Chapter Nine
In which several independent yet equally concerned parties contemplate possibly illegal substances and the Watch sees green
Dr. Lawn sat in his chair, staring at the wall for some time after Madam had left.
He hadn't told her everything, of course. Not his own, personal observations and speculations. Just the... ha... facts. Keel - Vimes probably wouldn't differentiate, but then, at the moment the man probably wouldn't do much besides stare.
He picked up the syringe and spun it, idly, between thin, agile fingers. The potion it contained looked innocent enough, at a glance. But no one ever would have given it just a casual glance. No one, in Dr. Lawn's scientific opinion, could have given it just a casual glance. It seemed to draw the eye towards it, no matter how well concealed it was.
Not the ideal illegal substance, he thought wryly.
And a closer look revealed its strangeness. It was... hard to define. A faint sense of wrongness hung about it. You could say that the jarring effect was just an optical illusion, just a momentary, apparently impossible image caused by logically explicable things like the pattern of shadows and light and the viscousity of the liquid making it slide smoothly across the glass just a little slower than the mind's eye expected it to.
Each of these things was true, but Dr. Lawn, who had stared at it, as far as he knew, longer than anyone else, was pretty damn sure that those solid facts weren't all that was true about the stuff.
He had received the liquid through a most unfortunate series of events that afternoon.
It had started when The Nurse(a) threw open his door (irrevocably reshaping the frame by virtue of sheer righteous indignation) and announced that he was needed in Psychotherapeutic Ward A immediately. He had, of course, trailed after her, doing his best not to think longingly of the brief nap he had been enjoying in his nice, comfy chair and conveniently placed copy of the Times, and obediently taken a look at the patient she had directed his gaze to.
Up to that point, it was a fairly normal sequence.
Past that point, things had started to go bad(c).
The man lying on the sterilized white hospital bed had been rough and coarse looking, with a heavy sort of build. He looked to be about forty, with that dark coloring of skin that suggested poverty and hardship. Supporting this theory were the tattered remains of a rather shabby black suit, the sort of thing a gentleman's driver might wear on business, which still clung to his bony limbs.
There was some blood drying on his chest, too. And of course the flask full to the brim of greenish liquid clutched in one hand had added another degree of strangeness to the whole scenario.
Doctors are, in essence, just scientists more concerned with the squishier ends than means, and sometimes there's not even that much differentiation, and it was in the spirit of scientific curiosity that he'd had the liquid carefully transfered into a sterile syringe. The lesions on the lad's chest were found to be quite shallow, and already healing, so he felt justified in turning his attentions to what the boy had been carrying as opposed to the boy himself.
He was starting to regret his decision.
(a) Dr. Lawn, despite appearances, was not free from the icebergitous trend. He, however, unique among those who had named her as such, felt slightly guilty whenever the thought inadvertently crossed his mind, and did his best, when he remembered, to refer to her by marginally politer names. After trying several variations on a more respectable and less offensive theme(b), he had eventually settled on the Nurse for simplicity and very nearly always remembered to think of her as such.
Honestly.
(b) That Woman Who No Doubt Has Many Wonderful Qualities, The Charming Chocolate Lover, and so forth.
(c) Fine, worse. It was a hospital, after all, with all the accompanying quirky charm, a term that, after some deliberation, Lawn had finally concluded meant 'insane hours, constant, ear-drum blowing sounds of construction, and mad nurses'. He'd felt especially guilty when he thought it, though, which must have counted for something.
---
The sun rose.
And lo, a sea of golden light did flow over the Disc, just like two and a fourth cups of butter that have been microwaved for a full minute, illuminating the world anew wherever it kissed the dark, sleeping land below, in what if Einstein is right was a vaguely incestuous manner, and generally just making everyone's day that much brighter. Literally.
But even that magic-infused sea of brilliance hesitated when faced with the smear on the face of the Disc that was Ankh-Morpork. It seemed to say: We didn't bargain for this. When did we agree to look at this dump? Who knows what they'll do with us? Probably ask stupid questions. Like... the oncoming wave gave the slightest of shudders... what color?
