The Song Dog

by James McClure

  Kramer shook his head. “Forget it,” he said. “Clever positioning, though, on Kritz’s part. I bet that at night any headlights going along this track wouldn’t touch it.”

  “Correct, Tromp—mine didn’t. I only noticed the car this morning and Sarel says the same.”

  “A very cautious man, then, Maaties,” said Kramer. “I see better now how he could have successfully worked alone for so long.”

  “Who told you that?” asked Terblanche, rather sharply, as he set the Land Rover in motion again.

  “The Colonel.”

  “Ach, of course. What else did he tell you?”

  “About Maaties Kritzinger? That he was a father of four, an ace detective and Olympic-class arse-creeper.”

  “Du Plessis said that?”

  “Not exactly,” admitted Kramer. “But it was there, if you read between the lines. I just didn’t want to bore you.”

  Terblanche smiled slightly. “What gives you the idea it might bore me?” he asked, his eyes fixed on the track ahead.

  “Who was Kritzinger’s main Bantu detective?”

  “Mtetwa,” Terblanche replied, nonplussed. “Why? What has that to do with—”

  “Do you know, Hans,” Kramer remarked, “you’ll say the name of everyone else here at Jafini, including a kaffir’s—but you never use the name of the male deceased in this matter. I find that a little strange.”

  The even roar of the Land Rover’s engine faltered, as though Terblanche’s foot had lifted involuntarily for a moment from the accelerator. “Is that so?” he said. “Then it’s easily put right: Maaties Kritzinger …”

  “I was more interested in the reason,” said Kramer.

  For a long moment, Terblanche stared ahead of him, as though all his attention had shifted to his driving and he wasn’t going to be drawn any further.

  “Man,” he said, quietly, “I don’t know the reason. Ja, he thought I was slow and I was stupid, but I didn’t mind that—every man is entitled to his opinion. What I did mind was him never being around to give me CID backup on jobs like the armed robbery at Mulamula yesterday. Where was he? But that still isn’t reason enough, I agree.”

  Then he began driving the Land Rover faster and faster, his eyes fixed on the track. “Huh! What I will always remember,” he said, “God forgive me, is how I reacted when I arrived at this place last night and found his body lying out there on the sand. I wanted to grin, to laugh, shout out—only I had a boy with me, and that put paid to that. You know, despite all my prayers, all that trying to find love for my neighbor, there’s a good chance I actually—ja, hated him?”

  “But why?” persisted Kramer, aware one piece of a minor puzzle had fallen into place: Terblanche was obviously some kind of practicing Christian, poor bugger.

  “Why? I don’t know why! I hadn’t even realized it until that moment—it was like a sudden feeling that came over me, there beside the house where little Annika had been blown to bits. You know what else?”

  Kramer shook his head.

  Terblanche gave a mirthless chuckle. “I got angry next,” he said. “I got so furious! I was outraged that he’d died a hero’s death of all things—now they’d never stop calling him ‘one of the best’!”

  And with that, Hans Terblanche accelerated hard, taking the Land Rover up the side of a high dune, and then slowed to a stop. Devastated, Fynn’s Creek lay before them.

  5

  KRAMER TRIED NOT to gape and look foolish, but nothing had fully prepared him for that moment at Fynn’s Creek. It was an extraordinary sight. Not just the sheer scale of it all, but that dizzy sense of being right at the edge of things.

  “What’s up?” asked Terblanche, puzzled. “You look like a man who’s never seen the sea before!”

  “No, never,” said Kramer. “There’s one hell of a lot of it.”

  “Ja, and remember, as my grandpa always used to say, that is only the top!”

  Kramer pondered this thought for a moment, then redirected his gaze down the far side of the dune to the remains of the game ranger’s house. Jesus wept, he thought, here’s a mess worse than Terblanche’s office.

  The only parts of the house still in place were the stout wooden posts that had once supported it high above flood level. The rest of the structure lay in pieces over an area the size of two tennis courts: a flapping, smoldering, scorched hodgepodge of half-recognizable shapes. Yet there was something of a predictable pattern to it: sections of plasterboard walls had been flung far from the apparent center of the blast, but as a general rule, the bulk of an object had determined the distance it had traveled. The stove, refrigerator, and kitchen sink, for example, had moved no distance at all, plunging instead to the ground beneath where they had once been positioned.

