The Song Dog

by James McClure

  “GONE, you bloody thick-head?” echoed Kramer, in total disbelief, his fists clenched. “Then you better get after it faster than my foot can reach your fat arse!”

  Claasens ignored him, keeping his sullen gaze fixed on Mackenzie, like a wronged dog expecting his master to set things right, and this made Kramer so angry he lunged forward.

  “Wait!” said Mackenzie, stepping hurriedly between them. “What Niko is implying, Lieutenant, is that the bag will have long since been incinerated by now—okay?”

  “Okay?” echoed Kramer. “How can that possibly be—”

  “Er, what I meant was, never to worry, there must be other ways of skinning the cat!”

  “The cat, Doc,” said Kramer very softly, “is going to get off bloody scot-free in this business, compared to you and shit-for-brains here. There’ll be a report, concerning both of you and your conduct in these matters, going to Colonel Du Plessis, head of the division. Furthermore—”

  “But, Lieutenant, surely—”

  “Furthermore,” Kramer went on, “should I, at any stage of this investigation, decide that my inquiries have been impeded by the behavior of you two persons, and the course of justice obstructed, then I will be compelled to regard your actions in a very different light, and to charge you both with accessory to murder after the fact—ja, a hanging offense, for which there is evidence already available.”

  Claasens certainly seemed to pale slightly, and Mackenzie went quite white, as Kramer then strode past them and made for the door.

  “But—!” Mackenzie began. “But you simply can’t do that, Lieutenant! We’re doing our best for you! I’d take you for a fair man, but that’s not being fair on us at all!”

  Kramer turned back for just a moment. “Doc,” he said, “the only thing that’s fair about me is the color of my hair. People should remember that.”

  7

  TERBLANCHE WAS AMBLING back from the main hospital building, carrying a wrapped sandwich, when the mortuary doors crashed open. “Let’s go!” snapped Kramer.

  “Heavens, what’s happened, Tromp?”

  “Those two bloody baboons gave the boiler boy the deceased’s clothing to burn this morning!” he said. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on around here, but the Colonel’s going to hear about this!”

  “Hold on a minute,” said Terblanche. “Here’s your—”

  “Lost my appetite!”

  “No, listen. You know what kaffirs are like, Tromp! Just because the boiler boy fetched the clothes bag this morning, it doesn’t necessarily follow that he’s remembered to put it in the incinerator yet, does it?”

  Kramer hesitated. “Ja, but—”

  “Then at least let me put it to the proof, hey?” said Terblanche, leaving the sandwich on the Land Rover’s roof and starting back toward the main hospital. “Oi, you!” he shouted out, beckoning. “Quick! Over here!”

  A Zulu hospital guard in a khaki uniform three sizes too large came shambling up at a half-run, knobkerrie in hand, and delivered a salute that would have taken the top off a dinosaur egg. “Yebo, nkosi?” he said.

  “The big boss here wants to talk to the boiler boy.”

  “Please, nkosi, this way, nkosi …”

  As they began following him, Terblanche said, “Er, these clothes, Tromp, what especially—”

  “I want a good look in the bloody pockets, for a start!”

  “But I saw Sarel go through them at the scene—just a wallet, with his warrant card and a few rand in it, plus his ballpoint, car keys, and a hanky. That was all.”

  “You’re certain? No little slips of paper? Meal receipt? He turned every pocket properly inside out?”

  “Well, maybe not exactly, but I mean you’ve got to bear in mind what a mess there was and it being a colleague and—”

  “Ach, forget it!”

  The boiler boy, a lean Zulu in his fifties, was bouncing an old tennis ball off the far wall of the boiler house, using his forehead and bare feet to return it with such vigor that, from a short distance, the steady pock-pock-pock sounded like an outboard engine.

  “Baa-bor!” he exclaimed, mortified to have been caught at play, and bolted into the boiler room, where he came stiffly to attention beside the main boiler, the sweat pouring from his bare chest.

  “Right,” Terblanche said to the hospital guard, “ask him what he did with today’s bag of clothing he took from the mortuary …”

  The guard launched into what sounded like a long haranguing in Zulu, augmented by mime.

  Kramer found this gave him plenty of time to note the spotless state of the boiler room’s concrete floor. He also noted the way in which each heap of coal had been neatly swept into an exact circle, and how brightly the copper piping gleamed. This meant he was not in the least surprised to hear, at the end of it all, that the boiler boy swore blind he’d instantly hurled the bag of disgusting rags into the flames that morning.

  “Just how big a fool does he think I look?” roared Terblanche. “Ask him that! And tell him he’ll go to prison if he tells me another untruth! I don’t believe a word of it!”

  There was a further outburst of Zulu, followed by a few hesitant words of evident denial, and then the hospital guard reported back: “Boiler boy says, true’s God, he not lie to the boss, boss. He say all clothings go in the fire mningi checha—very, very quick.”

