Vimes unexpectedly found that his feet had taken him all the way across
city to where the Rust family had their town residence.
They often did that, his feet. He would walk along, his mind on something completely different, and then his feet would suddenly call out to his brain over the intercom of the Vimes Express, metaphorically speaking, saying things like "Next stop, 'the Bucket'". With the autumn winds patrolling every avenue before him there weren't that many people about. That suited him perfectly, since it meant that his train of thought wasn't interrupted by train robbers of any kind.
And now his feet had taken him to the Rust's residence. Here, there were street lamps and actual cobblestones in the road paving, and trees lining the street.
This was nothing like the narrow alleys he had come to know over the years, where such things were unheard of. In his part of town, any cobbles lying around would be used as impromptu weapons in gang wars, and lamps taken down and sold for scrap metal as soon as they were put up. The lamp oil would probably be drunk by some optimist, or sold by Dibbler as wonder- inducing elixir of some sort.
He shook his head. Two different worlds, and he was stuck between them whether he wanted to or not.
He looked up at the house. So this is what I've been reduced to, he thought. He could feel the familiar steam building inside him. Chasing after carts. Well, he wasn't called "Vetinari's terrier" for nothing, was he? He rapped his knuckles against the oak door.
-----
There was a knock on the door.
Fred Colon, sitting at the front desk in the station's reception, despondently stirring his coffee, ignored it.
It had been such a nice job, being a traffic cop, but now here he was, back as desk officer again. His eyes followed the movements of the spoon as it sloshed the coffee round and round the discoloured inside of his cup.
It had been a fine cup, once, a gift from a distant cousin who lived in a small town in Uberwald. It had a picture of a rat wearing a straw hat on it, and the caption underneath read "Greetings from Bad Blintz[1]", but now the jolly-looking rat was almost covered in stains and the text had been smudged by several years worth of spilt ersatz-Klatchian[2].
Again came the knock, more insistent this time.
Sergeant Colon looked at the cup and its sludge-like contents again. As he did so, an unusually philosophical thought entered his mind's cathedral with the embarrassed air of a true unbeliever.
Maybe life is like a coffee cup, he thought. We start out in a pristine state, believing in the general goodwill of mice and men[3], but then we get filled to the brim with black unsavoury muck, and this eventually tarnishes us beyond repair? Oh, well. Nothing that a few lumps of sugar couldn't fix.
He picked up three lumps from the little bowl and was just about to add them to his coffee when he heard the door open. He looked up to see a small boy enter, balancing a scraggly potted plant in one hand.
-----
Vimes' hand was still raised, poised for another rap, when the larger gate doors off to the side of the mansion were opened, abruptly. Two footmen in colourful household uniforms came out, holding the doors ajar.
They didn't so much as glance in Vimes direction, but stood to attention on both sides of the gate. This annoyed him, too. He felt that at least his uniform served a purpose, and anyone wearing such garish colours as these two had no business looking down on him, or not looking at him at all, which was worse, somehow. Since there was no answer at the door anyway, he started moving towards the gateway instead.
He was just about to give the footmen a piece of his mind and maybe some of his more callused body parts, too, when the younger Lord Rust suddenly rode out through the gate. Rust was riding what even Vimes recognised to be a very fine steed, before he, Vimes, had to press up against the wall in order not to be ridden down by it.
"Damn beast!" he swore to himself, and it wouldn't have been clear to a listener if he meant the animal or its owner.
-----
"Damn beast!"
Vimes' words were echoed by Cheery as she entered the Dingleberry residence. She had never had much sympathy for the undead, and it was only after befriending Angua that she had come to view them with slightly more tolerance, but you had to draw the line somewhere, she felt.
The vampire had backed off, retching and gasping for air. He didn't look as if would be up to sucking anything out of anyone for at least an hour. This left Cheery to find her own way through the house and to its illusive owner, which suited her just fine.
The door beyond the hall was of a kind she had never encountered in a private home before, but she had seen something like it in a couple of the newfangled Counterweight restaurants that had sprung up around town over the last couple of years. Instead of opening inwards, it slid aside to reveal a large room where obviously expensive furniture was arranged in what she found herself thinking of as a quietly peaceful way.