And it's yellow, obviously(a), it seemed to add, so there's no need to look at us that way.
Eventually, though, spurred on by that shoddy set of rough guidelines that passed for physics on that equally patchily defined planet, the sun turned its noble face toward the twin city.
One of the first things the light touched was the north window of the Pseudopolis embassy to Ankh-Morpork. Behind the glass, Madam smiled an incredibly scary smile.
She'd returned to the embassy last night, filled all throughout the coach ride with the warm, glowing feeling of... ah... persuasion well done, but that feeling was fading along with the night, to be replaced with the customary anticipation of plotting.
Lawn had not been quite as enlightening as she'd hoped, though she was fairly sure he'd told her everything he knew of it. He had at least confirmed that they were the same man, and not just connected in some vague and mysterious way, and he'd told her, too, of second-hand reports he had received that testified of a pair of orange-bedecked monks who had hung around for a while, looking mystical, occasionally hitting each other on the head with the broom, presumably some sort of holy ritual, and whispering an awful lot.
Madam didn't see how that could possibly be relevant, however.
So it was time to turn her attentions to a different mystery, until a new lead popped up on the first. And clearly Havelock's advice hadn't been extremely helpful, so no inconvenient guilt, either.
She dressed(b) carefully, took care of her toilette, and descended to the main hall of the embassy, where she spent a few tasteful moments admiring the effect of the rosy glow dawn cast over the cold stone room.
After exactly five seconds of scenery-appreciation had been completed, she promptly turned her thoughts to more practical things.
First, it was time to use some of her special techniques on that coachman, because while she had no doubt that the Watch was efficient, she had... special skills, did she not?
Moments later she was in the stables. As per her expectations, the ancient hostler was up and about, although a better and more accurate term might be 'marginally more vertical than previously and making small, involuntary twitching motions that could, with generosity and the vision of a blind-folded man, be interpreted as an attempt at completing his daily duties'.
"Ah, Wells," she said, gently so as not to kill him via cardiac arrest. "Do you know where Harris is?"
"Dun't know, ma'am," the old man rasped.
Madam blinked. That was odd.
"When did you last see him?"
"Yesterday, round about two in the afternoon, ma'am."
"What? But he drove me to the Palace, didn't he?"
"No'm. That was Clarence, ma'am."
"And you haven't seen him at all since then?"
"No, ma'am."
But Wells saw everything...
"Are you sure?" she asked in a voice as sharp as the Low King's axe.
He met her gaze as steadily as was possible for a man with seventeen as yet unidentified forms of arthritis. "Yes'm."
"I see." There wasn't much of a reason for him to lie, she thought. What would he do with money? What would he be terrified of? He was already a walking corpse.
Not much reason to tell the truth either, then, a little voice pointed out. But the truth takes less effort, she replied silently.
She'd ask around, then, and... see what came up.
"Thank you, Wells." He nodded very gently, presumably for fear that his neck might snap with excessive pressure, the incessant fear of the primate and especially reasonable in a speciman such as Wells. She gestured vaguely at him, trying to convey a 'good man, well done' and a 'be very sure you know who you're dealing with in one', to cover her bases. It ended up as a curious sort of wiggle of the thumbs and a kind of snaking palm movement. Not, she decided, one for the books, and promptly fled the dank little outpost.
(a) It was just as well for the disgruntled sea of light that no Morporkian citizen could hear its thoughts at that moment, because they would inevitably have pointed out that it was actually more a sort of salmon color, tinging purple in some bits.
(b) In a lavender gown, because she was feeling spontaneous and creative today.
---
"Pear shaped, that's what," said Angua as she came down from what nobody noticed was the general direction of the Captain's room.
"Er... sorry?" said Carrot, giving her a blank look.
"Pear shaped. This whole damn business is, I mean."
