The Blood of an Englishman

by James McClure

  “Ja, it must be hell,” murmured Kramer, listening hard to the night outside. “But if it was such a terrible business, why make jokes about it?”

  “Come, come,” chided Wilson. “Don’t you ever do that sort of thing? Don’t mind admitting I do! Always best if you can see the funny side of appalling things that have happened to one. I’ve laughed on the spot, old boy. Nervous reaction.”

  Kramer had laughed at the first dead body he had ever seen, that of a janitor who had impaled himself on a broom handle left carelessly propped against some banister-less stairs. “Uh huh,” he conceded. “I suppose it’s not a bad joke as they go.”

  “But old Bradders never tells the rest, y’know. Doesn’t explain that the poor wretch in the nun’s outfit had dysentery. Oh God, yes—the gallopers, poured out of him, blood and all the bits. Startled the life out of this French priest who’d taken ‘her’ under his wing, and he nipped off to have the Huns find a doctor on the train and—well, the quack took one look and that was it. The whole lot of them were carried off, treated unspeakably, and then they were shot one by one, firing squad, y’know. Eight ack-emma each morning. Bradshaw might be a bit of a rough diamond, a bloody bolshy sort of cove, but that’s what kept him alive. Those swines tried everything on him, kept him till last, but Trigger Stevens cracked under torture, spilled the beans about their escape route, then succumbed, all in the nick of time. The chaps say Bradders came back to the camp in a frightful state, and was chucked straight into the cooler for a month’s solitary, while he licked his wounds. Came out very shaky but—”

  “Shhhh!”

  The night was deeply silent.

  “Sorry, go on, sir. You were saying?”

  “About prejudice. Got to be damned careful, y’know. Make sure you know the whole story. Isn’t ‘Kramer’ German?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Of course it’s ruddy German!” chuckled Wilson, pointing accusingly with his pipe stem. “A name notorious in certain quarters! And there you are, you see—the weak link!”

  Kramer forgot about the door for a moment. “I’m not with you, Mr. Wilson,” he said. “You mean a weakness in my theory?”

  “Look, old boy, your whole fanciful proposition depends upon the effect that a couple of harmless chaps could have on an eavesdropper by blethering on about blasting Jerry to bits. A thing I’ve done dozens of times! May I go on?”

  “Oh ja,” sighed Kramer. “But will you please try to keep your voice down a bit?”

  Wilson laughed. “There isn’t anybody out there! Good God, that’s what I’m about to prove to you.”

  “Even so, if you don’t mind, hey?”

  There was a dull, metallic clunk some distance off.

  “Didn’t have a motive for the cowardly attack on poor old Bradshaw, did you? No idea what brought about Bonzo’s wretched end? So what did you do? You decided to put yourself in the shoes of this murdering swine.”

  “Ja, ja, obviously.”

  “Young man, of distant Germanic extraction, tries to imagine motivation. Young man asks himself: Now what possible motive could I have for killing these men? What would make me feel justified in doing so? And with all that Hun blood in your veins, up popped the answer! Revenge, old boy; pure and simple.”

  “Ach, who’s showing prejudice now! Let me tell you that—”

  “Prejudice! The very word! You’re very obviously anti-Bradshaw even now, despite the fact he’s been on the receiving end! Doesn’t this tie in with that ‘feeling’ you insist gives you the right to invade a chap’s privacy? When did that feeling first assail you? Was it when you were first confronted by an ex-RAF—?”

  “It was when I went to interview Bradshaw at his—”

  “What did I tell you?” chortled Wilson, delighted with himself. “As a former member of the RAF, it must now be very plain to you why I’m not so easily persuaded by this tommy-rot of yours!”

  Kramer almost walked out then and went home. But his hunch had never felt stronger, and he dismissed Ernie Wilson’s deck-chair psychology with the thought that, were carrots a less accommodating shape, then he’d have told the old bastard to stuff one up his cotton-tail.

  18

  ZONDI GRADUALLY ALLOWED his taut muscles to relax again, fairly confident that there was nobody close at hand who might have heard the clunk of his gun barrel against an unexpected water pipe. Then he continued to crawl closer to the chicken house along a shallow, weed-choked ditch, pausing only when he had the door to the main rondavel in sight.