The tables were almost the right size for a dwarf, but there were no chairs to be seen anywhere. Instead, there were straw mats. Big pots stood here and there, with various types of bamboo growing in an unruly but harmonious fashion. She noticed that the stone walls were hidden behind paper screens, and that the lamps, too, seemed to be made out of lacquered paper. Beyond the room lay a terrace where she could see someone sitting. Cheery moved briskly towards him.
The floorboards squealed melodiously as she crossed the room, but the kneeling figure on the terrace didn't react. She moved closer and stepped through the sliding door and on to the terrace. Beyond it lay a beautiful miniature garden, filled with startling autumn colours. Seated in front of it, facing away from Cheery, was an old man with strands of grey hair whisking in the wind. Apart from that, he was utterly motionless.
"Mr. Dingleberry?" No response. Maybe the man was deaf? She repeated his name slightly louder.
"Mr. Dingle- "
"Ly Tin Wheedle say: Only man with light conscience tleads heavily on a nightingale flool," said the old man, with a voice as light as the last leaf fluttering on a branch, "So you have not come to lob ol bulgle me. Why al you hele, then?
"Oh. Well, sir," she started, "my name is Sergeant Littlebottom and I have come-"
"Little Bottom? Youl name is . . . 'Little Bottom'?"
-----
"What's your name then?" said the boy in a strange tone of voice.
Sergeant Colon paused for a second before realisation dawned. The boy was using that particular, slightly condescending tone that grown ups everywhere use when speaking to little kids.
"I am sergeant Colon," Colon said haughtily, "and wha-"
He didn't get any further, because the boy put his flowerpot on top of a pile of paper on Colon's desk. Sergeant Colon found this slightly disrespectful, since it implied that the paperwork wasn't handled very efficiently - which it wasn't - and that would have been bad enough, but now the vegetable was moving, too. The flower at the end of the stalk had swivelled towards a certain spot on the desk as soon as the boy had put it there. Colon looked on, mesmerised, as the plant bowed down towards the three sugars, ever so slowly.
"Are you in charge here?" the kid asked impatiently. "Only I was told I'd be paid a dollar by whomever was in charge, y'see?"
"What? 'Whomever'? Er . . . Yes?" said Colon, not taking his eyes off the plant as it inched its way towards the unsuspecting lumps.
"Don't you at least wanna know why I was to get a dollar?" The kid looked slightly exasperated, as if the gross stupidity of the grown-up in front of him was really beneath his dignity.
"Er . . . Yes?" It was stalking the sugar lumps. Colon was sure about it now.
The flower was beginning to open what Colon was now thinking of as its jaws, and two leafs were definitely outstretched towards its prey in a way that they hadn't been before.
"The old man with the expensive cigars told me to follow a zombie." The boy was speaking slowly and clearly, like people do when faced with those slow of mind. "Then he told me to come back here and tell someone about it, in return for which I would get a dollar. Now can I report to you or what?"
There was no reaction from Colon, who seemed all but hypnotised by the appearance. Exasperated with the lack of reply, the boy raised his voice in the universal call of coppers everywhere:
"Hey, you!"
-----
"Hey, you!"
Vimes hollered at the rapidly disappearing rider. The footmen remained carefully expressionless, but managed to convey their condescending attitude all the same. Vimes ignored them right back and started to run after the rider. It was useless, and he knew it, but it was instinct as much as anything.
His body protested loudly, and Vimes came to a halt after just a dozen steps. The horse and its rider disappeared in the distance, and when he turned around the footmen were already closing the gate doors behind them, their smug looks giving the steam cooker of Vimes' mind new fuel, causing it to boil violently. He swore under his breath. No way would the door be opened for him now, if he were to knock again.
Oh, well. There was no point in tiring himself like this. A good hunter didn't chase his prey; he went to the right place and waited for it to come to him. And two days before the bunburys there was one place where he was sure to find all of them, sooner or later.
-----
"Yes," said Cheery, her jaws tensing a little, "Cherry Littlebottom. What of it?"
The reply was not was she had expected at all.