"Yes?" said the Captain, politely uncomprehending.
"Never mind," she said, sighing. "Anything turn up while I was in the den?" Carrot gave her a reproachful look. "Don't tell me you haven't got used to the Office Humor by now, Carrot, I shan't believe it."
"Nothing, really. Dr. Lawn said that all he'd learned after an hour of work was that Mister Vimes apparently no longer deals well with the word 'universe', so be sure not to use it around him, and that he wishes us luck, poor," Carrot reeled off, with the conscientiousness of one who has never heard of the word 'paraphrase' and wouldn't understand it if he had, "b-stards."
Angua covered her smile with one hand. "Not a bad sort for a doctor?"
"I'm sure that Dr. Lawn is a very fine man and doctor. Lady Sybil and Mister Vimes no doubt think the world of him."
Or at least that sizable portion of it which could be bought with 100,000 AM$, Angua thought, but with only half-hearted cynicism. There were other things on both their minds.
"Did Pediment report yet?"
"Yes, I've got it here." He reached for a neatly organized stack apparently arranged according to size, shape and color. "Uh, he says that Louisa closed the shades after Madam Meserole left and he couldn't make out anything through it."
"Really? That's a little bit suspicious, isn't it? It's been very warm..."
"She may have been too hot," said Carrot, but doubtfully.
"Yes, and the gnome we found concussed under that particularly big drift of papers with a bunch of spare change may have been an innocent, upstanding citizen who happened to have the misfortune to come to complain at Mister Vimes and then had paper work put on it." She thought of Vimes' desk. "Well, it could have happened," she conceded, "but even with Mister Vimes I kind of doubt it. Huh. Hubert."
"I don't know what you mean by that, Sergeant," say Carrot, who was a loyal soul.
The door opened, and both officers turned.
A very harried-looking Lawn came in. "Captain Carrot?"
"Hello, Dr. Lawn, is there something-" then he stopped, because Angua had gone pale and was staring at the doctor's case.
"That's it," she breathed.
"What?" Carrot looked from Angua to the doctor and back. "Just a moment, sir, we'll be right back..."
He steered her into the canteen and shut the door, firmly.
"The chemical," she said. "The one Sally sensed and I smelled."
"Will you be all right?"
She managed a weak smile at that. "I'll be fine, Carrot. It's not as strong. He's probably put it in a sterile container, by the smell."
He hesitated. "If you're sure..."
"Go on."
The Captain carefully guided her to the bench, and gave her one last concerned look before stepping back outside.
Dr. Lawn had too many things on his mind to register all this strange behavior on anything more than a subconscious level. "Read this," he snapped, as soon as the man was paying attention to him, and thrust the letter at him.
"It's blackmail," said Carrot slowly, after a minute of intense concentration.
"You amaze me."
"Where did you find this, sir?"
He explained. Carrot listened very, very hard. At the appropriate point in the narrative, he took out the syringe, which was promptly (if politely) snatched up and examined closely before being locked in the Evidence safe. When he had finished, the Watchman said gravely,
"And this happened yesterday?"
Mossy winced slightly. "Er, yes. I only just found the letter this morning, though."
"You didn't think these... cuts warranted going to the Watch, sir?"
"Not really, no. I've been a doctor in Ankh-Morpork for the past forty years, Captain. Old habits die hard."
Carrot ignored this, and said instead "Thank you for informing us, Doctor. It will no doubt aid us in our inquiries."
Dr. Lawn was disarmed by the solemn expression on the man's face, but he recovered quickly. "The man isn't really fit to be moved quite yet, but you can come in if you want to see him for yourselves, I'm sure."
"Your offer is appreciated. We will certainly let you know if anything turns up."
Lawn, who was at this point seriously unnerved, elected to nod weakly and back away slowly before limping out of the building.
Carrot watched him go, and then read the letter again. The details of the threat and the payment were unclear, but it was addressed to Master James, and signed by, if he was not much mistaken, one significant coachman.