Night Watch - Terry Pratchett [51]
Admittedly, most of the arrests had been for possessing weaponry after dark, but quite a few had been for assaults on the Watch by irate citizens. That was Assault On A City Official, a very important and despicable crime, and, as such, far more important than all these thefts that were going on everywhere.
It wasn’t that the city was lawless. It had plenty of laws. It just didn’t offer many opportunities not to break them. Swing didn’t seem to have grasped the idea that the system was supposed to take criminals and, in some rough-and-ready fashion, force them into becoming honest men. Instead, he’d taken honest men and turned them into criminals. And the Watch, by and large, into just another gang.
And then, just when the whole wretched stew was thickening, he’d invented craniometrics.
Bad coppers had always had their ways of finding out if someone was guilty. Back in the old days—hah, now—they included thumbscrews, hammers, small pointed bits of wood, and, of course, the common desk drawer, always a boon to the copper in a hurry. Swing didn’t need any of this. He could tell if you were guilty by looking at your eyebrows.
He measured people. He used calipers and a steel ruler. And he quietly wrote down the measurements, and did some sums, such as dividing the length of the nose by the circumference of the head and multiplying it by the width of the space between the eyes. And from such figures he could, infallibly, tell that you were devious, untrustworthy, and congenitally criminal. After you spent the next twenty minutes in the company of his staff and their less sophisticated tools of inquiry, he would, amazingly, be proven right.
Everyone was guilty of something. Vimes knew that. Every copper knew it. That was how you maintained your authority—everyone, talking to a copper, was secretly afraid you could see their guilty secret written on their forehead. You couldn’t, of course. But neither were you supposed to drag someone off the street and smash their fingers with a hammer until they told you what it was.
Swing would probably have ended up face-down in some alley somewhere if it wasn’t for the fact that Winder had found in him a useful tool. No one could sniff out conspiracies like Swing. And so he’d ended up running the Unmentionables, most of whom made Sergeant Knock look like Good Copper Of The Month. Vimes had always wondered how the man had kept control, but maybe it was because the thugs recognized, in some animal way, a mind that had arrived at thuggery by the long route and was capable of devising in the name of reason the kind of atrocities that unreason could only dream of.
It wasn’t easy, living in the past. You couldn’t whack someone for what they were going to do, or for what the world was going to find out later. You couldn’t warn people, either. You didn’t know what could change the future, but if he understood things right, history tended to spring back into shape. All you could change was the bits around the edges, the fine details. There was nothing he could do about the big stuff. The lilac was going to bloom. The revolution was going to happen.
Well…a kind of revolution. That wasn’t really a word for what it was. There was the People’s Republic of Treacle Mine Road (Truth! Justice! Freedom! Reasonably Priced Love! And a Hard-Boiled Egg!), which would live for all of a few hours, a strange candle that burned too briefly and died like a firework. And there was the scouring of the House of Pain, and the—
Anyway…you did the job that was in front of you, like unimaginative coppers always did.
He got up around one in the afternoon. Lawn was closeted in his surgery, doing something that involved some serious whimpering on the part of something else. Vimes knocked on the door.
After a moment it was opened a fraction. Doctor Lawn was wearing a face mask and holding a pair of very long tweezers in his hand.
“Yes?”
“I’m going out,” said Vimes. “Trouble?”
“Not too bad. Slidey Harris was unlucky at cards last