'He must've stolen them!' said Sacharissa.
'No,' said William calmly. 'We'd have heard about a theft this big. We hear about things. A young man would certainly have told you. Check to see if he has a wallet, will you?'
'The very idea! And what--'
'Check for a damn wallet, will you?' said William. 'This is a story.
I'm going to check his legs, and I'm not looking forward to that, either. But this is a story. We can have hysterics later. Do it. Please?'
There was a half-healed bite on the dead man's leg. William rolled up his own trouser leg for comparison while Sacharissa, her eyes averted, pulled a brown leather wallet out of the jacket.
'Any clue to who he is?' said William, carefully measuring tooth-marks with his pencil. His mind felt strangely calm. He wondered if he was actually thinking at all. It all seemed like some dream, happening in another world.
'Er... there's something done on the leather in pokerwork,' said Sacharissa.
'What does it say?'
' "Not A Very Nice Person At All",' she read. 'I wonder what kind of person would put that on a wallet?'
'Someone who wasn't a very nice person,' said William. 'Anything else in there?'
There's a piece of paper with an address,' said Sacharissa. 'Er... I didn't have time to tell you this, er, William. Um
'What does it say?'
'It's 50 Nonesuch Street. Er. Which is where those men caught me. They had a key and everything. Er... that's your family's house, isn't it?'
'What do you want me to do with these jewels?' said Goodmountain.
'I mean, you gave me a key and everything,' said Sacharissa nervously. 'But there was this man in the cellar, highly inebriated, and he looked just like Lord Vetinari, and then these men turned up and knocked out Rocky and then--'
'I'm not suggesting anything,' said Goodmountain, 'but if these aren't stolen, then I know plenty of places that'd give us top dollar, even at this time of night--'
'--and of course they were most impolite but really there was nothing I could do--'
'--we could do with a bit of immediate cash, is the point I'm trying to make--'
It dawned on the girl and the dwarf that William was no longer listening. He seemed locked, blank-faced, in a little bubble of silence.
Slowly, he pulled the Dis-organizer towards him and pressed the button marked 'Recall'. There was a muffled 'Ouch'.
'... nyip-nyap mapnyap nyee-wheedlewheedlewheee
'What's that noise?' said Sacharissa.
'It's how an imp remembers,' said William distantly. 'It... sort of plays its life backwards. I used to have an early version of this,' he added.
The noise stopped. The imp said, very apprehensively, 'What happened to it?'
'I took it back to the shop because it wasn't working properly,' said William.
'That's a relief,' said the imp. 'You'd be amazed at some of the terrible things people did to the Mk I. What went wrong with it?'
'It got flung through a third-floor window,' said William, 'for being unhelpful.'
This imp was a little brighter than most of the species. It saluted smartly.
'... wheeeewheedlewheedle nyap-nyark... Testing, testing... seems okay--'