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.