"I once have good fliend, back in the old countly. Hel name was One Little Bottom," the man said, a distant smile forming on his lips. "She was like the chelly blossoms in the spling . . ."
Cheery felt her mouth drop open and hurried to shut it. The old man didn't seem to notice anything, his mind's eye still far away in distant lands.
"'Chelly'?" she ventured.
"Yes, chellies. The chelly tlees in the old countly wele levelled fol theil beauty", he explained.
"Oh, you mean cherries!"
"That's what I said," the ancient man confirmed.
Cheery did a quick replay in her mind of what she had heard.
"But why would you level the trees if they were considered beautiful?"
The venerable one didn't react. Instead, he turned back to his garden, his wrinkled features expressionless like bark on an ancient oak.
"We wanted to mally, but hel palents wouldn't allow it, of coulse,"
"Why couldn't you mall . . . er . . . marry, then?" asked Cheery, unable to help herself.
"They wele vely lich, and my family was not," he said simply, looking suddenly directly at Cheery with a world of sadness in his dark eyes.
They looked one another in the eye for a moment or two, the dwarf and the ancient auriental, before the old man's smile transformed his face into that of a friendly yellow grape.
"Hele I sit and leminiscence without shame," he said, with the same disarming smile. "I folget my own head next, as they say hele. What can I do fool you, officel?"
-----
"Fool you, officer? I won't try to fool you, officer," said the boy, although it would have been obvious to a bystander that he could've told Colon just about anything at the moment without the latter knowing whether his young visitor was having him on or not.
"I followed the deadhead to the docks near the Cattle Market down in the Shades," he continued, while Colon tried to look at the boy and not the plant.
It had now satisfied its curiosity with the sugar lumps, and had apparently found them wanting. Instead, it had turned towards Colon's fat fingers, which were drumming nervously on the tabletop. Colon pulled his hands away as quickly as his dignity allowed, almost spilling his coffee in the process.
"He got on the ferry there, and since I didn't have any money I couldn't track him any longer," said the boy, clearly annoyed with this state of affairs. "He did go into a large building near Ankh bridge before that, though."
The boy stopped and looked sharply at Colon, as if trying to figure out if what he had said would get him his dollar or not. Then he seemed to decide that it wouldn't.
"I bet you want to know which house it was, right? On account of you wanting to make further inquiries?"
Still not taking his eyes off the plant in case it begun moving again, Colon tried to focus on what was being said to him for a moment.
"Er . . . Yes? Yes! Yes, of course we will need to know where the deadhe- where the deceased gentleman went," he said, relieved that he was back on seemingly familiar ground again.
"Show me the money, then," said the boy, himself showing a very clear understanding of basic economics.
Colon didn't argue. Instead he leaned down and took out the old, beat up tin box that was the Watch's unofficial treasury. He produced a key from a grubby pocket and opened the box without ever looking away from the vegetable, and then reached inside it for a shiny coin to give to the eagerly outstretched hand, his eyes darting back and forth between the boy and his flower.
-----
Cheery looked from the old man to the flowers in his garden and back again. She realised that this reclusive old man had probably revealed the one reason why he had become so immensely rich to her just because of the coincidence of her name with that of his long lost love. Even so, she was surprised to find that she was moved by his story, and felt sympathetic towards one of the most feared men in all of Ankh-Morpork.
However, she was still cop enough to realise that this unlikely bond would make things easier for her when investigating the case, and even though she disliked herself for thinking like that, she still knew that she would have to use this fact in order to get what she wanted. She had to mine ore while the lamp wick still shone.
"It is wheely difficult," the old man said, suddenly.
"Sorry?"
"This whole business with the cheliot laces, I mean", he continued. "That is what you came hele to ask about, is it not?"
Cheery's mining train of thought was not only interrupted, but it seemed to her as if it had its contents spilled out in front of the ancient man, too. She decided to chance it.
"You are right, sir, it is," she admitted, and took a deep breath. "The Watch would like access to your family's stables and other facilities in order to try to secure evidence that could lead us to the perpetrator of the crime committed against you and your relatives."
