Fred Colon and Nobby Nobbs, having been rousted from their lengthy coffee break, proceeded gently up Broad Way, giving the ol’ uniform an airing. What with one thing or another, it was probably a good idea not to be back at the Yard for a while.

They walked like men who had all day. They did have all day. They had chosen this particular street because it was busy and wide and you didn’t get too many trolls and dwarfs in this part of town. The reasoning was faultless. In lots of areas, right now, dwarfs or trolls were wandering around in groups or, alternatively, staying still in groups in case any of those wandering bastards tried any trouble in this neighborhood. There had been little flare-ups for weeks. In these areas, Nobby and Fred considered, there wasn’t much peace, so it was a waste of effort to keep what little was left of it, right? You wouldn’t try keeping sheep in places where all the sheep got eaten by wolves, right? It stood to reason. It would look silly. Whereas in big streets like Broad Way there was lots of peace, which, obviously, needed keeping. Common sense told them this was true. It was as plain as the nose on your face, and especially the one on Nobby’s face.

“Bad business,” said Colon, as they strolled. “I’ve never seen the dwarfs like this.”

“It always gets tricky, Sarge, just before Koom Valley Day,” Nobby observed.

“Yeah, but Hamcrusher’s really got them on the boil and no mistake.” Colon removed his helmet and wiped his brow. “I told Sam about my water, and he was impressed.”

“Well, he would be,” Nobby agreed. “It would impress anyone.”

Colon tapped his nose. “There’s a storm coming, Nobby.”

“Not a cloud in the sky, Sarge,” Nobby observed.

“Figure of speech, Nobby, figure of speech.” Colon sighed and glanced sideways at his friend. When he continued, it was in the hesitant tones of a man with something on his mind. “As a matter of fact, Nobby, there was another matter about which, per say, I wanted to speak to you about, man to—” there was only the tiniest hesitation, “—man.”

“Yes, Sarge?”

“Now you know, Nobby, that I’ve always taken a pers’nal interest in your moral well-being, what with you havin’ no dad to put your feet on the proper path…”

“That’s right, Sarge. I would have strayed no end if you hadn’t,” said Nobby virtuously.

“Well, you know you was telling me about that girl you’re goin’ out with, what was her name, now…”

“Tawneee, Sarge?”

“That’s the…bunny. The one you said worked in a club, right?”

“That’s right. Is there a problem, Sarge?” said Nobby anxiously.

“Not as such. But when you was on your day off last week, me an’ Constable Jolson got called into the Pink PussyCat Club, Nobby. You know? There’s pole-dancing and table dancing and stuff of that nature? And you know ol’ Mrs. Spudding what lives in New Cobblers?”

“Ol’ Mrs. Spudding with the wooden teeth, Sarge?”

“The very same, Nobby,” said Colon magisterially. “She does the cleaning in there. And it appears that when she come in at eight o’clock in the morning ae-em, with no one else about, Nobby, well, I hardly like to say this, but it appears she took it into her head to have a twirl on the pole.”

They shared a moment of silence as Nobby ran this image in the cinema of his imagination and hastily consigned much of it to the cutting-room floor.

“But she must be seventy-five, Sarge!” he said, staring at nothing in fascinated horror.

“A girl can dream, Nobby, a girl can dream. O’course, she forgot she wasn’t as limber as she used to be, plus she got her foot caught in her long drawers and panicked when her dress fell over her head. She was in a bad way when the manager came in, having been upside down for three hours, with her false teeth fallen out on the floor. Wouldn’t let go of the pole, too. Not a pretty sight, I trust I do not have to draw you a picture. Come the finish, Precious Jolson had to rip the pole out top and bottom and we slid her off. That girl’s got the muscles of a troll, Nobby, I’ll swear it. And then, Nobby, when we was bringing her ’round behind the scenes, this young lady wearing two sequins and a bootlace comes up and says she’s a friend of yours! I did not know where to put my face!”

“You’re not supposed to put it anywhere, Sarge. They throw you out for that sort of thing,” observed Nobby.

“You never told me she was a pole dancer, Nobby!” Fred wailed.

“Don’t say it like that, Sarge.” Nobby sounded a little hurt. “This is modern times. And she’s got class, Tawneee has. She even brings her own pole. No hanky-panky.”

