The Fifth Elephant (Discworld 24)

Vimes smiled inwardly. He remembered the saying from his childhood: too poor to paint, but too proud to whitewash...

"Bit of a tough choice, is it?" he said. "I"ll tell you what, you can come in our coach but we"ll give you a hard seat and patronize you from time to time, how about that?"

"I am afraid you are making a mockery of me, Sir Samuel. Mhm-mhm."

"No, but I may be assisting. And now, if you"ll excuse me, I"ve got to nip down to the Yard to sort out a few last-minute things..."

A quarter of an hour later Vimes walked into the charge room at the Yard. Sergeant Stronginthearm looked up, saluted, and then ducked to avoid the orange that was tossed at his head.

"Sir?" he said, bewildered.

"Just testing, Stronginthearm."

"Did I pass, sir?"

"Oh, yes. Keep the orange. It"s full of vitamins."

"My mother always told me those things could kill you, sir:"

Carrot was waiting patiently in Vimes"s office. Vimes shook his head. He knew all the places to tread in the corridor and he knew he didn"t make a sound, and he"d never once caught Carrot reading his paperwork, not even upside down. Just once it"d be nice to catch him out at something. If the man was any straighter you could use him as a plank.

Carrot stood up and saluted:

"Yes, yes, we haven"t got a lot of time for that now," said Vimes, sitting behind his desk. "Anything new overnight?"

"An unattributed murder, sir. A tradesman called Wallace Sonky. Found in one of his own vats with his throat cut. No Guild seal or note or anything. We"re treating it as suspicious."

"Yes, I think that sounds fairly suspicious," said Vimes. "Unless he has a record as a very careless shaver. What kind of vat?"

"Er, rubber, sir."

"Rubber comes in vats? Wouldn"t he bounce out?"

"No, sir. It"s a liquid in the vat, sir. He makes rubber... things."

"Hang on, I remember seeing something once... Don"t they make things by dipping them in the rubber? You make, sort of, the right shapes and dip them in to get gloves, boots... that sort of thing?"

"Er, that, er, sort of thing, sir."

Something about Carrot"s uneasy manner got through to Vimes. And the little file at the back of his brain eventually waved a card.

"Sonky, Sonky... Carrot, we"re not talking about Sonky as in "a packet of Sonkies", are we?"

Now Carrot was bright red with embarrassment. "Yes, sir!"

"My gods, what was he dipping in the vat?"

"He"d been thrown in, sir. Apparently."

"But he"s practically a national hero!"

"Sir?"

"Captain, the housing shortage in Ankh-Morpork would be a good deal worse if it wasn"t for old man Sonky and his penny-a-packet preventatives. Who"d want to do away with him?"

"People do have Views, sir," said Carrot coldly.

Yes, you do, don"t you? Vimes thought. Dwarfs don"t hold with that sort of thing.