  “Let’s begin with where Kritz’s body was found and work our way in from there,” suggested Kramer.

  They climbed out of the Land Rover and started down the dune, the fine sand immediately making its way into Kramer’s shoes and thoroughly irritating him.

  “We’ve marked the spot,” explained Terblanche, “and I made sure that Sarel took plenty of snaps with his camera before the body was moved. With the sun so hot, we couldn’t delay—and besides, the Colonel wanted the postmortems done as soon as possible. Doc Mackenzie had to be in court over at Muilberg this morning, but he’s promised me he’ll start them at three.”

  “At three?” said Kramer, glancing at his watch. “That means we don’t have very long here.”

  Terblanche stopped and turned to him. “You don’t want to be present, do you?” he said, his face a picture of distaste. “There’s truly no need, not locally. We have this arrangement with Doc, whereby he just phones over his reports when he’s finished.”

  “I see. Did Kritzinger do business this way?”

  “Most often, ja, and—”

  “Me, I go by the book, Hans, which makes it imperative for me to attend,” said Kramer. “On top of which, I like to meet the people I’m working for—makes it all so cold and impersonal otherwise, don’t you agree?”

  Terblanche hesitated, a wary look in his eyes indicating he wasn’t too sure how seriously the remark was intended. “Whatever you decide, Tromp, you’re the boss,” he said. “But when we’re finished here, I’m going home to catch up on my beauty sleep!”

  “Fine,” said Kramer. “Who’s this lot poking around in the mess—your entire establishment at Jafini?”

  “Almost: Suzman, Malan, Mtetwa, and two of his boys. I hope I did right; I told them to start searching for clues, pending further instructions on your arrival, and to collect up Gillets’ things, any valuables and that.”

  “Fine,” Kramer said again, and they reached the outer edge of the debris.

  A second police Land Rover stood parked there, and against it leaned a big, vicious-faced coon, built like a brick abattoir and dressed in a pale yellow suit with yellow, pointed shoes to match. He was rolling himself a cigarette and at first, in an astonishing display of insolence, did not trouble to look up and acknowledge their approach. Then he raised his bloodshot eyes lazily, licked his cigarette paper, and rumbled some unintelligible greeting in Zulu.

  “Now listen to me, Mtetwa,” said Terblanche, “this is Lieutenant Kramer, the new CID boss who’s come to take charge. So just you see that anything the Lieutenant here wants, the Lieutenant gets—okay?”

  The Bantu detective sergeant looked at Kramer, flicked a salute like brushing a fly from his right temple, and began what sounded like a long complaint, again in Zulu, while making no attempt to stand up properly in a respectful manner.

  Kramer scratched at his left armpit under his jacket, plucked his Walther PPK from its shoulder holster, and fired, slamming a steel-jacketed bullet into the mud within an inch of the bastard’s left foot.

  “SHIT!” bellowed Mtetwa, startled into a wild, sideways leap, his eyes popping with fright.

  “Good, so you have mastered another language—that’s all I wanted to know,” said
Kramer, reholstering his gun. “Just see it’s the one you address me in on future occasions, hey, kaffir? Or, better still, Afrikaans.”

  The rest of the introductions went very smoothly after that. Kramer, however, was not overimpressed by his first sight of the so-called manpower now being placed at his disposal.

  Crew-cut Detective Constable Jaapie Malan only just topped the minimum height of five-six and breathed through his mouth, never closing it. He was the sort who wore rugby stockings with his khaki shorts, hoping this would make him appear more of a man, and yet was still having difficulty, aged about twenty-five, in getting a moustache to grow. Probably to make up for this, the squeeze of Malan’s handshake was so sudden and excessively hard that Kramer imagined he spent a good deal of time locked in the bathroom, struggling to get toothpaste back into its tube.

