“Well, now I’m going to admit something to you,” said Bradshaw, leaning forward and raising a finger, “that you’ve got to accept for my Bible oath. It concerns Darren.”
“Of course—and you’re going to say you’d not made him aware of any of these plans when he came down to help out in the shop.”
“Exactly! And that’s the truth!”
Bradshaw was lying, Kramer could see it in his eyes, but decided to let it pass for the moment. Like father, like son, and two peas in a pod. If Bradshaw had gone to the wall, then the shop and young Darren’s future would have gone with it.
“You’re satisfied it’s the truth?” Bradshaw demanded.
“Uh huh. Go on.”
“I had another brilliant idea,” continued Bradshaw, and without any attempt at humor. “The snag about the bullet was the scratches left on its surface by the barrel—but what if there was no bullet? What if it passed right through and disappeared? Then all your district surgeon would have was the hole made by a thirty-two, and he could use that to put together the two and two I wanted. Quite without Darren knowing what was happening, I fixed up with Silver Touch Benson for him to get hold of a thirty-two for me. It was to be brought to the shop, and Darren was to pay for it from the safe. Despite anything you have heard to the contrary, that is what happened.”
And he believes that part, thought Kramer. He believes that Darren didn’t try to cut in on the action, perhaps with the hope of beating Meerkat down, and pocketing the difference in the price. He had taught his son the tricks of the trade too well.
“Darren didn’t know it was a gun he was buying?”
“No idea,” said Bradshaw. “He brought it home to me in a shoe box that was still taped up. Then I went up to my cottage and waited for Hookham to appear. Nothing happened Monday or Tuesday night. On Wednesday, when lack of sleep was beginning to get me, I rang the Digby-Smith house, putting on an accent, just to see where he was. Or was that the Tuesday? Nevermind, the accent came in handy later on.”
“Ja, let’s not bother with the details, Bradshaw. That was the night Hookham arrived?”
Bradshaw grinned. “At about ten. He left his car up near the gate, and took the obvious route down along the stream. I had the thirty-two stuck in my belt, and I was down by the jetty, listening to his progress, when the thought occurred to me that, unless I could get very close and surprise him, then it was still possible he might get a shot in—and I didn’t like the thought of that.”
“Uh huh. Not many would.”
“The boat, I thought. If I take the boat out, then I can catch him sideways when he reaches the rushes. But the distance was the problem. I had it! Back in the cottage was my Marlin Century, which I kept for buck. You know, a lever-action thirty-thirty! The trouble was I’d had revolvers on the brain, and had missed this easy answer. I just had time to double back, grab it and get behind the pine tree by the time Hookham appeared, creeping up the bank.”
Bradshaw’s eyes had a gleam in them now, which Kramer found decidedly sick. But he went on listening, fascinated.
“The boat still served its purpose. Have you seen it? It’s white. Against that background, even in moonlight, Hookham’s head looked like a black bull’s eye on a target.” Bradshaw paused to moisten his thick lips. “Like I said, I keep the rifle for buck, shooting them by torchlight, and its foresight has a luminous bead. As Hookham’s head was raised slowly to look at the cottage, I waited until the bullet would end up in the middle of the dam, and then squeezed the trigger. Bam! I got him first shot, right in the forehead, and the hole was perfect for being mistaken for a thirty-two.”
Oh Doc, thought Kramer, just wait until Van Rensburg hears this.…
“The rifle shot was loud, naturally, and I knew it would be heard up at the farmhouse, so I couldn’t waste any time. I was about to pick up Hookham though, when the revolver in his hand slipped from his fingers, and I saw then that my wishes had all come true. I would put a few more shots into him, angling them so they wouldn’t come out. The gun had a hell of a kick for its size. The first bullet went into the soft mud beside him. I was more careful with the next two, getting him nicely in the chest, and I checked his back for exit wounds—none. Before anything else, I threw his own revolver as far out into the dam as I could, keeping the other one in my belt so I could tell the Pretoriuses I was just taking potshots for fun if they came down.”
“You went for the car?”
