He felt the clink of Mama Bhengu refilling his glass, and nodded his thanks to her. And yet, just like the Lieutenant, he had this feeling deep inside him, a feeling that criminal involvement could not be ruled out of the case, even if Hookham made it seem incompatible. Or was it that he knew too little of this kind of white man? Was he also being swept away by his imagination? Perhaps the best plan was to sleep on it, and to keep to what he said he’d set out to do.
Zondi opened his eyes and smiled at Mama Bhengu. “I have something to show you,” he said. “Not the hacksaw blade again, but something new. I have just found it.”
“Hau!”
“But first, Mama, a serious question. Is it true that nobody has been in that cubicle since Willie Jackson was stabbed there?”
“As true as I sit here, Michael Zondi.”
“Then maybe my time has not been wasted.”
“Why?”
“While I was talking in there, my eye saw this rolled into a corner, and I cannot say I looked everywhere last Thursday night; there was that niece of yours under the body to remove, together with many other distractions.”
“Indeed it was terrible! I thought she was dead as well, not only fainted!”
“But can we see what this thing is?” begged Missy Madam.
Zondi opened his fist and an aluminum object, rather bigger and rounder than a thimble, closer in shape to an acorn cup, tinkled on the table top, rolled round in a half-circle and came to a stop. It made both women gasp very loudly.
Rupert Digby-Smith was a man with a smooth, almost glassy exterior, storm-gray eyes, and a sharp chin that jutted out, dividing the way before him. He was dressed in a silk cravat, white shirt, fawn slacks, desert boots and a double-breasted blazer with brass buttons and a bowls club badge. His voice came from far back in his mouth, rounding its vowels into plum puddings of over-rich sound, and his handshake was like testing the weight of a seal’s flipper: cold, damp, quite impersonal.
“I saw you at the window, officer,” he said, opening a small liquor cabinet. “Wretched business, but it had to be done. My wife is quite beside herself at the thought of her brother being the object of their attentions this morning, and insisted I had them put down without delay. The vet was very good about it.”
“You’d had the two dogs long, sir?”
“Since pups. Fine animals both of them, and I dare say I’d have forgiven and forgotten soon enough, but.…” And he sighed with restraint. “I can offer you brandy, whisky, gin, rum—or would you care for a beer?”
“A brandy and orange juice.”
“What you people call a ‘dop en dam,’ I believe?”
Kramer tried not to allow his hackles to rise. “And what you people call a ‘ghastly concoction,’ I believe?” he replied.
Digby-Smith stared at him. “Ah! Very good!” he said, noting humor rather than appreciating it.
Down under the apple tree, the garden boy was refilling the dogs’ graves, working slowly and apparently enjoying himself. Probably, to judge by Digby-Smith’s slow, stiff gait, it had been the servant’s job to take the big Irish Setters for their walk every evening.
“Your glass, officer.”
“Cheers, sir,” said Kramer, turning round. “Now I wonder if we can—”
“Ice?”
Kramer accepted two lumps of ice, and watched the muscles in the angle of Digby-Smith’s narrow jaw bunch up and set hard. They stayed that way for several seconds, went down again, there was a moment’s delay, then the action was repeated.
“Now, sir, as I was about to say, there are a lot of questions I must—”
“What I dread,” said Digby-Smith, taking a sip of his brandy and water, “is telling the servants. They were fond of my brother-in-law, he spoiled them, treated them quite wrongly; he’d been away too long, y’know. God, what a scene.”
“How long exactly had he been away, sir?”
“Oh, years and years,” Digby-Smith replied, taking the high-backed chair behind the desk. “Do sit down, officer, there’s a good chap.”
Kramer pulled a chair up to face him on the other side of the desk, and took out his notebook. “He was in the RAF during the war? Why was that?”
“Wanted to do his bit, I suppose—fiery little devil Edward, of course. Couldn’t wait until we had got things sorted out here, so off he went. Joined the RAF in Rhodesia, got his wings and that was the last my wife’s family saw of him; rather selfish, I thought. Still, even some of your people got the same bee in their bonnet, didn’t they?”
“Sir?”
“You must have heard of Sailor Malan, surely? Afrikaner like yourself; finished up the top-scoring RAF fighter pilot in the war, friend of Bader’s, came back here and blotted his copybook by starting the Torch Commando.”
“That would be before my—”
“War veterans, y’know. It’d all gone a bit to their heads, this business of having blacks out there in the desert with them, doing the cooking and the ambulance driving and that. They tried to nip the Nats’ plan to implement apartheid in the bud, but not too surprisingly came unstuck.”
“Uh huh. If we could—”
Digby-Smith narrowed his eyes distrustfully. “You may have been too young then, as you say, but surely you must have read about Malan when he died? Parkinson’s disease? There were headlines in all the papers when the Government refused him a military funeral on the grounds that he’d fought for—what was by then—a foreign power.”
“It wasn’t headlines in the Afrikaans press, I don’t think,” said Kramer, curbing his impatience but only just. “I’m really more interested in Mr. Hookham himself, sir, and in what you can tell me about him. I notice you don’t call him ‘Bonzo’ the same as your wife does.”
