Discworld 39 - Snuff Read online

  “The poo lady, yes, Commander Vimes. It’s amazing, isn’t it, how people remember?”

  “Well, you must admit that it does—how can I put it?—stick in the mind, Miss Felicity Beedle.”

  “Very well done, commander, considering that we’ve met only once!”

  And now Vimes noticed that with her there was a goblin, a young one by the size of it, but more noticeable because it was staring directly at him with a keen and interested gaze, quite uncharacteristic of the goblins that he had seen so far, apart from the wretched Stinky. Feeney, on the other hand, was taking great care not to catch the lady’s eye, Vimes noticed.

  Vimes smiled at Miss Beedle. “Madam, I reckon I see your name at least once every day. When I was putting my lad to bed yesterday, do you know what he said? He said ‘Dad, do you know why cows do big wet sloppy poos and horses do them all nice and soft and smelling of grass? Because it’s weird, isn’t it? That you get two different kinds of poo when they’re both about the same size and it’s the same grass, isn’t it, Dad? Well, the poo lady says it’s because cows have room in ants, and the ants help them get, sort of, more food out of their food, but because horses don’t have room in ants, they don’t sort of chew all that much, so that their poo is still very much like grass and doesn’t smell too bad.’ ”

  Vimes saw that the woman was grinning, and went on, “I believe that tomorrow he is going to ask his mother if he may chew his dinner very hard one day, and the next day not do it very much, and see if he gets different smells. What do you think of that, madam?”

  Miss Beedle laughed. It was a very enjoyable laugh. “Well, commander, it would seem that your son combines your analytical thinking with the inherited Ramkin talent for experimentation. You must be very proud? I certainly hope you are.”

  “You can bet on that, madam.” The child standing in Miss Beedle’s shadow was smiling too, the first smile he’d seen on a goblin. But before he could say anything, Miss Beedle directed a disapproving look at Feeney and went on, “I only wish I could find you in better company, commander. I wonder if you know where my friend Jethro is, officer?”

  Even in the lamplight, Feeney looked furious, but if you read people, and Vimes was a ferocious reader, it was clear the fury was spiced with shame and dread. Then Vimes looked down at the little bench, where there were a few tools and some more brightly covered books. It was the streets that had taught Vimes that there were times when you would find it best to let a nervous person get really nervous, and so he picked up a book as if the previous dreadful exchange had not taken place, and said, “Oh, here’s Where’s My Cow?! Young Sam loves it. Are you teaching it to the goblins, Miss?”

  With her eyes still on the agitated Feeney, Miss Beedle said, “Yes, for what it’s worth. It’s hard work. Incidentally, technically I’m Mrs. Beedle. My husband was killed in the Klatchian war. I went back to ‘Miss’ because, well, it’s more authory, and besides, it wasn’t as though I’d had much time to get accustomed to ‘Mrs.’ ”

  “I’m sorry about that, madam, Had I known I’d have been a lot less flippant,” said Vimes.

  Miss Beedle gave him a wan smile. “Don’t worry, flippant sometimes does the trick.” Beside the teacher the little goblin said, “Flip-ant? The ant is turned over?”

  “Tears of the Mushroom is my star pupil. You’re wonderful, aren’t you, Tears of the Mushroom?”

  “Wonderful is good,” said the goblin girl, as though tasting every word. “Gentle is good, the mushroom is good. Tears are soft. I am Tears of the Mushroom, this much is now said.”

  It was a strange little speech: the girl spoke as if she were pulling words out of a rack and then tidily putting them back in their places as soon as they had been said. It sounded very solemn and it came from an odd, flat, pale face. In a way, Tears of the Mushroom looked handsome, if not exactly pretty, in what looked like a wraparound apron, and Vimes wondered how old she was. Thirteen? Fourteen, maybe? And he wondered if they would all look as smart as this if they got their hands on some decent clothing and did something about their godawful hair. The girl’s hair was long and braided and pure white. Amazingly, in this place, she looked like a piece of fragile porcelain.