  “Well, Tromp, what do you think?” asked Terblanche. “Is this cunning monkey telling the truth or what? Is there anything you’d like to say to him?”

  “Ja, there is—catch!” said Kramer, tossing the man his tennis ball.

  Twice on the way back to Jafini, Terblanche tried to begin a conversation; twice it got him nowhere. His third attempt carried a hint of desperation.

  “This widow I’ve fixed you up with is a good woman,” he declared, apropos of nothing. “Big and cheerful, but a nice figure.”

  Kramer flicked a cigarette end out of the window and dug in his shirt pocket for another Lucky. He was still seething over the Jafini shambles, made worse by the time wasted in the boiler room.

  “Terrible what happened to the widow’s late husband,” Terblanche went on. “It was at the mill where Annika’s pa worked. You’ve seen the big vats they’ve got there of sugar all boiled up, swirling around. The poor bloke must have tripped—he went headfirst straight in, death instantaneous, came out coated in sugar as hard as anything. The DS we had at the time said it was like trying to do a postmortem on a giant toffee apple!”

  Kramer shielded his match flame.

  “She was left with four kiddies, and one just a babe—imagine that,” Terblanche added, with a doleful shaking of his head. “No family of her own to rally round, just the neighbors to help, yet never once did anyone ever hear her complain. She simply—”

  “This previous DS,” said Kramer, exhaling, “the one who carried out that postmortem you’ve just mentioned, what happened to him? Is he still in the vicinity? Could we get him in to double-check Mackenzie’s reports on Annika and Kritz?”

  “Ach, no, Doc Abrahams retired and went to live with his daughter in the Cape. Anyway, as I was—”

  “What we need is a good map of the district, hey?” interrupted Kramer. “You’ve got one?”

  “Er, large-scale, you mean?”

  “Bigger the better.”

  “We’ve got a map that shows farmhouses—is that big enough?”

  Kramer shrugged. “It’s a start,” he said. “We’ll get the others together, and then I want you to draw a big circle on it showing twenty minutes’ car drive from anywhere within that curved line to Fynn’s Creek.”

  Terblanche raised an eyebrow. “Excuse, but what has ‘twenty minutes’ to do with anything?”

  “A proper, sit-down meal’s been found in Kritzinger’s belly, which means we can work on the basis that Kritz must have eaten no longer than half an hour before he got the chop, okay? So take off the ten minutes it must’ve taken him to get from his car to the house, even if
he bloody ran, and twenty minutes is the maximum traveling time you’ve got left. That’s why we’re going to consider any point within that circle as his possible starting point—or in other words, where he ate his last curry.”

  “Bet it was a meat curry.”

  “Why say that?”

  “Maaties would never touch it if it was chicken or fish, but meat curry, yes—especially mutton! It was his most favorite food.”

  “Oh, ja?”

  “You know, he would always ask for it, without even looking at the menu. Hettie wouldn’t have curry powder in the house, see? She said it was coolie swill. Next, you’ll be telling me he’d had tinned peaches as well.”

  “Another big favorite of his?”

  “Very definitely—pineapple also.”

  “Well, I’m buggered,” said Kramer. “You’ve just narrowed things down again, hey?”

  “But how does that narrow down anything?”

  “For the obvious reason that whoever provided him with that meal must have known Kritz pretty well to make sure he had his favorite scoff—it can’t have been some stranger, someone unknown to him.”

  Terblanche, throttling down on the last straight before Jafini, nodded slowly. “Ja, that makes sense—it makes good sense,” he said. “Now, why didn’t I think of that?”

  Because CID isn’t your bloody department, thought Kramer.

  Back at Jafini, Bokkie Maritz claimed to have been through Maatie Kritzinger’s desk three times with a fine-comb tooth, as he insisted on calling it, without coming across anything of interest, and so he had turned instead to listing the dead detective sergeant’s most recent cases.

  “You’re sure you could find nothing of interest?” said Kramer, pulling open the desk’s top drawer.

  “Apart from this,” said Maritz, pointing to a row of irregularly shaped pieces of colored plastic arranged along the typewriter’s roller. “It makes a Scottie dog you can hang on your key chain—provided you can work out how to fit them back together, hey? I’m going to try again in a minute.”

  “You do that,” Kramer murmured, glancing through a small stack of box camera prints.

  They were all of the same four freckle-faced little kids, and in three, true to the tradition of amateur snapshots, the photographer’s shadow was visible. In each instance, however, this shadow was that of a woman—which possibly explained why Ma Kritzinger appeared in none of them. This did not explain, however, why a supposedly devoted father had never seemed to be around much.

  Nothing else of a personal nature came to light as Kramer went on to search the two other drawers in the desk. This struck him as only slightly odd, given Kritzinger’s reputation as work-obsessed. There was certainly plenty of proof of that: time and again, Kramer came across sheets of carbon paper, some used so often they were full of tiny holes that made them look like the black lace that panties were made of.

