brain thief

[holli]

“Let’s say I believe you,” Sam said. “I still want to hear everything you know about the missing parts. And I want your alibi for every date on this list.”

Mr. Cholmondley sagged with relief. “Certainly, officer. More than happy to oblige.”

Sam scowled down at his list. Hettie might be right, but he didn’t have to be happy about it. And if these two weren’t the Rag-and-Bone Man, Sam was no closer to finding him than he’d been before.

As Mr. Cholmondley prattled on, and Sam took careful notes, there was a part of his brain that wasn’t paying attention. It was the part that was trying to think like the suspect, trying to put himself in the culprit’s shoes and work out what he’d do next. Ordinarily, Sam wasn’t bad at this-- he’d gotten top marks in Profiling, back in school, and he’d solved his first murder case by carefully working out the killer’s motives, assembling a profile, and finding someone who matched it. But here he had no apparent motive, which was bloody frustrating.

Mad scientists didn’t have to have logical motives, of course; that was what made them mad. You didn’t end up in a castle in Uberwald, shrieking laughter at a bunch of bubbling tubes while your Igor got the lightning rod ready if you were entirely in possession of you faculties.

Sam absently jotted down ties to uberwald? on the edge of his notes. He was going to have to work up a proper profile, even without a motive-- there was nothing for it.

“Um, officer? Is that all? Can I go?” Mr. Cholmondley had finished recounting all the hospital gossip he could remember, as well as given a thorough accounting of his movements.

Sam frowned at him. “Not yet, I’m afraid. You did attempt to rob a grave, and the law rather frowns on that sort of thing.” But the man looked so stricken that Sam relented a little. “You helped a bit with an ongoing investigation, though. That’ll help your case.”

Mr. Cholmondley sighed. “I don’t suppose it would help if I mentioned that my father is very influential...?”

“No. It wouldn’t.”

“Right. Right. Of course. Sorry.”

Sam handed off the case to a lance-constable and headed upstairs to the squadroom, spreading his notes around him. So what profile could he come up with? Well, the Rag-and-Bone Man probably had some education, if he worked at the hospital: he was medically trained, if not surgically trained. In fact, scratch surgical training-- his early attempts were too clumsy for a surgeon. He was learning as he went, and he’d started by stealing parts he hadn’t thought would be missed-- hence the initial grave robbing. Once he’d determined that he couldn’t do really good work with old parts, he’d turned to stealing from the hospital-- but if he was highly placed enough at the hospital, he would have done that from the start without fear of discovery. So he wasn’t someone really high up in the hospital hierarchy.

He might be from Uberwald, or have some links to Uberwald, although this veered uncomfortably close to ethnic profiling, which Sam was aware was not the best idea.*

What did he want, though? That was the million-dollar question. To cheat death? To create life? Why do it this way? Why do it at all?

Sam stared down at his notes. Well, this was getting him nowhere. Time to turn in, perhaps. A night’s sleep wouldn’t make the Rag-and-Bone Man’s motives any clearer, but it would certainly make Sam’s head hurt less. He swept the paperwork into a pile, and headed for home.

*Although in Ankh-Morpork it was possible to profile to a certain degree without being accused of discrimination. If your victim had axe marks on his knees, the Watch probably wasn’t going to start looking for suspects in Quarry Lane.

***

Gordon and Sam had been friends since the age of four, and best friends for nearly as long. They’d come up through school together, spent most of their time together, shared an intensely embarrassing crush on Captain Angua at the age of thirteen together. Sam didn’t suppose there was anyone in the world who knew him as well as Gordon did.

Which was why it was upsetting that Gordon hadn’t noticed Sam keeping a secret from him.

Sam sat in their flat, reading reports, and watched Gordon putter around the kitchen. It occurred to him that Gordon’s inattention might not have anything to do with Sam, but might in fact be something wrong with Gordon himself. He had been awfully quiet this last week or so.

“Is everything all right with you and Hettie?” Sam asked, and Gordon looked up from the spice rack, surprised.

“Yes,” he said, “we’re fine. I think we’re fine, anyway. Has she said something to you?”

“No, no,” Sam waved this away. “I was just wondering-- you’ve seemed a bit down, and I know I’ve been distracted, so I wanted to be sure it wasn’t that.”

“Oh.” Gordon looked around distractedly. “Where did I put...”

“On your head,” Sam said, and Gordon retrieved his spectacles.

“Things are fine with Hettie,” Gordon said. “Things are great with Hettie, sometimes I still pinch myself because I can’t actually believe how great they are. My mum, on the other hand...”

“She can’t disapprove of Hettie,” Sam said, shocked. “She loves Hettie. I think she might like Hettie better than you.”

“It’s not that,” Gordon said. “She’s been ill again, and she won’t listen when I tell her to take it seriously. She think you can cure anything with hot mustard and a flannel, and I just don’t think that’s going to cut it this time.”

