“But that was for Timmy’s benefit, Lieutenant. Ted had been explaining to Timmy that a fighter pilot’s weak spot was—”
“Ja, consciously maybe, but subconsciously—listen, did Mr. Hookham make any other jokes?”
Mrs. Westford’s smile was bittersweet. “He was always joking! Although perhaps it isn’t surprising that Rupert didn’t tell you that.”
“You saw him the next night?”
“Timmy did. I was lying down in my bedroom next door with a dreadful migraine, and the pair of them sat in here making aeroplane noises.” She laughed softly. “Then Timmy found the Sunday papers which Ted had brought me with that ridiculous ‘giant’ story in them—a man like Bradshaw would obviously have to be attacked by someone bigger than him!—and Timmy became so overexcited, jumping about and pretending to be a giant himself, that I had to call out and ask Ted to go home. He was awfully apologetic when we saw him next on Tuesday night.”
“Can you remember any funnies from then?”
“None. As I’ve told you, it wasn’t a very funny occasion. I thought I’d never see him again, and.…” She bit her lip hard.
“But if you could tell me again, in more detail, it might—”
“I really can’t see the point, Lieutenant.”
“Ach, please, Mrs. Westford,” said Kramer, although he disliked causing this woman any pain.
She kept her head well down over her embroidery as she spoke. “Ted broke it very gently to us that he had decided to cut short his stay and return as soon as possible to England. He said he should never have come at a time when his mind was in such a turmoil, and then, suddenly, he was saying good-bye. Timmy went absolutely to pieces. He knows people tend to reject him, and he blamed Ted’s wanting to leave on himself. I told Ted to go and sit on the bed in my room, and I took Timmy on my knee, here on the sofa. I told him all about Uncle Bonzo’s garden being in desperate need of watering, and we tut-tutted over how long he had left it to bake in the sun, and finally Timmy was quite happy again. Then Ted came back to join us, and we took him to the door and—goodness, do you know, you’ve just done it again! I’d heard about your methods, but I thought you used hose-pipes and bright lights and things.”
“Was it another joke?” urged Kramer. “Did he—?”
“Ted looked at me and his last words were, ‘Well, old thing, perhaps I’ll risk a final sortie. I could be back here on Thursday.’ That would have been tonight.”
“Hey? What’s a sortie, Mrs. Westford?”
“You really ought to ask Timmy that, but it’s a sort of flight somewhere, a journey—I took it to mean he’d be making one last call on us, and you’ll see I’ve bought some wine specially. A sortie is, well, a mission over enemy territory, or even.… Oh my God, now I see what you’re driving at!” She stood up and her embroidery fell to the floor. “Look, you’ve only said that Ted had been shot, but now I want to know where and how!”
“It’s twelve-thirty, Mrs. Westford,” said Kramer.
N2134 Bantu Constable Nxumalo had a remarkable physique beneath his khaki uniform. He had never been in a gym, neither had he subscribed to any course involving dynamic tension. But he had spent a decade or more lifting and carrying some extremely dead weights about, and this had put considerable muscle on him, particularly in the region of his shoulders and arms.
“Er, Nxumalo,” murmured Strydom, appearing without warning in the refrigerator room.
“The doctor boss wants me?”
It alarmed Nxumalo to turn about and find himself being surveyed like something on a slab, for truly the district surgeon seemed to be looking right through his clothes. Then he saw a gleam of admiration, which was gratifying, and also a hint of surprise.
“You’re even better than I thought, hey, Nxumalo? It’s amazing the things you find right under your nose.”
“Boss?”
“Ach, just put the girl down and come this way.”
Nxumalo found a spare trolley to dump her on, and went through into the post-mortem room, where his lord and master, Sergeant Van, was standing red-faced and sweaty beside a strange contraption attached to an unattached arm.
“Hau!” exclaimed Nxumalo, breaking out into a sweat himself, then he realized to his great relief that it wasn’t the arm about which his conscience was bad.
“What I’ve done so far,” explained Strydom, “is I’ve ruled out the possibility that weight alone is sufficient to cause fractures of the ulna and radius bones at this point in the human arm.”
