“Then sit yourself somewhere,” invited Bradshaw, lowering himself gingerly into a leather armchair. “Has something come up?”
“Ja, you could say that. It’s just the body of a man was found shot in town this morning.”
“Shot dead, you mean?”
“Stone dead. Three shots, a skull fracture, and his wrists had been tied together with such force they’d been broken. He’d been shot by the same gun as you were.”
The heavy jaw went slack for an instant, and the antique dealer swallowed hard. “The same gun? Where? Did you get him?”
“We haven’t a clue where. The body was left in the boot of a car.”
“But—but it was the same gun? You’re sure about that?”
“Uh huh.”
“And the wrists were broken?”
Kramer nodded. “That’s right. Like you say, this must be one hell of a big bastard we’re looking for. The victim was a visitor from overseas staying with—”
Bradshaw started to laugh, checked himself but couldn’t get the ugly grin off his face.
“Sir?”
“Ach, I know it’s rough this poor bugger’s copped it, Lieutenant, don’t get me wrong! But you don’t know how relieved I—”
“Relieved? In what way?”
“Well, how would you put it? To have this proof that I’ve not been going out of my bloody mind after all! Christ, how long has it been? Six days? For six bloody days I’ve had this mental picture of the bastard, towering up above me against the sodding skyline, and I’ve known bloody well that nobody’s believed me, including yourself. And now you—”
“Correction, I’ve never been so far as—”
“Don’t give me any bull, Lieutenant! It was there in your face at the hospital! I knew it’d be, right from the start. I said to myself: Archie, who the hell’s going to believe you? Keep this ‘tall tale’ to yourself, man! Why do you think I didn’t tell the wife when I got home? Why didn’t I tell the quack when he was called? Those clever-dick buggers at the hospital? And then, when I did come out with the truth, Jesus! I tell you, I’ve been regretting it ever since, what with you lot, the Press and all the cranks ringing up. But the worst part has been not believing myself any longer; the doubts. Did I really see a bloke that size? Then what exactly did he look like? Did he say anything? What sort of clothes? What height? What weight? Can’t you see for yourself what a bloody obsession it’s become?”
Bradshaw gestured agitatedly towards his desk. Kramer went over and found a scatter of sketches in black crayon; each was very much like another, and depicted a hulking shape holding a revolver in both hands.
“You drew these, Mr. Bradshaw?”
“The wife did—y’know, to my instructions. I can’t use my hand properly yet, and, besides, I’ve never been any good at art.” He extended a limp forefinger from his sling. “There, that one on top is the best of the bunch so far, but still isn’t right.”
“Why’s it all shaded in?”
“Because,” replied Bradshaw, with a sigh to indicate his patience was being sorely tried, “because as I’ve said umpteen bloody times already, he was against the sun, silhouetted against the sun, and I had only about a split-second before I saw the flash of his gun going off.”
“He’s got it in both hands, hey? You never said anything about that before.”
“What’s that? Oh, that came out when we were getting the outline right, not that I see it’s of any special—”
“But it is significant,” Kramer cut in. “That style of taking aim is quite recent really, so we can guess that this man was either in a young age bracket or had been taking instruction. Would you hold a gun like that, for instance?”
Bradshaw shook his head, and blustered, “Well, you know what they say about old dogs! It just hadn’t occurred to me—”
“You said you’d been going over heights and weights, sir. Have you got anything there for me?”
“Er, I’d say not an inch under six-four. I’m five-ten and—”
“Weight?”
“You’ve got the picture there, so your guess is as good as mine.”
“Two-eighty pounds?”
“I’d have said two-seventy. Shall we split the difference? As to clothing, all I’m sure of is that he wasn’t wearing a jacket. Probably a short-sleeved sports shirt, dark trousers, dark shoes. Just a chance his hair was brown, but that might have been the way the sun was catching it.”
Kramer watched Bradshaw clumsily load his pipe from an ostrich-skin tobacco pouch, and noted how agitated he was just beneath the surface; obviously a hardcase of his type hated to be enfeebled in this fashion. Then Kramer took another look at the topmost sketch.
