Three left… three right…
Up from some cerebral basement came strains of a boozy band steaming into a strutting number just made for the routine. The throbbing entered her and began to set its own pace, always progressively faster, although pausing intermittently to tease with a twang of silence before the downbeat. She abandoned herself to it. She was lifted to her toes and the petticoat fell away forgotten.
Lisbet was aware of only one thing: a sense of wonder as she looked into the mirror and realized That’s me.
Bump-bump!
God, yes, and she would share this discovery with the next man of her choice; an older man, a proper man who would rejoice with her-not shrink back startled and fearful of Sin.
Crash.
Her foot had snagged the cord to the table lamp. It lay on the floor with its china base shattered and its shade off but still working. The harsh light, striking upward, made her recoil.
Or rather the exaggerated shadows did, for they were vindictive in their illusion of aging; drawing muscle, sinew, and knobs of bone to the surface, while molding the swell of the stomach into a potbelly beneath the hollowed rib cage.
She barely recognized the face with its jutting chin, high cheekbones, and-
In that instant, Lisbet knew whose hard blue eyes had stared from the reflection all along, considering her body from every angle. They were his.
“I won’t change,” she whispered. “I’ll never change as much as this. Some people don’t.”
Knowing a lot about bodies, the eyes stayed steady.
Zondi wound up his gramophone and was reaching for the “Golden City Blues” when the twins came pelting in, shrieking something unintelligible. Miriam gave them a clout apiece and they calmed down enough to pant in unison, “Uncle Argyle is getting killed!”
Their father ran straight out into the night in his shirt and underpants without pausing to as much as slip on his shoes. There were no street lights so he had to rely on sound to indicate where the trouble was. That was easy, however, as short, weak blasts on a police whistle were coming from the next street.
He sprinted around the corner and found a crowd jibbering in high excitement outside the home of Nursing Sister Gertrude Dhalmini, an expensive whore when she was not on duty at the clinic advising on birth control.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
Everyone wanted to tell him, but by beginning at the beginning. He listened only for as long as it took him to push his way through. Even so, they conveyed a great deal.
Apparently Sister Gertrude had been entertaining an enormous witch doctor of incredible wealth-that was where his Lincoln had been parked-and unbridled savagery. All had been perfectly amicable until he had removed the trousers of his tweed suit, whereupon Sister Gertrude’s training alerted her to a definite public health hazard. She told him this and refused to run the risk of infection. Out of personal or professional pique, nobody was quite sure which, he had then beaten her brutally before leaving. Sister Gertrude, whose job gave her an extension line, rang the check-out gate and had him arrested for assault. She was just telling her neighbors about all this when the witch doctor returned on foot-having escaped custody with the declared intention of dissecting her. The neighbors had scattered. Argyle Mslope had gone in alone.
The whistling had stopped.
Zondi approached the door with one slight advantage: every house in Kwela Village was identical so he knew it would open into the living room and the bedroom would be to his left. The very nature of the case suggested he would find her-and the others-in the latter. He found her in both. The witch doctor had been as good as his word.
And was about to behead the reeling figure of Argyle with the same ax when Zondi leaped upon him from behind, clamping an elbow around the massive, fat neck. He could hardly encompass it.
Like a cheetah on the back of a maddened buffalo, Zondi realized that he had bitten into a lot more than he could chew. With a toss of his horned headdress, the witch doctor broke into a short charge, spun round, slammed backwards into the concrete-block wall.
Zondi collapsed with the breath knocked from him. He saw the ankles start to turn and grabbed them, leaping to his own feet and heaving. The witch doctor sprawled, letting the ax fly out through a window. A roar of delight came from outside.
Argyle blew his whistle and fell over a chair, dazed, bleeding badly. His spear was nowhere to be seen.
The quick glance around cost Zondi dearly. The witch doctor brought him down with a kick from the floor to the groin. Then tried to bite his nose off-the foul spittle pouring into Zondi’s own gasping mouth as he held him up and away.
Zondi was fighting for his life. It was not the first time, so he knew what to do. The problem was finding the right opportunity.
The prospect of which diminished almost entirely when the witch doctor relaxed his enormous weight, pinning him down as effectively as a pile of cement bags, and shifted his grip to the throat.
In a pink blaze of light Zondi saw-or thought he saw-the lieutenant enter the room.
“Shoot!” he gurgled.
But what made him uncertain was the fact that the ghostly blond figure failed to fire the gun in its hand. Instead it disappeared into the bedroom.
“Die, die, die!” the witch doctor bellowed, oblivious to any further intrusion.
This, too, led Zondi to believe he was going faster than he supposed. The pain was excruciating. He was no longer able to squeeze back. A wave of nausea swept up him and, finding the way blocked, spilled into his lungs. They tried to burst. His brain burst instead and everything went black.
For a very long moment, in the middle of which he heard the most terrible scream and wondered how he had managed it, he counted his children.
Then he sat up and was sick. He was alive and the witch doctor was dying.
That was all he needed to know until he ceased retching. And then he took a proper look.
