Theatre of Cruelty

Terry Pratchett

Summary

A Discworld short story, originally written for W. H. Smith's Bookcase magazine in 1993. You can read it here.

Quotes

He was, in fact, dead. It would be hard to be deader without special training.

"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."

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.

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.

Carrot: "You see, sir, as I understand the law, you are an Accessory After The Fact. Or possibly Before The Fact."
Death: YOUNG MAN, I AM THE FACT.

...[Carrot] 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).

Gnome: "We thought we could start a people's co-operative. You know ... experimental drama, street theatre, that sort of thing. Not hitting each other with sticks..."
Carrot: "You did that for children?"
Gnome: "He said it was a new sort of entertainment."