Angua (a woman … most of tbe time) and Corporal Nobbs (disqualified from the human race for shoving).
And they need all the help they can get. Because they’ve only got twenty-four hours to clean tip the town and this is Ankh-Morpork we’re talking about…
‘Sergeant Colon,’ said Angua. ‘He was the fat one, yes?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Why has he got a pet monkey?’
‘Ah,’ said Carrot. ‘I think it is Corporal Nobbs to whom you refer …’
*
‘Who was that man with the granite face I saw in the Watch House?’ said Angua.
‘That was Detritus the troll,’ said Carrot.
‘No, that man,’ said Angua, learning as had so many others that Carrot tended to have a bit of trouble with metaphors. ‘Face like thu— face like someone very disgruntled.’
‘Oh, that was Captain Vimes. But he’s never been gruntled, I think’
*
Vimes’s meeting with the Patrician ended as all such meetings did, with the guest going away in possession of an unfocused yet nagging suspicion that he’d only just escaped with his life.
*
Sybil Ramkin lived in the kind of poverty that was only available to the very rich, a poverty approached from the other side. Women who were merely well-off saved up and bought dresses made of silk edged with lace and pearls, but Lady Ramkin was so rich she could afford to stomp around the place in rubber boots and a tweed skirt that had belonged to her mother. She was so rich she could afford to live on biscuits and cheese sandwiches. She was so rich she lived in three rooms in a thirty-four-roomed mansion; the rest of them were full of very expensive and very old furniture, covered in dust sheets.
*
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of okay for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness.
*
The natural condition of the common swamp dragon is to be chronically ill, and the natural state of an unhealthy dragon is to be laminated across the walls, floor and ceiling of whatever room it is in. A swamp dragon is a badly run, dangerously unstable chemical factory one step from disaster. One quite small step.
It has been speculated that its habit of exploding violently when angry, excited, frightened or merely plain bored is a developed survival trait† to discourage predators. Eat dragons, it proclaims, and you’ll have a case of indigestion to which the term ‘blast radius’ will be appropriate.
*
To understand why dwarfs and trolls don’t like each other you have to go back a long way.
They get along like chalk and cheese. Very like chalk and cheese, really. One is organic, the other isn’t, and also smells a bit cheesy. Dwarfs make a living by smashing up rocks with valuable minerals in them and the silicon-based lifeform known as trolls are, basically, rocks with valuable minerals in them.
*
Carrot often struck people as simple. And he was.
Where people went wrong was thinking that simple meant the same thing as stupid.
Carrot was not stupid. He was direct, and honest, and good-natured and honourable in all his dealings. In Ankh-Morpork this would normally have added up to ‘stupid’ in any case and would have given him the survival quotient of a jellyfish in a blast furnace, but there were a couple of other factors. One was a punch that even trolls had learned to respect. The other was that Carrot was genuinely, almost supernaturally, likeable. He got on well with people, even while arresting them. He had an exceptional memory for names.
Vimes would be the first to admit that he wasn’t a good copper,
but he’d probably be spared the chore