The Steam Pig

by James McClure

  The hen party broke up with a great clucking of mild recrimination.

  “Whatever have you boys been doing in there?” Mrs Trenshaw chided. “Did you sneak dear Phyllis van Reenen in there without our knowing?”

  So they were not altogether as stupid as they seemed to their husbands.

  “Sorry, not tonight, ladies.”

  It helped to get them laughing. Paved the way, so to speak.

  “I’m afraid something very important has cropped up,” Kramer said. “None of your hubbies had the courage to ask you so they sent me: do you think you could all make your own way home? They said take the cars.”

  “I should hope so!” snorted a peroxided shrew with long nails who was strangling her silver fox. And her companions echoed the lack of sentiment.

  Kramer smiled charmingly as they walked to the exit—he had one minute to go.

  Then Mrs Trenshaw swung round.

  “Oh, you might tell my husband,” she said, “that there was a man looking for him a little while ago. We told him where you were but he just took a peep through that big keyhole and said it looked a long business and he couldn’t wait.”

  “What man?”

  Kramer stepped forward.

  “Pardon? Oh, he didn’t give his name. Said it wasn’t important.”

  “I still say bow ties suit some men,” the shrew added firmly, as if having the final word in an argument.

  Then she and the other women gasped, for they had never seen a man move so fast.

  Van Niekerk was right, the Salvation Army Men’s Hostel had seemed a most unlikely place to find Lenny. It was almost enough to convince you that Moosa had run amok. But as Kramer pressed his foot to the floorboards, it all suddenly made very good sense. The sort of sense that Jackson had displayed on other occasions.

  Going back to what the waiter at the pie-cart had said, Lenny had been picked up by several men in a Trekkersburg car. Point Two: he had not been back to his flat since then. Conclusion: Lenny was staying in Trekkersburg. If he had moved into any non-white area, however, the presence of a stranger would have been noted, and particularly so by police informers. The alternative was a white area, and that would also have attracted attention anywhere but in the hostel. Ensign Roberts was always pointedly indifferent as to where a man came from or why. Nor would his suspicions be aroused by a man claiming the rights of a white while looking very much on the borderline: an accident of pigmentation was a common reason for men taking to the road rather than spend lives producing written evidence of their statutory status.

  The hostel was, in fact, the ideal place for Lenny to lie low within Jackson’s call.

  And this meant that Zondi could now be in far greater peril than it appeared when the call from headquarters came through beside the mayoral seat. That area of the chamber had been right opposite the keyhole. If the mysterious Jackson had known a policeman when he saw one, or conceivably recognised Kramer, then he would have immediately set about destroying whatever evidence there was. This just might include Lenny Francis—and Zondi would doubtless try to prevent that happening.

  Unlike Jackson, he would be all alone in the world at the time.

  The hostel was around the next corner to the right, coming up fast.

  Moosa had the shakes. And a suspicion that he had wet himself, ever so slightly. But Moosa was not afraid.

  He had never felt such curious excitement; it tickled its way right down him, even into his loins. His eyes felt fat with their looking. It was simply that to maintain his watch on the hostel he had been forced to stand on his toes for well over an hour, enough to give any mature man of sedentary habits quivering muscles. Singh had been adamant about putting up his steel window guards after nightfall as he always did to protect his property. He offered Moosa a box but it had proved too high and exposed too much of the watcher. So Moosa had no choice but to put a cruel strain on his legs and back.

  Despite the discomfort, he had left his post only four times and then to make brief telephone calls. As it was, he missed the arrival of a big black car with dirty number-plates that now stood parked right outside the hostel gates.

  At first Moosa had mistaken the white man seated over on the far side in the passenger seat for Zondi’s boss. The trouble was he kept his back turned as he stared into the yard. But the lights of a passing bus had shown he had dark hair after all. Obviously he was waiting for the driver to return from calling on Ensign Roberts. Well, he would have to be very patient. This was the hour during which Bible reading took place and Ensign Roberts permitted no interruptions—nor would he allow anyone who had supper in the hostel to leave until it was over. Moosa wondered if it was significant that he had not seen Leon Francis leave the rehabilitation dormitory when the meal bell rang.