“Naturally, Lieutenant. He’d left it parked in an odd place. I drove it down to the front of the cottage, dragged him up to it, and decided to ring Darren to fetch me—he could drive Hookham back to Trekkersburg unwittingly, while I could use my own car, which had automatic.”
Kramer stubbed out his cigarette. “So Darren was on standby all this week? Not going out because he didn’t know when you would ring him to stage a rescue operation?”
“He was very happy just being with his mother!” snapped Bradshaw, lying again by the look of him. “And he was exhausted by his long day in the shop.”
“Uh huh. Then you had him help you tie up the wrists? You pulled with your strong left, and he put his muscle—”
“Jesus!” exploded Bradshaw. “I’ve told you the boy didn’t have any part in it! I was fiddling with the skipping rope by the porch—all right, trying hard to get it tight like you’ve said—and a very simple solution occurred to me. I took out the long tow rope in the back of Hookham’s car, and used it to attach one end of the skipping rope to the Rover’s bumper and another to one of the porch posts. All I had to do then was ease the Rover forward and it did the pulling for me. Frankly, I thought I’d overdone it a bit when I saw the bones smashed, but thank God that didn’t seem to worry your forensic so-called experts. Did it?”
“One of them was a little doubtful,” admitted Kramer, “but he has been distracted by other things lately. Slimy things in hard shells like yourself, Bradshaw. Tell me the rest.”
“You are beginning to believe me now?” asked Bradshaw, showing his relief in a weak smile. “My boy’s going to be released from custody? All charges dropped?”
“Darren’s not got a thing to worry about,” said Kramer.
“Thank God! Well, the rest must be fairly self-evident to you. The point is that Darren had no knowledge of what lay in the back of that car when he drove it back to—”
“Ach, come on, man! Doesn’t he read the newspapers?”
Bradshaw was trapped, and his cheeks went gray again. “All right, I’ll tell you what actually happened. I drove the Rover myself—I left before he arrived, and he found a note saying I’d got a lift from someone.”
“Rubbish, Bradshaw. He drove the Rover, you waited round the corner for him, and then you two went home together. That fits in much better,” Kramer lied glibly, “with what he’s—”
“Then why hasn’t he anything to worry about?” asked Bradshaw, glancing up at footsteps on the floorboards above his head.
“Because I think Mrs. Bradshaw is going to suffer enough,” said Kramer, and began to make a plan to really spare her all he could; with Bradshaw’s help, it would be easy to fiddle the evidence and yet still leave sufficient to hang him with. “Please speak freely from now on.”
“You mean that, don’t you?” remarked Bradshaw in surprise. “I can’t understand why!”
“Perhaps that’s because you can’t see your wife as a person,” said Kramer. “Where does Classina Baksteen figure in all this?”
“You should know!” snorted Bradshaw. “You were the one digging your nose into the last thing you should have done! Why did you latch on to the RAF angle like that?”
Kramer glanced around the room. “It was in here I first got that feeling,” he said. “Here in your study. Mrs. Bradshaw was talking about Bonzo Hookham and—” A sudden flash of hindsight brought it back to him. “Ja, I know where that feeling came from! It was when, from what Mrs. Bradshaw was saying, I must have felt surprised you’d not spoken to her about Bonzo s
ince the party—funny behavior for a veteran, hey? And where were all the old mementos? The sort of things an ex-RAF bomber pilot would have on view in his own private room. Why weren’t they there? Had you tried to cast them out of your mind too? And yet, socially, you still had to play the part, you couldn’t get round it without avoiding—what? Suspicion?”
“I can see,” said Bradshaw, “that I wasn’t wrong in trying to mislead you and get you away from digging into that too deeply.”
“I might have found Bonzo Hookham’s motive?”
“You stood a very fair chance. But weren’t you interested in Classina? The idea came to me when you and Colonel Muller came here, and I could see how obsessed you were with the Raf. Luckily, that ‘strange accent’ nonsense I’d planted in Myra earlier put up a bit of flak, distracting the Colonel, and from what he said I had to break the pattern before it got any further.”
Half a mark to De Klerk, thought Kramer; maybe even eight out of ten.