The beast’s massive body lay on its side in a heap, heaving in spasm, with its tail sticking out straight. Not a tail at all, but the shaft of Argyle’s spear. And holding the end of it, Argyle himself, out cold.
Kramer preferred to sit outside in the Chev, so Miriam brought his tea out using her washboard for a tray, disguising it with a dishcloth.
“Pity I missed the fun,” he said to Zondi, raising his cup in salute. “Might have evened up our score a little. I still owe you for that time at the brickworks-that bugger with a knife in his bike pump.”
“So the score isn’t even, boss?” Zondi asked with a slight smile.
“No, man, and I’m glad it wasn’t this time. If I’d got mixed up in that business it would have been statements and inquests and all that rubbish right in the middle of this other job.”
“Argyle Mslope is a brave man to go on fighting with such wounds.”
“You’ve said it. A brave man to go in there in the first place.”
“I spoke with the doctor, boss.”
“Oh, yes?”
“He said he did not know how Argyle could do such a thing.”
“I don’t think that’s a problem. The bastard had his bum stuck in the air-must’ve done. Easy enough target even if you are half out.”
“Because, boss, Argyle’s right hand was nearly cut off already.”
“ Ach, no! I didn’t notice. So much blood about. Did the doctor say what his chances are?”
“Not very good.”
“Of course this will make sure his widow gets a proper pension-in the line of duty as they say.”
Zondi sipped his tea slowly.
“What are you thinking?” Kramer asked.
“Nothing, boss. Just that Argyle didn’t have his spear in the living room.”
“Christ, kaffir! I tell you we’re not getting sidetracked onto this case. There’s a lot you’ve got to hear from me and a lot we must do. That’s why I came by your place tonight-I want you to start at Greenside first thing. It could be we’re at last making some pro
gress.”
The mortuary van passed by to collect together Sister Gertrude, a good nurse notwithstanding.
9
While waiting for Zondi to report back, Kramer had Pembrook fetch the toffee tin from the safe so that they could study its contents afresh in the light of a drizzly morning. Little wonder people caught colds in such an unpredictable climate.
“Pull over Zondi’s stool but don’t sit too close to me,” he said.
Pembrook complied with a sniff.
“I went round to the Swanepoels’ at breakfast time, sir,” he said. “That reference the father made to Boetie oversleeping one Sunday and missing church for the first time-it was on November the sixteenth.”
“Fine! Now we have narrowed it right down to the morning after, so to speak.”
“And that reminded Bonita that Boetie had been in high spirits the morning before. He’d exchanged his bike for a better one with a dynamo lamp-said he’d be out late testing it.”
“Even better. But it still beats me why his parents never asked him what he was up to.”
“They keep saying the same thing: they trusted him and-”
“Who, man?”
“God.”
Kramer wrote the name on his blotter. Then he opened the tin, giving two of the squares of tissue to Pembrook and opening the other one out himself.
“I have a feeling,” he said, “that these things might tell us a lot about what our young friend knew. The trouble is finding out how they work.”
“Well, isn’t the first thing deciding whether it’s a code or a cipher, sir?”
“Hey? Come again? And stick to Afrikaans this time.”
The probationer squirmed.
“I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t know the word for ‘cipher.’ ”
“What does it mean, then?”
“That you give each letter of the alphabet a number or something, perhaps switch the letters around, and write like that.”
“Bugger it, Pembrook, that is a code!”
“No, sir-at least not according to what I read once. A code is where one letter stands for a whole word-or where a drawing, say a circle, stands for ‘battleship.’ The trouble is you can’t write just anything and you must have a codebook to do it.”
Kramer made a show of peering into the tin.
“Nothing there,” he said.
“That’s also the trouble, sir,” Pembrook went on, rather apprehensively. “You can’t get anywhere without one.”
“Uhuh.”
A prisoner from the cells shuffled in to sweep the floor and was waved out again.
“Seeing you know so much about it, my boy, which one is this in?”
Pembrook caught a sneeze in a tissue and spent some time folding it away.
“Couldn’t we ask them through in Security, sir? They’re supposed to know all there is to know-more than me.”
“What? And make a bloody fool of myself if it’s a lot of twaddle? We’re dealing with a kid of twelve, remember.”
“Sir.”
“Well?”
“I think it’s in code, sir. You’ll notice how each line of letters stays straight and keeps inside a sort of square. There’s a pattern to it you wouldn’t need if you were just switching letters around. It must match up with something.”
“Of course! That explains the tracing paper!”
Pembrook flushed with embarrassed pride.
“Shall I have another go at his room, sir?”
Kramer did not hear him. He was closely examining all four slips, putting one on top of another and holding them to the light.
“No good,” he said finally, “can’t see anything that way. But I can help you in your search a little. You’ll notice that although he used tissue paper and a sharp pencil, there are no tears in it-no dents along his lines either. He must have done these on a very hard, smooth surface.”
“A book cover?”
“Much harder than that. Probably some sort of plastic or tin.”
“And the bedroom’s a likely place?”
