Snuff (Discworld 39)

The mother of Sam Vimes had managed, heavens know how, to scrape up the penny a day necessary for him to be educated at the Dame School run by Mistress Slightly.

Mistress Slightly was everything a dame should be. She was fat, and gave the impression of being made of marshmallows, had a gentle understanding of the fact that the bladders of small boys are almost as treacherous as the bladders of old men, and, in general, taught the basics of the alphabet with a minimum of cruelty and a maximum of marshmallow.

She kept geese, as any self-respecting dame should do. Later in life the older Vimes had wondered if, underneath the endless layers of petticoats, Mistress Slightly wore red-and-white spotted drawers. She certainly had a mob cap and a laugh like rainwater going down a drain. Invariably, while she gave lessons, she was peeling potatoes or plucking geese.

There was still a place in his heart for old Mistress Slightly, who occasionally had a mint in her pocket for a boy who knew his alphabet and could say it backward. And you had to be grateful to someone who taught you how not to be afraid.

She had one book in her tiny sitting room, and the first time she had given it to young Sam Vimes to read he had got as far as page seven when he froze. The page showed a goblin: the jolly goblin, according to the text. Was it laughing, was it scowling, was it hungry, was it about to bite your head off? Young Sam Vimes hadn’t waited to find out and had spent the rest of the morning under a chair. These days he excused himself by remembering that most of the other kids felt the same way. When it came to the innocence of childhood, adults often got it wrong. In any case, she had sat him on her always slightly damp knee after class and made him really look at the goblin. It was made of lots of dots! Tiny dots, if you looked closely. The closer you looked at the goblin the more it wasn’t there. Stare it down and it lost all its power to frighten. “I hear that they are wretched, badly made mortals,” the dame had said sadly. “Half-finished folk, or so I hear. It’s only a blessing this one had something to be jolly about.”

Later on, because he had been a good boy, she had made him blackboard monitor, the first time anyone had entrusted him with anything. Good old Mistress Slightly, Vimes thought, as he stood in this gloomy cave surrounded by ranks of silent, solemn goblins. I’ll have a bag of peppermints on your grave if I get out of this alive. He cleared his throat. “Well now, lad, what we appear to have here is a goblin who has been in a fight.” He looked down at the corpse, and then to Feeney. “Perhaps you would care to tell me what you see?”

Feeney was one step away from trembling. “Well, sir, I surmise that it is dead, sir.”

“And how do you deduce this, please?”

“Er, its head isn’t attached to its body, sir?”

“Yes, we generally recognize that as a clue that the corpse is indeed dead. Incidentally, lad, you may as well take the string off. I wouldn’t say this is the best light I’ve ever seen by, but it’ll do. Do you notice anything else, chief constable?” Vimes tried to keep his tone level.

“Well, sir, it’s pretty cut about, sir.”

Vimes smiled encouragingly. “Notice anything about that, lad?” Feeney was making heavy weather of it, but recruits often did at the start, doing so

much looking that they forgot to see. “You’re doing well, chief constable. Would you care to extrapolate?”

“Sir? Extrapolate, sir?”

“Why would somebody be all cut about on their arms? Think about that.”

Feeney’s lips actually moved as he thought, and then he grinned. “He was defending himself with his hands, sir?”

“Well done, lad, and people who are defending themselves with their hands are doing so because they don’t have a shield or a weapon. I would wager, too, that his head was cut off while he was on the ground. Can’t exactly put my finger on it, but that looks to me like deliberate butchering rather than a hasty slice. Everything is messy, but you can see that the belly has been sliced open, yet there is hardly any blood around it. He was taken by surprise. And because of the belly would I know something else about him that I wish I didn’t know,” he said.

“What’s that, sir?”

“He is a she, and she was ambushed, or maybe trapped.” And, he thought, there’s a claw missing.

After a while it becomes a puzzle, not a corpse, said Vimes to himself as he knelt down, but never soon enough, and never for long enough. Aloud he said, “Look at the marks on this leg, lad. I reckon she stepped in a rabbit snare, probably because she was running away from…somebody.”

Vimes stood up so fast that the watching goblins backed away. “Good grief, boy, we shouldn’t do that, not even in the country! Isn’t there some kind of code? You kill the bucks, not the does, isn’t that right? And this isn’t some spur-of-the-moment thing! Someone wanted to get a lot of blood out of this lady! You tell me why!”

Vimes wasn’t certain what Feeney would have replied had they not been surrounded by solemn-faced goblins, which was just as well.

“This is murder, lad, the capital crime! And do you know why it was done? I’ll wager anything that it was so that Constable Upshot, acting on information received, would find a lot of blood in Dead Man’s Copse, where Commander Vimes was apparently going to have a meeting with an annoying blacksmith, and so, given that both of them were men of quick temper, quite possibly foul play could have been involved, yes?”

“It’s a legitimate deduction, sir, you must admit that.”

“Of course I do, and now it’s a total bastard of a deduction, and now you must admit that.”

“Yes, sir, I do, sir, and apologize. However, I’d like to search the premises for any sign of Mr. Jefferson.” Feeney looked half ashamed, half defiant.

“And why do you want to do that, chief constable?”

Feeney stuck out his chin. “Because I’ve been shown to be a bloody fool once, and I don’t intend to be one again. Besides, sir, you might be wrong. This poor lady might have been in a fight with the blacksmith, perhaps, I don’t know, but I do know that if I don’t make a search here in the circumstances, somebody important is bound to ask me why I didn’t. And that person would be you, wouldn’t it, commander?”

“Good answer, young man! And I have to admit that I’ve been a bloody fool more times than I can count, so I can sympathize.”

Vimes looked down again at the corpse and it was suddenly urgent to try to find out what Willikins had done with the claw, complete with ring, that they had found the previous night. Awkwardly, he said to the assembled goblins, “I believe that I have found some jewelry belonging to this young lady and, of course, I shall bring it to you.”