Bradshaw had his braggart’s glint back. “It all came to me in a flash. Colonel Muller seemed dead set on the racecourse being the scene of the crime, so I made a phone call that I knew would get every available patrol down there, clearing the rest of Six Valleys for a young bloke I’d hired. It had to be Six Valleys, of course, because that would support your pattern. I was also getting a bit sick of making up stuff I’d ‘forgotten to tell you,’ and wanted the investigation to die a natural, so I made it fit Muller’s prediction of one last attack.”
“It sounds to me,” said Kramer, “as if Stormtrooper Schoeman needs a kick up his arse.”
“No, you can’t blame him for missing me making the call,” said Bradshaw, smugly. “I suggested to Myra that she should invite him for a swim, and he seemed quite transfixed by her. Anyway, do you remember the first shot I’d fired with Hookham’s revolver?”
“Uh huh.”
“I’d recovered that bullet, naturally, and I’d hung on to it, the way one does with something that might come in useful unexpectedly. I gave it to this youngster, who I paid good money, and told him to go round the back of Six Valleys and take a look at these Afrikaans addresses I’d picked out of the Kelly’s directory. If he saw something harmless he could shoot at, using the bullet for a stone in his catty, and preferably with someone near it, then he was to have a go. I made the stipulation about a harmless shot because I didn’t want—”
“Ja, I’ve got the picture,” said Kramer. “You didn’t want the innocent to suffer? Not after all those bombs you dropped?”
Bradshaw appreciated the irony. “A very nasty moment,” he admitted. “I equipped this kid with some more false clues, a bag of cigarette ash and cigarette ends, told him to stand under a branch in these big shoes, and by pressing upwards, really make some deep impressions, and so on. He was meant, however, to light a firecracker and fire his catapult when it went off, but the cracker was a dud and made hardly any noise at all. Again, very fortunately for me, the imaginative geniuses in the police force put forward a theory to cover that, and as De Klerk explained it to me before asking any questions, I was able to play him along nicely.”
“That wasn’t just any kid,” said Kramer. “It was Darren. Detective Constable Schoeman is not all tiptoes and tinkling laughter, Bradshaw—he made his observations.”
“What? Then why didn’t you—?”
Kramer shrugged. “Why didn’t we try for you before? Ach, it was simpler to let you think the whole thing had been forgotten, and then to wait until one of the pair of you made his fatal error. That’s what Darren did last night, Mr. Bradshaw, when he pulled a gun on a police officer. You are not the only man in Trekkersburg who can use elements of the truth to keep the pot boiling.”
That dropped not so much a bombshell as a blockbuster on Bradshaw. He went rigid. He probably died a little in that moment.
“Fatal error?” he forced out, his voice quavering. “You mean somebody shot him? Who?”
“Totally fatal, but nobody shot him.”
Bradshaw started to come out of his seat at Kramer, his great arms ready to claw at him. A push on the chest sent him reeling back.
“Jesus Christ Almighty! I must know what’s happened!” Bradshaw bellowed. “Tell me, you bastard! Tell me!”
“Calm yourself, Bradshaw, and I’ll do better than that,” said Kramer, in a soft voice like Meerkat had used, “I’ll actually show you. But first I want to know why you killed a true man like Bonzo Hookham—and why he wanted to kill you.”
“Oh no, no more tricks!”
“It all began at the social, didn’t it? You said something to him that tore the lid off, ripped open an old scar? You gave yourself away somehow, even though he’d never seen you in his life before? What was it? Come on, you must have guessed long ago!”
“Get stuffed! Go and—”
“What was it? A name? The name he called out at you? Was it your nun joke? You tell that to everyone, don’t you?”
Bradshaw actually shrank back, and Kramer knew he had him then. “Just tell me about my son,” he whimpered.
“We’ll play swaps, Mr. Bradshaw. You tell me what really happened when the Gestapo caught you, and I’ll tell you what really happened to Darren. Okay?”