“This bloke’s hair is very short,” he said to Bradshaw. “And the ears, they’re very flat.”
“The wife’s theory is that he could have been wearing a nylon stocking over his head, which would certainly explain that.”
“Or he could have been a coon. As you say, we mustn’t forget this was a silhouette you saw, and—”
“No,” said Bradshaw. “He was not a coon.”
“How can you be so certain, sir? There’s nothing in this outline that contradicts the—”
“I’m sure, damnit! Now tell me about this poor sod who got shot.”
Perhaps it was typical of Bradshaw, thought Kramer, to have delayed this question for so long—or until he’d had time to think about someone other than himself for a moment. “Ach, the bloke who got shot was a visitor from overseas, like I said earlier, who was staying with the Digby-Smiths. Do you know them?”
“Only as occasional customers—their taste is putrid. But just a second, you can’t mean.…” Bradshaw took the pipe from his mouth. “You can’t mean Bonzo Hookham?”
The pit of Kramer’s stomach cringed, but somehow he’d been expecting this and the thud never came. “Edward Bonzo Hookham, DFC and bar,” he said, quoting Jonty.
“I don’t believe it!”
“Why not, sir?”
“Why not? Well … God, I don’t know why not! You can’t have got it wrong? He isn’t strictly a visitor from overseas, y’know, he was born and brought up in—”
“No mistake,” said Kramer. “So you and Mr. Hookham—”
Bradshaw rose and made his way painfully to the door. “Myra!” he bawled across the lawn. “Myra! Come here, woman. You won’t believe what’s happened now!” Then he turned to Kramer and said, “He was at our flying club social last week, the guest of honor. Naturally, as we’d both been in the RAF, the pair of us spent—”
“In the same squadron?”
“Oh no, nothing like that. I was flying Spits, Hurricanes, while Bonzo—as you might have guessed from his size—was in Bomber Command. Not much elbow space in a bloody Lancaster! So they used to snap up all the little blokes, and the—” Mrs. Bradshaw arrived, dripping, in the verandah doorway. “Listen to this, Myra. The crazy bastard has shot someone else now—Bonzo Hookham!”
“Who, Archie?”
“For Christ’s sake, that Bomber Command chappie we met at the flying club the other night. Short, drank brandy—”
“No!” she gasped. “Not that nice man! But he was utterly charming, so why would anyone—”
“Let’s get one thing straight first,” interrupted Kramer, taking out his notebook. “Are you saying that, although you both served in the English air force, you’d never come across him before? Or have I maybe—?”
“Never,” said Archie Bradshaw, “more’s the pity. But there were one helluva lot of us, y’know.”
7
ZONDI WAS STILL fiddling with the cord when Kramer returned to the car about half an hour later. He had the thing looped over part of the steering wheel and was working it gently up and down, as though trying to trigger off some association.
“Progress, Mickey?”
“A little progress, boss. With much respect, I think the Lieutenant talks a lot of nonsense sometimes.”
“Oh ja?”<
br />
Zondi held the severed ends of the cord together. “You say this rope was cut to make it shorter.”
“Uh huh.”
“But this rope isn’t short, boss! It’s a very long rope just to tie a man’s hands together.”
Kramer thought about that for a moment. “How do you know he hadn’t intended to connect the hands to the feet or something?”
“You mean with Boss Hookham standing up?”
“I mean—”
“And another thing,” Zondi went on, “is it not strange that the rope on either side of the worn section is almost precisely the same length?”
“Is it? Perhaps—”
“I tell you, Lieutenant, the answer is very simple, and somewhere a bell is ringing.”
“Ding-dong,” said Kramer, impatiently. “Just concentrate on getting me back to the office, hey? And on the way I’ll tell you what real progress sounds like!”
Zondi draped the cord around his neck like a tailor’s tape measure and drove off. In under a mile, Kramer had covered the main points of what he’d just learned in Bradshaw’s study.
“Well, Mickey, what do you think of that, hey?”
“Hmmm.”
