while still clasping the empty flagons because, well, you never knew. A sign over the door proclaimed that this was the Goblin’s Head.
    Opposite the pub was a large open space laid, as they say, to grass. A few sheep grazed on it and towards the far end was a large stack of wood like wicker hurdles, the purpose of which Vimes could not guess. He was, however, familiar with the term ‘village green’, although he had never seen one. Ankh-Morpork wasn’t very big on greens.
    The pub smelled of stale beer. This helped as a bulwark against temptation, although Vimes had been clean for years, and could face the occasional sherry at official events, because he hated the taste of it anyway. The smell of antique beer had the same effect. By the pitiful light of the tiny windows Vimes made out an elderly man industriously polishing a tankard. The man looked up at Vimes and gave him a nod, the basic nod which is understood everywhere as meaning ‘I see you, you see me, it’s up to you what happens next’, although some publicans can put an inflection on a nod which also manages to convey the information that there might just be a two-foot length of lead piping under the counter should the party of the second part want to start anything, as it were.
    Vimes said, ‘Do you serve anything that isn’t alcoholic?’
    The barman very carefully hung the tankard on a hook over the bar and then looked directly