The Caterpillar Cop kaz-2

by James McClure

  “He buys a paper. What’s in it? An inquest stating Andy Cutler died accidentally. He must have flipped. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t make the same mistake we made over that line. ‘A typical drowning.’ ”

  “But, sir…”

  “Go on.”

  “Surely that was his cue to tell the police? Now he was in the strongest possible position.”

  “Oh, no, he could go one better. Here, the letter reads: ‘I think I have found a way of proving to him a big mistake has been made.’

  “You mustn’t overlook Boetie’s feud with the station commander. That had made him really sore. He didn’t want to reveal the crime so much as actually use it to prove how useful he and his mates could be.”

  Pembrook pushed back his cuff from his watch and frowned.

  “You see,” said Kramer, leaning forward, “what Boetie had in mind was presenting the police not with just his eyewitness report, but the whole bloody thing tied up in a string. Real evidence like a real detective.”

  “Sorry, sir, that’s too much to believe.”

  “All right, let’s try another approach. Up to the moment Boetie saw the newspaper article he had no reason to doubt his assessment of the activity by the pool. Now he is confronted by what seems an incredible oversight. Or is it? Only an investigation can give him the answer and he prefers to carry it out himself.”

  “Then nobody can call him a fool,” Zondi murmured.

  “Well, Johnny?”

  Pembrook had been turning the rubber roller of the typewriter in an irritating way. He jerked his head up.

  “I think all he wanted was something to back up his word. One or two outside facts, maybe. If he had just gone to the station commander with his story, it could have been dismissed as a nasty piece of malicious hearsay-particularly as everyone was being so soft about the thing. I’m with you there, but now I can’t understand why he put it in his letter to the Detective Club. Or why he wrote to it at all.”

  “A good point. My theory is simply that he felt he had to tell someone. You can see the kids take this club pretty personally.”

  “Hmmm. Where do we go from here then, sir?”

  “Just a minute-the wire netting. There is a chance that it boosted any doubt that started to grow in his mind. At that range he might not necessarily have been able to give a good description of the other party. He’d have to see them again first, so he decided to get mixed up with the family. He notices Sally is twelve and somehow finds out she goes to dancing. Let’s not trouble with that point too much. In the first place, it’s a reasonable deduction considering the type of girl she is-and in the second place, we know he was training down at the town baths with English boys. They could have told him.

  “Hester is a snag. She expects him to go around with her, and won’t be easily fobbed off with excuses. She’ll get in the way. Then the conscience thing again, which I think is very real. And on top of this, the breaking-off committed him to his plan of action.

  “Boetie gets all togged up and goes to dancing on Friday night. Naturally Sally is pleased when a boy takes so much notice of her for a change. She’s probably so hard-up that it doesn’t make any difference he’s Afrikaans-or maybe she goes for being a rebel daughter. With an old man like that, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. From here on, Boetie worms his way into the household, trying to find out what he can.”

  “Yet he still isn’t any the wiser after how many visits?”

  “Who said? He must have finally got somewhere because he implied as much when he asked Hennie to look after the toffee box.”

  Pembrook opened it.

  “I bet these codes could explain a few things. Pity there was nothing in his room-I was there two hours, you know.”

  “That’s what I’m going to work on as soon as you leave. Christ, the time! You’d better go.”

  Zondi handed Pembrook his raincoat and small suitcase, adding a little bow which did not go down very well.

  “All right, sir, I’ll ring in the morning. I think I know what you want out of Miss Jarvis.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Mainly if Boetie told her dirty jokes, too. That’s the one bit that doesn’t fit into all of this.”

  “You’re my boy.” Kramer grinned.

  The padlocked Ford van carrying Danny Govender from the place of safety to the magistrate’s court for another remand that Thursday afternoon was being driven by Constable Hendriks.

  A very cheerful Hendriks, because he had once again succeeded in winning a transfer to a job he considered more congenial-and this time he was confident of having found his true billet. Nobody else had transfers granted as readily as he did. He wondered again if, in point of fact, he did have a winning personality. A sergeant had once murmured something to that effect.

  There was not a great deal of traffic, yet he kept his speed down. The whole secret of ferrying prisoners to and fro was in the timing; if you did the journey too quickly, the jail would find paper work for you; too slowly and the court cell sergeant would bawl you out in front of the wogs.

  He looked into his mirror, noting with satisfaction that the sole occupant of the lock-up section in the rear was sitting nice and quiet. Now here was an interesting case, this snot-nosed Indian kid who claimed he had gone into a posh area to dig up a dog. What a story! And yet everyone felt there was an even better one somewhere if only they could coax it out.

  Hendriks’ thoughts homed in on himself. Actually, when he dispassionately reviewed his career in the force to date, he could detect only one minor shortcoming: a tendency to forgetfulness.

  Which was one of the reasons he had for being so pleased about his present job. There was nothing to remember-no messages, no beats, no faces on the wanted list. All he did was count the prisoners as they hopped in, snap the lock, drive, twist the key, count them as they got out, and hand over the papers.