“Why the ‘hmmm’? There’s a link there! The start of a pattern.”
“That both were in the RAF?”
“Uh huh, all that.”
Zondi gave him a sideways glance. “How many people were at this party, boss?”
“Bradshaw estimates around two hundred,” replied Kramer, putting on his sunglasses, “if you count wives and girlfriends. These socials aren’t formal affairs, you understand. The flying club just advertises in shop windows and the small ads, and anybody who’s interested turns up. Generally, it’s the same crowd each time: Sunday pilots, kids from the parachute club, a sprinkling of ex-SAAF and RAF officers, plus—”
“So there were more men from the RAF?”
“He’s given me the names of six, and is going to check with the club secretary in case there were more.”
“But surely,” said Zondi, throttling back with a slight frown, “this isn’t a very big link, boss? And what is a ‘guest of honor?’ ”
“Ach, that isn’t to be taken too seriously—they hadn’t planned it or anything. Hookham just turned up, and because he was from overseas, they tried to make something special out of the occasion. I suppose basically it meant he was taken round, introduced to everyone, and somebody made a stupid speech.”
The Chevrolet picked up speed again. “So Boss Hookham and Boss Bradshaw are both ex-RAF and they were both at this party. From what you say, Boss Hookham’s link with the other six men is just the same.”
“Ja, but none of them’s been shot, hey? I tell you it’s a start, Mickey! You can’t expect all the pieces to fall in your lap.”
Zondi sucked his teeth. “And what do they share in other matters? Boss Bradshaw was also born in this place?”
“Trekkersburg? No, he’s from Jo’burg originally. His wife explained they’d come down after the war, looking for somewhere there wasn’t too much competition. Being so English around here, it’s a good place to pick up old bits of furniture and suchlike in house sales, and Bradshaw supplies other antique shops all over.”
“But his wife, could she give you more of a link?”
Kramer shrugged. “She did her best when I explained about patterns, but no, not really. She said they’d started to talk about fishing and so she’d buggered off quite soon after, leaving the two of them at it. I’ll tell you one thing, old son, she’s wasted on that bastard.”
“In what way, Lieutenant?”
“The only way,” Kramer sighed, winking lecherously, and they both laughed. “But what’s really happened is that now I’m seeing this whole business in a different light. When it was just Bradshaw involved, and we hadn’t any idea of the motive, there was always a slight chance of some criminal element behind the shooting. As you said yourself, Bradshaw could have been up to some tricks he wasn’t going to tell us about. But you add Hookham to the mixture and all that gets ruled out.”
“You mean Meerkat Marais and—”
“Of course! It isn’t their scene! How could a man like Hookham—respectable background, a virtual stranger to the city—be mixed up with them? Okay, I’ve still got to find out about him properly, but I can tell you now that—”
“What I am thinking about is the killer, boss, and the gun,” said Zondi, turning a crocodile of schoolgirls into kangaroos on a pedestrian crossing. “Those bullets are very old.”
“And so?”
“Well, as the Lieutenant knows, most of the guns in the hands of people such as Meerkat are guns stolen from—”
“Ja, ja, ja,” agreed Kramer, “I know what you’re going to say: are guns stolen from the tops of wardrobes where they’ve been lying for years, collecting up the dust. Right?”
Zondi nodded.
“I’ve been going over that myself, and I’ll admit—when we still suspected a possible criminal involvement—that Meerkat’s type seemed the most likely source for such a weapon. But since hearing just how old those bullets were, the idea has begun to make real nonsense. Firstly, we have to imagine a killer who is willing to use old ammunition, risking the chance of misfires and so on, when fresh ammunition is always easy to get hold of. Secondly, we have to imagine Meerkat, for instance, selling a gun cheap because its ammunition doesn’t look too good. Would he do that? Never! He’d put in some new cartridges himself. And thirdly, if you like, we have to imagine that criminal link-up with Hookham, which is just plain impossible.”
“I see your reasoning, boss—” began Zondi.
