"Yessir?" said Colon, touching his helmet. "We"ve had a burglareah, officer!" "Burglar rear?" said Nobby.
"Oh dear, sir," said Colon, putting a warning hand on the corporal"s shoulders. "Anything taken?"
"Years. I rather think that"s hwhy it was a burglareah, you see?" said
the man. He had the attitude of a preoccupied chicken, but Fred
Colon was impressed. You could barely understand the man, he was
that posh. It was not so much speech as modulated yawning. "I"m Sir Reynold Stitched, curator of Fine Art, and I was hwalking through the Long Gallereah and ... oh, dear, they took the Rascal!"
The man looked at two blank faces.
"Methodia Rascal?" he tried. "The Battle of Koom Valley? It is a priceless work of art!"
Colon hitched up his stomach. "Ah," he said, "that"s serious. We"d better take a look at it. Er ... I mean, the locale where it was situated in.
"Years, years, of course," said Sir Reynold. "Do come this hway. I am given to understand that the modern hWatch can learn a lot just by looking at the place where a thing was, is that not so?"
"Like, that it"s gone?" said Nobby. "Oh, years. We"re good at that."
"Er ... quite so," said Sir Reynold. "Do come this way."
The watchmen followed. They had been inside the museum before, of course. Most citizens had, on days when no better entertainment presented itself. Under the governance of Lord Vetinari it had hosted fewer modern exhibitions, since his lordship held Views, but a gentle stroll amongst the ancient tapestries and rather brown and dusty paintings was a pleasant way of spending an afternoon. Plus, it was always nice to look at the pictures of big pink women with no clothes on.
Nobby was having a problem. "Here, sarge, what"s he going on about?" he whispered. "It sounds like he"s yawning all the time. What"s a galler rear?"
"A gallery, Nobby. That"s very high-class talkin", that is." "I can hardly understand him!"
"Shows it"s high class, Nobby. It wouldn"t be much good if people like you could understand, right?"
"Good point, sarge," Nobby conceded. "I hadn"t thought of that."
"You found it missing this morning, sir?" said Colon, as they trailed after the curator into a gallery still littered with ladders and dust sheets.
"Years indeed!
"So it was stolen last night, then?"
Sir Reynold hesitated. "Er ... not necessarileah, I"m afraid. We have been refurbishing the Long Gallereah. The picture was too big to move, of course, so hwe"ve had it covered in heavy dust sheets for the past month. But when we took them down this morning, there hwas only the frame! Observe!"
The Rascal occupied - or rather, had occupied - a frame some ten feet high and fifty feet long which, as such, was pretty close to being a work of art in its own right. It was still there, framing nothing but uneven, dusty plaster.
"I suppose some rich private collector has it now," Sir Reynold moaned. "But how could he keep it a secret? The canvas is one of the most recognizable paintings in the world! Every civilized person would spot it in an instant!"
"What did it look like?" said Fred Colon.
Sir Reynold performed that downshift of assumptions that was the normal response to any conversation with Ankh-Morpork"s Finest.
"I can probableah find you a copy," he said weakly. "But the original is fifty feet long! Have you never seen it?
"Well, I remember being brought to see it when I was a kiddie, but it"s a bit long, really. You can"t really see it, anyway. I mean, by the time you get to the other end you"ve forgotten what was happening back up the line, as it were."
"Alas, that is regrettableah true, sergeant," said Sir Reynold. "And hwhat is so vexing is that the hwhole point of this refurbishment hwas to build a special circular room to hold the Rascal. His ideah, you know, hwas that the viewer should be hwholly encircled by the mural and feel right in the thick of the action, as it hwere. You hwould be there in Koom Valleah! He called it panoscopic art. Say hwhat you like about the current interest, but the extra visitors hwould have made it possible to display the picture as hwe believe he intended it to be displayed. And now this!"
"If you were going to move it, why didn"t you just take it down and put it away nice and safe, sir?"
"You mean roll it up?" said Sir Reynold, horrified. "That could cause such a lot of damage. Oh, the horror! No, hwe had a very careful exercise planned for next hweek, to be done with the utmost diligence: He shuddered. "hWhen I think of someone just hacking it out of the frame I feel quite faint-"