Three faces locked in expressions of concentrated thought. This was Nobby they were talking about. There were so many questions they were not going to ask.
‘Has he shown you the tricks he can do with his spots?’ Angua said.
‘Yes. I thought I’d widdle myself! He’s so funny!’
Angua stared into her drink. Cheery coughed. Sally studied the menu.
‘And he’s very dependable,’ said Tawneee. And, as if dimly aware that this was still not sufficient, she added sadly, ‘If you must know, he’s the first boy who’s ever asked me out.’
Sally and Angua breathed out together. Light dawned. Ah, that was the problem. And this one’s a baaaad case.
‘I mean, my hair’s all over the place, my legs are too long and I know my bosom is far too—’ Tawneee went on, but Sally had raised a quieting hand.
‘First point, Tawneee—’
‘My real name’s Betty,’ said Tawneee, blowing a nose so exquisite that the greatest sculptor in the world would have wept to carve it. It went Blort.
‘First point, then… Betty,’ Sally managed, struggling to use the name, ‘is that no woman under forty-five—’
‘Fifty,’ Angua corrected.
‘Right, fifty… no woman under fifty uses the word “bosom” to name anything connected to her. You just don’t do it.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ Tawneee sniffed.
‘It’s a fact,’ said Angua. And, oh dear, how to begin to explain the jerk syndrome? To someone like Tawneee, on whom the name Betty stuck like rocks to a ceiling? This wasn’t just a case of the jerk syndrome, this was it, the quintessential, classic, pure platonic example, which should be stuffed and mounted and preserved as a teaching aid for students in the centuries to come. And she was happy with Nobby!
‘What I’ve got to tell you now is…’ she began, and faded in the face of the task, ‘is… Look, shall we have another drink? What’s the next cocktail on the menu?’
Cheery peered at it. ‘Pink, Big and Wobbly,’ she announced.
‘Classy! We’ll have four!’
Fred Colon peered through the bars. He was, on the whole, a pretty good jailer: he always had a pot of tea on the go, he was as a general rule amiably disposed to most people, he was too slow to be easily fooled and he kept the cell keys in a tin box in the bottom drawer of his desk, a long way out of reach of any stick, hand, dog, cunningly thrown belt or trained Klatchian monkey spider.[13]
He was a bit worried about this dwarf. You got all sorts in jail, and they often yelled a bit but with this one he didn’t know what was worse, the sobbing or the silence. He’d put a candlestick on a stool by the bars, too, because the dwarf carried on alarmingly if there wasn’t enough light.
He stirred the tea reflectively and handed a mug to Nobby.
‘We’ve got a rum ’un here, I reckon,’ he said. ‘A dwarf that’s scared of the dark? Not right in the head, then. Wouldn’t touch his tea and biscuit. What do you think?’
‘I think I’ll have his biscuit,’ said Nobby, reaching over to the plate.
‘Why’re you down here, anyway?’ said Fred. ‘I’m surprised you ain’t out there a-ogling of young women.’
‘Tawneee’s going out boozing with the girls tonight,’ said Nobby.
‘Ah, you want to warn her about that sort of thing,’ said Fred Colon. ‘You know what it’s like in the centre when the pubs and clubs empty. There’s throwin’ up and yellin’ and unladylike behaviour and takin’ their vests off and I don’t know what. ’S called… ’ he scratched his head ‘… minge drinking.’
‘She’s only gone out with Angua and Sally and Cheery, sarge,’ said Nobby, taking another biscuit.
‘Oooh, you wanna watch that, Nobby. Women gangin’ up on men—’ Fred paused. ‘A vampire and a werewolf out on the razzle? Take my tip, lad, stay indoors tonight. And if they start behaving in—’
He stopped as the sound of Sam Vimes’s voice came down the spiral stone steps, followed closely by its owner.
‘So I’ve got to stop them forming a block, right?’
‘If you’re playing the troll side, yes,’ said a new voice. ‘A tight group of dwarfs is bad news for trolls.’
‘Trolls shove, dwarfs throw.’
‘Right.’
‘And the central rock, no one can jump that, right?’ said Vimes.
‘Yes.’
‘I still think the dwarfs have it all their own way.’
‘We shall see. The important thing—’
Vimes stopped when he saw Nobby and Colon. ‘Okay, lads, I’ll talk to the prisoner now,’ he said. ‘How is he?’
Fred indicated the hunched figure on the narrow bunk in the corner cell.
‘Captain Carrot tried talking to him for nearly half an hour, and you know he’s got a way with people,’ he said. ‘Didn’t get as much as a sentence out of him. I read him his rights but don’t ask me if he understood ’em. He didn’t want his tea and biscuit, at any rate. That’s Rights 5 and 5b,’ he added, looking Bashfullsson up and down. ‘He gets Right 5c only if we’ve got Teatime Assortment.’
‘Can he walk?’ said Vimes.
‘He sort of shuffles, sir.’
‘Fetch him out, then,’ said Vimes, and seeing Fred’s enquiring look at Bashfullsson he went on: ‘This gentleman is here to make sure we don’t use the rubber truncheon, sergeant.’
‘Didn’t know we had one, Mister Vimes,’ said Fred.
‘We haven’t,’ said Vimes. ‘No point in hitting ’em with something that bounces, eh?’ he added, looking at Bashfullsson, who smiled, once again, his strange little smile.
One candle burned on the table. For some reason Fred had seen fit to put another on a stool near the one occupied cell.
‘Isn’t it a bit dark in here, Fred?’ said Vimes, as he pushed aside the debris of mugs and old newspapers that covered most of the table.
‘Yessir. The dwarfs came and nicked some of our candles to put round their heathe— that nasty sign,’ said Fred, with a nervous look at Bashfullsson. ‘Sorry, sir.’
‘I don’t know why we can’t just burn it,’ grumbled Vimes, setting out the Thud board.
‘That would be dangerous, now that the Summoning Dark is in the world,’ said Bashfullsson.
‘You believe in that stuff?’ said Vimes.
‘Believe? No,’ said the grag. ‘I just know it exists. The troll pieces go all round the central stone, sir,’ he added helpfully.
Populating the board with its little warriors took some time, but so did the arrival of Helmclever. With Fred Colon steering him carefully by a shoulder he walked like someone in a dream, his eyes turned up so that they mostly showed the whites. His iron boots scraped on the flagstones.
Fred pushed him gently into a chair and put the second candle beside him. Like magic, the dwarf’s eyes focused on the little stone armies to the exclusion of everything else in the jail.
‘We’re playing a game, Mr Helmclever,’ said Vimes quietly. ‘And you can choose your side.’
Helmclever reached out with a trembling hand and touched a piece. A troll. A dwarf had chosen to play as the trolls. Vimes gave the hovering Bashfullsson a questioning glance, and got another smile in return.
Okay, you got as many of the little sods as possible in a defensive huddle, right? Vimes’s hand hesitated, and shifted a dwarf across the board. The click as he placed it was echoed by the one made by the movement of Helmclever’s next troll. The dwarf looked sleepy, but his hand had moved with snake speed.
‘Who killed the four mining dwarfs, Helmclever?’ said Vimes softly. ‘Who killed the boys from the city?’