Thud! Read online

  He beamed.

  “Well done, Sergeant!” said the curator.

  “Good thinking, Fred,” said Nobby.

  “Thank you, Corporal,” said Fred Colon generously.

  “Or it could have been a couple of dwarfs with a stepladder,” Nobby went on cheerfully. “The decorators have left a few behind. They’re all over the place.”

  Fred Colon sighed.

  “Y’see, Nobby,” he said, “it’s comments like that, made in front of a member of the public, that are the reason why I’m a sergeant and you ain’t. If it was dwarfs, it would be neat all ’round, obviously. Is this place locked up at night, Mr. Sir Reynold?”

  “Of course! Not just locked, but barred! Old John is meticulous about it. And he lives in the attics, so he can make this place like a fortress.”

  “This’d be the caretaker?” said Fred. “We’ll need to talk to him.”

  “Certainly you may,” said Sir Reynold nervously. “Now, I think hwe may have some details about the painting in our storeroom. I’ll, er, just go and, er, find them…”

  He hurried off toward a small doorway.

  “I wonder how they got it out?” said Nobby, when they were alone.

  “Who says they did?” said Fred Colon. “Big place like this, full of attics and cellars and odd corners, well, why not stash it away and wait awhile? You get in as a customer one day, see, hide under a sheet, take out the muriel in the night, hide it somewhere, then go out with the customers next day. Simple, eh?” He beamed at Nobby. “You’ve got to outsmart the criminal mind, see?”

  “Or they could’ve just smashed down a door and pushed off with the muriel in the middle of the night,” said Nobby. “Why mess about with a cunning plan when a simple one will do?”

  Fred sighed. “I can see this is going to be a complicated case, Nobby.”

  “You should ask Vimesy if we can have it, then,” said Nobby. “I mean, we already know the facts, right?”

  Hovering in the air, unsaid, was: Where would you like to be in the next few days? Out there, where the axes and clubs are likely to be flying, or in here, searching all the attics and cellars very, very carefully? Think about it. And it wouldn’t be cowardice, right? ’Cos a famous muriel like this is bound to be part of our national heritage, right? Even if it is just a painting of a load of dwarfs and trolls having a scrap.

  “I think I will do a proper report and suggest to Mr. Vimes that maybe we should handle this one,” said Fred Colon slowly. “It needs the attention of mature officers. D’you know much about art, Nobby?”

  “If necessary, Sarge.”

  “Oh, come on, Nobby!”

  “What? Tawneee says what she does is Art, Sarge. And she wears more clothes than a lot of the women on the walls around here, so why be sniffy about it?”

  “Yeah, but…” Fred Colon hesitated here. He knew in his heart that spinning upside down around a pole wearing a costume you could floss with definitely was not Art, and being painted lying on a bed wearing nothing but a smile and a small bunch of grapes was good solid Art, but putting your finger on why this was the case was a bit tricky.

  “No urns,” he said at last.

  “What urns?” said Nobby.

  “Nude women are only Art if there’s an urn in it,” said Fred Colon. This sounded a bit weak even to him, so he added: “Or a plinth. Both is best, o’course. It’s a secret sign, see, that they put in to say that it’s Art and okay to look at.”

  “What about a potted plant?”

  “That’s okay if it’s in an urn.”

  “What about if it’s not got an urn or a plinth or a potted plant?” said Nobby.

  “Have you one in mind, Nobby?” said Colon suspiciously.

  “Yes, The Goddess Anoia*Arising from the Cutlery,” said Nobby. “They’ve got it here. It was painted by a bloke with three i’s in his name, which sounds pretty artistic to me.”

  “The number of i’s is important, Nobby,” said Sergeant Colon gravely, “but in these situations you have to ask yourself: ‘Where’s the cherub?’ If there’s a little fat pink kid holding a mirror or a fan or similar, then it’s still okay. Even if he’s grinning. Obviously you can’t get urns everywhere.”

  “All right, but supposing—” Nobby began

  The distant door opened, and Sir Reynold came hurrying across the marble floor with a book under his arm.

