The quarry could have gone anywhere by now. Such daylight as had been filtering through the fog had given up.
Vimes stood beside the gibbet, which creaked.
It had been built to creak. What's the good of a public display of retribution, it had been argued, if it didn't creak ominously? In richer times an elderly man had been employed to operate the creak by means of a length of string, but now there was a clockwork mechanism that needed to be wound up only once a month.
Condensation dripped off the artificial corpse.
'Blow this for a lark,' muttered Vimes, and tried to head back the way he came.
After ten seconds of blundering, he tripped over something.
It was a wooden corpse, hurled into the gutter.
When he got back to the gibbet, the empty chain was swinging gently, jingling in the fog.
Sergeant Colon tapped the golem's chest. It went donk.
'Like a flowerpot,' said Nobby. 'How can they move around when they're like a pot, eh? They ought to keep cracking all the time.'
'They're daft, too,' said Colon. 'I heard there was one over in Quirm who was made to dig a trench and they forgot about it and they only remembered it when there was all this water 'cos it had dug all the way to the river...'
Carrot unrolled the chem on the table, and laid beside it the paper that had been put in Father Tubelcek's mouth.
'It's dead, is it?' said Sergeant Colon.
'It's harmless,' said Carrot, looking from one piece of paper to the other.
'Right. I've got a sledgehammer round the back somewhere, I'll just...'
'No,' said Carrot.
'You saw the way it was acting!'
'I don't think it could actually have hit me. I think it just wanted to scare us.'
'It worked!'
'Look at these, Fred.'
Sergeant Colon glanced at the desk. 'Foreign writing,' he said, in a voice which suggested that it was nothing like as good as decent home writing, and probably smelled of garlic.
'Anything strike you about them?'
'Well... they looks the same,' Sergeant Colon conceded,
'This yellowing one is DorfFs chem. The other one is from Father Tubelcek,' said Carrot. 'Letter for letter the same.'
'Why's that?'
'I think Dorfl wrote these words and put them in old Tubelcek's mouth after the poor man died,' said Carrot slowly, still looking from one piece of paper to the other.
'Urgh, yuk,' said Nobby. 'That's mucky, that is...'
'No, you don't understand,' said Carrot. 'I mean he wrote them because they were the only ones he knew that worked...'
'Worked how?'
'Well... you know the kiss of life?' said Carrot. 'I mean first aid? I know you know, Nobby. You came with me when they had that course at the YMPA.'