“But, I mean…showin’ her body off in lewd ways, Nobby! Dancing around without her vest and practic’ly no drawers on. Is that any way to behave?”

Nobby considered this deep metaphysical question from various angles.

“Er…yes?” he ventured.

“Anyway, I thought you were still walking out with Verity Pushpram? That’s a handy little seafood stall she runs,” Colon said, sounding as though he was pleading a case.

“Oh, Hammerhead’s a nice girl if you catch her on a good day, Sarge,” Nobby conceded.

“You mean those days when she doesn’t tell you to bugger off and chases you down the street throwing crabs at you?”

“Exactly those days, Sarge. But good or bad, you can never get rid of the smell of fish. And her eyes are too far apart. I mean, it’s hard to get a relationship goin’ with a girl who can’t see you if you stand right in front of her.”

“I shouldn’t think Tawneee can see you if you’re up close, either!” Colon burst out. “She’s nearly six feet tall and she’s got a bosom like…well, she’s a big girl, Nobby.” Fred Colon was at a loss. Nobby Nobbs and a dancer with big hair, a big smile, and…general bigitigy? Look upon this picture, and on this! It did your head in, it really did.

He struggled on. “She told me, Nobby, that she’d been Miss May on the centerfold of Girls, Giggles and Garters! Well, I mean…!”

“What do you mean, Sarge? Anyway, she wasn’t just Miss May, she was the first week in June as well,” Nobby pointed out. “It was the only way they had room.”

“Err…well, I ask you,” Fred floundered, “is a girl who displays her body for money the kind of wife for a copper? Ask yourself that!”

For the second time in five minutes, what passed for Nobby’s face wrinkled up in deep thought.

“Is this a trick question, Sarge?” he said at last. “’Cos I know for a fact that Haddock has got that picture pinned up in his locker and every time he opens it he goes, ‘Pwaor, will you look at th—’ ”

“How did you meet her, anyway?” said Colon quickly.

“What? Oh, our eyes met when I shoved an IOU in her garter, Sarge,” said Nobby happily.

“And…she hadn’t just been hit on the head, or something?”

“I don’t think so, Sarge.”

“She’s not…ill, is she?” said Fred Colon, exploring every likelihood.

“No, Sarge!”

“Are you sure?”

“She says perhaps we’re two halves of the same soul, Sarge,” said Nobby dreamily.

Colon stopped with one foot raised above the pavement. He stared at nothing, his lips moving.

“Sarge?” said Nobby, puzzled by this.

“Yeah…yeah,” said Colon, more or less to himself. “Yeah. I can see that. Not the same stuff in each half, obviously. Sort of…sieved…”

The foot landed.

“I say!”

It was more of a bleat than a cry, and it came from the door of the Royal Art Museum. A tall, thin figure was beckoning to the watchmen, who strolled over.

“Yessir?” said Colon, touching his helmet.

“We’ve had a burglareah, officer!”

“Burglar rear?” said Nobby.

“Oh dear, sir,” said Colon, putting a warning hand on the corporal’s shoulders. “Anything taken?”

“Years. I rather think that’s hwhy it was a burglareah, you see?” said the man. He had the attitude of a preoccupied chicken, but Fred Colon was impressed. You could barely understand the man, he was that posh. It was not so much speech as modulated yawning. “I’m Sir Reynold Stitched, the curator of Fine Art, and I was hwalking through the Long Gallereah and…oh, dear, they took the Rascal!”

The man looked at two blank faces.

“Methodia Rascal?” he tried. “The Battle of Koom Valley?” It is a priceless work of art!”

Colon hitched up his stomach. “Ah,” he said, “that’s serious. We’d better take a look at it. Er…I mean, the locale where it was situated in.”

“Years, years, of course,” said Sir Reynold. “Do come this hway. I am given to understand that the modern hWatch can learn a lot just by looking at the place where a thing was, is that not so?”

“Like, that it’s gone?” said Nobby. “Oh, years. We’re good at that.”

“Er…Quite so,” said Sir Reynold. “Do come this way.”