  How heavy the Walther PPK always seemed at moments like these, and how slippery in his grip.

  There was a shower of pebbles down the side of the ditch behind him.

  A toad, most probably.

  “Saved by the bell!” said Ernie Wilson, reaching his hand into a chipped water jug. “Don’t look so startled, old chap!”

  Bleep-bleep-bleep.

  Kramer reholstered his Ruger magnum. “Robert du Plooi?” he said, recognizing the device.

  “So you’ve met? You wouldn’t have so much as a pencil about you? Whacko! I’ll get this number down.…”

  The control-room girl’s voice sounded eerily disembodied, and Kramer stole a quick glance out of the window. Still nothing.

  “Ah, where were we?” asked Wilson, tearing the corner off the ancient copy of Wings that he had used for a note pad. “That’s right, talking about this thingummy. Being in cahoots with young Du Plooi, he lets me have one on the cheap—absolute ruddy Godsend, as you can imagine. You don’t happen to have a spare coin on you, do you? Here’s the pen.”

  “Hey, hold on a tick, Mr. Wilson! You’re not thinking of leaving this—”

  “Only to pop up the road, old chap.”

  Kramer blocked the gap leading to the door. “I’m sorry, but under these circumstances, I can’t allow you to leave the rondavel, sir.”

  “Good God, don’t think you can come barging in here and start telling a fellow what he can and can’t do! If I wish to leave, there’s nothing you can do to stop me!”

  “There’s a lot I can do,” warned Kramer, “and don’t worry, I bloody will if you don’t listen! Whose number is that anyway? What makes it so urgent?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest, to be honest. Now, if you’ll be so good as to get out of my way, I’ll—”

  Kramer snatched the scrap of paper from him. “You don’t even know whose number this is?”

  “That’s what makes it so damnably intriguing,” replied Wilson, trying unsuccessfully to grab it back. “It might well be that tragic young woman I met only last week.”

  “Does she live in this area? Because the first digit shows it must be a phone on the west side of Trekkersburg.”

  Wilson looked a little less cocksure of himself. “Six Valleys and all that, do you mean?”

  “Or very much closer than that.”

  “Look, it wouldn’t take me more than a minute or two to find out,” said Wilson, digging into his hip pocket.

  Like one of those special color slides, flashed for only a split-second on the screen at the police college, Kramer saw a fleeting tableau in his mind’s eye: A Free State farmer and his family; an Israeli hitch-hiker; a hefty, fair-haired man with his back turned, who kept looking from his coffee to his newspaper to the clock to the telephones standing out on the forecourt.

  “Wait here, Mr. Wilson!” he said, edging towards the door. “And don’t you move an inch outside this rondavel, because that’s exactly what he wants you to do!”

  “Oh, what utter tripe,” snapped Wilson, whipping out a five-cent coin. “I’m simply not going to be dictated to by a—”

  Kramer heaved over a pile of egg boxes, blocking the exit, and then grabbed for the door handle.

  Zondi felt the heavy footfalls through the ground before he heard them. He raised his head, looked quickly behind him, saw nothing, and turned in surprise to face the rondavels. A giant was heading straight for him, looming enormous against the scud of clouds acro
ss the moon. He aimed his pistol and curled the first squeeze on its trigger. He had to suck spit from his cheeks before his voice would work.

  “Hold it right there! Police!”

  “Don’t be a bloody fool,” hissed the Lieutenant. “The killer’s that fair-haired bastard back at the café! But stay here and see this old fool doesn’t try to come after me—use your cuffs, use anything!”

  “But, boss, you can’t go by yourself to—”

  “Orders, kaffir!”

  It would be a pity, thought Zondi, as he watched the Lieutenant sprint towards the service station, if those turned out to be his last words. Then he was distracted by a very agitated white man who skidded to a halt and wet himself.