Sam thought about Gordon’s mum for a minute. “Right,” he said. “And she won’t go to the Free Hospital, because she doesn’t want to be a bother--”

“--and because people on the street would talk,” Gordon said. “You’ve got it.”

Gordon had grown up in Cockbill Street. And Sam knew all about Cockbill Street...

Every year, Sam and his dad went to Cockbill Street. It was a ritual that had begun before Sam's memory, and continued unbroken into the present. Every year, as a child, he'd been fussed over by pinched-faced women, who then conferred in hushed tones with Sam's dad while Sam played football with a pack of ragged children. Every year he brought a new football, and every year he left without it, and often without his jacket and shoes as well. And the pinched-faced women, over the months that followed, got things like jobs, scholarships and doctor's visits for their children, loans, and other things that absolutely were not charity, because Cockbill Street people didn't take charity. But from a Cockbill Street lad who'd done well for himself, there were things they could take without calling them charity, that they might not take from someone else.

Gordon had been one of those charity pupils: he’d gone to the Watch School on scholarship, and ended up best friends with the son of the man who’d sponsored him. It had been awkward, sometimes, when they were younger, but the two of them had it more or less sorted out by now. Gordon didn’t give Sam a hard time about going to nobby parties, and Sam didn’t try to pay more than his share of the rent.

It meant Sam had someone he could talk to about the troublesome parts of being born rich and privileged, who didn’t say he was whining or discount how he felt. That was no small thing, for Sam. And Gordon had a friend who knew where he came from, and didn’t make a fuss about it.

But apparently Sam had been too wrapped up in his own troubles to notice Gordon’s, and that made him feel like a bad friend. “I’m sorry, mate,” he said. “Been so tied up with this case and all that I didn’t realize you were in a bad way.”

“It’s all right,” Gordon said. “I know you’ve been busy with the case, and I haven’t much wanted to talk about it.” He grinned at Sam. “Anyway, Hettie tells me you’ve been a bit busy outside of work, as well. How’s it been going with this girl?”

“Er,” said Sam. “Well. I may have backed myself into a bit of a corner there.”

Sam told Gordon about the mess he was in with Meg. When he was done, Gordon sat back and whistled.

“Golly, Sam,” he said. “You’ve done some stupid things before because of the Viscount, but I think this takes the prize.”

“I know,” Sam said. “It was really, really dumb of me. But I’ve done it, and now I’m in this mess, and I’ve no idea how to get out of it. I don’t know that this is something you can break gently to a girl.”

“Not really,” Gordon said. “What can you say-- ‘incidentally, Meg, have I mentioned Ramkin is actually my middle name? Oh, my last name, you ask? Well, you may have heard it around the city, once or twice or on the hospital you work at, but don’t be alarmed-- I’m actually very well-adjusted, all things considered.’”

Sam laughed. “I may try that, actually. It can’t be worse than any of the ways I’ve thought of to tell her.”

He nearly did it, too: Meg came over that night for dinner, and while she looked over his notes on the Rag-and-Bone Man case (Sam had more or less abandoned confidentiality in favor of taking all the help he could get), the words were on the tip of his tongue. Meg, there’s something I ought to tell you. That was all he needed to say: start there, and the rest was inevitable. He gathered up all the wherewithal he could, sat up straight, and said, “Meg--”

“Sam, there’s something funny about this picture,” she said, holding up an iconograph of the patchwork woman. Sam sagged back against the davenport, momentum arrested. “I didn’t get a long enough look at her before, but I could swear she looks familiar.”

“Huh.” Sam examined the picture. He’d thought that too, hadn’t he? His confession forgotten, he shuffled through his memory, trying to place the face. “You’re right, Meg. I thought so too, but it’s not... quite right, is it?”

“No! It’s like, like-- a bad drawing of someone you know. Approximate, but not enough to identify as the subject.” Meg frowned at the picture, trying to jog her own memory.

“But it’s someone we’ve both seen, which has to be significant. If it were just me it could be anybody, I know people all over the city, but, well--” Sam shrugged apologetically “--you don’t know that many people here yet.”

“Then it’s someone at the hospital,” Meg said. “But we knew that, already, didn’t we?”

“Well, we knew the monster-maker was,” Sam said, picking up speed; he was starting to put pieces together. “But it never occurred to me that he was trying to make someone specific a new body; I just figured he was using whatever brain was handy. If that’s not the case, if it was someone he knew, then that gives me a hook, a motive. That makes it personal.”

“I think you’re on to something, Sam,” Meg said, her face alight with interest. “But how do we work out whose brain it was?”

“That,” said Sam, “is the part of coppering I’m really good at. I might not be much for breaking up gang wars, or moonlight chases across the rooftops--”

“Do you get those often?” Meg asked.

“Not really,” Sam said, not wanting to be distracted, “but even if I’m not much for those flashy sorts of things, what I’m absolutely aces at is paperwork.”

Meg laughed at that, and for the next little while Sam didn’t think about the Rag-and-Bone Man at all.