There was a big parade to greet them at Quirm Central, heralding another round of civic and political razzmatazz, all punctuated with more alcohol and ending with a huge dinner in the engine shed. And there were yet more toasts before the locomotive was turned around on the new-fangled turning table to take the Ankh-Morpork contingent home, where they had to be decanted from the train.

And so it was that one fine summer evening shortly afterwards, Moist and Adora Belle sat down to an excellent dinner of fresh lobsters from Quirm brought up on the new Fruits de Mer Express. They were good, and cheaper now than he ever remembered, and the dish went very well with the watercress, which burned all the way down as they ate it.

And afterwards there were fresh strawberries and a soft bed with fluffy pillows and somehow it made all the running around worthwhile.

It began in Higher Overhang in the Shires. People locally were saying they could hear noises in the night … metallic noises, clanking, and the occasional scream of metal straining in torment. Of course everybody said, Well, goblins, what can you expect?

And all this came to the notice of Chief Constable Feeney Upshot, attached to the Ankh-Morpork constabulary. Feeney liked the attachment. It meant that anyone getting stroppy with him would sooner or later have to deal with Commander Vimes or even Sergeant Detritus, whose appearance in this sleepy hinterland had caused such a big stir a couple of years before. So Feeney got on his horse and headed to the Overhangs, so called because in the flaming distant past the landscape had been twisted all over the place with unfathomable caverns and a jagged unforgiving terrain.

Feeney was a decent and sensible copper and such men made friends because they never knew when they would need one, especially when they were a copper all alone, although in theory Feeney had the support of Special Constable Of the Chimney the Bones. There had to be a law, and law applied to everyone, and now the law had decreed that goblins were people and therefore protected by the law in these parts, which, in fact, was made incarnate in Chief Constable Feeney and his constable. Amazingly, the constable allowed his superior officer to call him Boney on the sensible basis that if there was some mêlée or other and you needed help you’d want a simple word to scream.[53]

Feeney had been to Ankh-Morpork and was proud to have undertaken his basic training in Pseudopolis Yard under Sergeant Detritus. He recognized that Boney was slightly more intelligent than the notorious Corporal Nobby Nobbs and so he didn’t grumble. And now he was glad to see his constable waiting for him just outside the main goblin cave where he had an office, regarded by the local goblins as something of a shrine.