She had practised the sentence in her mind on the way there, but now it seemed clumsy and officious even to her own ears. She winced inwardly.
The old man's brow creased even more, even though this was hard to achieve, but he remained quiet. He looked at her until Cheery felt sure that she would be asked to leave, and then the wrinkles were rearranged anew. It took her a couple of seconds to realise that he was now smiling at her.
"My nephew is not hele at the moment. He would gleatly disapplove of this, but you shall have what you ask fol, officel Little Bottom," he said. "I will make an exception in honol of the chellies that wele, fol the chellies that al."
-----
"Is that all?" the kid asked, disbelief displayed loud and clear as he looked at the coin in his hand. "A measly shilling for all my work?"
Sergeant Colon forced himself to look away from the plant and took a closer look at the grubby little palm, where, indeed, nothing but a ten penny coin was to be seen. Then he looked back inside the box, which he already knew to be empty. In his mind's eye he saw a face like a convention of spots and boils, connected loosely with a body like that of a skinned chimpanzee: Nobby[4]. Colon was at a loss for words. The withering look the boy was giving him in combination with the snaking movements of the mean-looking vegetable had him bullied into silence.
"Well? Where's the rest of my money?"
"That's the King's shilling," came a voice from behind Colon, "and the act of accepting it means that you are now officially a watchman. Isn't that right, Sergeant?"
Angua stepped out from the shadows of the staircase.
----------------------- [1] It was said that the people of Bad Blintz lived in harmony with a clan of highly intelligent rats, but Colon was sure that that was just a load of backwater nonsense. Really! People were willing to do anything to attract tourists these days. [2] Proper Klatchian coffee can only be drunk in thimble-sized cups, since it is strong enough to make the drinker knurd - a state of mind somewhere well beyond the borders of sanity. [3] Steinbeck would have been proud of Colon. [4] Corporal Nobbs had always been one to have a liberal view of other people's property, and ever since the games had been announced it had been virtually impossible to keep him away from the tea money. The betting shops were doing brisk business already, and it was an educated guess that the money-shaped hole in the time-space continuum inside the shoebox was compensated for in one of the bookmakers' stalls outside the Hippo.
They often did that, his feet. He would walk along, his mind on something completely different, and then his feet would suddenly call out to his brain over the intercom of the Vimes Express, metaphorically speaking, saying things like "Next stop, 'the Bucket'". With the autumn winds patrolling every avenue before him there weren't that many people about. That suited him perfectly, since it meant that his train of thought wasn't interrupted by train robbers of any kind.
And now his feet had taken him to the Rust's residence. Here, there were street lamps and actual cobblestones in the road paving, and trees lining the street.
This was nothing like the narrow alleys he had come to know over the years, where such things were unheard of. In his part of town, any cobbles lying around would be used as impromptu weapons in gang wars, and lamps taken down and sold for scrap metal as soon as they were put up. The lamp oil would probably be drunk by some optimist, or sold by Dibbler as wonder- inducing elixir of some sort.
He shook his head. Two different worlds, and he was stuck between them whether he wanted to or not.
He looked up at the house. So this is what I've been reduced to, he thought. He could feel the familiar steam building inside him. Chasing after carts. Well, he wasn't called "Vetinari's terrier" for nothing, was he? He rapped his knuckles against the oak door.
-----
There was a knock on the door.
Fred Colon, sitting at the front desk in the station's reception, despondently stirring his coffee, ignored it.
It had been such a nice job, being a traffic cop, but now here he was, back as desk officer again. His eyes followed the movements of the spoon as it sloshed the coffee round and round the discoloured inside of his cup.
It had been a fine cup, once, a gift from a distant cousin who lived in a small town in Uberwald. It had a picture of a rat wearing a straw hat on it, and the caption underneath read "Greetings from Bad Blintz[1]", but now the jolly-looking rat was almost covered in stains and the text had been smudged by several years worth of spilt ersatz-Klatchian[2].
Again came the knock, more insistent this time.
Sergeant Colon looked at the cup and its sludge-like contents again. As he did so, an unusually philosophical thought entered his mind's cathedral with the embarrassed air of a true unbeliever.