The watchmen followed. They had been inside the museum before, of course. Most citizens had, on days when no better entertainment presented itself. Under the governance of Lord Vetinari it hosted fewer modern exhibitions these days, since his lordship held Views, but a gentle stroll among the ancient tapestries and rather brown and dusty paintings was a pleasant way of spending an afternoon. Plus, it was always nice to look at the pictures of big pink women with no clothes on.

Nobby was having a problem. “Here, Sarge, what’s he going on about?” he whispered. “It sounds like he’s yawning all the time. What a galler rear?”

“A gallery, Nobby. That’s very high-class talkin,’ that is.”

“I can hardly understand him!”

“Shows it’s high class, Nobby. It wouldn’t be much good if people like you could understand, right?”

“Good point, Sarge,” Nobby conceded. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“You found it missing this morning, sir?” said Colon, as they trailed after the curator into a gallery still littered with ladders and dust sheets.

“Years indeed!”

“So it was stolen last night, then?”

Sir Reynold hesitated.

“Er…not necessarileah, I’m afraid. We have been refurbishing the Long Gallereah. The picture was too big to move, of course, so hwe had it covered in heavy dust sheets for the past month. But when we took them down this morning, there hwas only the frame! Observe!”

The Rascal occupied—or rather, had occupied—an actual frame some ten feet high and fifty feet long, which, as such, was pretty close to being a work of art in its own right. It was still there, framing nothing but uneven, dusty plaster.

“I suppose some rich private collector has it now,” Sir Reynold moaned. “But how could he keep it a secret? The mural is one of the most recognizable paintings in the hworld! Every civilized person hwould spot it in an instant!”

“What did it look like?” said Fred Colon.

Sir Reynold performed that downshift of assumptions that was the normal response to any conversation with Ankh-Morpork’s Finest.

“I can probableah find you a copy,” he said weakly. “But the original is fifty feet long! Have you never seen it?”

“Well, I remember being brought to see it when I was a kiddie, but it’s a bit long, really. You can’t really see it, anyway. I mean, by the time you get to the other end you’ve forgotten what was happening back up the line, as it were.”

“Alas, that is regrettableah true, Sergeant,” said Sir Reynold. “And hwhat is so vexing is that the hwhole point of this refurbishment hwas to build a special circular room to hold the Rascal. His ideah, you know, hwas that the viewer should be hwholly encircled by the mural and feel right in the thick of the action, as it hwere. You hwould be there in Koom Valleah! He called it panoscopic art. Say hwhat you like about the current interest, but the extra visitors hwould have made it possible to display the picture as hwe believe he intended it to be displayed. And now this!”

“If you were going to move it, why didn’t you just take it down and put it away nice and safe, sir?”

“You mean roll it up?” said Sir Reynold, horrified. “That could cause such a lot of damage. Oh, the horror! No, hwe had a very careful exercise planned for next wheek, to be done with the utmost diligence.” He shuddered. “hWhen I think of someone just hacking it out of the frame I feel quite faint—”

“Hey, this must be a clue, Sarge!” said Nobby, who had returned to his default activity of mooching about and poking at things to see if they were valuable. “Look, someone dumped a load of stinking ol’ rubbish here!”

He’d wandered across to a plinth, which did, indeed, appear to be piled high with rags.

“Don’t touch that, please!” said Sir Reynold, rushing over. “That’s Don’t Talk to Me About Mondays! It’s Daniellarina Pouter’s most controversial hwork! You didn’t move anything, did you?” he added nervously. “It’s literalleah priceless, and she’s got a sharp tongue on her!”

“It’s only a lot of old rubbish,” Nobby protested, backing away.

“Art is greater than the sum of its mere mechanical components, Corporal,” said the curator. “Surely you hwould not say that Caravati’s Three Large Pink Women and One Piece of Gauze is just, ahem, ‘a lot of old pigment’?”

“What about this one, then?” said Nobby, pointing to the adjacent plinth. “It’s just a big stake with a nail in it! Is this art, too?”

“Freedom? If it hwas ever on the market, it hwould probableah fetch thirty thousand dollars,” said Sir Reynold.

“For a bit of wood with a nail in it?” said Fred Colon. “Who did it?”

“After he viewed Don’t Talk to Me About Mondays!, Lord Vetinari graciousleah had Ms. Pouter nailed to the stake by her ear,” said Stitched. “However, she did manage to pull free during the afternoon.”