“Don’t I? Well, perhaps that’s because I regard that sort of thing as fractionally childish. Got saddled with that after his squadron’s fox terrier was run over by a drunken wing commander, y’know; they were due to fly on a raid again that night, hadn’t time to find a replacement, and so they decided—on account of his size, I believe, and his snappy, terrier-like temperament—to adopt him as their lucky mascot. Rather rash of them, in the event: he only survived three more raids before they were faced again by the same problem. Settled for a greyhound that was a damned sight faster than the wing commander’s Austin.”
Kramer underscored the one phrase in all that he’d copied down. “Do I understand you to mean, when you say he ‘only survived three more raids,’ that he was shot down or something?”
“Over France,” confirmed Digby-Smith, smiling slightly. “Which was, on reflection, a lucky-ish thing. Yes, our young hero found himself up to his neck in a midden in Normandy, surrounded by grinning peasantry, and was duly marched off to a POW camp. Had that midden been in Saxony, I dare say the peasantry there would have continued to heap ordure upon him until he suffocated or whatever—if he hadn’t had a pitchfork through him before then. You know what the Germans called them? ‘Terrorflieger’—hated, loathed and feared them like nothing on earth; would butcher them on sight.”
“Oh ja?”
“Oh yes,” said Digby-Smith. “And if you’ve ever read an account of what happened to places like Dresden, who could really blame them?” His slight smile twitched at the corners. “Ironic that—no, nevermind. He was a prisoner of war for only six months, escaped with two others and, helped by the French underground, made his way back to England. In fact, the girl he married came from one of the French families who’d hidden him in their attic for a time.”
Kramer looked up from his notebook. “She was French? I’m sure I was told English by someone today.”
“It’s a common assumption people make,” replied Digby-Smith, shrugging. “They hear he married and settled down in England after the war, and—well, need I go on? You can’t have got that from anyone we know intimately.”
“And so that’s why your brother-in-law stayed on in England?” said Kramer, sidestepping the question implicit
in that last remark. “He didn’t want to take his wife too far away from her family?”
“Not quite, old chap,” murmured Digby-Smith, patronizingly. “Alice—he always called her that, although her real Christian name was Alloise—had become an orphan by the time he got back to France. Some bother with the Gestapo.”
“Oh ja? Then what was the reason for him staying on, sir?”
“The village pub, if he’s to be believed. Cricket on the green, The Times, his circle of friends, something nebulous he calls ‘civilisation,’ while damning trade unions as ‘the new barbarism.’ However, the truth probably lies closer to the fact his ex-navigator, Hampshire born-and-bred and totally unwillingly to move, had this brilliant idea for some form of electronic gadget, and asked him to make up a partnership. With his approach to life, Edward did rather well on the business side.”
“His approach?” repeated Kramer, detecting a faint echo of Bradshaw in this. “Are you saying that Mr. Hookham was a hard-headed bas—um, businessman?”
Digby-Smith considered his reply carefully, swilling a mouthful of his drink round and round before finally swallowing it. “If required,” he said, “to provide a thumbnail sketch of my brother-in-law’s chief characteristics, then I’d possibly describe him as resolute, impetuous, unforgiving and an aggressive little bore at times. But I’d rather you didn’t put that on record for my good lady’s sake.”
God, thought Kramer, why this bugger keeps ice for his drinks, I’ll never know; he’s so cold that all he needs to do is stir the stuff with his finger.
“Well, officer, have we finished with the biographical background? I’ve had an afterthought, actually: possibly the fact his wife was known as Alice led to the confusion in the mind of that person who thought she was English.”
“Uh huh,” said Kramer, almost certain the man was fishing. “She died of cancer, I’m told.”
“Like his mother.”
“Sir?”
“Left her with us, you see. I had to feed, house and maintain her, put up with her whining, listen to her eternal stories about her golden-haired boy. The most abominable woman.”
“I see, and—”
“Well, you don’t think he’d have honored us with this visit had she still been alive, do you?” Digby-Smith laughed then, but his laughter was completely silent. “Always a chap to look after his end of things is Brother Edward.”
“Was Brother Edward,” Kramer corrected him.
For upwards of a minute, Digby-Smith stared straight back over his desk, not moving a muscle. Kramer held the stare, trying to see in beyond the cool, calm facade confronting him; never before had he conducted an interview quite like this one.
“You must think it odd.…” began Digby-Smith.
“What, sir?”
“That I have spoken to you so frankly. You should perhaps be made aware that my opinion of Edward Hookham has never been a secret. I have made it known to him personally on several occasions, just as he has informed me of what a dull, stuffy, wet and thoroughly gutless specimen I am. I may yet, of course, come to moderate my views somewhat, to feel a degree of remorse, to even enumerate his undoubted virtues as a self-made man—who knows? But not until I have finally convinced myself.”
“Convinced yourself of what, Mr. Digby-Smith?”
“Why, that he’s well and truly dead, of course!”
