Snuff

now. ‘Copper to copper . About the past and maybe about the shape of things to come.’
    ‘Actually, I meant to thank you, commander, for thinking that I’m a policeman.’
    ‘Your father was policeman down here three years ago, yes?’
    Feeney stared straight ahead. ‘Yes, sir.’
    ‘So, what happened with the goblins, Feeney?’
    Feeney cleared his throat. ‘Well, Dad told me and Mum to stay indoors. He said we was not to look, but he couldn’t tell us not to listen, and there was a lot of shouting and I don’t know what, and it upset my old mum no end. I heard later that a load of goblins had been taken out of the hill, but Dad never spoke about it until much later. I think it broke him, sir, it really did. He said he watched while a bunch of men, gamekeepers and roughs mostly, came down from the cave dragging goblins behind them, sir. Lots of them. He said what was so dreadful was that the goblins were all sort of meek, you know? Like they didn’t know what to do.’
    Vimes relented a little at the sight of Feeney’s face. ‘Go on, lad.’
    ‘Well, sir, he told me people came out of their houses and there was a lot of running about and he started to ask questions and, well, the magistrates said it was all right because they were nothing more than vermin, and they were going to be taken down to the docks so they could earn their living for a change and not bother other people. It was all right, Dad said. They were going somewhere sunny, a long way away from here.’
    ‘Just out of interest, Mister Feeney, how could he know that?’
    ‘Dad said the magistrates were very firm about it, sir. They were just to be put to work for their living. He said that it was doing them a favour. It wasn’t as if they were going to be killed.’
    Vimes kept his expression deliberately blank. He sighed. ‘If it was without their consent, then that would be slavery, and if a slave doesn’t work for his living he’s dead. Do you understand?’
    Feeney looked at his boots. If eyeballs had polish on them his boots would have been gleaming. ‘After he told me this, my dad told me that I was a copper now and I was to look after Mum, and he gave me the truncheon and his badge. And then his hands started shaking, sir, and a few days later he was dead, sir. I reckon something snuck up on him, sir, in his head, like. It overcame him.’
    ‘Have you heard about Lord Vetinari, Feeney? I can’t say I like him all that much but sometimes he’s bang on the money. Well, there was a bit of a fracas, as we say, and it turned out that a man had a dog, a half-dead thing, according to bystanders, and he was trying to get it to stop pulling at its leash, and when it growled at him he grabbed an axe from the butcher’s stall beside him, threw the dog to the ground and cut off its back legs, just like that. I suppose people would say “Nasty bugger, but it was his dog”, and so on, but Lord Vetinari called me in and he said to me, “A man who would do something like that to a dog is a man to whom the law should pay close attention. Search his house immediately.” The man was hanged a week later, not for the dog, although for my part I wouldn’t have shed a tear if he had been, but for what we found in his cellar. The contents of which I will not burden you with. And bloody Vetinari got away with it again, because he was right: where there are little crimes, large crimes are not far behind.’
    Vimes stared at the rolling acres stretching out below: his fields, his trees, his fields of yellow corn … All his, even though he’d never planted a seed in his life, except for the time when he was a kid and he tried to grow mustard and cress on a flannel, which he’d then thrown up because no one had told him he should have washed the flannel first to get all the soap out. Not a good background for a landowner. But … His land, right? And he was sure that neither he nor Sybil had ever said yes to turning a lot of sad-looking goblins out of the mess they were pleased to call a home and taking them to who knew where.
    ‘Nobody told us!’
    Feeney leaned back to escape that particular ball of wrath. ‘I wouldn’t know about that, sir.’
    Vimes stood up and stretched his arms. ‘I’ve heard enough, lad, and I’ve had enough too! It’s time to report to a higher authority!’
    ‘I think it’d take at least a day and a half to get a galloper to the city, sir, and you’d have to be lucky with horses.’
    Sam Vimes began to