Maybe life is like a coffee cup, he thought. We start out in a pristine state, believing in the general goodwill of mice and men[3], but then we get filled to the brim with black unsavoury muck, and this eventually tarnishes us beyond repair? Oh, well. Nothing that a few lumps of sugar couldn't fix.
He picked up three lumps from the little bowl and was just about to add them to his coffee when he heard the door open. He looked up to see a small boy enter, balancing a scraggly potted plant in one hand.
-----
Vimes' hand was still raised, poised for another rap, when the larger gate doors off to the side of the mansion were opened, abruptly. Two footmen in colourful household uniforms came out, holding the doors ajar.
They didn't so much as glance in Vimes direction, but stood to attention on both sides of the gate. This annoyed him, too. He felt that at least his uniform served a purpose, and anyone wearing such garish colours as these two had no business looking down on him, or not looking at him at all, which was worse, somehow. Since there was no answer at the door anyway, he started moving towards the gateway instead.
He was just about to give the footmen a piece of his mind and maybe some of his more callused body parts, too, when the younger Lord Rust suddenly rode out through the gate. Rust was riding what even Vimes recognised to be a very fine steed, before he, Vimes, had to press up against the wall in order not to be ridden down by it.
"Damn beast!" he swore to himself, and it wouldn't have been clear to a listener if he meant the animal or its owner.
-----
"Damn beast!"
Vimes' words were echoed by Cheery as she entered the Dingleberry residence. She had never had much sympathy for the undead, and it was only after befriending Angua that she had come to view them with slightly more tolerance, but you had to draw the line somewhere, she felt.
The vampire had backed off, retching and gasping for air. He didn't look as if would be up to sucking anything out of anyone for at least an hour. This left Cheery to find her own way through the house and to its illusive owner, which suited her just fine.
The door beyond the hall was of a kind she had never encountered in a private home before, but she had seen something like it in a couple of the newfangled Counterweight restaurants that had sprung up around town over the last couple of years. Instead of opening inwards, it slid aside to reveal a large room where obviously expensive furniture was arranged in what she found herself thinking of as a quietly peaceful way.
The tables were almost the right size for a dwarf, but there were no chairs to be seen anywhere. Instead, there were straw mats. Big pots stood here and there, with various types of bamboo growing in an unruly but harmonious fashion. She noticed that the stone walls were hidden behind paper screens, and that the lamps, too, seemed to be made out of lacquered paper. Beyond the room lay a terrace where she could see someone sitting. Cheery moved briskly towards him.
The floorboards squealed melodiously as she crossed the room, but the kneeling figure on the terrace didn't react. She moved closer and stepped through the sliding door and on to the terrace. Beyond it lay a beautiful miniature garden, filled with startling autumn colours. Seated in front of it, facing away from Cheery, was an old man with strands of grey hair whisking in the wind. Apart from that, he was utterly motionless.
"Mr. Dingleberry?" No response. Maybe the man was deaf? She repeated his name slightly louder.
"Mr. Dingle- "
"Ly Tin Wheedle say: Only man with light conscience tleads heavily on a nightingale flool," said the old man, with a voice as light as the last leaf fluttering on a branch, "So you have not come to lob ol bulgle me. Why al you hele, then?
"Oh. Well, sir," she started, "my name is Sergeant Littlebottom and I have come-"
"Little Bottom? Youl name is . . . 'Little Bottom'?"
-----
"What's your name then?" said the boy in a strange tone of voice.
Sergeant Colon paused for a second before realisation dawned. The boy was using that particular, slightly condescending tone that grown ups everywhere use when speaking to little kids.
"I am sergeant Colon," Colon said haughtily, "and wha-"
He didn't get any further, because the boy put his flowerpot on top of a pile of paper on Colon's desk. Sergeant Colon found this slightly disrespectful, since it implied that the paperwork wasn't handled very efficiently - which it wasn't - and that would have been bad enough, but now the vegetable was moving, too. The flower at the end of the stalk had swivelled towards a certain spot on the desk as soon as the boy had put it there. Colon looked on, mesmerised, as the plant bowed down towards the three sugars, ever so slowly.