  “Ah, I’m afraid there is no copy of the painting,” he said. “Clearly, a copy that did it justice hwould be quite hard to make. But, er, this rather sensationalist treatise has many detailed sketches, at least. These days every visitor seems to have a copy, of course. Did you know that more than two thousand four hundred and ninety individual dwarfs and trolls can be identified by armor or body markings in the original picture? It drove Rascal quite mad, poor fellow. It took him sixteen years to complete!”

  “That’s nothing,” said Nobby cheerfully. “Fred here hasn’t finished painting his kitchen yet, and he started twenty years ago!”

  “Thank you for that, Nobby,” said Colon coldly. He took the book from the curator. The title was The Koom Valley Codex. “Mad how?” he said.

  “hWell, he neglected his other hwork, you see. He hwas constantly moving his lodgings, because he couldn’t pay the rent and he had to drag that huge canvas with him. Imagine! He had to beg for paints in the street, hwhich took up a lot of his time, since not many people have a tube of burnt umber on them. He said it talked to him, too. You’ll find it all in there. Rather dramatized, I fear.”

  “The painting talked to him?”

  Sir Reynold made a face. “hWe believe that’s hwhat he meant. hWe don’t really know. He did not have any friends. He hwas convinced that if he hwent to sleep at night he hwould turn into a chicken. He’d leave little notes for himself saying ‘You are not a chicken,’ although sometimes he thought he hwas lying. The general belief is that he concentrated so much on the painting that it gave him some kind of brain fever. Toward the end he hwas sure he hwas losing his mind. He said he could hearh the battle.”

  “How do you know that, sir?” said Fred Colon. “You said he didn’t have any friends.”

  “Ah, the incisive intellect of the policeman!” said Sir Reynold, smiling. “He left notes to himself, Sergeant. All the time. hWhen his last landlady entered his room, she found many hundreds of them, stuffed in old chicken-feed sacks. Fortunately, she couldn’t read, and since she’d fixed in her mind the idea that the lodger hwas some sort of genius and therefore might have something she could sell, she called in a neighbor, a Miss Adelina Happily, hwho painted hwatercolors, and Miss Happily called in a friend hwho framed pictures, hwho hurriedly summoned Ephraim Dowster, the noted landscape artist. Scholars have puzzled over the notes ever since, seeking some insight into the poor man’s tortured mind. They are not in order, you see. Some are very…odd.”

  “Odder than ‘You are not a chicken’?” said Fred.

  “Yes,” said Sir Reynold. “Oh, there is stuff about voices, omens, ghosts…he also hwrote his journal on random pieces of paper, you know, and never gave any indication as to the date or hwhere he hwas staying, in case the Chicken found him. And he used very guarded language, because he didn’t hwant the Chicken to find out.”

  “Sorry, I thought you said he thought he was the chic—” Colon began.

  “hWho can fathom the thought processes of the sadleah disturbed, Sergeant,” said Sir Reynold wearily.

  “Er…and does the painting talk?” said Nobby Nobbs. “Stranger things have happened, right?”

  “Ahah, no,” said Sir Reynold. “At least, not in my time. Ever since that book hwas reprinted, there’s been a guard in here during visiting hours, and he says it has never uttered a hword. Certainlyeah it has always fascinated people and there have always been stories about hidden treasure there. That is hwhy the book has been republished. People love a mystereah, don’t they?”

  “Not us,” said Fred Colon.

  “I don’t even know
what a Mister Rear is,” said Nobby, leafing through the Codex. “Here, I heard about this book. My friend Dave who runs the stamp shop says there’s this story about a dwarf, right, who turned up in this town near Koom Valley more’n two weeks after the battle, an’ he was all injured ’cos he’d been ambushed by trolls, an’ starvin,’ right, an’ no one knew much dwarfish, but it was like he wanted them to follow him, and he kept sayin’ this word over and over again, which turned out, right, to be dwarfish for ‘treasure,’ right, only when they followed him back to the valley, right, he died on the way, an’ they never found nothin,’ an’ then this artist bloke found some…thing in Koom Valley and hid the place where he’s found it in this painting, but it drove him bananas. Like it was haunted, Dave said. He said the government hushed it up.”