Bradshaw looked up at him with tears beginning to stream down his gross cheeks. “We were not just father and son,” he said, lost from the reality of the moment, “we were—”
“Ja, I know,” said Kramer, “two of a kind. But that’s Snap, and swaps is played this way.”
Then he began to deal out the Polaroid pictures of Darren Bradshaw’s mutilated corpse face down on the study desk. For every print Archie Bradshaw turned over, he would have to pay a forfeit of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Kramer felt sure he would catch on very quickly.
A slight shadow fell over the atlas on Colonel Muller’s lap, and he looked up to see Mrs. Bradshaw trying to smile sweetly at him, but her eyes were frantic with worry.
“Please,” she whispered, “can you tell me what’s happening? I can hear Archie crying like a baby in his study, but I’m not really supposed to go in.”
“Er, there’s some bad news, Myra,” mumbled Colonel Muller, handing the atlas back to Zondi. “Um, an accident. Sergeant, will you take yourself—”
“On my way, Colonel,” said Zondi.
He retreated to the Chevrolet and slipped in behind the wheel, propping his atlas against it. The rear-view mirror on the right wing showed Colonel Muller helping Mrs. Bradshaw into his car. They spoke for less than a minute, and then Mrs. Bradshaw threw her arms around the Colonel’s neck, and buried her plain little face in his big broad shoulder. Her own shoulders shook and shook. Then the Colonel’s arms came up and wrapped comfortingly around her, while he bent his head to say soothing things in her ear.
“Hmmmm,” said Zondi, opening his atlas to stare at it for inspiration.
At the same moment, the front door of the house opened for the first time. The Lieutenant stepped out, leading a shambling, shrunken figure tightly by the right arm.
Zondi gave a final glance at the map of Picardy. There, just above Amiens, was a town called Albert. Knowing this, it was possible to give a fresh interpretation to the entry in Bonzo Hookham’s diary for May 27th: Dear God, hasn’t my poor Alice suffered enough in her life? Albert—her family, now this! Albert lay on what seemed a likely escape route from Germany, and Alice’s family had been betrayed to the Germans. A motive for murder if the traitor were discovered? Colonel Muller had been impressed by the idea, but neither he nor Zondi had been able to decide quite what to do with it.
28
EVERYONE SEEMED TO be in the Supreme Court on the balmy summer’s afternoon when Archibald Meredith Bradshaw, aged 56, of 19 Kitchener Row, Bullerton, Trekkersburg, was sentenced to death for the murder of Edward “Bonzo” Hookham, aged 55, of Forge Cottage, Little Bowerby, Hampshire, England.
The Widow Fourie was there, sitting in the front row of the public gallery on the side r
eserved for whites, and she caught Kramer’s eye with an understanding look as Mr. Justice Willoughby-Evans, an Oxford Blue, began to intone the formula.
Archibald Meredith Bradshaw, the sentence of the Court is
Miriam Zondi was there, seated in the middle of the public gallery on the side reserved for non-whites, and gazing proudly at her husband, who had just received a special commendation in the judge’s speech for the assistance he had given the arresting officer. Zondi, squirming a little on the wooden bench beside the Lieutenant, kept his eyes averted in embarrassment.
you shall be taken back
Colonel Muller was there, hunched forward in the disused jury box, watching Bradshaw’s face with a curious sort of satisfaction, for all the world as though his bachelor days were numbered. It was already known there would be no appeal.
to the place of custody whence you came
Three former members of the French Resistance were there, having been flown out specially to confirm beyond any reasonable doubt that the prisoner in the dock was the selfsame bullnecked, toadying airman glimpsed pointing out the “safe house” in Albert where young Alice Hookham had once lived with her family.
and that you from there, on a day to be appointed
Six former prisoners of war were there, also having been flown out, to testify that the prisoner in the dock had not been seen for a month after his return to camp, by which time he claimed to have recovered from his injuries by torture. None of this was essential to the case, but the Attorney-General had left such a show trial required the proper embellishing.
by the State President
The widow of Trigger Stevens was there, having traveled the 6,000 miles at the expense of a British Sunday paper, to see her husband’s name cleared at long last.
The Blood of an Englishman Page 29