“What ‘weight alone?’ ” protested Van Rensburg. “How could I pull if I didn’t have a terrifying grip?”
“Now what I want you to try,” Strydom said to Nxumalo, who was trying to pick out Afrikaans words that he knew, “is to apply maximum force to—”
“It can’t be done,” said Van Rensburg, sniffing. “I tell you, Doc, with all respect, it’s just impossible.”
“Quiet, please, Sergeant—you have had your chance. Do you see these ropes, Nxumalo? Do you understand what they are designed to do?”
Nxumalo saw a piece of rope knotted around the arm, just below the wrist, and that one end of the rope was loose. The other end of the rope was attached to the hook at the bottom of a spring balance, and there was a second piece of rope, to provide him with something to pull on that side, attached to the ring on the top of the spring balance. If he took the two free ends and tugged, the amount of force would register on the spring balance’s scale in between.
“Not understand, boss,” said Nxumalo.
“Well, that doesn’t matter, hey? Just do as I say. Take that end and that end and pull like hell!”
“Hau, but I break these bones, boss!” warned Nxumalo, in a state of confused alarm.
“You do that, hey, and I’ll give you one rand for each bone you snap! Ready now?”
“The rope’s wrong,” objected Van Rensburg. “I’ve heard it was a special kind of skipping rope with fancy handles.”
“This is that kind of skipping rope,” said Strydom. “I personally went into the shop this morning and bought one.”
“They rooked you, Doc. This one’s got no handles, hey?”
“I cut them off,” growled Strydom, implying a great deal more than he said, should this go on any longer. “Take hold, Nxumalo.”
Having thrown his inhibitions to the wind, and agog at the thought of how many cheap cigarettes he could buy for two rand, Nxumalo flexed his pectorals and took up the strain.
“The arm’s wrong,” objected Van Rensburg. “That’s a young arm, it can’t be more than twenty, and so it’ll break by sheer fluke after I’ve been weakening it up for an hour.”
“Stop!” Strydom ordered Nxumalo, then took a very deep breath. “My patience, Sergeant, is close to the end of its tether. A young arm will, in actual fact, be harder to fracture than one belonging to a fifty-year-old man, and you, you great clown, have weakened nothing except your facile case with that stupid observation!”
Van Rensburg went his predictable purple, but less predictably, stood his ground. “Oh ja? Let us see.…”
“On your marks, Nxumalo!” snapped Strydom. “Get ready! Go!”
Nxumalo applied a sudden violent jerk to the ends of rope in his iron hands. What happened next was over in an instant: the arm leapt up from the slab, the spring balance’s hook straightened out, and the spring balance itself went whizzing just over Strydom’s head, shattering a bottle of stomach contents on a shelf.
“Now that was clever!” chortled Van Rensburg. “Hell, that was a fantastic trick, Doc! Why not do it again?”
“There’s no need to do it again,” Strydom replied smugly. “The measurement doesn’t matter—the proof is enough.”
“Hey?”
“Look for yourself—both bones fractured, and in a manner identical to Hookham’s!”
Nxumalo wiped his right palm in readiness to receive those two rand notes. Perhaps he would keep only the one, and present the other to his wife.
“The experiment’s wrong,” objected Van Rensburg. “In Hookham’s case, the rope was knotted round two wrists, not just one. That’s why I couldn’t put my heart into it.”
Now Strydom started going purple. “Wrong?”
“By some fluke, Nxumalo has been able to break this set of bones,” conceded Van Rensburg. “I’ll even say, for the sake of argument, he used x amount of strength. But has he got twice x in his arms, Doc? Because, unless I’m very much mistaken, so far he has, as usual, only half-done a proper job.”
“It wouldn’t take twice—”
“But there would be a difference, Doc! As a man of science, you can’t deny that.”
Perhaps, thought Nxumalo, who couldn’t follow a word of all this incessant arguing, he would keep fifty cents for himself, give forty cents to his wife, and distribute the remainder among his many children.
“Nxumalo?” said Strydom gloomily.
“Two bones broken, boss!”