"Are you in charge here?" the kid asked impatiently. "Only I was told I'd be paid a dollar by whomever was in charge, y'see?"
"What? 'Whomever'? Er . . . Yes?" said Colon, not taking his eyes off the plant as it inched its way towards the unsuspecting lumps.
"Don't you at least wanna know why I was to get a dollar?" The kid looked slightly exasperated, as if the gross stupidity of the grown-up in front of him was really beneath his dignity.
"Er . . . Yes?" It was stalking the sugar lumps. Colon was sure about it now.
The flower was beginning to open what Colon was now thinking of as its jaws, and two leafs were definitely outstretched towards its prey in a way that they hadn't been before.
"The old man with the expensive cigars told me to follow a zombie." The boy was speaking slowly and clearly, like people do when faced with those slow of mind. "Then he told me to come back here and tell someone about it, in return for which I would get a dollar. Now can I report to you or what?"
There was no reaction from Colon, who seemed all but hypnotised by the appearance. Exasperated with the lack of reply, the boy raised his voice in the universal call of coppers everywhere:
"Hey, you!"
-----
"Hey, you!"
Vimes hollered at the rapidly disappearing rider. The footmen remained carefully expressionless, but managed to convey their condescending attitude all the same. Vimes ignored them right back and started to run after the rider. It was useless, and he knew it, but it was instinct as much as anything.
His body protested loudly, and Vimes came to a halt after just a dozen steps. The horse and its rider disappeared in the distance, and when he turned around the footmen were already closing the gate doors behind them, their smug looks giving the steam cooker of Vimes' mind new fuel, causing it to boil violently. He swore under his breath. No way would the door be opened for him now, if he were to knock again.
Oh, well. There was no point in tiring himself like this. A good hunter didn't chase his prey; he went to the right place and waited for it to come to him. And two days before the bunburys there was one place where he was sure to find all of them, sooner or later.
-----
"Yes," said Cheery, her jaws tensing a little, "Cherry Littlebottom. What of it?"
The reply was not was she had expected at all.
"I once have good fliend, back in the old countly. Hel name was One Little Bottom," the man said, a distant smile forming on his lips. "She was like the chelly blossoms in the spling . . ."
Cheery felt her mouth drop open and hurried to shut it. The old man didn't seem to notice anything, his mind's eye still far away in distant lands.
"'Chelly'?" she ventured.
"Yes, chellies. The chelly tlees in the old countly wele levelled fol theil beauty", he explained.
"Oh, you mean cherries!"
"That's what I said," the ancient man confirmed.
Cheery did a quick replay in her mind of what she had heard.
"But why would you level the trees if they were considered beautiful?"
The venerable one didn't react. Instead, he turned back to his garden, his wrinkled features expressionless like bark on an ancient oak.
"We wanted to mally, but hel palents wouldn't allow it, of coulse,"
"Why couldn't you mall . . . er . . . marry, then?" asked Cheery, unable to help herself.
"They wele vely lich, and my family was not," he said simply, looking suddenly directly at Cheery with a world of sadness in his dark eyes.
They looked one another in the eye for a moment or two, the dwarf and the ancient auriental, before the old man's smile transformed his face into that of a friendly yellow grape.
"Hele I sit and leminiscence without shame," he said, with the same disarming smile. "I folget my own head next, as they say hele. What can I do fool you, officel?"
-----
"Fool you, officer? I won't try to fool you, officer," said the boy, although it would have been obvious to a bystander that he could've told Colon just about anything at the moment without the latter knowing whether his young visitor was having him on or not.
"I followed the deadhead to the docks near the Cattle Market down in the Shades," he continued, while Colon tried to look at the boy and not the plant.
It had now satisfied its curiosity with the sugar lumps, and had apparently found them wanting. Instead, it had turned towards Colon's fat fingers, which were drumming nervously on the tabletop. Colon pulled his hands away as quickly as his dignity allowed, almost spilling his coffee in the process.
"He got on the ferry there, and since I didn't have any money I couldn't track him any longer," said the boy, clearly annoyed with this state of affairs. "He did go into a large building near Ankh bridge before that, though."
