Feet of Clay (Discworld 19)

'It's an ancient Klatchian script,' said Constable Visit. 'One of the desert tribes called the Cenotines, sir. They had a sophisticated but fundamentally flawed...'

'Yes, yes, yes,' said Vimes, who could recognize the verbal foot getting ready to stick itself in the aural door. 'But do you know what it means?'

'I could find out, sir.'

'Good.'

'Incidentally, were you able by any chance to find time to have a look at those leaflets I gave you the other day, sir?'

'Been very busy!' said Vimes automatically.

'Not to worry, sir,' said Visit, and smiled the wan smile of those doing good against great odds. 'When you've got a moment will be fine.'

The old books that had been knocked from the shelves had spilled their pages everywhere. There were splashes of blood on many of them.

'Some of these look religious,' Vimes said. 'You might find something.' He turned. 'Detritus, have a look round, will you?'

Detritus paused in the act of laboriously drawing a chalk outline around the body. 'Yessir. What for, sir?'

'Anything you find.'

'Right, sir.'

With a grunt, Vimes hunkered down and prodded at a grey smear on the floor. 'Dirt,' he said.

'You get dat on floors, sir,' said Detritus, helpfully.

'Except this is off-white. We're on black loam,' said Vimes.

'Ah,' said Sergeant Detritus. 'A Clue.'

'Could be just dirt, of course.'

There was something else. Someone had made an attempt to tidy up the books. They'd stacked several dozen of them in one neat towering pile, one book wide, largest books on the bottom, all the edges squared up with geometrical precision.

'Now that I don't understand,' said Vimes. 'There's a fight. The old man is viciously attacked. Then someone- maybe it was him, dying, maybe it was the murderer - writes something down using the poor man's own blood. And rolls it up neatly and pops it into his mouth like a sweetie. Then he does die and someone shuts his eyes and makes him tidy and piles these books up neatly and... does what? Walks out into the seething hurly-burly that is Ankh-Morpork?'

Sergeant Detritus's honest brow furrowed with the effort of thought. 'Could be a ... could be dere's a footprint outside der window,' he said. 'Dat's always a Clue wort' lookin' for.'

Vimes sighed. Detritus, despite a room-temperature IQ, made a good copper and a damn good sergeant. He had that special type of stupidity that was hard to fool. But the only thing more difficult than getting him to grasp an idea was getting him to let go of it.

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[8]

'Detritus,' he said, as kindly as possible. 'There's a thirty-foot drop into the river outside the window. There won't be - ' He paused. This was the river Ankh, after all. 'Any footprints'd be bound to have oozed back by now,' he corrected himself. 'Almost certainly.'

He looked outside, though, just in case. The river gurgled and sucked below him. There were no footprints, even on its famously crusted surface. But there was another smear of dirt on the window-sill.

Vimes scratched some up, and sniffed at it.

'Looks like some more white clay,' he said.

He couldn't think of any white clay around the city. Once you got outside the walls it was thick black loam all the way to the Ramtops. A man walking across it would be two inches taller by the time he got to the other side of a field.

'White clay,' he said. 'Where the hell is white-clay country round here?'

'It a mystery,' said Detritus.