“No, forget that now and go back to work, hey? It looks like I’m going to have to start this whole frustrating business back at square one again.”
The Chevrolet’s tires squealed as Kramer swung from the dirt road out on the high-speed carriageway from the south leading back into town. In under a minute he was passing everything before him, and making up for all the time lost by the briefing he had given Zondi after leaving Mrs. Westford and Timmy at their gate. Mother and son had stood together, hand in hand, not waving, and the memory of that made him sick to the stomach.
“But,” said Zondi, looking at his watch, “it is only twelve-thirty now, boss, so why did you tell a lie to that woman?”
“I was trying to get out of telling her any of the details, Mickey. She was not to be fooled so easily, but I didn’t mention about the rope and the car boot and all that. I just said he’d been found in Gillespie Street.”
“Then she will know you are a liar!”
“They don’t get the papers, hey?”
Zondi used one of the two knives he carried in his trouser-tabs to clean the sand from under his fingernails. “You seem to like this woman, boss.”
“Very much.”
“How was it exactly that Boss Hookham started to go to her place?”
“Remember his Basil Strongpiece entry in the diary? He went there without the Digby-Smiths, and naturally these people tried to fill him in on all that’d happened since he left for the war. Obviously people who weren’t friends of the Smiths had a ball telling him about Rupert and his love life, and Hookham suddenly wanted to see his old girlfriend again. The Digby-Smiths had never mentioned in their letters that she’d had such misfortunes—I suppose they didn’t want him to try and help her or something. Anyway, he made contact again, and that place must have become sort of an escape hole for him. At least he could talk about his wife to someone—nobody else wanted to listen, they said he mustn’t dwell on it or he’d become morbid—and with her knowledge of suffering, Mrs. Westford was just the right person. She thinks he was missing his grandchildren too, and Timmy was a bit of a substitute for that. Personally, I think it all went deeper than she lets on, but I’m not saying they were sleeping together or anything like that.”
“No, they did not,” said Zondi, with a grin. “That is one of many, many things that I have learned this morning. Hau, I am ready to be a garden boy. Lieutenant! I know now the names of every flower! I also have learned the meaning of the word ‘flak’ and what is signified by ‘coming out of the sun.’ ”
Kramer nodded. “And the bastard did come out of the sun, Mickey! Old habits die hard, perhaps! But Hookham could only have guessed that—all right, all right, subconsciously—if his mind had already started to put things together.”
“Hmmmm.”
“Look, man, this new ‘hmmmm’ habit of yours is beginning to get right up my nose, hey?”
“I was just wondering if Boss Hookham would not automatically say that, because as Timmy has taught me, that was the only easy way of attacking a fighter pilot.”
“Okay, I’ll accept that,” said Kramer, handing Zondi one of two cigarettes he had just lit. “But let’s go on from there. He also spoke of risking a ‘final sortie,’ and when you take that with the various descriptions of his behavior, how do you read it then? Do you think that flying club social simply ‘lifted him out of himself?’ ”
Zondi remained in silent thought.
“And remember, Mickey, his thoughts of his bereavement seemed pushed aside. Clear your mind of everything else! In a nutshell, from then until he suddenly decided to get far away from here, how did he seem to behave? Ach, what makes you feel very alive?”
“Danger, boss,” replied Zondi without hesitation.
“Exactly, hey? Hookham smelled danger at that social! He went looking for these two other men, perhaps to find out if they felt the same way, and then he could be right when Bradshaw was shot. That’s what made him shake a bit! Probably it was the same men he saw again on the Monday night, and by the Tuesday he was wanting out. Then he saw how upset he’d made Mrs. Westford and Timmy, and must have wanted to stay a little longer. So what does he propose? That he will risk one more sortie! He will take one more look and see if a theory of his is correct.”
“And if it is wrong after all, then he need not escape a danger which isn’t real,” continued Zondi, nodding. “But one thing strikes me which is strange.”
“Uh huh?”
“Why didn’t Boss Hookham come and see you, Lieutenant? There was an appeal in the Sunday papers he took out to that house, and Colonel Muller had stated clearly that we knew of no motive.”