“I bet she was mad!” said Nobby.

“Not after she hwon several awards for it. I believe she’s planning to nail herself to several other things. It could be a very exciting exhibition.”

“Tell you what, then, sir,” said Nobby cheerfully. “Why don’t you leave the ol’ big frame where it is and give it a new name, like Art Theft?”

“No,” said Sir Reynold coldly. “That would be foolish.”

Shaking his head at the way of the world, Fred Colon walked right up to the wall so cruelly—or cruelleah—denuded of its covering. The painting had been crudely cut from its frame. Sergeant Colon was not a high-speed thinker, but that point struck him as odd. If you’ve got a month to pinch a painting, why botch the job? Fred had a copper’s view of humanity that differed in some respects from that of the curator. Never say that people wouldn’t do something, no matter how strange it was. Probably there were some mad rich people out there who would buy the painting, even if it meant only ever viewing it in the privacy of their own mansion. People could be like that. In fact, knowing that this was their big secret probably gave them a lonely, tight little shiver inside.

But the thieves had slashed the painting out as if they didn’t care about making a sale. There were several ragged inches all along the—just a moment…

Fred stood back. A Clue. There it was, right there. He got lovely, tight little shiver inside.

“This painting,” he declared, “this painting…this painting which isn’t here, I mean, obviously, was stolen by a…troll.”

“My goodness, how can you tell?” said Sir Reynold.

“I’m very glad you asked me that question, sir,” said Fred Colon, who was. “I have detected, you see, that the top of the circular muriel was cut really close to the frame.” He pointed. “Now, your troll would easily be able to reach up with his knife, right, and cut along the edge of the frame at the top and down a bit on each side, see? But your average troll don’t bend that well, so when it come to cutting along the bottom, right, he made a bit of a mess of the job and left it all jagged. Plus, only a troll could carry it away. A stair carpet’s bad enough, and a rolled-up muriel would be a lot heavier than that!”

He beamed.

“Well done, Sergeant!” said the curator.

“Good thinking, Fred,” said Nobby.

“Thank you, Corporal,” said Fred Colon generously.

“Or it could have been a couple of dwarfs with a stepladder,” Nobby went on cheerfully. “The decorators have left a few behind. They’re all over the place.”

Fred Colon sighed.

“Y’see, Nobby,” he said, “it’s comments like that, made in front of a member of the public, that are the reason why I’m a sergeant and you ain’t. If it was dwarfs, it would be neat all ’round, obviously. Is this place locked up at night, Mr. Sir Reynold?”

“Of course! Not just locked, but barred! Old John is meticulous about it. And he lives in the attics, so he can make this place like a fortress.”

“This’d be the caretaker?” said Fred. “We’ll need to talk to him.”

“Certainly you may,” said Sir Reynold nervously. “Now, I think hwe may have some details about the painting in our storeroom. I’ll, er, just go and, er, find them…”

He hurried off toward a small doorway.

“I wonder how they got it out?” said Nobby, when they were alone.

“Who says they did?” said Fred Colon. “Big place like this, full of attics and cellars and odd corners, well, why not stash it away and wait awhile? You get in as a customer one day, see, hide under a sheet, take out the muriel in the night, hide it somewhere, then go out with the customers next day. Simple, eh?” He beamed at Nobby. “You’ve got to outsmart the criminal mind, see?”

“Or they could’ve just smashed down a door and pushed off with the muriel in the middle of the night,” said Nobby. “Why mess about with a cunning plan when a simple one will do?”

Fred sighed. “I can see this is going to be a complicated case, Nobby.”

“You should ask Vimesy if we can have it, then,” said Nobby. “I mean, we already know the facts, right?”

Hovering in the air, unsaid, was: Where would you like to be in the next few days? Out there, where the axes and clubs are likely to be flying, or in here, searching all the attics and cellars very, very carefully? Think about it. And it wouldn’t be cowardice, right? ’Cos a famous muriel like this is bound to be part of our national heritage, right? Even if it is just a painting of a load of dwarfs and trolls having a scrap.

“I think I will do a proper report and suggest to Mr. Vimes that maybe we should handle this one,” said Fred Colon slowly. “It needs the attention of mature officers. D’you know much about art, Nobby?”