  “Yeah, but your mate Dave says the government always hushes things up, Nobby,” said Fred.

  “Well, they do.”

  “Except he always gets to hear about ’em, and he never gets hushed up,” said Fred.

  “I know you like to point the finger of scoff, Sarge, but there’s a lot goes on that we don’t know about.”

  “Like what, exactly?” Colon retorted. “Name me one thing that’s going on that you don’t know about. There—you can’t, can you?”

  Sir Reynold cleared his throat. “That is certainly one of the theories,” he said, speaking carefully, as people tended to after hearing the Colon-Nobbs Brains Trust crossing purposes. “Regrettably, Methodia Rascal’s notes support just about any theory one may prefer. The current populariteah of the painting is, I suspect, because the book does indeed revisit the old story that there’s some huge secret hidden in the painting.”

  “Oh?” said Fred Colon, perking up. “What kind of secret?”

  “I have no idea. The landscape hwas painted in great detail. A pointer to a secret cave, perhaps? Something about the positioning of some of the combatants? There are all kinds of theories. Rather strange people come along with tape measures and rather hworryingly intent expressions, but I don’t think they ever find anything.”

  “Perhaps one of them pinched it?” Nobby suggested.

  “I doubt it. They tend to be rather furtive individuals who bring sandwiches and a flask and stay here all day. The sort of people who love anagrams and secret signs and have little theories and pimples. Probably quite harmless except to one another. Besides, hwhy steal it? We like people to take an interest in it. I don’t think that kind of person hwould hwant to take it home, because it hwould be too large to fit under the bed. Did you know that Rascal hwrote that sometimes in the night he heard screams? The noise of battle, one is forced to assume. So sad.”

  “Not something you’d want over the fireplace, then,” said Fred Colon.

  “Precisely, Sergeant. Even if it hwere possible to have a fireplace fifty feet long.”

  “Thank you, sir. One other thing, though. How many doors are there in this place?”

  “Three,” said Sir Reynold promptly. “But two are always locked.”

  “But if the troll—”

  “—or the dwarfs,” said Nobby.

  “Or, as my junior colleague points out, the dwarfs tried to get it out—”

  “Gargoyles,” said Sir Reynold proudly. “Two hwatch the main door constantleah from the building opposite, and there’s one each on the other doors. And there are staff on during the day, of course.”

  “This may sound a silly question, sir, but have you looked everywhere?”

  “I’ve had the staff searching all morning, Sergeant. It hwould be a very big and very heavy roll. This place is full of odd corners, but it hwould be very obvious.”

  Colon saluted. “Thank you, sir. We’ll just have a look around, if you don’t mind.”

  “Yes, for urns,” said Nobby Nobbs.

  Vimes eased himself into his chair and looked at the damned vampire. She could have passed for sixteen; it was certainly hard to believe that she was not a lot younger than Vimes. She had short hair, which Vimes had never seen on a vampire before, and looked, if not like a boy, then like a girl who wouldn’t mind passing for one.

  “Sorry about the…remark down there,” he said. “It’s not been a good week and it’s getting worse by the hour.”

  “You don’t have to be frightened,” said Sally. “If it’s any help, I don’t like this any more than you do.”

  “I am not frightened,” said Vimes sharply.

  “Sorry, Mr. Vimes. You smell frightened. Not badly,” Sally added. “But just a bit. And your heart is beating faster. I am sorry if I have offended you. I was just trying to put you at your ease.”

  Vimes leaned back. “Don’t try to put me at my ease, Miss von Humpeding,” he said. “It makes me nervous when people do that. It’s not as though I have any ease to be put at. And do not comment on my smell, either, thank you. Oh, and it’s Commander Vimes, or ‘sir,’ understand? Not ‘Mister Vimes.’ ”

  “And I would prefer to be called Sally,” said the vampire.

  They looked at each other, both aware that this was not going well, both uncertain that they could make it go any better.

