Snuff

‘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