‘Look,’ said Vimes, keeping his body down but raising his voice. ‘Anyone who got hit with that, it must have been an accident. This is the Watch. Open the door. Otherwise Detritus will open it. And when he opens a door, it stays open. You know what I mean?’
There was no reply.
‘All right. Detritus, just step over here—’
There was a hissed argument inside, and then the sound of scraping as furniture was moved.
He tried the door. It swung inwards.
The family were at the far end of the room. Vimes felt eight eyes on him. The atmosphere had a hot, worrying feel, spiced with the smell of burnt food.
Mr Goriff was holding the crossbow gingerly, and the expression on his son’s face told Vimes a lot of what he needed to know.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Now you all listen to me. I’m not arresting anyone right now, you hear? This sounds like one of those things that make his lordship yawn. But you’d do better spending the rest of the night in the Watch House. I can’t spare the men to stand guard here. Do you understand? I could arrest you. But this is just a request.’
Mr Goriff cleared his throat.
‘The man I shot—’ he began, and left the question and the lie hanging in the air.
Vimes forced himself not to glance at the boy. ‘Not badly hurt,’ he said.
‘He… ran in,’ said Mr Goriff. ‘And after last night—’
‘You thought you were being attacked again and grabbed the crossbow?’
‘Yes,’ said the boy, defiantly, before his father could speak.
There was a brief argument in Klatchian. Then Mr Goriff said:
‘We must leave the house?’
‘For your own good. We’ll try to have someone watch it. Now, get something together and go off with the sergeant. And give me that crossbow.’
Goriff handed it over with a look of relief. It was a typical Saturday Night Special, so badly made and erratic that the only safe place to be when it was fired would be directly behind it, and even then you would be running a risk. And then no one had told its owner that under the counter in a steamy shop and a perpetual rain of grease wasn’t the best place to keep it strung. The string sagged. Probably the only way you could reliably hurt someone with it was to beat them over the head.
Vimes waited until they’d been ushered out and took a last look around the room. It wasn’t large. In the kitchen behind the shop something spicy in a pot was boiling dry. After burning his fingers a couple of times he managed to tip the pot on to the fire to put it out and then, vaguely remembering his mother doing something like this, put the pot under the pump to soak.
Then he barricaded the windows as best he could and went out, locking the door behind him. A discreetly obvious brass Thieves’ Guild plaque over the door told the world that Mr Goriff had conscientiously paid his annual fee,[7] but the world had plenty of less formal dangers and so Vimes took a piece of chalk out of his pocket and wrote on the door:
UNDER THE PROTECTION OF THE WATCH
As an afterthought he signed it:
SGT DETRITUS
In the imaginations of the less civically minded the majesty of the rule of law didn’t carry anything like as much weight as the dread of Detritus.
The Riot Act! Where the hell had he dredged that from? Carrot, probably. It hadn’t been used for as long as Vimes could remember, and that was no wonder when you knew what it really did. Even Vetinari would hesitate to use it. Now it was nothing more than a phrase. Thank goodness for trollish illiteracy…
It was when Vimes stood back to admire his handiwork that he saw the glow in the sky over Park Lane, almost at the same time as he heard the clatter of iron boots on the street.
‘Oh, hello, Littlebottom,’ he said. ‘What now? Don’t tell me — someone’s set fire to the Klatchian embassy.’
‘All right, sir,’ said the dwarf. She stood uncertainly in the middle of the alley, looking worried.
‘Well?’ said Vimes.
‘Er… you said—’
With a sinking feeling Vimes remembered that the generic dwarfish skill with iron was matched only by the fumble-fingered grasp of irony.
‘The Klatchian embassy is really on fire?’
‘Yes, sir!’
Mrs Spent opened the door a crack.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m a friend of…’ Carrot hesitated, wondering if Fred would have given his real name. ‘Er… big fat man, suit doesn’t fit—’
‘The one who goes around with the sex maniac?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Skinny little twerp, dresses like a clown?’
‘They said you’d have a room,’ said Carrot desperately.
‘They’ve got it,’ said Mrs Spent, trying to shut the door.
‘They said I could use it—’
‘No sub-lettin’!’
‘They said I should pay you two dollars!’
The pressure of the door was released a little.
‘On top of what they paid?’ said Mrs Spent.
‘Of course.’
‘Well…’ She looked Carrot up and down and sniffed. ‘All right. What shift are you on?’
‘Sorry?’
‘You’re a watchman, right?’
‘Er…’ Carrot hesitated, and then raised his voice. ‘No, I am not a watchman. Haha, you think I’m a watchman? Do I look like a watchman?’
‘Yes, you do,’ said Mrs Spent. ‘You’re Captain Carrot. I seen you walking about the town. Still, I suppose even coppers have to sleep somewhere.’
On the roof, Angua rolled her eyes.
‘No wimmin, no cookin’, no music, no pets,’ said Mrs Spent, as she led the way up the creaking stairs.
Angua waited in the dark until she heard the window open.
‘She’s gone,’ Carrot hissed.
‘There’s glass on the tiles out here, just like Fred reported,’ said Angua, as she swung herself over the sill. Inside the room she took a deep breath and shut her eyes.
First she had to forget the smell of Carrot — anxious sweat, soap, the lingering hints of armour polish…
… and Fred Colon, all perspiration with a hint of beer, and then the odd ointment Nobby used for his skin condition, and the smells of feet, bodies, clothes, polish, fingernails…
After an hour it was possible for the eye of the nose to see someone walk across the room, frozen in time by their smell. But after a day smells crisscrossed and entangled. You had to take them apart, remove the familiar pieces, and what you had left—
‘They’re so mixed up!’
‘All right, all right,’ said Carrot soothingly.
‘At least three people! But I think one of them is Ossie… It’s stronger round the bed… and…’
She opened her eyes wide and looked down at the floor. ‘Somewhere here!’
‘What? What is?’
Angua crouched down with her nose just above the floorboards.
‘I can smell it but I can’t see it!’
A knife appeared in front of her. Carrot got down on his knees and ran the blade along the dust-filled crack between the floorboards.
Something splintery and brown popped up. It had been trodden on and rolled underfoot, but at this distance even Carrot could pick up traces of the clove smell. ‘Do you think Ossie made a lot of apple pies?’ he whispered.
‘No cookin’, remember?’ said Angua, and grinned.
‘There’s something else…’
Carrot levered out more dirt and dust. In it, something glittered. ‘Fred said all the glass was outside, didn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, supposing we assume that someone didn’t pick up all the bits when they broke in?’
7
And would not, therefore, be officially burgled. Ankh-Morpork had a very direct approach to the idea of insurance. When the middle-man was cut out, that wasn’t a figure of speech.