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Theatre of Cruelty
A Discworld short story
By Terry Pratchett
Copyright © Terry Pratchett 1993
It was a fine summer morning, the kind to make a man happy to be alive. And probably the
man would have been happier to be alive. He was, in fact, dead. It would be
hard to be deader without special training.
"Well, now," said Sergeant Colon (Ankh-Morpork City Guard, Night Watch), consulting his
notebook, "so far we have cause of death as a) being beaten with at least one blunt instrument b)
being strangled with a string of sausages and c) being savaged by at least two animals with big
sharp teeth. What do we do now, Nobby?"
"Arrest the suspect, Sarge," said Corporal Nobbs, saluting smartly.
"Suspect, Nobby?"
"Him," said Nobby, prodding the corpse with his boot. "I call it highly suspicious, being
dead like that. He's been drinking, too. We could do him for being dead and
disorderly."
Colon scratched his head. Arresting the corpse offered, of course, certain
advantages. But...
"I reckon," he said slowly, "that Captain Vimes'll want this one sorted out. You'd better
bring it back to the Watch House, Nobby."
"And then can we eat the sausages, sarge?" said Corporal Nobbs.
It wasn't easy, being the senior policeman in Ankh-Morpork, greatest of cities of the Discworld
[*].
There were probably worlds, captain Vimes mused in his gloomier moments, where there weren't
wizards (who made locked room mysteries commonplace) or zombies (murder cases were really
strange when the victim could be the chief witness) and where dogs could be relied on to do
nothing in the night time and not go around chatting to people. Captain Vimes believed in
logic, in much the same way as a man in a desert believed in ice -- i.e., it was something he
really needed, but this just wasn't the world for it. Just once, he thought, it'd be nice to
solve something.
He looked at the blue-faced body on the slab, and felt a tiny flicker of excitement. There
were clues. He'd never seen proper clues before.
"Couldn't have been a robber, Captain," said Sergeant Colon. "The reason being, his
pockets were full of money. Eleven dollars."
"I wouldn't call that full," said Captain Vimes.
"It was all in pennies and ha'pennies, sir. I'm amazed his trousers stood the
strain. And I have cunningly detected the fact that he was a showman, sir. He had some
cards in his pocket, sir. 'Chas Slumber, Children's Entertainer'."
"I suppose no one saw anything?" said Vimes.
"Well, sir," said Sergeant Colon helpfully, "I told young Constable Carrot to find some
witnesses."
"You asked Corporal Carrot to investigate a murder? All by himself?" said
Vimes.
The sergeant scratched his head.
"And he said to me, did I know anyone very old and seriously ill?"
And on the magical Discworld, there is always one guaranteed witness to any
homicide. It's his job.
Constable Carrot, the Watch's youngest member, often struck people as simple. And he
was. He was incredibly simple, but in the same way that a sword is simple, or an ambush is
simple. He was also possibly the most linear thinker in the history of the universe.
He'd been waiting by the bedside of an old man, who'd quite enjoyed the company. And now
it was time to take out his notebook.
"Now I know you saw something, sir," he said. "You were there."
WELL, YES, said Death. I HAVE TO BE, YOU
KNOW. BUT THIS IS VERY IRREGULAR.
"You see, sir," said Corporal Carrot, "as I understand the law, you are an Accessory After The
Fact. Or possibly Before The Fact."
YOUNG MAN, I AM THE FACT.
"And I am an officer of the Law," said Corporal Carrot. "There's got to be a law, you
know."
YOU WANT ME TO... ER... GRASS SOMEONE UP? DROP A DIME ON
SOMEONE? SING LIKE A PIGEON? NO.
NO-ONE KILLED MR. SLUMBER. I CAN'T HELP
YOU THERE.
"Oh, I don't know, sir," said Carrot, "I think you have."
DAMN.
Death watched Carrot leave, ducking his head as he went down the narrow stairs of the hovel.
NOW THEN, WHERE WAS I...
"Excuse me," said the wizened old man in the bed. "I happen to be 107, you know.
I haven't got all day."
AH, YES, CORRECT.
Death sharpened his scythe. It was the first time he'd ever helped the police with their
enquiries. Still, everyone had a job to do.
Corporal Carrot strolled easily around the town. He had a Theory. He'd read a book
about Theories. You added up all the clues, and you got a Theory. Everything had to
fit.
There were sausages. Someone had to buy sausages. And then there were pennies.
Normally only one subsection of the human race paid for things in pennies.
He called in at a sausage maker. He found a group of children, and chatted to them for a
while.
Then he ambled back to the alley, where Corporal Nobbs had chalked the outline of the corpse on
the ground (colouring it in, and adding a pipe and a walking stick and some trees and bushes in the
background -- people had already dropped 7p in his helmet). He paid some attention to the
heap of rubbish at the far end, and then sat down on a busted barrel.
"All right... you can come out now," he said, to the world at large. "I didn't know there
were any gnomes left in the world."
The rubbish rustled. They trooped out -- the little man with the red hat, the hunched back
and the hooked nose, the little woman in the mob cap carrying the even smaller baby, the little
policeman, the dog with the ruff around its neck, and the very small alligator.
Corporal Carrot sat and listened.
"He made us do it," said the little man. He had a surprisingly deep voice. "He used
to beat us. Even the alligator. That was all he understood, hitting things with
sticks. And he used to take all the money the dog Toby collected and get drunk. And
then we ran away and he caught us in the alley and started on Judy and the baby and he fell over
and --"
"Who hit him first?" said Carrot.
"All of us!"
"But not very hard," said Carrot. "You're all too small. You didn't kill him.
I have a very convincing statement about that. So I went and had another look at him.
He'd choked to death. What's this?"
He held up a little leather disc.
"It's a swozzle," said the little policeman. "He used it for the voices. He said
ours weren't funny enough."
"That's the way to do it!" said the one called Judy.
It was stuck in his throat," said Carrot. "I suggest you run away. Just as far as
you can."
"We thought we could start a people's co-operative," said the leading gnome.
"You know... experimental drama, street theatre, that sort of thing. Not hitting each
other with sticks..."
"You did that for children?" said Carrot.
"He said it was a new sort of entertainment. He said it'd catch on."
Carrot stood up, and flicked the swozzle into the rubbish.
"People'll never stand for it," he said. "That's not the way to do it."
* Which is flat and goes through space on the back of an enormous turtle, and why not...
[Back to the plot]
"Theatre of Cruelty" was originally written for the W. H. Smith "Bookcase" magazine. The
expanded version reproduced above was later published in the program book for the OryCon 15
convention.
This online version of the story is made available on the Net by kind indulgence of the author,
who reserves all reproduction and other rights to the story. In his own words: "I don't want
to see it in distributed print anywhere but don't mind people downloading it for their own
enjoyment."
'Terry Pratchett', 'Discworld', 'Ankh-Morpork',
'Octarine' and 'C.M.O.T. Dibbler' are registered as trade marks by Terry
Pratchett.
No commercial use of these marks can be made without the written permission of Terry Pratchett,
c/o cpsmythe@aol.com
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