The Fifth Elephant (Discworld 24)

"But you ain"t a lady, Nobby. You"re just wearing your traffic-calming disguise."

"He wasn"t to know."

"You"d got your helmet on. Anyway, you shouldn"t have clamped him."

"He was parked, Fred."

"He"d been knocked down by a cart," said Captain Colon. "And that"s captain."

"Well, they always have excuses," said Nobby sullenly.

"You"d better show us the corpus, Reg," said Colon.

The body in the cellar was duly inspected.

"... and I remember Cheery saying there was a smell of cat"s pee and sulphur at the Dwarf Bread Museum," said Reg.

"Certainly hangs about," said Colon. "You wouldn"t have blocked sinuses if you worked here for a day."

"And I thought, "I wonder if someone"d tried to make a mould of the replica Scone", sir," said Reg.

"Now that is clever," said Fred Colon. "You"d get

the real one back then, wouldn"t you?"

"Er, no, Sarge -  Captain. But you"d get a copy of the. replica."

"Would that be legal?"

"Can"t say, sir. I wouldn"t think so. It wouldn"t fool a dwarf for five minutes."

"Then who"d want to kill him?"

"A father of thirteen kids, maybe?" said Nobby. "Haha."

"Nobby, will you stop pinching the merchandise?" said Colon. "And don"t argue, I just saw you put a couple of dozen in your handbag."

"Dat don"t matter," rumbled the troll. "Mister Sonky always said dey was free to the Watch."

"That was very... civic of him," said Captain Colon. ;I did," said Reg.

He put the lid on the sulphur again and sniffed the air of the factory. It smelled of liquid rubber, which is very much like the smell of incontinent cats.

"And some things stick in the mind," he said. "Special job, eh?"

It was Constable Visit-The-Infidel-With-Explanatory-Pamphlets"s week as Communications Officer, which largely meant looking after the pigeons and keeping an eye on the clacks, with of course the assistance of Constable Downspout. Constable Downspout was a gargoyle. When it came to staring fixedly at one thing you couldn"t beat a gargoyle. The gargoyles were getting a lot of employment in the clacks industry.

Constable Visit quite enjoyed the pigeons. He sang them hymns. They listened to short homilies, cocking their heads from side to side. After all, he reasoned, had not Bishop Horn

preached to the molluscs of the sea? And there was no record of them actually listening, whereas he was certain that the pigeons were taking it in. And they seemed to be interested in his pamphlets on the virtues of Omnianism, admittedly as nesting material at the moment, but this was certainly a good start.

A pigeon fluttered in as he was scraping the perches.

"Ah, Zebedinah," he said, lifting her up and removing the message capsule from her leg. "Well done. This is from Constable Shoe. And you shall have some corn, provided locally by Josiah Frument and Sons, Seed Merchants, but ultimately by the grace of Om."

There was a whirr of wings and another pigeon settled on the perch. Constable Visit recognized it as Wilhelmina, one of Sergeant Angua"s pigeons.

He removed the message capsule. The thin paper inside was tightly folded and on it someone had written "Cpt. Carrot, Personal."