“Now what if this man has no criminal connections? He wants a gun: the only gun to which he has access is the one on top of the wardrobe in, say, his uncle’s house, and he takes it. He doesn’t know a lot about guns, and the first time he fires only one shot and thinks that’ll do it. But no, Bradshaw lives to tell the tale, so next time he adds two more rounds just to make sure.”
Zondi pouted, silently conceding the sound logic behind all this. He braked and swung into the police vehicle yard.
“Happy now?” asked Kramer, as they came to a halt. “Not that you bloody look it, hey?”
“My problem, boss,” said Zondi, “is maybe that I did not speak with Boss Bradshaw myself, because I cannot see how you can be so sure there is a link between these two men—I mean a stronger link than you have told me about already—that gives us the start of a pattern.”
“It’s a feeling in my bones, man!”
“Ah,” murmured Zondi who, as the officially more primitive of them, had curiously little faith in such things. “Hmmmm.”
Niggled, Kramer made a quick estimate of the length of the mystery cord in relation to Zondi’s own modest stature as they climbed from the car. “You can’t bluff me that wouldn’t be long enough to tie your feet as well,” he grunted. “Go on, try it.”
Zondi slipped the cord from his shoulders and dangled the loop just above the tarmac.
“You’re bloody cheating, kaffir! Extend both your arms down properly!”
With a grin, Zondi obeyed and the loop lay on the tarmac with plenty of slack to spare. “You win, Lieutenant.”
“Always,” said Kramer, turning away to hide a smile. “Now get that damned thing to Forensic right away—there’s been enough buggering around with it.”
Kramer had gone several yards before he realized that Zondi was not following his usual pace behind in public. He looked round and saw him still standing beside the car, holding the ends of the cord, and staring at the worn section which rested on the rough surface of the yard.
“Zondi?”
“Hau, so simple.… We had it upside down.”
“What’s simple?” demanded Kramer.
“This, boss!”
And with a sweep of the cord over his head, Zondi came skipping across the gap between them.
Forensic were not to be outshone, however. Within a r
emarkably short time, they had not only confirmed that the length of cord was indeed a skipping rope, minus its telltale wooden handles, but they’d used the unusual weave of the fibers to identify the brand. It was a Master Skip, large size, with Xtra-Zip thanks to two sets of ball-bearings, and its price was so exorbitant that only flashy gymnasiums, the energetic rich or total idiots ever bought one.
“Ja, but we must try and be more exact than that,” said Colonel Muller, turning from Kramer to Gait from Forensic. “I hope you asked them at this sports shop to go through their invoices?”
Gait blinked behind his finger-smeared spectacle lenses. “Oh, I made a special point of it, Colonel,” he replied, and dropped his voice even further to add, “they’re Trekkersburg’s sole stockists.…”
He always spoke a little as though he were giving away dark secrets, and wrote everything in a very thin hand. Kramer ran an amused eye over the razor cut on his throat, the mud on his shoes, the dried bloodspots on his soiled shirt, and watched him pick another almost invisible thread from the cuff of his lab coat.
“And?” prompted Colonel Muller, tapping his pencil.
“And they’d only sold three of them in six months, sir, and were thinking of putting the rest on their next sale at half-price. One of the Master Skips went to the Aquarius Fitness Center in Stanley Street, and the other two were cash sales. A young woman bought one of them for her boyfriend.”
“No name? Her description then?”
“She had freckles—that’s all they could agree on.”
“And the other rope?”
“A blank, but they’ll do their best to remember, sir.”
Colonel Muller made a note on his blotter. “And now, Gait, what can you tell us about the things in the car?”
“Including Hookham’s personal effects,” added Kramer.
Gait stopped poking about in the ash-tray and took a minute scrap of paper from his pocket. “This isn’t a list of results,” he stressed, “but just a rough breakdown of what we’ve got to work on. The deceased was carrying hardly anything: ten rand in notes, thirty cents in loose change, a pen, a pen-torch, his British passport, British driving license, and what looks like a letter from a grandchild in England. We also have a quantity of soil samples for analysis, some pieces of vegetation, an intriguing variety of maggot, and—”
The Blood of an Englishman Page 7