Snuff (Discworld 39)

“I shall, of course, mention your cooperation to the authorities and, of course, in the local pub as well, ah, yes.”

And now Mr. Flutter was relishing the thought of being seen as some kind of grass, so stupidly he went for, “I never told you anything about any tobacco, and you know it, copper!”

At this point Feeney stepped around the corner with his fearsome club raised and a look of almost comical aggression on his face. “You want me to give him the old one-two, commander, just say the word, guv!”

Vimes rolled his eyes in mock despair. “No need for that, Feeney, no need for that, just when Mr. Flutter here is so anxious to talk to us, understand?”

Flutter decided that the way forward was an appeal to Feeney. “Look, Feeney, you know me—”

He got that far and no further because Feeney said, “It’s Constable Upshot to you, Flutter. My dad had you up before the beaks two dozen times, you know. He used to call you the bluebottle on account of whenever there was a load of shit going down he’d find you flapping about in it. And he told me to watch you, which is what I am doing right now, in fact.” He glanced at Vimes, who gave him an encouraging nod and then said, “You see my problem, Mr. Flutter, we’re not here to talk about contraband tobacco, okay? Now, I never saw myself as a revenuer, not a popular profession. I’m a copper pure and simple, right, and in my hand I have this man what is only doing a favor to his employer by storing a few barrels of tobacco in his shed, but on the other hand, well, if I found a murderer in the other hand, why, gods bless you, I might totally forget all about the first hand…Don’t ask me to draw you a picture, Flutter, because my hands are full.”

Flutter looked aghast. “This is about that goblin, right? Look, it wasn’t me! Okay, I’m a bit of a naughty boy, I put my hand up to that, but I ain’t like him! I’m a scallywag, not a damn murderer!”

Vimes looked at Feeney. Some people could be said to be as pleased as punch. Feeney could be said to look as pleased as Punch, Judy, the dog Toby, the crocodile and, above all, the policeman, all rolled in together. Vimes raised his eyebrows in new interrogation, and Feeney said, “I believe him, chief. He hasn’t got it in him, I swear. The best he could manage would be knocking over an old lady for her purse, and even then she’d probably have to be blind too.”

“There, you see!” said Flutter triumphantly. “I’m not really a bad person!”

“No,” said Vimes, “you’re a veritable choirboy, Mr. Flutter, I can see that, and I’m rather religious too, and I like chapter and verse, but are you willing to swear that the individual known as Stratford knifed a goblin girl to death on Hangman’s Hill in the grounds of Ramkin Hall, three nights ago?”

Flutter raised a finger. “Can I say that I told him to stop, and he laughed, and I didn’t know it was a girl neither—I mean, how can you tell?”

Vimes’s face was deadpan. “Tell me, Ted, what would you have done if you had known? I’m intrigued.”

Flutter looked down at his feet. “Well, I, well, well, I mean…not a girl, I mean…well, not a girl…I mean, that’s not right, know what I mean?”

And you can find someone like this dangerous clown in nearly every neighborhood, Vimes thought. “Clearly chivalry is not dead, Mr. Flutter. Okay, Feeney, let’s carry on. Mr. Flutter, why were you on Hangman’s Hill on the aforesaid night?”

“We were just having a walk,” said Flutter.

Vimes’s face was again deadpan, so deadpan as to be mortified. “Of course you were, Mr. Flutter. Silly of me to ask the question, really. Constable Upshot, I can see Willikins over there having a smoke.” He pushed at the open door and dragged Flutter inside. “Does this building have a cellar?”

Flutter was one step away from a toilet break, but nevertheless, being the kind of fool to dig himself in deeper, managed to sneer, “There might be. So what?”

“Mr. Flutter, I have already told you that I’m a religious man, and since you would test the patience of a saint I need to spend a moment in quiet contemplation, understand? I’m sure you know that there’s always an easy way, and then again, there’s always the hard way. Currently, this is the easy way, but the hard way is also quite easy, in a manner of speaking. Before talking to you again I want to be alone with my thoughts. And it occurs to me, Mr. Flutter, that you might have some thoughts about, as it were, legging it, and so my colleague, Chief Constable Upshot, will guard the door and I shall send in my batman, Mr. Willikins, to keep you company.”

Before Vimes was even able to tap on the window, the door opened and Willikins, immaculate as ever, stepped into the grubby room, all smart and crisp with shiny shoes and a hint of pomade on his hair. The three men then watched Vimes heave at a likely ring on the floor, which pulled back to reveal the trap door to a dark cellar and a ladder going down.

