(no subject)
1:.Abduction
There were quite a few people in Ankh Morpork who wanted the Commander of the City Watch out of the way. He was a nuisance. A variable. These were the type of people who liked to play checkers as if the entire board was red.
But how to get rid of him?
Assassination? No. The Assassins’ Guild refused to take any further contracts and hiring anyone from the outside was simply too messy.
Blackmail? Impossible. Sam Vimes was the sort of man to take blackmail and to report it to the newspaper just to see what the other nobles’ faces looked like the morning of.
Bribery? Laughable. He had a certain way of going absolutely ballistic whenever someone even tried to imply it.
Abduction. It worked. It was simple. It wouldn’t be easy, but it would hardly be overly difficult. If there was one thing the commander loved in his life more than his job (though this was questionable), it was his family. He wouldn’t dare do anything that would put his son’s life in jeopardy, and soon enough they would have even the unbreakable Sir Samuel in the palm of their hands. Moreover, he wouldn’t dare doling out cruel and unusual punishment, even when put under that much stress, they were sure.
But Vetinari would.
2. Adultery
In all his years as a copper, Sam Vimes had seen a great array of crime. In his younger years, he had mostly seen it whizzing past him as he lay drunk in the gutter and tried to look as small and insignificant as possible. One thing, however, had not changed in all his years of coppering. He never ceased to be astonished by precisely how dangerous it was to clear up domestic mishaps. He still remembered the first time he had been assigned to clear up a case of domestic abuse. The neighbours had had enough of hearing the wife scream bloody murder every night as her man beat four different types of hell out of them and had explained to the police that they just wanted a quiet night in, and was that too much to ask?
When the complaint came in, the rest of the coppers looked furtively at their feet and quietly pushed young Vimesy up to the plate. He had been pleased. A man beating his wife was a heinous crime, and one that would be easily solved provided the man wasn’t huge and muscle-bound and equipped with weaponry and young Sam rather fancied the idea of being some poor lady’s saviour. All he knew was that his fellow men seemed all too happy to see him go.
So off he went, flanked by two other coppers - even the most grimy of men wouldn’t send a kid off to a dirty job like that without enough backup to at least make them look slightly more intimidating - and knocked smartly on the door.
To Sam’s surprise, the man who answered the door was not the picture of an abuser that he was expecting. He was a small, skinny man who wore tweed and glasses and looked as if he was more likely to bleat feebly than lay a hand on anyone. It was too easy to lock his skinny wrists in their flimsy handcuffs and put him under suspicion of abuse.
Sam had been in the middle of remarking brightly to his comrades how easy the arrest had been until he saw twin masks of horror on their faces. A frying pan made a connection with the back of his head, and Sam was sent tumbling down to the ground.
“You let go of my husband!” The woman shrieked, still clutching onto the frying pan as if for dear life.
Sam stared up at her broad face and saw the bruising across her face, some faded and some in fresh bloom. She had a limp, and her wrist was bent at an odd angle. “What did you do that for?” He yelled. “We’re helping you?”
“How is taking my husband away from me helping me? Let him go!”
“He’s been beating you!”
The other two watchmen were beginning to back away slowly.
“He has not been.”
“Oh yeah?” Sam clambered to his feet, unable to believe his ears. “You’re all bruised!”
“It’s only ‘cos she’s been cheatin’ on me with that godsdamn mail carrier down the way,” the husband mumbled, but was quickly silenced by the steel in his wife’s eyes.
“I’ll hit you again, I swear I will,” said the woman, waving the frying pan at them once more which was around the time the watchmen (and the offender) had quickly run out and in the direction of the Watch House.
Sam gingerly felt at the egg’s lump on the back of his head and winced when his fingers came away bloody. “What the hell was that about?” He complained loudly.
“Happens all the time,” said the eldest watchman. “You go in, but people don’t like seein’ their husbands or wives or sp-sposses or whatever you callit bein’ hauled off. Don’t ask me why.”
Sure enough, that old watchman was right. It didn’t matter if he was just a two-bit, run of the mill watchman or the commander, he rarely went into cases of domestic abuse without one of the pair threatening him with some seemingly innocuous blunt object.
Contrary to popular belief, horrifying killers and acts of human desperation did not make Sam Vimes stay awake at night. He could understand killers in their own way. What he couldn’t understand about people, about all people, was how willing they were to stay in a bad situation, how willing they were to be beaten day and night or accept a king just because it was easy or to follow the orders of someone in a uniform just because they happen to look the right way.
