Men at Arms - Gonne Range

He drew his knife and started digging at the floorboards, with care. Eventually he excavated a metal slug, flattened slightly by its passage through the window, the mirror, the floorboards and certain parts of the late Lettice Knibbs that had never been designed to see daylight.


He turned it over and over in his hand.


'Angua?'


'Yes?'


'How did you know there was someone dead in here?'


'I . . . just had a feeling.'


The beggars returned, so unnerved that half a dozen of them were trying to carry one piece of string.


Carrot hammered the nail into the frame under the smashed pane to hold one end of the string. He stuck his knife in the groove and affixed the other end of the string to it. Then he lay down and sighted up the string.


'Good grief.' 'What is it?'


'It must have come from the roof of the opera house.' 'Yes? So?'


'That's more than two hundred yards away.' 'Yes?'


'The . . . thing went an inch into an oak floor.’

***

Men at Arms p152-153