  In direct contrast, Sergeant Sarel Suzman’s handshake was the almost illusory contact contrived by someone who hates to be touched, just a brushing of palms and a quick, light clasp of cool fingers. It wasn’t a pretty thought, picturing what Suzman would be like should a prisoner try to wrestle with him, and he obviously had his revolver out a lot, to judge by the worn look of his button-down, leather holster. Aged about thirty-one, his blue uniform had the knife-edge creases a good wife would insist on her washerwoman making, yet he wore no wedding ring.

  Lastly came the two Bantu detective constables Mtetwa had with him, whose names Kramer didn’t catch and wouldn’t have remembered anyway. One was skinny and the other had most of an ear missing.

  “And now,” said Terblanche, “I’m going to step aside and the Lieutenant here will take charge of this double murder inquiry. Okay?”

  “Excuse, sir,” said Suzman hesitantly.

  “Ja?” invited Kramer.

  “I thought this was actually a single murder, and poor Maaties getting killed was more of a case of—”

  “Bad timing?” said Kramer. “Good, Sergeant, I’m glad someone is using his brains. It’s important we make that distinction right at the start, or a hell of a lot of time is going to get wasted through sheer bloody emotionalism. The target here was clearly Annika Gillets—maybe even her hubby as well—and not Maaties Kritzinger. Got that?”

  Everyone nodded.

  “And by the same token,” Kramer went on, “it’s only by investigating this target that we stand any chance of establishing motive—our key to who might have committed this act. Eventually, of course, that means we’ll probably find out the same things that Maaties must have found out, and which brought him here early this morning. You’ll get your chance for revenge then, I expect.”

  “Good!” said Suzman and Malan together, and there was a grunt from Mtetwa as well.

  “Anyone found anything interesting yet?” asked Kramer.

  There was a shaking of heads.

  “Any questions?”

  “Er, ja, if you don’t mind, sir,” said Malan, tugging up one of his rugby stockings. “Is there anything special we should be looking for?”

  Kramer nodded. “Means of detonation,” he said. “There’s a bomb expert on his way apparently, but in the meantime we can try and find out what made the thing go off. Was it lit by hand—or was there a timing device? In other words, was the murderer here in the vicinity at the time—or had he got himself off to a safe distance?”

  “You want us to search for clocks and wires, sort of?” asked Sarel Suzman, looking up from his notebook.

  “Ja, and don’t forget one of the simplest fuses of all, hey? An ordinary cigarette gives you about eight minutes to—”

  “Cigarette?” echoed Malan. “Hell, there’s cigarette ends every bloody place here, Lieutenant! Surely, you can’t expect us to—”

  “But I do,” said Kramer. “I want every cigarette end picked up, and I want the envelope you put it in marked with the exact position in which it was found. What was that remark, Malan?”

  “Me, Lieutenant?” said Malan, who’d just muttered something and was now turning red in the face. “I never—”

  “You did, so let me warn you now: any childish nonsense from you again, and I’ll kick your arse so hard the echo will break both your bloody ankles—understood?”

  Malan glared at Mtetwa, who was fighting off a smirk, and then gave Kramer a curt nod.

  “Well, back to work, chaps, hey?” said Terblanche in a jolly tone obviously intended to lighten the mood. “Would you like to see around now, Tromp?”

  It was a moment Kramer had been almost avoiding, his own close inspection of the site. Usually, at a murder scene, the trick was to look for something that seemed out of place, but here everything was bloody out of place.

  “Why not?” said Kramer. “Starting with where Kritz’s body was found …”

  Terblanche took him to a spot a good twenty yards from where the front steps to the house still stood, attached to the wooden piles. “He was lying here on his back,” he said, “with one leg sort of bent under him.”

  “Not much sign of blood.”

  “Plenty in his clothes, and it’s this sea sand—soaks up everything that touches it.”

  “Uh-huh. Whose is the boot, about five yards closer in?”

  “Probably Lance’s—it’s for fishing. Shall we move closer in now?”

  Treading carefully, they advanced over a litter of wooden fragments and river-rush thatch, sidestepping sharp slivers of window glass.

  “You’ll notice,” said Terblanche, “the floor of the house is only missing totally from one of the rooms, the little one at the back. The kitchen boy says it was going to be the guest room for scientists staying overnight when they came to study the birds. It just had an unmade bed in it.”