“If necessary, Sarge.”

“Oh, come on, Nobby!”

“What? Tawneee says what she does is Art, Sarge. And she wears more clothes than a lot of the women on the walls around here, so why be sniffy about it?”

“Yeah, but…” Fred Colon hesitated here. He knew in his heart that spinning upside down around a pole wearing a costume you could floss with definitely was not Art, and being painted lying on a bed wearing nothing but a smile and a small bunch of grapes was good solid Art, but putting your finger on why this was the case was a bit tricky.

“No urns,” he said at last.

“What urns?” said Nobby.

“Nude women are only Art if there’s an urn in it,” said Fred Colon. This sounded a bit weak even to him, so he added: “Or a plinth. Both is best, o’course. It’s a secret sign, see, that they put in to say that it’s Art and okay to look at.”

“What about a potted plant?”

“That’s okay if it’s in an urn.”

“What about if it’s not got an urn or a plinth or a potted plant?” said Nobby.

“Have you one in mind, Nobby?” said Colon suspiciously.

“Yes, The Goddess Anoia*Arising from the Cutlery,” said Nobby. “They’ve got it here. It was painted by a bloke with three i’s in his name, which sounds pretty artistic to me.”

“The number of i’s is important, Nobby,” said Sergeant Colon gravely, “but in these situations you have to ask yourself: ‘Where’s the cherub?’ If there’s a little fat pink kid holding a mirror or a fan or similar, then it’s still okay. Even if he’s grinning. Obviously you can’t get urns everywhere.”

“All right, but supposing—” Nobby began

The distant door opened, and Sir Reynold came hurrying across the marble floor with a book under his arm.

“Ah, I’m afraid there is no copy of the painting,” he said. “Clearly, a copy that did it justice hwould be quite hard to make. But, er, this rather sensationalist treatise has many detailed sketches, at least. These days every visitor seems to have a copy, of course. Did you know that more than two thousand four hundred and ninety individual dwarfs and trolls can be identified by armor or body markings in the original picture? It drove Rascal quite mad, poor fellow. It took him sixteen years to complete!”

“That’s nothing,” said Nobby cheerfully. “Fred here hasn’t finished painting his kitchen yet, and he started twenty years ago!”

“Thank you for that, Nobby,” said Colon coldly. He took the book from the curator. The title was The Koom Valley Codex. “Mad how?” he said.

“hWell, he neglected his other hwork, you see. He hwas constantly moving his lodgings, because he couldn’t pay the rent and he had to drag that huge canvas with him. Imagine! He had to beg for paints in the street, hwhich took up a lot of his time, since not many people have a tube of burnt umber on them. He said it talked to him, too. You’ll find it all in there. Rather dramatized, I fear.”

“The painting talked to him?”

Sir Reynold made a face. “hWe believe that’s hwhat he meant. hWe don’t really know. He did not have any friends. He hwas convinced that if he hwent to sleep at night he hwould turn into a chicken. He’d leave little notes for himself saying ‘You are not a chicken,’ although sometimes he thought he hwas lying. The general belief is that he concentrated so much on the painting that it gave him some kind of brain fever. Toward the end he hwas sure he hwas losing his mind. He said he could hearh the battle.”

“How do you know that, sir?” said Fred Colon. “You said he didn’t have any friends.”

“Ah, the incisive intellect of the policeman!” said Sir Reynold, smiling. “He left notes to himself, Sergeant. All the time. hWhen his last landlady entered his room, she found many hundreds of them, stuffed in old chicken-feed sacks. Fortunately, she couldn’t read, and since she’d fixed in her mind the idea that the lodger hwas some sort of genius and therefore might have something she could sell, she called in a neighbor, a Miss Adelina Happily, hwho painted hwatercolors, and Miss Happily called in a friend hwho framed pictures, hwho hurriedly summoned Ephraim Dowster, the noted landscape artist. Scholars have puzzled over the notes ever since, seeking some insight into the poor man’s tortured mind. They are not in order, you see. Some are very…odd.”

“Odder than ‘You are not a chicken’?” said Fred.