  Adrenaline gave Kramer his high and his cool detachment; while everything at the service station now seemed pricked out much clearer, sharper, brighter than before, it also appeared so unreal to him that he moved with the confidence of a dreamer in a dream world where nothing had the power to hurt him. He covered the last fifty yards without feeling his feet touch the uneven ground, then cut back his pace, slowed right down and came to a halt behind the His and Hers lavatory block, which stood at the abrupt edge of the spotlit set, an actor’s stride away from the darkness.

  Deception was the crucial factor in a one-man operation like this. First he removed his shoulder holster, being well aware that only police officers went about covered up in jackets on sweltering hot nights, and hid it behind a rubbish bin. Next he tucked his shirt in very tightly all the way round, which would give the impression that he had only just risen from a prolonged sitting in the gents’. He switched his watch from his left wrist to his right, a little trick that had more than once gained him a split-second’s advantage when his opponent had mistaken him for a southpaw. He combed his hair, just as he might have done at the basin after washing his hands, and then, lastly, he slipped the Ruger magnum into a sleeve of his jacket, and arranged the folds so that he could carry it casually without any telltale lumps or bumps showing.

  Action. Kramer slipped out from behind the lavatory block, sidestepped into the straight line leading from His to the café entrance, and fell into an easy stroll, fighting an inclination to up heels and run. Heavy traffic roared and flashed by across the back projection, divorced from what lay before him.

  The Israeli hitch-hiker had moved on to the concrete apron in front of the pumps, his haversack at his feet and his thumb in the air. It was good to see him there: one less innocent bystander to be mourned if anything went wrong. Better still, as Kramer neared the café, the Free State family came solemnly from the side entrance, applauding the quality of drinking-water in Natal, and dispersed to their numerous vehicles. Circling them with a friendly smile, Kramer went to pretend a check on whether his car was securely locked—Zondi had forgotten to see to this, as it turned out—and to take in the revised tableau inside the glass-fronted café. The two black waiters were disappearing into the kitchen with trays of dirty plates, followed by the raven-haired manageress gesturing in their wake, and the fair-haired man was still at his table. But what made Kramer shudder was the scamper of young children that had since appeared, racing around all over the place, and plainly far beyond the control of their travel-weary parents, who sat studying the menu together right in the middle.

  Realizing that any form of direct approach was now out of the question, he took advantage of the fact the fair-haired man’s back was still turned to beat a quick retreat behind the Chevrolet, there to reconsider his strategy.

  The hitch-hiker came over. “You gonna eat too? Or are you ready to blow?” He spoke with an odd American accent. “I mean I could use a ride, man.”

  “You must be tired,” said Kramer, trying desperately to think of a way to get rid of him fast without attracting the fair-haired man’s attention—short of slugging the stupid bastard. “You look tired,” he added, lamely.

  “I’m dead,” said the hitch-hiker.

  You could be at any moment, thought Kramer, and noted the very masculine, aggressive stance the youth had, which suggested that tough tactics wouldn’t work too well on him. He also had a self-pitying sulkiness that didn’t guarantee a polite rebuff any success, not without a long wheedling argument.

  “Don’t much care which way you’re headin”, man,” the hitchhiker said. “If it’s back downtown, then I guess I’ll find me a pad at the Y.”

  Kramer decided it’d have to be done the other way round: the hitch-hiker would have to reject him—yet an outburst of rank anti-Semitism could backfire nastily.

  “If you’re so tired,” said Kramer, smiling like a toothpaste ad, “perhaps you’d like a bed for the night at my place? I don’t live far away.”

  “You don’t? That’s great! And I’ll get a chance to study your culture up close the way—”

  “Shhhh! Not so loud, hey? Of course, you can study my culture! And this bed, it’s a really big one, you know? Satin. All the sheets are satin. Not pink-for-girls satin, mind! Blue satin. Do you like blue things, my friend?”

  “Sure, I like blue things. I sleep on anything.”

  “So you’ll sleep on mine?”

  “Sounds really snappy.”

  “Share and share alike, hey?”

  The hitch-hiker’s bloodshot eyes suddenly narrowed, and there was a horrifying moment when a small smile played about his thick lips—then those lips twisted down at the corners. “Oh shit,” he said softly, “and so butch with it. I thought this was gonna turn out my lucky night.”

  “And so it could, my friend! Don’t go!”