  Not knowing what to say, he said it anyway: “Pleased to meet you, Tears of the Mushroom.” Vimes held out his hand. The goblin girl looked at it, then looked at him, and then turned to Miss Beedle, who said, “They don’t shake hands, commander. For people who seem so simple they’re astoundingly complicated.”

  She turned to Vimes. “It would seem, commander, that providence has brought you here in time to solve the murder of the goblin girl, who was an excellent pupil. I came up here as soon as I heard, but the goblins are used to undeserved and casual death. I’ll walk with you to the entrance, and then I’ve got a class to teach.”

  Vimes tugged at Feeney to make him keep up as they followed Miss Beedle and her charge toward the surface and blessed fresh air. He wondered what had become of the corpse. What did they do with their dead? Bury them, eat them, throw them on the midden? Or was he just not thinking right, a thought which itself had been knocking at his brain for some time. Without thinking, he said, “What else do you teach them, Miss Beedle? To be better citizens?”

  The slap caught him on the chin, probably because even in her anger Miss Beedle realized that he still had his steel helmet on. It was a corker, nonetheless, and out of the corner of his stinging gaze he saw Feeney take a step back. At least the boy had some sense.

  “You are the gods’ own fool, Commander Vimes! No, I’m not teaching them to be fake humans, I’m teaching them how to be goblins, clever goblins! Do you know that they have only five names for colors? Even trolls have around sixty, and a lot more than that if they find a paint salesman! Does this mean goblins are stupid? No, they have a vast number of names for things that even poets haven’t come up with, for things like the way colors shift and change, the melting of one hue into another. They have single words for the most complicated of feelings; I know about two hundred of them, I think, and I’m sure there are a lot more! What you may think are grunts and growls and snarls are in fact carrying vast amounts of information! They’re like an iceberg, commander: most of them is where you can’t see or understand, and I’m teaching Tears of the Mushroom and some of her friends so that they may be able to speak to people like you, who think they are dumb. And do you know what, commander? There isn’t much time! They’re being slaughtered! It’s not called that, of course, but slaughter is how it ends, because they’re just dumb nuisances, you see. Why don’t you ask Mr. Upshot what happened to the rest of the goblins three years ago, Commander Vimes?”

  And with that Miss Beedle turned on her heel and disappeared down into the darkness of the cave with Tears of the Mushroom bobbing along behind her, leaving Vimes to walk the last few yards out into the glorious sunlight.

  The feeling that hit Samuel Vimes when he stepped into the vivid light of day was as if somebody had pushed an iron wire through his body and then, in one moment, pulled it out again. It was all he could do to keep his balance and the boy grabbed him by the arm. Full marks, Vimes thought, for being either smart enough to see how the land lay, or at least smart enough not to make a run for it just now.

  He sat down on the turf, relishing the breeze through the gorse bushes and sucking in pure fresh air. Whatever you thought about gobli
ns, their cave had the kind of atmosphere about which people say, “I should wait two minutes before going in there, if I was you.”

  “I’d like to talk with you, chief constable,” he said 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 where 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, Mr. 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 favor. 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 ax 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 walk smartly down the hill. “I was talking about Lady Sybil, lad.”

  Sybil was in a drawing room full of teacups and ladies when Vimes arrived at the Hall in a run, with Feeney lagging behind. She took one look at him and said, rather more brightly than warranted, “Oh, I see you have something to discuss with me.” She turned to the ladies, smiled and said, “Please do excuse me, ladies. I must just have a brief word with my husband.” And with that she grabbed Vimes and pulled him none too gently back into the hallway. She opened her mouth to deliver a wifely sermon on the importance of punctuality, sniffed and recoiled. “Sam Vimes, you stink! Did you fall into something rural? I’ve hardly seen you since breakfast! And why are you still dragging that young policeman behind you? I’m sure he’s got something more important to do. Didn’t he want to arrest you? Is he coming to tea? I hope he washes first.” This was said to Vimes but aimed at Feeney, who was keeping his distance and looked ready to run.