“Why not? A job like this would have taken time and he’d need to be private.”
Pembrook reached for his raincoat but Kramer stopped him.
“Wait to hear what Zondi has to say first,” he said. “I’m sick of repeating everything.”
Grandfather Govender was being very tiresome. Short of telling him he was a senile old fool, the rest of the family could find no obvious way of explaining why he could not understand what had happened to Danny. There he stood, clutching his staff like some latter-day Gandhi in the corridor of the magistrate’s court, toothlessly sucking on an orange and shaking his head.
“All rubbish!” he muttered once again.
“Listen to me, Grandfather,” said his son Sammy. “Last night Danny was arrested by the police and today he must go to a place of safety until they find out what it was he has done.”
“They remanded him,” said the half-cousin.
“They say he was carrying a housebreaker’s tools, Grandfather,” went on Sammy. “Do not make another noise here or it will go badly for all of us-Danny, too.”
“What tools?”
Sammy winced.
“A spade,” said the half-cousin.
“Rubbish!” shouted Grandfather, expelling a seed with the word.
“They can get you for just having a nail file sometimes,” said an uncle with unhappy experience in these matters.
“What’s the matter with you all?” Grandfather spluttered. “Do you think I’m senile?”
All Zondi wanted to talk about were the dogs. To avoid any complications, he had left the Chev some distance from 10 Rosebank Road and gone on foot the rest of the way, dressed as ordered in his worst. Within a matter of yards he felt like the star attraction at a jackal hunt. One haughty old bitch in a floppy hat, cutting a rosebush down to size with secateurs, had actually encouraged a toy poodle to join in the chase.
“Shame!” laughed Kramer. “Did you show them your warrant card?”
Zondi patted his Walther PPK in the shoulder holster.
“Next time, boss,” he growled.
“Don’t let the Colonel hear you, kaffir. He’s always saying he doesn’t ever want a Sharpeville in his area.”
Pembrook seemed ill at ease in their company. He would have to grow used to the idea that CID work made such partnerships necessary and therefore fairly common. Kramer felt himself curiously irritated.
“Why the look?” he asked sharply. “Are you a liberal or something?”
“ Pardon, sir?”
“Forget it. Now, Zondi, my heart bleeds for you, but tell us what you found out. We’re all busy men here.”
Zondi began, in the way of his people, at the very beginning. He told them how, in his ragged jacket and trousers, he had slunk up to the door of the back veranda at the Jarvis house and informed the maid he was a togt boy. She came back and said there were no odd jobs going. Then he had pleaded for a morsel of food. This had brought him a doorstep of stale bread, spread thickly with apricot jam, and a can of black tea, well sugared. He had been given permission to eat in the compound.
There he had encountered one Jackson Zulu, the head cookboy, who was resting from his labors and idly planning the midday menu. He looked askance at the stranger and ordered him into the coal shed. Jackson had such a grand manner, Zondi almost obeyed him.
Then he had shown Jackson his handcuffs and suggested a confidential chat. Jackson was a wily old bird, though. Before agreeing to anything, he had asked if Zondi, who would have to be educated if he really was a detective sergeant, could spell “asparagus.” Oddly enough, he could. Jackson added it to his list on the back of an old bill and pronounced himself ready to be of any service. He had a great respect for the police, as had any man with something to lose.
They got on tremendously after that. Shrewdly, Zondi had started with the staff, leaving his questions about the family to appear polite afterthoughts to make Jackson feel important.<
br />
The Jarvises employed a head cookboy, a head maid who cooked in his absence, a housemaid, a wash girl part time, a garden boy, and a youngster who helped him. They had all been with the family some time and had arrived with first-class references.
“Get on with it,” said Kramer, tossing a cigarette to Pembrook. The smoke might dry up that damn nose of his.
Zondi seemed mildly aggrieved but continued. Captain Jarvis-that was a captain of an army-was regarded as a good master. He was very particular about everything, and sometimes he swore terribly in a language nobody else understood, but he was just. The remarkable thing about him was the fact he never went out to work. Jackson had once asked tactfully for an explanation from the missus and she had told him a long story about sharing petrol that he could not understand. Still, it did not matter, as the wages were better than most.
Jackson liked his missus very, very much. She was much younger than her husband and never got angry. She forgot many things, too, and that was why she let Jackson run everything and even order groceries by telephone himself. It was a great honor to be so trusted. One of which, of course, Jackson was eminently worthy. Zondi had entirely agreed with him.
That loosened things up a bit. Jackson then admitted that there were times when the Jarvis household was not a pleasant place to be. There was the night of the elder daughter’s birthday, for example. There had been a dinner party with ten guests and no less than six delicious courses which Jackson had served personally, resplendent in his red sash and white gloves. He had thought the missus very happy and talkative. Why, she had raised her voice like their own women did when they were enjoying themselves. And yet, afterwards, there was a quarrel in the missus’s bedroom-his employers slept separately-that became so bad that he and the other servants were told to leave the washing-up. The master had shouted that the visitors would say things about her that could do the family harm.
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