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“Who hit him first (кто ударил его первым)?” said Carrot.

“All of us (все мы)!”

“But not very hard (но не очень сильно),” said Carrot. “You’re all too small (вы слишком маленькие). You didn’t kill him (вы не убивали его). I have a very convincing statement about that (у меня есть очень убедительные показания по этому поводу). So I went and had another look at him (поэтому я пошел и взглянул на него еще раз). He’d choked to death (он задохнулся). What’s this (что это)?”

He held up a little leather disc (он показал маленький кожаный диск; hold up – выставлять, показывать).

“It’s a swozzle (это пищалка),” said the little policeman. “He used it for the voices (он использовал ее, чтобы делать голоса). He said ours weren’t funny enough (говорил, наши недостаточно смешные).”

“That’s the way to do it (вот так это делается)!” said the one called Judy.

“It was stuck in his throat (она застряла у него в горле),” said Carrot. “I suggest you run away (я предлагаю вам убежать отсюда). Just as far as you can (так далеко, как только сможете).”

“We thought we could start a people’s co-operative (кооперативное общество народцев = балаган на паях),” said the leading gnome.

“You know… experimental drama, street theatre (экспериментальная драма, уличный театр), that sort of thing (и все такое). Not hitting each other with sticks (а не дубасить друг друга палками)…”

“You did that for children (вы делали это для детей)?” said Carrot.

“He said it was a new sort of entertainment (он сказал, что это новый вид развлечения). He said it’d catch on (он сказал, что это станет модным; catch on – становиться модным).”

Carrot stood up, and flicked the swozzle into the rubbish (щелчком запустил пищалку в мусор).

“People’ll never stand for it (люди никогда не потерпят этого),” he said. “That’s not the way to do it.”

Corporal Carrot strolled easily around the town. He had a Theory. He’d read a book about Theories. You added up all the clues, and you got a Theory. Everything had to fit.

There were sausages. Someone had to buy sausages. And then there were pennies. Normally only one subsection of the human race paid for things in pennies.

He called in at a sausage maker. He found a group of children, and chatted to them for a while.

Then he ambled back to the alley, where Corporal Nobbs had chalked the outline of the corpse on the ground (colouring it in, and adding a pipe and a walking stick and some trees and bushes in the background—people had already dropped 7p in his helmet). He paid some attention to the heap of rubbish at the far end, and then sat down on a busted barrel.

“All right… you can come out now,” he said, to the world at large. “I didn’t know there were any gnomes left in the world.”

The rubbish rustled. They trooped out—the little man with the red hat, the hunched back and the hooked nose, the little woman in the mob cap carrying the even smaller baby, the little policeman, the dog with the ruff around its neck, and the very small alligator.