  He went. Lock, stock and haversack, and never glanced back, which tended to prove two basic suppositions: firstly, that it was possible to lose the look of a police officer, and secondly, that every prejudice had its virtues, provided it was used correctly. Then Kramer forgot all about him and turned to face the café once more, having tried to keep half an eye on the fair-haired man throughout this bad moment.

  The man was moving. He had stood up with the newspaper folded in his right hand, and he was going out towards the telephone boxes. The traffic noise made it impossible to tell at that range whether one of the telephones was ringing, but Kramer judged from his stride that he was in no particular hurry. The man went into the far box with his newspaper still clutched tight and closed the door. Vandals had kicked in its panes of glass, and someone had stuck a sheet of semi-transparent blue plastic in their place, which showed whether anyone occupied it but gave away no details of feature.

  This made the far box an ideal place for a killer to hide himself—but only up to a point. His intended victim might well not be able to see in, but how was the man going to see out? There would be no need for him to see out, Kramer reasoned, if instead of gunning Wilson down on his approach to the telephones, he shot him in the actual boxes themselves. The dividing wall was only a sheet of thick plywood, and a .32 could go right through that and still blow a hole in a war-surplus squadron leader. There was a snag, though. How would the man be able to know for certain that it was Wilson in the next box, and not some innocent member of the public? The traffic sounds were enough to blot out even the sound of Wilson’s self-opinionated voice. But this wouldn’t apply, of course, if the killer heard that voice over the telephone! And there might be a few words of hate he’d like to spew out before he pulled the trigger.

  “Ach, it’s perfect.…” murmured Kramer, admiring a mind which could think like that. “Only I’ve got him like a dead duck!”

  Kramer moved swiftly round in a wide circle, coming up on the pair of telephone boxes from behind. There were no sounds of speech coming through the rear wall of the far box, although he pressed an ear gently against it to check this. The bastard was just standing there, waiting for Wilson to step into the empty box and dial his number, and then he would plug him. The timing of the whole thing was pretty good too, considering how long Wilson would have taken to reach the garage, had there been nobody around to save his bacon.

  As Kramer ed
ged around the side of the near box, he saw to his annoyance that the hitch-hiker had returned, and was crouched about seventy yards away, taking something out of his haversack. The hitch-hiker had not noticed him, however, by all appearances, and so could probably be safely ignored.

  The big problem was whipping open that far door fast enough to disarm the killer before he had time to react. Some sort of distraction would be the answer, but it wasn’t easy to think of one which mightn’t alert him. Then Kramer was seized by a sudden temptation to hear exactly what it was that he said to his victims before pulling the trigger, and just how this strange mixture of an accent sounded.

  He paused, took out the scrap of paper with the number on it, memorized the digits, put it away and decided to kill two birds with one stone, as it were. Neither would this be anything as difficult as it might seem. The nearside telephone box had three things going for it: it was vacant, of course; the vandals had removed its door completely, so the killer would not be listening for any opening and closing; and best of all, it wasn’t a large telephone box, which meant that Kramer could remain on the concrete outside—out of the firing line—while he put through the call.

  Before stepping up to the front of the empty box, he glanced round to make sure there were no kids, petrol-pump attendants or other encumbrances who might either get hurt or precipitate the action by becoming nosy at the last moment. There was none. The hitch-hiker had settled down on a patch of lawn, and was connecting together what looked like one of those small, take-apart tent poles.

  Kramer made his move. He reached into the telephone box, lifted the receiver, dialed the number with the muzzle of his magnum, and was not at all surprised to hear the ringing tone without there being a reciprocal ringing sound from the other box beside him. The killer would have anticipated what an immediate give-away this could be, and had no doubt disconnected the bell leads in his instrument. He had no need to be alerted by the bell, not when a hand, pressed against the plywood division, would easily pick up the distinctive vibration of the dial being turned and allowed to return to zero. After feeling the vibrations cease, he would probably wait about twenty seconds before lifting the receiver on his side. What followed after that would be the fascinating part. Kramer stood poised outside the box, ready to plunge his five-cent piece into the slot at the very moment the call was answered.