Vimes said, “Constable Upshot, I need a little time to think in the darkness. I won’t be long.” He went down the ladder and pulled the trap door closed behind him.

The darkness said, “Ah, commander, at long last. I suspect that you’re here to take a witness statement.”

This is wrong, Vimes told himself. How can you take testimony from a demon, especially when it’s one of no fixed abode? But on the other hand, who needs a witness statement if you’ve got a confession?

Up above, Ted Flutter’s eyes rolled this way and that as he analyzed the situation. Let’s see: we have one young twit who is playing at being a copper, and a snooty butler type, all pink and shiny. I reckon Mrs. Flutter’s little boy is out of here. At this point, at this very point, Willikins, without looking at Flutter, reached into his jacket and there was a slap as he laid down on the table in front of him a steel comb. It gleamed. And it gleamed even stronger in Flutter’s imagination. He took one look at Willikins’ expression, and Mrs. Flutter’s little boy decided he would sit very still until that nice Commander Vimes came back. Out of another pocket Willikins produced the sharpest-looking knife Flutter had ever seen and, without paying any attention whatsoever to Flutter, beg

an to clean his fingernails.

In fact it was only a matter of seconds before the trap door was heaved back, and Vimes emerged, then nodded to Willikins, who secured the comb and walked out of the room without a word. Vimes regained the chair. “Mr. Flutter, I have a witness statement that puts you on Hangman’s Hill on the night in question with another man, said man being known as Stratford. The witness tells me that you said to him that you could have got hold of some turkey blood, but he said that there were rabbits all over the place and he never missed with his slingshot. At this point the witness says a young goblin girl came out of the bushes and your companion struck at her as she was begging for her life—and furiously, to the extent that you yourself told him, in your words, to leave off, upon which he turned on you, still holding his knife, described to me as a machete, so swiftly that you urinated into your boots.

“No, don’t speak, I haven’t finished. Nevertheless, I am informed that you did say to your companion that you were supposed to leave just blood, and not, as you put it, ‘guts all over the place,’ whereupon he forced you to put them back into the cadaver and hide it further down the hill in some gorse bushes. No, I said don’t talk! In your pocket you had a pork pie, which you’d brought from home, and three dollars in cash, which was your payment for this little errand.

“After that you and Stratford walked back some distance to your horses, which you had temporarily stabled in the tumbledown old barn on the other side of the village. The horses were a chestnut mare and a gray gelding, both of them broken down by ill use. In fact, the gelding threw a shoe as you were leaving, and you had to stop your companion from killing it there and then. Oh, and the witness told me that you were naked to the waist when you left, since your shirt was soaked with blood and you left it in the barn after an argument with Stratford. I’ll recover it when we get back. Your friend told you to take your trousers off as well, but you declined; however, I noted splashes of blood on them earlier. I don’t want to go to the expense of sending a rider back to the city, where my Igor will ascertain whether the blood is human, goblin or turkey. I said don’t speak, didn’t I? I haven’t mentioned some of the other conversation between you and Mr. Stratford, because Feeney here is listening, and you should be relieved about that; gossip can be so cruel.

“And now Mr. Flutter, I’m going to stop talking and upon doing so I would like the first words you utter to be—pay attention—‘I want to turn King’s evidence.’ Yes, I know we don’t have kings anymore, but nobody has amended the law. You are a little shit, but I’m reluctantly persuaded that you were dragged into something beyond your control and worse than you could have imagined. The good news is that Lord Vetinari will almost certainly take my advice and you will live. Remember: ‘I want to turn King’s evidence,’ that’s what I want to hear, Mr. Flutter, otherwise I’ll go for a walk and Mr. Willikins will comb his hair.”

Flutter, who had listened to most of this with his eyes shut, blurted out the words so fast that Vimes had to ask him to repeat them more slowly. When he had finished he was allowed to go to the privy, with Willikins waiting outside, cleaning his nails with his knife, and Feeney was sent to feed the frantic turkeys.

For his part, Vimes entered one of the stinking sheds and prodded around in the dirty straw for what he knew would be there. He was not disappointed. Sufficiently close to, the smell of tobacco was just discernible above the stifling stink of turkey. He rolled a barrel out, found Feeney and said, “I think this is full of tobacco and so I’m intending to take it as evidence. Your job right now is to scout out a jemmy for me and somebody known to you as a decent upstanding citizen, insofar as there might be one around this place.”