  “Where’s this kitchen boy now?”

  “In his hut back there—I told him not to go anywhere in case you wanted to question him.”

  “Fine. Let’s take a look where the guest room was.”

  Kramer found there exactly what he’d expected: scorch marks at almost ground level on the wooden posts immediately below the gaping hole in the floor. “So the bomb must have gone off on the ground here,” he said. “Where was the female’s body found?”

  Terblanche swallowed hard. “All over, really,” he said.

  “Then how did you identify her?”

  “Er, the hand. The left hand, the one with the rings on it. Like I told you, it was a matter of being blown to bits. I don’t think I’ve ever—”

  “What was she doing in the guest room at that hour?”

  “Sorry? I’m not quite with you, Tromp.”

  “I’ve seen blast injuries before,” said Kramer. “You get a lot of them on the mines in the Free State. To be actually blown to pieces, she’d have had to be practically standing on the bloody thing—not lying in bed in another room.”

  “Well, I suppose Annika could’ve heard a noise in the night and come through here to the guest room to investigate,” suggested Terblanche.

  “Sounds logical,” agreed Kramer. “Ja, you’re probably right. By the way, what are these funny marks in the mud?”

  “Ach, that’s just crocodile spoor,” said Terblanche. “I remember once, when I came over for a few beers with the builder who put the place up, there were these big old crocs under the house. He said they were there often and weren’t any trouble. You just had to be careful that one didn’t do a snap at your leg when you came down the front steps.”

  “Ja, my auntie had a fox terrier like that once,” said Kramer, “until I trod on the bastard. But this I don’t understand: crocodiles that live in the sea?”

  “No, in the estuary—it’s still fresh water, you see.”

  “Ah, I get you …”

  Kramer turned his attention to the estuary for a moment. It was a silty brown, like tea with a dollop of condensed milk in it, and it had a margin of scum the same as the mouth of a sherry tramp. A little way out, some mud banks rose like small, flat islands only a couple of inches or so above the water, and on these were about a dozen croco
diles. They lay totally inert, armor-plated, some with jaws agape, their hideous teeth on show.

  “At least with lizards,” said Kramer, “you can see when the one you’re up against is a bloody psychopath, hey?”

  Terblanche smiled wearily. “Ours has never been an easy job,” he said. “Time to go, hey?”

  Heading back through the cane fields toward Jafini to retrieve his car, Kramer said nothing for a long while, but reflected on what he had learned so far. Admittedly, it wasn’t much, but there were definitely some intriguing aspects to the case.

  “You know, Hans, what I find most significant?” Kramer said, stirring to light a Lucky. “It’s the way Kritz hid his car out of earshot of the house and then came sneaking up on foot with his gun at the ready. This can only mean he knew in advance something bad was on the go at Fynn’s Creek last night—and tried hard not to give away his approach.”

  “Ja, that’s a fact, Tromp.”

  “And so the big question becomes: How did Kritz come by such knowledge? Who tipped him off that some maniac was going to blow—”

  “Totally beyond me!” said Terblanche. “The tip-off can’t have been long before, though, or surely he’d have asked for some backup from the rest of us.”

  “Good point, unless he was overplaying the Lone Ranger,” said Kramer. “You’re positive Kritz hadn’t mentioned anything to you recently that could have a—”

  “No, nothing, Tromp. Of that I’m certain. In fact, I’ve been thinking, and it’s two whole days since I last saw him, typing up a statement in his office. His family last saw him yesterday morning, since when nobody seems to have seen him at all.”

  “What about his sidekick Malan?”

  “The same. So far as he was aware, his boss was out working on just routine Bantu cases. Nothing special.”

  “Hmmm,” said Kramer. “Who else might know what Kritz was up to lately? Did he talk to his wife about his job?”

  Terblanche shook his head. “I doubt that very much,” he said. “Hettie’s a nervous little thing, always biting her nails and getting stomach cramps almost for nothing. I remember the time she told my wife she hated being married to a policeman because of all the dangers and so forth. Five of us had just been stabbed to death doing a marijuana raid in the reserve.”