That kept him up at night. It really did.
3. Arson
Angua hated being in charge of a team investigating arson. Mr. Vimes knew that! Why would he put her on it?
All right, all right, so she knew why she was put on it, but she still didn’t like it. No one in the Watch had a nose like hers as she was reminded many, many times but it was more unpleasant for her than anyone else. She trudged unhappily to the scene and didn’t dare voicing her complaints to Carrot on account of the fact that she didn’t feel like hearing what a valuable asset to the team she was. She felt like having someone tell her how awful it was she had to do that and bestow upon her the correct amount of sympathy.
Once she got there, all the smells had already intermingled.
“How am I supposed to tell what’s what in this?” She demanded, finally unable to keep it in any longer. “All the furniture burned down, and all of the furniture had at least a dozen different smells, and those smells had smells growing on top of it.”
“Just take your time,” Carrot said soothingly.
Angua scowled, but closed her eyes and tried to ignore the budding headache she could feel pulsing in her forehead. She could hardly tell any of the smells apart between the furniture and the smoke and the corpses. She had spent about ten minutes painstakingly taking the smells apart when the sound of footsteps made her eyes slam open only to be greeted by Cheery’s face. “What is it?” She demanded.
Cheery tentatively held up a card with flames inscribed on it along with the words, The Great Firestarter. “We found this.”
“Oh great,” she groaned. “A calling card?”
“Yes, but I think we’ve caught him already. In a way.”
Cheery pointed at one of the bodies they had piled up unceremoniously in the corner of the site which was still mostly intact. “Him. His pockets were full of them, but it looks like he didn’t get away fast enough.”
Angua stared. “How did he manage that?”
Cheery grinned nervously. “I think it was his first time.”
Angua stared in disbelief, and felt the temptation to simply accept the easy answer for once in her life. Then she imagined Mr. Vimes’ face when she told him that the criminal had just left a card. He hated that rubbish.
“We’ll keep that in mind,” she said. “For now, let’s see if we can find anything else.”
She watched Cheery gloomily trudge back to inspecting whatever it is she inspected and sighed. She took a moment to curse her own integrity and went back to work.
4. Assault
Assault was a word that was generally reserved for one species beating up another. It did not, in Cheery’s limited experience, count for when someone damaged a crop. Despite this notable fact, that was what the man in front of her was currently attempting to insist.
She shifted underneath the man’s scrutiny and looked down at her notes once more. “I’m sorry sir, but it says it quite clearly here that that doesn’t count as assault. Would you like to file willful damage of property instead?”
“What’s the punishment for that?”
“Normally they just replace it and pay you a little extra.”
“No! I want the scoundrel who did this thrown into prison!”
“I’m afraid not, Mister-Mister Wintler. Was this your family’s supply of income? Can you tell me how big it was? So I can file a report.”
Mister Wintler scowled. “Small. Very small. But nevertheless valuable!”
Cheery looked relieved. “Then it shouldn’t be too hard to replace. If we receive any notice of-“
“I want him thrown in prison!”
Cheery sighed. “Mister Wintler, why do you want him thrown into prison? Food can be replaced.”
Wintler’s red face turned even redder. “Because without this crop, who’s going to supply The Times with humorously shaped vegetables?”
Cheery looked down at her ledger again. It was going to be a long day.
5. Battery
Vimes really wished Carrot hadn’t reminded the citizens of Ankh Morpork of the existence of the law against battery. He had read out that battery was less than assault and consisted merely of unwanted, apparently painful, contact. As far as he knew, it was a very old rule that nobs used to enjoy flaunting whenever someone bumped into them so they could have his ears or his nose cut off or so that he could be thrown into prison for their own amusement, but it had been largely defunct for years.
Not anymore.
There was a line coming out of the Watch House a mile long, filled with people claiming someone had offended them, often with both parties standing in line beside each other and loudly yelling at each other. He could hear the voices out the door.
“You shoved me! That was battery, it was! Made me spill my basket right over.”
“I only batteried you because you batteried me first! You’ve always had it out for me, ever since my business started doin’ better than yours, you jealous twit.”
“Now you be quiet, I’m the real victim here, you trod on my shoe and broke it right up, and now I have an offensive blister on my heel and someone’s gonna pay for it, I’ll tell you that much…”
Vimes wrote a note to remind himself to tell Carrot never to inform them that it was technically illegal to consume any less than two pounds of meat a day.