Snuff

This offended Vimes to his shakily egalitarian core.⁴ He said, ‘I know your station, Willikins, and it’s about the same station as mine when the chips are down and the wounds have healed.’

‘Look, sir,’ said Willikins, almost pleading. ‘Just occasionally we have to follow some rules. So on this occasion I won’t drink with you, it not being Hogswatch or the birth of an heir, which are accounted for under the rules, but instead I’ll follow the acceptable alternative, which is to wait until you’ve gone to bed and drink half the bottle.’

Well, thought Vimes, we all have our funny little ways, although some of Willikins’ would not be funny if he was angry with you in a dark alley; but he brightened as he watched Willikins rummage through a well-stocked cocktail cabinet, meticulously dropping items into a glass shaker.⁵

It should not be possible to achieve the effect of alcohol in a drink without including alcohol, but among the skills that Willikins had learned, or possibly stolen, over the years was the ability to mix out of common household ingredients a totally soft drink that nevertheless had very nearly everything you wanted in alcohol. Tabasco, cucumber, ginger and chilli were all in there somewhere and beyond that it was best not to ask too many questions.

Drink gloriously in hand, Vimes leaned back and said, ‘Staff okay, Willikins?’

Willikins lowered his voice. ‘Oh, they’re skimming stuff off the top, sir, but nothing more than usual in my experience. Everyone sneaks something, it’s the perk of the job and the way of the world.’

Vimes smiled at Willikins’ almost theatrically wooden expression and said loudly for the hidden listener, ‘A conscientious man, then, is he, Silver? I’m very glad to hear it.’

‘Seems like a steady one to me, sir,’ said the manservant, rolling his eyes towards heaven and pointing a finger to a small grille in the wall: the inlet to the fabled extractor, which no doubt needed a man behind the scenes to wind the clockwork, and would any butler worth his bulging stomach forgo an opportunity to keep tabs on what the new master was thinking? Would he hell.

It was perks, wasn’t it? Of course people here would be on the take. You didn’t need evidence. It was human nature. He had constantly suggested to Sybil – he wouldn’t have dared insist – that the place be closed down and sold to somebody who really wanted to live in what he had heard was a creaking, freezing pile that could have housed a regiment. She would not hear of it. She had warm childhood memories of the place, she said, of climbing trees and swimming and fishing in the river, and picking flowers and helping the gardeners and similar jolly rural enterprises that were, to Vimes, as remote as the moon, given that his adolescent preoccupations had had everything to do with just staying alive. You could fish in the River Ankh, provided you took care not to catch anything. In fact it was amazing what you could catch by just letting one drop of the Ankh pass your lips. And as for picnicking, well, in Ankh-Morpork when you were a kid sometimes you nicked and sometimes you picked, mostly at scabs.

It had been a long day and last night’s sleep in the inn had not been salubrious or restful, but before he got into the huge bed Vimes opened a window and stared out at the night. The wind was murmuring in the trees; Vimes mildly disapproved of trees, but Sybil liked them and that was that. Things that he didn’t care to know about rustled, whooped, gibbered and went inexplicably crazy in the darkness outside. He didn’t know what they were and hoped never to find out. What kind of noise was this for a man to go to sleep to?