  This brought him back to that fourth and last call he had made to the CID headquarters. It had been surprisingly cordial. He had been assured most politely that Bantu Detective Sergeant Zondi was already on his way down, and that Lieutenant Kramer himself was taking an interest in his information.

  What was beginning to bother Moosa was that he had been back at the window for another twenty minutes and yet had seen no sign of either of them.

  It took Kramer more time than he had supposed to slink through the gardens that backed on to the hostel. There had been dogs and rose bushes and hard-arsed gnomes to contend with. His shins were a mess but luckily nobody heard or saw him.

  The corrugated iron fence had also posed a problem, being very difficult to climb quietly if at all. Finally, however, he came across an avocado tree with branches as orderly as the rungs of a ladder. And up he went.

  Better and better—right in front of him now was some scaffolding that carried on around a chapel which was being built in the hostel yard behind Ensign Roberts’s house. Kramer swung over to it with little trouble.

  The builders, presumably drawn from the rehabilitation group, had reached the eaves, and so the scaffolding afforded a good high vantage point. Only there was nothing to see. The yard was completely deserted. All the dormitories were in darkness, as the regulations required when not in use. The sole light came from the dining-room—and with it the sound of someone reading Scripture in a deep monotone.

  Kramer rose slowly to his feet and looked over the last course of bricks to the road. He drew in his breath sharply.

  There was a big black car at the hostel gates, with a white man seated at the passenger window. The traffic’s lights did not reach round to his face, and anyway from that distance it would have been impossible to distinguish the features, or even the type of clothing he wore. Except that whereas a conventional tie would have made a vertical blur, a bow tie made a dark blob under the chin.

  Jackson.

  Kramer was sure of it. He was searching for the way down to the ground when he thought again. According to the councillors’ wives, Jackson had left in a hurry. Now he was sitting there as if he had all the time in the world. This was so eccentric it was dangerous. More than that: potentially lethal.

  There had to be a reason. Kramer forced himself to ponder it although his whole body strained on a poodle leash. Logic demanded that he began with what was known: Jackson was a cautious man; Jackson kept himself out of trouble; Jackson was not alone; Jackson had sent a man in for Lenny Francis.

  Kramer started to crawl on all fours along the scaffolding to look down into the yard again. He had been on the property for perhaps two minutes—in itself more than long enough for a messenger to fetch Lenny to the car. It was no messenger that Jackson had dispatched but a killer.

  The yard, fifteen feet below and in deep shadow, still appeared empty. To his left, flanking one side of the chapel, was the corrugated iron fence behind Ensign Roberts’s back garden. Directly in front of him, the bare earth stretched away for twenty yards until it met the old age pensioners’ wing running across at right angles. On his right the wing housing the rehabilitation and hobo section protruded to within a few feet of the chapel. He could
almost reach out to touch it.

  Then he heard a sound. It came from two doors down.

  “Christ. Oh, bloody hell. What’s happening?”—the voice was soggy with sleep.

  Click.

  “You kaffir bastard!”

  The answering laugh was one Kramer would recognise anywhere.

  “How long have you been sitting there?”

  “Shhh! CID.”

  Zondi was in his playful mood.

  But this was no time for games. He would lead his prisoner only a matter of ten yards before they could be seen from the gate. Jackson would be off like a flash. Or he might fire first and then flee.

  Kramer had to stop that door opening, and there was no longer the time to look for ladders. He calculated that by swinging from the edge of the scaffolding, he would be left with a drop of nine feet. He could make it safely.

  But before he could move, someone else did. The figure slipped out of the door nearest to him and began to edge towards the next one up the line—the one from which Zondi would emerge at any second.

