Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

sir,” he said. “Seem to have lost you there.”
    “I said , Vimes, that one of your men arrested the head of the Thieves’ Guild.”
    “One of my men?”
    “Yes.”
    Vimes’s scattered brain cells tried valiantly to regroup. “A member of the Watch ?” he said.
    Wonse grinned mirthlessly. “Tied him up and left him in front of the palace. There’s a bit of a stink about it, I’m afraid. There was a note…ah…here it is…‘This man is charged with, Conspiracy to commit Crime, under Section 14 (iii) of the General Felonies Act, 1678, by me, Carrot Ironfoundersson.’”
    Vimes squinted at him.
    “Fourteen eye-eye-eye?”
    “Apparently,” said Wonse.
    “What does that mean?”
    “I really haven’t the faintest notion,” said Wonse dryly. “And what about the name…Carrot?”
    “But we don’t do things like that!” said Vimes. “You can’t go around arresting the Thieves’ Guild. I mean, we’d be at it all day!”
    “Apparently this Carrot thinks otherwise.”
    The captain shook his head, and winced. “Carrot? Doesn’t ring a bell.” The tone of blurred conviction was enough even for Wonse, who was momentarily taken aback.
    “He was quite—” The secretary hesitated. “Carrot, Carrot,” he said. “ I’ve heard the name before. Seen it written down.” His face went blank. “The volunteer, that was it! Remember me showing you?”
    Vimes stared at him. “Wasn’t there a letter from, I don’t know, some dwarf—?”
    “All about serving the community and keeping the streets safe, that’s right. Begging that his son would be found suitable for a humble position in the Watch.” The secretary was rummaging among his files.
    “What’d he done?” said Vimes.
    “Nothing. That was it. Not a blessed thing.”
    Vimes’s brow creased as his thoughts shaped themselves around a new concept.
    “A volunteer ?” he said.
    “Yes.”
    “He didn’t have to join?”
    “He wanted to join. And you said it must be a joke, and I said we ought to try and get more ethnic minorities into the Watch. You remember?”
    Vimes tried to. It wasn’t easy. He was vaguely aware that he drank to forget. What made it rather pointless was that he couldn’t remember what it was he was forgetting anymore. In the end he just drank to forget about drinking.
    A trawl of the chaotic assortment of recollections that he didn’t even try to dignify anymore by the name of memory produced no clue.
    “Do I?” he said helplessly.
    Wonse folded his hands on the desk and leaned forward.
    “Now look, Captain,” he said. “Lordship wants an explanation. I don’t want to have to tell him the captain of the Night Watch hasn’t the faintest idea what goes on among the men under, if I may use the term loosely, his command. That sort of thing only leads to trouble, questions asked, that sort of thing. We don’t want that, do we. Do we?”
    “No, sir,” Vimes muttered. A vague recollection of someone earnestly talking to him in the Bunch of Grapes was bobbing guiltily at the back of his mind. Surely that hadn’t been a dwarf? Not unless the qualification had been radically altered, at any rate.
    “Of course we don’t,” said Wonse. “For old times’ sake. And so on. So I’ll think of something to tell him and you, Captain, will make a point of finding out what’s going on and putting a stop to it. Give this dwarf a short lesson in what it means to be a guard, all right?”
    “Haha,” said Vimes dutifully.
    “I’m sorry?” said Wonse.
    “Oh. Thought you made an ethnic joke, there. Sir.”
    “Look, Vimes, I’m being very understanding. In the circumstances. Now, I want you to get out there and sort this out. Do you understand?”
    Vimes saluted. The black depression that always lurked ready to take advantage of his sobriety moved in on his tongue.
    “Right you are, Mr. Secretary,” he said. “I’ll see to it that he learns that arresting thieves is against the law.”
    He wished he hadn’t said that.