  He hiccuped, tasting again the very strong coffee he had been given out at the place of safety by the housekeeper. A nice woman who always made him very comfortable, and it was good to put up his feet for five minutes.

  Jesus! Some cheeky sod behind him was hooting to pass; he would bloody well-

  A fire engine shot by, its siren coming on with a long wail of derision. Hendriks could have sworn that the baboon next to the driver had shaken a fist at him.

  He would bloody well show them!

  The van leaped in pursuit, its police markings giving it the same immunity from the normal rules of the road, and all other traffic shrank towards the curbside.

  To his delight, Hendriks started gaining and could spare a moment to check his prisoner in the mirror again. The little devil was loving it. There would be no complaints, and if there were…

  Just look at that, the fire engine was chickening out at the turnoff to Binswood Avenue. It might be a blind corner but there was no need to drop down into bloody first gear for it. Wait till he got there. The fire engine disappeared out of sight.

  Hendriks braced himself against the door and gunned the van into a fancy four-wheel drift.

  He came out of the corner into Binswood Avenue at thirty mph, which, while being a lot slower than it felt, gave him a thinking distance of thirty feet and a braking distance of forty-five feet. For the first ten yards he thought about the petrol tanker lying on its side, completely blocking the road, and its load gushing out of the fractured seams. For the rest of the way he braked.

  As it happened, he traveled all of eighty feet from the corner-missing the fire engine by a coat of red paint-before denting his radiator grille slightly on the stricken vehicle. It was amazing how his all-weather tires kept their grip through the great spread of fuel.

  A fireman wrenched his door open.

  “Jump, you stupid bastard! This lot could go up any second!”

  Hendriks wobbled out on trembling legs and was hustled to safety.

  “Has he got anyone in there?” asked the fire chief, being answered with a nod. “Then give
us the bloody key, mate, and be quick!”

  Hendriks felt in his pocket. Then in his other pocket. All three other pockets.

  “ Ach, no! I forgot it when I had coffee,” he mumbled. “You see, you don’t need it to snap on-”

  “Bolt cutters!” bellowed the fire chief, somewhat needlessly, as two of his men were already rushing towards the van with them.

  The exhaust manifold on the police van ignited the vapor-or so it seemed, for the first explosion came from under its bonnet. There were nine others, and flames as high as the walls of hell.

  Luckily for the pair with the bolt cutters, the initial blast knocked them flying before they got their boots wet. But although suffering severe injuries, they did not lose consciousness and were able to hear, as much as they tried not to, the sounds that Danny Govender made as he was roasted alive.

  A horrible death for a boy-but pure accident.

  11

  If there was one thing that bored the pants off Kramer, it was a fire story. He picked up the evening newspaper, noticed BLAZE in the main headline, and dropped the whole shebang into the wastepaper basket.

  Then he continued to pace the office, varying his stride only when he turned or had to step over Zondi’s outstretched legs.

  On his desk lay the three pieces of tracing paper with their enigmatic inscriptions uppermost. All around them were crumpled leaves from the memo pad, each covered in various permutations of the letters. Three hours’ work had proved nothing more than the fact Pembrook was correct in his assumption that a code, rather than a cipher, had been used. A cipher required that each character of the alphabet be given a substitute symbol-even another letter would do; but Kramer had been able to find only twelve different letters anyway and you could not make up words from such a limited number.

  “What I am wondering about,” said Zondi eventually, “is why Boetie was thinking in English when he wrote this thing.”

  He pointed to a c in the bottom line of one sheet he had copied down. There was no such letter in Afrikaans.

  “Yes, I noticed that, too, man. But I suppose it’s all part of making up a secret message-if you can do it in another language as well, so much the better.”

  “And another matter, boss-who was he writing these messages to?”

  “Himself, I’d say. Case notes. Information he had picked up but didn’t want known until he was certain. Kids like writing things down-I remember a bloke at school who used to make huge lists of birds he had seen, even though he remembered every last one.”

  Zondi went over to the desk and examined the original.

  “Did Boss Pembrook find anything hard in his room to write on?”

  “Bugger all.”

  “Boetie could have used this toffee tin lid.”

  “I’ve tried that-it isn’t as smooth as it looks. Pencil picks up tiny bumps.”

  Sighing, Kramer wandered over to the window. Suddenly he stiffened.

  “Bring me a spare bit of tracing paper and a pencil,” he said.

  They were in his hands in seconds. He pressed the paper against the pane and wrote. The effect was identical.

  “As smooth as glass.” Kramer smiled. “He did it on his window because the light coming through made it even easier to trace.”

  “But this paper is quite thin, boss.”

  “Perhaps whatever he was tracing wasn’t too distinct, then. Come on, man, what could they have been? What is about that size and shape?”

  No good-they had been through everything they could think of.

  “What would this code thing have on it?” Zondi asked. “Just words?”

  “I expect so.”

  “Then wouldn’t it be just as hard to understand as these things-and mean, by itself, nothing at all?”

  “Like a dictionary?”

  “Yes, boss, you cannot find secrets in those books. They are quite safe.”

  “So?”

  “Why should he hide the code if he has hidden the message?”

  “Christ, that’s a notion!”

