"You have to have money to be a man of leisure," Ford pointed out, to Wye. "So really you'd just put him out of a job." Not that Ford was really going to advocate for the existence of criminals just to give Mr. Woodcroft something to do, of course, but he also couldn't go along with burning down a building to get rid of them. Of course, to Wye this was a perfectly logical thing to suggest; for obvious reasons, he didn't exactly see death as something final and terrible and to be avoided at all costs, so why not off a few of them if it improved the peace of the rest? This was the problem with trying to reason with ghosts, sometimes — they had a different way of looking at things, and a different set of priorities, so sometimes it took a little trial and error before you could find the right thing to say to convince them. Ford didn't mind, generally, but he also didn't usually have to do this with an audience and Constable Woodcroft had so far added nothing helpful to the conversation.

"It's not as though he could actually do anything," he pointed out to the constable, hoping he would see the merit of this argument, realize the tavern was not in any danger, and leave.

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