The boy stopped and looked sharply at Colon, as if trying to figure out if what he had said would get him his dollar or not. Then he seemed to decide that it wouldn't.
"I bet you want to know which house it was, right? On account of you wanting to make further inquiries?"
Still not taking his eyes off the plant in case it begun moving again, Colon tried to focus on what was being said to him for a moment.
"Er . . . Yes? Yes! Yes, of course we will need to know where the deadhe- where the deceased gentleman went," he said, relieved that he was back on seemingly familiar ground again.
"Show me the money, then," said the boy, himself showing a very clear understanding of basic economics.
Colon didn't argue. Instead he leaned down and took out the old, beat up tin box that was the Watch's unofficial treasury. He produced a key from a grubby pocket and opened the box without ever looking away from the vegetable, and then reached inside it for a shiny coin to give to the eagerly outstretched hand, his eyes darting back and forth between the boy and his flower.
-----
Cheery looked from the old man to the flowers in his garden and back again. She realised that this reclusive old man had probably revealed the one reason why he had become so immensely rich to her just because of the coincidence of her name with that of his long lost love. Even so, she was surprised to find that she was moved by his story, and felt sympathetic towards one of the most feared men in all of Ankh-Morpork.
However, she was still cop enough to realise that this unlikely bond would make things easier for her when investigating the case, and even though she disliked herself for thinking like that, she still knew that she would have to use this fact in order to get what she wanted. She had to mine ore while the lamp wick still shone.
"It is wheely difficult," the old man said, suddenly.
"Sorry?"
"This whole business with the cheliot laces, I mean", he continued. "That is what you came hele to ask about, is it not?"
Cheery's mining train of thought was not only interrupted, but it seemed to her as if it had its contents spilled out in front of the ancient man, too. She decided to chance it.
"You are right, sir, it is," she admitted, and took a deep breath. "The Watch would like access to your family's stables and other facilities in order to try to secure evidence that could lead us to the perpetrator of the crime committed against you and your relatives."
She had practised the sentence in her mind on the way there, but now it seemed clumsy and officious even to her own ears. She winced inwardly.
The old man's brow creased even more, even though this was hard to achieve, but he remained quiet. He looked at her until Cheery felt sure that she would be asked to leave, and then the wrinkles were rearranged anew. It took her a couple of seconds to realise that he was now smiling at her.
"My nephew is not hele at the moment. He would gleatly disapplove of this, but you shall have what you ask fol, officel Little Bottom," he said. "I will make an exception in honol of the chellies that wele, fol the chellies that al."
-----
"Is that all?" the kid asked, disbelief displayed loud and clear as he looked at the coin in his hand. "A measly shilling for all my work?"
Sergeant Colon forced himself to look away from the plant and took a closer look at the grubby little palm, where, indeed, nothing but a ten penny coin was to be seen. Then he looked back inside the box, which he already knew to be empty. In his mind's eye he saw a face like a convention of spots and boils, connected loosely with a body like that of a skinned chimpanzee: Nobby[4]. Colon was at a loss for words. The withering look the boy was giving him in combination with the snaking movements of the mean-looking vegetable had him bullied into silence.
"Well? Where's the rest of my money?"
"That's the King's shilling," came a voice from behind Colon, "and the act of accepting it means that you are now officially a watchman. Isn't that right, Sergeant?"
Angua stepped out from the shadows of the staircase.
----------------------- [1] It was said that the people of Bad Blintz lived in harmony with a clan of highly intelligent rats, but Colon was sure that that was just a load of backwater nonsense. Really! People were willing to do anything to attract tourists these days. [2] Proper Klatchian coffee can only be drunk in thimble-sized cups, since it is strong enough to make the drinker knurd - a state of mind somewhere well beyond the borders of sanity. [3] Steinbeck would have been proud of Colon. [4] Corporal Nobbs had always been one to have a liberal view of other people's property, and ever since the games had been announced it had been virtually impossible to keep him away from the tea money. The betting shops were doing brisk business already, and it was an educated guess that the money-shaped hole in the time-space continuum inside the shoebox was compensated for in one of the bookmakers' stalls outside the Hippo.