  “So…‘Sally’…you want to be a copper?” said Vimes.

  “A policeman? Yes.”

  “Any history of policing in your family?” said Vimes. It was a standard opening question. It always helped if they’d inherited some idea about coppering.

  “No, just the throat biting,” said Sally.

  There was another pause.

  Vimes sighed.

  “Look, I just want to know one thing,” he said. “Did John Not-A-Vampire-At-All Smith and Doreen Winkings put you up to this?”

  “No!” said Sally. “I approached them. And if it’s any help to you, I didn’t think there’d be all this fuss, either.”

  Vimes looked surprised.

  “But you applied to join,” he said.

  “Yes, but I don’t see why there has to be all this…interest!”

  “Don’t blame me. That was your League of Temperance.”

  “Really? Your Lord Vetinari was quoted in the newspaper,” said Sally. “All that stuff about the lack of species discrimination being in the finest traditions of the Watch.”

  “Hah!” said Vimes. “Well, it’s true that a copper’s a copper, as far as I’m concerned, but the fine traditions of the Watch, Miss von Humpeding, largely consist of finding somewhere out of the rain, mumping for free beer ’round the backs of pubs, and always keeping two notebooks!”

  “You don’t want me, then?” said Sally. “I thought you needed all the recruits you could get. Look, I’m probably stronger than anyone on your payroll who isn’t a troll, I’m quite clever, I don’t mind hard work, and I’ve got excellent night vision. I can be useful. I want to be useful.”

  “Can you turn into a bat?”

  She looked shocked. “What? What kind of question is that to ask me?”

  “Probably among the less tricky ones,” said Vimes. “Besides, it might be useful. Can you?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, well, never mind—”

  “I can turn into a lot of bats,” said Sally. “One bat is hard to do, because you have to deal with changes in body mass, and you can’t do that if you’ve been Reformed for a while. Anyway, it gives me a headache.”

  “What was your last job?”

  “Didn’t have one. I was a musician.”

  Vimes brightened up.

  “Really? Some of the lads have been talking about setting up a Watch band.”

  “Could they use a cello?”

  “Probably not.”

  Vimes drummed his fingers on his desk. Well, she hadn’t gone for his throat yet, had she? That was the problem, of course. Vampires were fine right up until the point where, suddenly, they weren’t. But, in truth, right now, he had to admit it: he needed anyone who could stand upright and finish a sentence. This damn business was taking its toll. He needed men out there all the time, just to keep the lid on things. Oh, rig
ht now it was just scuffles and stone throwing and breaking windows and running away, but all that stuff added up, like snowflakes on an avalanche slope. People needed to see coppers at a time like this. They gave the illusion that the whole world hadn’t gone insane.

  And the Temperance League was pretty good and very supportive of its members. It was in the interests of all members that no one found themselves standing in a strange bedroom with an embarrassingly full feeling. They’d be watching her…

  “We’ve got no room for passengers in the Watch,” he said. “We’re too pressed right now to give you any more than what is laughingly known as on-the-job training, but you’ll be on the streets from day one…er, how are you with the daylight thing?”

  “I’m fine with long sleeves and a wide brim. I carry the kit, anyway.”

  Vimes nodded. A small dustpan and brush, a vial of animal blood, and a small card saying:

  Help, I have crumbled and I can’t get up. Please sweep me into a heap and crush vial. I am a Black Ribboner and will not harm you. Thanking you in advance.

  His fingers rattled on the desktop again. She returned his stare.

  “All right, you’re in,” Vimes said at last. “On probation, to start with. Everyone starts that way. Sort out the paperwork with Sergeant Littlebottom downstairs, report to Sergeant Detritus for your gear and orientation lecture, and try not to laugh. And now you’ve got what you want, and we’re not being official…tell me why.”

  “Pardon?” said Sally.

  “A vampire wanting to be a copper?” said Vimes, leaning back in his chair. “I can’t quite make that fit, ‘Sally.’ ”

  “I thought it would be an interesting job in the fresh air, which would offer opportunities to help people, Commander Vimes.”