It wasn’t an easy line to follow. Kramer stood up, took the man’s glass over to the liquor cabinet for a refill, and returned it to him without speaking. Then he gave the big globe of the world a spin, and tried to pick out the area of England called Hampshire.
Digby-Smith came round to stand beside him. “Ah, I see what you’re at! Take a line directly just to the east of it—yes, about there. A lovely thing, a globe.”
“True,” said Kramer. “And the fact of the matter is, sir, that your brother-in-law has departed this one forever. I would now like to hear about the last three weeks, dating back to his time of arrival.”
“He came, he saw, he didn’t care much for it.”
“Pardon?”
“Things here had either changed too much or they hadn’t changed enough,” said Digby-Smith, adopting his icy, nonchalant manner again. “But shall we leave out the politics? Lillian—my wife, y’know—tried to find things to amuse him. The trip to Hluhluwe Game Reserve was a partial success, in that he managed to capture on film the rare sight of a rhinoceros mating, but otherwise our idea of entertainment seldom seemed to suit him. Then again, how does one entertain a man whose wife has just died? Hardly with bawdy song and dancing girls.”
“Ja, I see the problem,” said Kramer, wondering how soon the tense would switch from the past to the present again. “You reckon he was quite upset then?”
“Liked to go off on his own, moped a good deal, was liable to bite one’s head off for practically nothing. Neither of us had seen him for ages, of course, but yes, I think it would be fair to say that at least some of his behavior can be attributed to his recent bereavement.”
“And last night? Do you know where he went?”
Digby-Smith returned to his chair. “Not the faintest idea—neither has Lillian. It’s almost become a regular routine in this house: he disappears after dinner, comes back at an unearthly hour, and the servants are under instructions to allow him to sleep in the following morning. Come to think of it, the only evening I’ve actually known his whereabouts was at the start of last week, when I suggested he might like to gate-crash the flying club’s monthly social.”
“You’re saying that was your idea, sir?”
“Entirely,” said Digby-Smith, lighting a cigarette without thinking to offer one first. “It seemed to buck him up a bit. I thought it might—birds of a feather, y’know! Wings?”
“Ah, very apt,” Kramer replied, finding a half-smile. “It bucked him up in what way?”
“Became livelier, more attentive to our idle conversation. Oh, it lasted until last Saturday, when the paper arrived with that tale about that swine Bradshaw—no doubt up to his devious tricks again, and somebody with enough decency and nerve tried to put an end to it. Damned shame they missed.”
“You’ve had dealings with Mr. Bradshaw?”
“Dealings singular,” said Digby-Smith, bitterly. “I thought it might be amusing to put one of my small creations on the market, just to see what sort of price it could fetch, and he swindled me completely.”
Kramer looked across at the little ships. “So those are your handiwork, hey? I’m impressed. Where did you learn how to do it, sir? Were you in the navy?”
“I regret to say I have never served in any of the armed services, old chap; Royal, Republican or otherwise.”
“Really? You were saying—”
“Black-outs, y’know; don’t remember a damned thing.”
“Shame, hey? This newspaper report.… Did Mr. Hookham have some reaction to it?”
“Fright,” said Digby-Smith, twisting his thin smile.
“He looked scared, you mean?”
“Shook like a leaf and we had to ask him what the matter was. Told us he’d only just met the chap, former RAF type and so on. Lillian disagrees with me, mark you. She says our little hero looked absolutely furious at the thought that an old comrade-in-arms had been attacked in such a cowardly fashion. Again, in an effort to be fair, his reaction probably lay somewhere between those two extremes—shall we say he was merely startled?”
Kramer nodded. “Ja, maybe we’d better, sir—unless you can suggest a reason for it frightening him. Without there being more of a connection between him and Bradshaw, why the hell should it?” Then he gazed intently at Rupert Digby-Smith, who appeared as glassy smooth and suave as ever on the surface, yet seemed to have all manner of tempestuous things bottled up inside him.
“Maybe that was a big mistake,” Mama Bhengu confided in a mumble, having second thoughts as she watched Missy Madam lead a swaggering youth with one eye into the middle cubicle. “Maybe I should have said t
o him, ‘No! You choose another girl!’ You can plainly see he isn’t a house boy, so for him to—well, he could be not straight in the head. He could have strange practices.…”
“He could just have a lust for young girls before they become proper women,” sniffed one of her nieces, whose own charms were bountiful. “She is not a woman that one. Where are her breasts?”
“Such jealousy.…” murmured Zondi.
Mama Bhengu laid a hand on his arm. “You will stay five minutes more, Michael Zondi?”
“Why sound so worried, Mama? You know how to handle these guys if they get rough.”
“You have not finished your questions. Look, Gertrude has just come out.” She beckoned to the slut. “Here, Gertrude, the detective sergeant wants to ask you something.”
Gertrude, a dull-skinned, sour-faced frump, whose one redeeming feature was that she didn’t mind lying with dirty old men and other undesirables like Jiji Govender, slopped over, buttoning up her blouse.
The Blood of an Englishman Page 10