  “Thank you, boss.”

  Kramer sat down and ate his pie, which had gone cold.

  “Know something, Zondi? He could even have had the code on him for all that it mattered-I mean when he got the chop.”

  “You said there was just rubbish in his pockets.”

  “Let’s have another look, though. I’ve got the stuff here in my drawer.”

  Kramer cleared a space before emptying the plastic bag. The penknife clattered out first, followed by the rubber eraser, which bounced away under the furniture. The khaki handkerchief was next and in its slipstream fluttered the three bubble gum wrappers.

  “Big deal,” said Kramer.

  Zondi retrieved the eraser and, after looking at it closely, put it back in the bag.

  Kramer absently smoothed out one of the wrappers.

  “Boss!” exclaimed Zondi.

  But Kramer had already seen it was the same size and shape.

  “Chewsy Super Bubble Gum,” he read out in English before turning over the wrapper. It was deep blue on the inside. There was also a joke printed on it in black.

  He slipped one of the squares of tracing paper over it.

  “Can’t see a bloody thing,” he grunted. “Let’s try the window.”

  There the low sun made the sandwich of paper translucent enough to show the letters at least were the same height, and set across the same width. No sense could be made of them, however.

  “There are a lot of c’s in that joke, boss, and one near the end like this other tracing here.”

  Kramer substituted it for the first tracing, and held it against the glass.

  Still no luck.

  The third tracing was matched up.

  “We’ve got it, man! Look!”

  Zondi took a little longer to grasp what Boetie had done. And then he realized that all the letters in pencil were random and irrelevant-with the exception of a very few that coincided exactly with the initial letter of a printed word in the joke underneath.

  What he saw was, in effect, this: A bad-tempered cobbler was sitting working on a shoe one day when a little boy pointed to some leather and asked him: “What’s that?” The cobbler snapped: “Hide! Hide! The cow’s outside!” “I’m not afraid of a cow,” the little boy laughed.

  Chewsy Chuckle No. 113

  “Write this down quickly,” Kramer said. “B-s-o-h-c-b. Hell, that doesn’t spell anything! Here we go again.”

  Zondi peered over his shoulder.

  “But if you read the whole word each time, it does make some kind of sense, boss. Bad-sitting-on-him-cow-boy.”

  “Cowboy! One word, I bet you. The bad man was sitting on him-of course, on the American. You see, cowboy is the nearest he could-”

  “Then why not underline this word and make it clearer by saying ‘the cowboy’?”

  “True. It does seem to break there. What can he mean?”

  “Like you said, he just writes down notes for himself, he doesn’t need the pieces in between.”

  “Uhuh. Let’s try another and see if it works the same way first. I’ll have the other one with a c near the end and that tracing over there.” A very fat old man standing in the gutter was asked by a cheeky Girl Guide what he was doing there. “Would it be possible to see me across the busy street?” he said with a sigh. She grinned at him and replied: “I could see you a mile off, mister!” Chewsy Chuckle No. 57

  “It bloody does work! Was-girl-doing-it-with-him? You can bet your socks she was, Boetie my lad. Hurry and get this all down.” A judge to the prisoner in the dock: “So we meet again. Aren’t you ashamed to be seen in court so often? I would be.” The old lag replied: “What’s good enough for you, m’lud, is good enough for me!” Chewsy Chuckle No. 317

  Zondi added it to the other two on his slip of paper and handed it over.

  “You made a mistake in this last one when I read it out. No, maybe you’re right after all-I’m certain Boetie meant that. One of the fir
st things I learned about English was there were many words that sounded the same but were spelled different. It’s so stupid it sticks in your mind. Here he’s found a use for it.”

  The slip read: “Bad sitting on him. Cowboy/Was girl doing it with him/To meet in wood good for me.”

  Kramer was elated. He slapped Zondi on the shoulder and they each nearly broke a bone.

  “See? This last one? He thought he would have it all wrapped up after this meeting in the wood.”

  “A good time to kill him, boss?”

  “You’re so right. What a fluke we did them in their correct sequence, although it wouldn’t have taken much effort to sort out anyway.”

  An uneasiness stirred in Kramer as he said this-flukes were seldom to be trusted.

  “Boetie must have worked hard to find good jokes.”

  “Ones that would carry his message? Well, obviously he had more than three hundred of the buggers to choose from-and all the rubbish bins at school to find them in.”

  “It is a shame.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That he did not write these things another way. Have you noticed that not one of these papers has a word that connects the case with the foreign boy?”

  “Except for cowboy.”

  “But, boss, you said that-”

  “ He, Andy, could have been the one doing the sitting.”

  “Then why say ‘bad sitting on him’? Surely the man who is bad is the one that does the deed that is evil? I tell you it is not a plain matter at all.”

  Zondi was right. The bastard.

  Traveling at 400 mph toward the northwest, an agitated air stewardess reached the flight deck of the South African Airways Boeing 727.

  “We’re flying as low as we can,” the first officer protested. “Who’ve you got in there that’s making such a fuss? This isn’t the first time we’ve lost a bit of cabin pressure, and never have I heard-”