  “That was a misunderstanding,” said Vimes hastily, “and I’m sure that if I ever find out where my escutcheon is there won’t be a stain on it, but Mr. Feeney here has been generously and of his own free will imparting information to me.”

  And by the time the husband and wife conversation was in full swing, containing shouted whispers on the lines of “Surely not!” and “I think he’s telling the truth,” Feeney looked ready to sprint.

  “And they didn’t put up a fight?” said Sybil. The young policeman tried to avoid her gaze, but she had the kind of gaze that came around to find you wherever you stood.

  “No, your ladyship,” was all he managed.

  Lady Sybil looked at her husband and shrugged. “There would be one hell of a fight with someone who wanted to take me off to a place I didn’t want to go to,” she said, “and I thought goblins had weapons? Pretty nasty fighters, so I’ve heard. I’d have thought there’d have been a war! We would have heard about it! From the way you talk about it, it sounds as if they were sleepwalking. Or perhaps they were starving? I haven’t noticed very many rabbits around here, compared with when I was a little girl. And why leave some behind? It’s all a bit of a puzzle, Sam. Nearly everyone around here is a family friend—” She held up a hand quickly. “I wouldn’t dream of asking you to fail in your duty, Sam, you must understand that, but be careful and be sure of every step. And please, Sam—and I know you, Sam—don’t go at it like a bull at a gate. People round here might get the wrong idea.”

  Sam Vimes was certain that he did have the wrong idea and his brow wrinkled as he said, “I don’t know, Sybil, how does a bull go at a gate? Does it just stop and look puzzled?”

  “No, dear, it smashes everything to pieces.”

  Lady Sybil gave a warning smile and brushed herself down. “I don’t think we need detain you any longer, Mr. Upshot,” she said to the grateful Feeney. “Do remember me to your dear mother. If she does
n’t mind, I’d like to meet her while I’m down here again to talk about old times. In the meantime I suggest you leave via the kitchen, no matter what my husband thinks about a policeman using the servants’ entrance, and tell Cook to supply you with, well, anything your mother would like.”

  She turned to her husband. “Why don’t you escort him down there, Sam? And since you’re enjoying the fresh air, why not go and find Young Sam? I think he’s back in the barnyard, with Willikins.”

  Feeney was silent as they went down the long corridors, but Vimes sensed the boy’s mind working its way through a problem, which came out when he said, “Lady Sybil is a very nice kind lady, isn’t she, sir?”

  “I do not need to be reminded of that,” said Vimes, “and I’d like you to understand that she stands in vivid contrast to me. I get edgy when I think there’s a crime unsolved. A crime unsolved is against nature.”

  “I keep thinking of the goblin girl, sir. She looked like a statue, and the way she spoke, well, I don’t know what to say. I mean, they can be a bloody nuisance—they’ll have the laces out of your boots if you don’t move quick enough—but when you see them in their cave you realize there’s, well, kids, old granddad goblins and—”

  “Old mum goblins?” Vimes suggested quietly.

  Once again, Mrs. Upshot’s little boy struggled in the unfamiliar and terrifying grip of philosophy and fetched up with, “Well, sir, I dare say cows make good mothers, but at the end of the day a calf is veal on the hoof, yes?”

  “Maybe, but what would you say if the calf walked up to you and said, ‘Hello, my name is Tears of the Mushroom?’ ”

  Feeney’s face once again frowned in the effort of novel cogitation. “I think I’d have the salad, sir.”

  Vimes smiled. “You were in a difficult position, lad, and I’ll tell you something: so am I. It’s called being a copper. That’s why I like it when they run. That makes it all so simple. They run and I chase. I don’t know if it’s metaphysical, or something like that. But there was a corpse. You saw it, so did I and so did Miss Beedle. Keep that in mind.”