  The .38 Smith and Wesson was in Kramer’s hand and levelled when it struck him that Jackson would react to a shot like an Olympic sprinter to a starting pistol.

  The figure stopped moving. Like Jackson, it was waiting.

  Cramp bit Kramer in the left calf. He rocked on his haunches, putting out his free hand to steady himself. It touched something hard and cold: the blade of a trowel honed sharp by coarse mortar. He grasped it tightly by the handle.

  The door opened, a fraction too soon.

  Lenny Francis stepped out into the night with a gun in his back and Zondi behind it. They took three paces. The figure sprang. There was a glint. A small cry came from Zondi. He sprawled, tripping Lenny.

  Then as the figure raised its knife hand again, Kramer sprang. Not feet first but in a long dive with the trowel held at the apex of his arrowed body.

  There was nothing calculated about it. Pure chance provided the perfect trajectory that tore open the throat of the hired killer. Gravity did the rest of the damage.

  Kramer landed badly and Zondi’s skull, so hard against the ground, drove the wind from him. He curled up, gasping, retching, helpless.

  Lenny, untouched, recovered Zondi’s automatic and trained it on them.

  The engine of the big black car was running. The man had slid across and started it a minute ago. Now he was revving it gently.

  Moosa had lost all patience. If this was how the CID responded to two good tip-offs, they were not worth his time and trouble. He would tender his account and sell cabbages.

  Then the car was switched off again. The white man with a bow tie got out and stood on the pavement, his right hand closed over something in his trouser pocket.

  Just a minute, this could be a detective after all. Moosa decided to keep watch for one minute longer.

  Van Niekerk slammed down the receiver and turned to Colonel du Plessis.

  “It was just that churra bastard to say there’s nothing doing down at the hostel.”

  “Moosa?”

  “He wanted to bugger off home.”

  “Why tell him to stay on then?”

  “Why not, sir?”

  The Colonel dearly loved a dry wit. Their relationship deepened.

  “He took a hell of a time to get that out, Sergeant.”

  “Oh, he also talked a lot of crap about us having a bloke down there.”

  “And so?”

  “I didn’t say anything. Two seconds later he’s changed his mind and thinks it’s someone paying a visit.”

  “He was sure it wasn’t the Lieutenant?”

  “Positive.”

  “But where is he then? And Zondi?”

  Van Niekerk shrugged. The movement could not have been made more expressive by Don Quixote’s mother-in-law.

  “Ach, it can wait, Van. We’ll give him until eight and then take over the case, meantime let’s get your complaint about his conduct on the telephone down in writing. I can’t have my officers speaking like that. Paper?”

  Van Niekerk had an idea as he drew the foolscap from its appointed place.

  “I suppose there’s not a chance he’s in trouble, sir?”

  “Some bloody hope,” the Colonel muttered.

  Kramer laughed and found it personally reassuring.

  But it disconcerted Lenny.

  “What’s so bloody funny?” he demanded in a hoarse whisper, jabbing at him with the automatic.

  For a start, Lenny was. His actions were absurd. Only a fool would handle a loaded firearm like an interviewer’s mike. Only a fool would dither around instead of getting the hell out while the going was good.

  And then there was that soft trickle coming from Zondi’s mouth down there in the dust—each obscure Zulu obscenity a delight in itself, although the joke was really on Jackson.

  “I was thinking of Jackson,” Kramer said.

  “Don’t worry, I’ve seen him.”

  So that was it. Lenny must have stepped back a couple of paces and caught a glimpse of the watcher by the gate. Yet this should not have deterred him. He could have got out the back way. Better still, he could have shot from the shadows at close range and made off for the wide blue yonder in the big black car. There had been more than enough time for all this.