“Yes,” said Sir Reynold. “Oh, there is stuff about voices, omens, ghosts…he also hwrote his journal on random pieces of paper, you know, and never gave any indication as to the date or hwhere he hwas staying, in case the Chicken found him. And he used very guarded language, because he didn’t hwant the Chicken to find out.”

“Sorry, I thought you said he thought he was the chic—” Colon began.

“hWho can fathom the thought processes of the sadleah disturbed, Sergeant,” said Sir Reynold wearily.

“Er…and does the painting talk?” said Nobby Nobbs. “Stranger things have happened, right?”

“Ahah, no,” said Sir Reynold. “At least, not in my time. Ever since that book hwas reprinted, there’s been a guard in here during visiting hours, and he says it has never uttered a hword. Certainlyeah it has always fascinated people and there have always been stories about hidden treasure there. That is hwhy the book has been republished. People love a mystereah, don’t they?”

“Not us,” said Fred Colon.

“I don’t even know what a Mister Rear is,” said Nobby, leafing through the Codex. “Here, I heard about this book. My friend Dave who runs the stamp shop says there’s this story about a dwarf, right, who turned up in this town near Koom Valley more’n two weeks after the battle, an’ he was all injured ’cos he’d been ambushed by trolls, an’ starvin,’ right, an’ no one knew much dwarfish, but it was like he wanted them to follow him, and he kept sayin’ this word over and over again, which turned out, right, to be dwarfish for ‘treasure,’ right, only when they followed him back to the valley, right, he died on the way, an’ they never found nothin,’ an’ then this artist bloke found some…thing in Koom Valley and hid the place where he’s found it in this painting, but it drove him bananas. Like it was haunted, Dave said. He said the government hushed it up.”

“Yeah, but your mate Dave says the government always hushes things up, Nobby,” said Fred.

“Well, they do.”

“Except he always gets to hear about ’em, and he never gets hushed up,” said Fred.

“I know you like to point the finger of scoff, Sarge, but there’s a lot goes on that we don’t know about.”

“Like what, exactly?” Colon retorted. “Name me one thing that’s going on that you don’t know about. There—you can’t, can you?”

Sir Reynold cleared his throat. “That is certainly one of the theories,” he said, speaking carefully, as people tended to after hearing the Colon-Nobbs Brains Trust crossing purposes. “Regrettably, Methodia Rascal’s notes support just about any theory one may prefer. The current populariteah of the painting is, I suspect, because the book does indeed revisit the old story that there’s some huge secret hidden in the painting.”

“Oh?” said Fred Colon, perking up. “What kind of secret?”

“I have no idea. The landscape hwas painted in great detail. A pointer to a secret cave, perhaps? Something about the positioning of some of the combatants? There are all kinds of theories. Rather strange people come along with tape measures and rather hworryingly intent expressions, but I don’t think they ever find anything.”

“Perhaps one of them pinched it?” Nobby suggested.

“I doubt it. They tend to be rather furtive individuals who bring sandwiches and a flask and stay here all day. The sort of people who love anagrams and secret signs and have little theories and pimples. Probably quite harmless except to one another. Besides, hwhy steal it? We like people to take an interest in it. I don’t think that kind of person hwould hwant to take it home, because it hwould be too large to fit under the bed. Did you know that Rascal hwrote that sometimes in the night he heard screams? The noise of battle, one is forced to assume. So sad.”

“Not something you’d want over the fireplace, then,” said Fred Colon.

“Precisely, Sergeant. Even if it hwere possible to have a fireplace fifty feet long.”

“Thank you, sir. One other thing, though. How many doors are there in this place?”

“Three,” said Sir Reynold promptly. “But two are always locked.”

“But if the troll—”

“—or the dwarfs,” said Nobby.

“Or, as my junior colleague points out, the dwarfs tried to get it out—”

“Gargoyles,” said Sir Reynold proudly. “Two hwatch the main door constantleah from the building opposite, and there’s one each on the other doors. And there are staff on during the day, of course.”

“This may sound a silly question, sir, but have you looked everywhere?”

“I’ve had the staff searching all morning, Sergeant. It hwould be a very big and very heavy roll. This place is full of odd corners, but it hwould be very obvious.”

Colon saluted. “Thank you, sir. We’ll just have a look around, if you don’t mind.”

“Yes, for urns,” said Nobby Nobbs.