Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett Page A

for.”
    Vimes sighed. Detritus, despite a room-temperature IQ, made a good copper and a damn good sergeant. He had that special type of stupidity that was hard to fool. But the only thing more difficult than getting him to grasp an idea was getting him to let go of it. *
    “Detritus,” he said, as kindly as possible, “There’s a thirty-foot drop into the river outside the window. There won’t be—” He paused. This was the river Ankh, after all. “Any footprints’d be bound to have oozed back by now,” he corrected himself. “Almost certainly.”
    He looked outside, though, just in case. The river gurgled and sucked below him. There were no footprints, even on its famously crusted surface. But there was another smear of dirt on the windowsill.
    Vimes scratched some up, and sniffed at it.
    “Looks like some more white clay,” he said.
    He couldn’t think of any white clay around the city. Once you got outside the walls it was thick black loam all the way to the Ramtops. A man walking across it would be two inches taller by the time he got to the other side of a field.
    “White clay,” he said. “Where the hell is white-clay country round here?”
    “It a mystery,” said Detritus.
    Vimes grinned mirthlessly. It was a mystery. And he didn’t like mysteries. Mysteries had a way of getting bigger if you didn’t solve them quickly. Mysteries pupped.
    Mere murders happened all the time. And usually even Detritus could solve them. When a distraught woman was standing over a fallen husband holding a right-angled poker and crying “He never should’ve said that about our Neville!” there was only a limited amount you could do to spin out the case beyond the next coffee break. And when various men or parts thereof were hanging from or nailed to various fixtures in the Mended Drum on a Saturday night, and the other clientele were all looking innocent, you didn’t need even a Detritic intelligence to work out what had been happening.
    He looked down at the late Father Tubelcek. It was amazing he’d bled so much, with his pipe-cleaner arms and toast-rack chest. He certainly wouldn’t have been able to put up much of a fight.
    Vimes leaned down and gently raised one of the corpse’s eyelids. A milky blue eye with a black center looked back at him from wherever the old priest was now.
    A religious old man who lived in a couple of little poky rooms and obviously didn’t go out much, from the smell. What kind of threat could he…?
    Constable Visit poked his head around the door. “There’s a dwarf down here with no eyebrows and a frizzled beard says you told him to come, sir,” he said. “And some citizens say Father Tubelcek is their priest and they want to bury him decently.”
    “Ah, that’ll be Littlebottom. Send him up.” said Vimes, straightening. “Tell the others they’ll have to wait.”
    Littlebottom climbed the stairs, took in the scene, and managed to reach the window in time to be sick.
    “Better now?” said Vimes eventually.
    “Er…yes. I hope so.”
    “I’ll leave you to it, then.”
    “Er…what exactly did you want me to do?” said Littlebottom, but Vimes was already half-way down the stairs.

    Angua growled. It was the signal to Carrot that he could open his eyes again.
    Women, as Colon had remarked to Carrot once when he thought the lad needed advice, could be funny about little things. Maybe they didn’t like to be seen without their make-up on, or insisted on buying smaller suitcases than men even though they always took more clothes. In Angua’s case she didn’t like to be seen en route from human to werewolf shape, or vice versa. It was just something she had a thing about, she said. Carrot could see her in either shape but not in the various ones she occupied on the way through, in case he never wanted to see her again.
    Through werewolf eyes the world was different .
    For one thing, it was in black-and-white. At least, that small part of it which as a human she’d