  As it was, Kramer had already recovered both wit and wind and made a cursory review of the proceedings. There was a fine irony in the fact that Jackson had finally revealed himself to be a man cautious to a fault. If only he had taken a chance and hired an amateur to deal with Lenny, things might have been so different. The thing was that every killer—however deprived his childhood—had his qualms. The novice suffered most in this respect, being inclined to over-react out of a sense of insecurity. But what had happened was no accident and Jackson would have made sure of hiring a true professional. In this he had overlooked that while an expert virtually ensured a proper job being done, he was also confident enough to employ one of his lesser skills when assailed by some inner misgivings. The tsotsi, now languidly losing body heat beside them, had clearly baulked at something—in all probability the very human dread of a bad name. And there was certainly no surer way of getting one than by needlessly killing a policeman; it inevitably brought out the very worst in the forces of law and order, who would then disrupt the entire twilight fraternity, implicated or otherwise, with a process of elimination which was often just that. If at the end of it the dead officer’s colleagues failed to get their man, the private sector would. It was enough to give any psychopath a social conscience—and make him twist a knife to strike an artful blow with the hilt.

  Zondi sat up, shook his head, and felt behind his ear for blood. There was none.

  “What now, boss?” he said.

  Kramer shrugged and then looked expectantly at Lenny. He saw a changed man.

  “Get up slowly,” Lenny ordered, as though he had been waiting for just this moment to assert himself. “Put your hands on your head and go round to the kitchen.”

  Kramer and Zondi set off immediately. When a hypersensitive young thug held your life in the curl of his trigger finger, it paid to humour him until a realistic alternative suggested itself. Even if you were somewhat vague about the kitchen’s exact location.

  “The next one along,” Lenny corrected them.

  The kitchen door was slightly ajar. Kramer pushed it wide open with his foot and stepped inside.

  Only a fool would accompany him and Zondi into a darkened room and so, having new regard for Lenny’s character, he was not surprised to find it relatively well lit. He was taken aback, however, to note that the light which passed through the big window came from the street and that he could see what had to be Jackson down there leaning on a gatepost. He had certainly got his mental plan of the hostel a little confused.

  “Over there,” Lenny said, pointing.

  Again they obeyed without hesitation and found themselves boxed into the far corner with the window wall on their right,
another wall behind them, an Aga cooker to their left and the end of a double-sink unit before them. The latter had been pressed out of a single sheet of stainless steel so that when Lenny heaved himself up on the far draining-board, they felt the vibrations carry through to their end.

  Ordinarily the draining-board might have seemed a somewhat eccentric place to sit, but in the circumstances it was nothing more than strategically sound: it allowed Lenny to keep one eye on Jackson and the other on the pair in the corner, it was too far for a quick rush and too near for a bullet to miss.

  But this on its own fell short of explaining precisely what Lenny had in mind by bringing them there in the first place—or indeed why he felt it necessary to prolong the association. Kramer realised now that he had been more seriously affected by his fall than he had so far conceded; his thoughts had been engaged on all manner of frivolities and, like the prisoner debating his final menu in the death cell, had been avoiding the real issue. It had to stop.

  “Your arse is getting wet,” he cautioned politely.

  Lenny frowned.

  “Those splashes of water on the sink—they’re seeping up into your pants.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Just thought you ought to know.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Can we talk then? You don’t mind?”

  “If you like, Mr Detective. Just keep your voice down.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want you to frighten him away.”

  “Jackson’s coming here?”

  “He will, by-and-by.”

  “To see what happened to the tsotsi?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Uhuh. What then?”

  “I’ll shoot him.”

  The raw stupidity implicit in this statement gave Kramer mental indigestion. There was simply no place for it alongside the obvious fact that Jackson could have been dropped at the gate with the minimum of fuss. He could take no more.

  So it was left to Zondi to get down to brass tacks.

  “You’re going to shoot us, too?” he asked.

  “Police? Don’t make me laugh!”

  But Lenny should have delivered the line with more conviction. Such patent insincerity worked faster than a double dose of fruit salts—Kramer’s blood fizzed and his brain burped. Suddenly he was thinking clearly again.