“Put yourself in his shoes, man. If he suspected some ordinary motive, okay! But what sort of motive connects two men whose only link is their membership of the RAF? A pretty crazy one, if you ask me!”
“But Boss Hookham wasn’t alive to make the—”
“Ach, Zondi, don’t start buggering me around, hey? I’m saying Hookham smelled a motive when he smelled danger, but it all seemed so fantastic he couldn’t be sure he was right, even after Bradshaw was shot. In fact, he was never sure, hence the final sortie which could have put his mind at rest, dispelling his fears and letting him stay on here.”
“Would a brave man run though, Lieutenant?”
Kramer grunted irritably. “He didn’t in the end, did he? He bloody took that risk, my friend, and it didn’t come off! Now he’ll never run anywhere. But there’s another thing about even brave men that you should remember: we can all fight an enemy if he is clearly marked out to us; only, when we can’t be sure who he is, whether he’s even real or not, then we can run away from our own imaginings, cursing ourselves for fools. Have you never been a child in a dark room at night?”
“Such poetry, boss,” chuckled Zondi. “What is the next step? The two men Boss Hookham went to see?”
“Damn right,” said Kramer, overtaking a traffic cop.
Zondi winced and slid down in his seat with his feet propped on the dashboard. “I feel very much alive, Lieutenant,” he murmured. “And you?”
15
COLONEL MULLER HAD reached the point where he needed every square centimeter of space on his enormous desktop, simply to do his job. Information had been flooding in from all directions, sparked off by his brilliantly worded appeal in the Trekkersburg Gazette that morning, and he had enough stuff about gunshots, guns and giants to keep him busy for a week. That was the big snag, of course. None of the information had something so conclusive about it that his team of detectives had put a mark beside it in red. A typical example of this inconclusiveness was a report from an up-country farmer who had heard four gunshots on the night in question, only there had been a ten-minute interval between the first shot and the other three, and anyway, the first had sounded more like a rifle, while his wife was sure it was only three shots, fired at irregular intervals, and his son, a neighboring farmer, had claimed to have found some guinea-fowl feathers on his land. If one multiplied this sort of thing by fifty�
��and more reports were coming in all the time—the mind boggled at how long it would take to check all these stories out. And as for the tall tales of giants he was receiving, there the mind cringed; some people had quite missed the fact that the actual description was not bizarre at all, there were plenty of good, strong South African men that size. Yet the phones were constantly ringing with anonymous tips about gargantuan malcontents, rugby-players who could tear the head off an ox, and one meter maid in Durban had been the subject of several more obviously malicious calls. That left the great pile of stuff on .32 Smith & Wesson revolvers, most of it plainly from people who didn’t know a revolver from a water pistol, and many of them seemed to have very dubious reasons for suggesting searches under so-and-so’s bed. Colonel Muller had, in fact, also reached the point where he was looking for an easy way out of all this—and for somewhere to put his tray, simply to have his lunch.
Galt appeared at just the right moment. “Allow me, sir,” he whispered, and lifted a pile of papers aside. “Curry and rice, sir? You have no idea how that stuff stains the stomach walls.”
“I’m glad I haven’t,” said Colonel Muller, sitting down and tucking the paper napkin into his collar. “I would also be glad, unless this is very important, to get my meal out of the way before you go any further.”
“Well, it might be very important, sir, provided we can support the notion with enough other factors.”
“What’s the topic, briefly?”
“Vegetable matter, sir.”
“Ach, then that’s okay, hey? You just fire away.”
Galt produced a number of small labeled packets. “These are all little snippets of things I have found on Hookham’s clothes,” he explained. “Of particular interest are the samples taken from here and there under the straps of his sandals where they attach to the sole. I have identified soil, dry horse manure, grass seeds and fragments of the wattle-bark chips they use on the soft-track around the racecourse. None of which is conclusive in itself, of course, but taken together they suggest something rather interesting. Now do you remember there was a little stream running near where Bradshaw was shot? My prize exhibit, Colonel Muller, is this.” And he handed over a tiny packet with a minute green speck in it.
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