Free Snuff by Terry Pratchett Page A

newfangled variety pushed by a man whose life was, knowing his lordship, quite probably unbearable.
    But hatred tends not to have a long half-life and in recent years Vimes had regarded the man as now no more than a titled idiot, rendered helpless by age, yet still possessed of an annoying horsy voice that, suitably harnessed, might be used to saw down trees. Lord Rust was not a problem any more. There were surely only a few more years to go before he would rust in peace. And somewhere in his knobbly heart Vimes still retained a slight admiration for the cantankerous old butcher, with his evergreen self-esteem and absolute readiness not to change his mind about anything at all. The old boy had reacted to the fact that Vimes, the hated policeman, was now a duke, and therefore a lot more nobby than he was, by simply assuming that this could not possibly be true, and therefore totally ignoring it. Lord Rust, in Vimes’s book, was a dangerous buffoon but, and here was the difficult bit, an incredibly, if suicidally, brave one. This would have been absolutely ticketyboo were it not for the suicides of those poor fools who followed him into battle.
    Witnesses had said that it was uncanny: Rust would gallop into the jaws of death at the head of his men and was never seen to flinch, yet arrows and morningstars always missed him while invariably hitting the men right behind him. Bystanders – or rather people peering at the battle from behind comfortingly large rocks – had testified to this. Perhaps he was capable of ignoring, too, the arrows meant for him. But age could not be so easily upstaged, and the old man, while no less arrogant, had a sunken look.
    Rust, most unusually, smiled at Vimes and said, ‘First time I’ve ever seen you down here, Vimes. Is Sybil going back to her roots, what?’
    ‘She wants Young Sam to get some mud on his boots, Rust.’
    ‘Well done her, what! It’ll do the boy good and make a man of him, what!’
    Vimes never understood where the explosive what s came from. After all, he thought, what’s the point of just barking out ‘What!’ for absolutely no discernible reason? And as for ‘What what!’, well, what was that all about? Why what? What s seemed to be tent-pegs hammered into the conversation, but what the hells for, what?
    ‘So not down here on any official business, then, what?’
    Vimes’s mind spun so quickly that Rust should have heard the wheels go round. It analysed the tone of voice, the look of the man, that slight, ever so slight but nevertheless perceptible hint of a hope that the answer would be ‘no’, and presented him with a suggestion that it might not be a bad idea to drop a tiny kitten among the pigeons.
    He laughed. ‘Well, Rust, Sybil has been banging on about coming down here since Young Sam was born, and this year she put her foot down and I suppose an order from his wife must be considered official, when!’ Vimes saw the man who pushed the enormous wheelchair trying to conceal a smile, especially when Rust responded with a baffled ‘What?’
    Vimes decided not to go with ‘Where’ and instead said, in an offhand way, ‘Well, you know how it is, Lord Rust. A policeman will find a crime anywhere if he decides to look hard enough.’
    Lord Rust’s smile remained, but it had congealed slightly as he said , ‘I should listen to the advice of your good lady, Vimes. I don’t think you’ll find anything worth your mettle down here!’ There was no ‘what’ to follow, and the lack of it was somehow an emphasis.
    It was often a good idea, Vimes had always found, to give the silly bits of the brain something to do, so that they did not interfere with the important ones which had a proper job to fulfil. So he watched his first game of crockett for a full half-hour before an internal alarm told him that shortly he should be back at the Hall in time to read to Young Sam – something that with any luck did not have poo mentioned on every page – and tuck him