  “Anyway,” said Kramer, pushing the last drawer shut, “how’s that list of cases going? Can I see it?”

  “Actually, I’d like a little more time first to, er, perfect it,” said Maritz, hastily putting aside two pieces of the key-ring puzzle. “But what I can tell you already is, old Maaties was one hell of a worker, even if it was almost all the usual Bantu rubbish: faction fights, stabbings, assault, arson, robberies, murder, theft, one rape—”

  “ ‘Almost,’ you say,” interrupted Kramer. “With what exceptions?”

  Maritz floundered, sending a pile of dockets cascading off the desk to the floor as he sought the one he was after. “Here’s one, Lieutenant!” he said, handing over a slim folder upside down. “But as you’ll note, there’s nothing special about it either.”

  Kramer turned the papers the right way up and saw that one Hendrik Willem Schmidt, white adult male aged forty-six, had been charged with the culpable homicide of an Asiatic male who had trespassed on his land. Schmidt, according to his sworn statement, had shot the man with a single round from a .303 rifle in the belief “the coolie after my chickens.” According to the statement made by the wife of the deceased, her husband had been approaching the farmyard with a sack in his hand because he had hoped to beg any old clothing the family might have for his children, and that she had witnessed this from where she was standing with the aforesaid offspring. A third statement, sworn by a Bantu farm worker, said that it was true, nobody in his right mind ever came to beg at that house because of its reputation, and so his employer had acted in a reasonable manner entirely in accordance with the known facts at the time, unaware the Asiatic male was new to the area.

  “Uh-huh, nothing special,” said Kramer, “apart from the date—Christ, man, this thing is months old! What’s all this I’ve been hearing about the famous Kritzinger efficiency?”

  “Which case is that?” asked Terblanche, who had just entered the CID office to peer over his shoulder. “Ach, the Schmidt one. My guess is he probably thought it’d get watered down to justifiable homicide in court and so he just couldn’t be bothered to pursue matters. That Schmidt is always a big pain to deal with, let me tell you.”

  “Fine,” said Kramer. “All set for the briefing yet?”

  Terblanche nodded. “I’ve got the map stuck up on the wall of my office, duly marked as you requested, and both the blokes have just got back from Fynn’s Creek, so we’re ready and waiting for your instructions.”

  “Keep up the good work, Bok!” said Kramer, palming two pieces of the Scottie dog puzzle to keep his interest up.

  Ash-smeared Sarel Suzman and Jaapie Malan looked ready for a shower, half a dozen Castle lagers each, and ten hours’ sleep, which made getting them to concentrate more than Terblanche could apparently handle.

  “No, listen,” he said. “The map shows a total of thirty-three possible addresses within the twenty-minute area at which curry might have been served, so we’ll now divide it equally and each of us will do a group, not go round them all together, hey?”

  “I still don’t get it,” whined Malan, rugby stockings at halfmast and one knee grazed.

  “Ach, what don’t you get, Jaapie?”

  “How we’re going to divide this list up.”

  “Surely, that’s obvious. We—”

  “But four doesn’t go into thirty-three, sir!”

  “Oh, yes, it bloody does,” intervened Kramer. “I take the first eight addresses, Suzman takes the next eight, Lieutenant Terblanche the next eight, and you, Malan, the last lot. After which we—”

  “But that means I get nine to do and—”

  “Look, have you forgotten my warning earlier on, hey?”

  “What I don’t get,” cut in Suzman, fingering a trouser crease morosely and finding it no longer had its knife edge, “is why Maaties should have eaten out at all last night, when his own home is less than twenty minutes from Fynn’s Creek. Are you sure Hettie hasn’t changed her mind about this curry business?”

  “Absolutely sure,” said Terblanche. “I sent Blackspot down to have a word with her kitchen boy just a quarter of an hour ago, and he confirms not only that but also that his boss didn’t come home again at all after he left at breakfast time.”

  “Nice thinking, Hans,” said Kramer. “But can we get back to—”

  “I still don’t see the point of all this,” grumbled Malan. “If Maaties was at one of these places beforehand, and the people there told him the explosion was going to happen, then they’re not going to tell us that, are they? I mean, if they were going to, they’d have done so already—not so?”

  “No, not necessarily so,” said Suzman unexpectedly. “Maybe they’re frightened to get involved now, with a proven killer on the loose. It could be a different story once we actually catch him.”

  “Correct—except for one thing,” said Kramer. “We’re cops, hey? It’s our job to get people to talk when we want them to talk, not just when it suits them, so get out there and start twisting a few arms. You follow, Malan? Show them what a real man is like when he does business!”

  Suzm
an and Terblanche exchanged amused glances as Malan, tugging those stockings up, went over to the map and started earnestly jotting down addresses as though now hell-bent on terrorizing half of Northern Zululand.

  8

  BARELY TWO MINUTES later, Kramer was alone in his Chevrolet, heading out of Jafini back down the Nkosala road to the first address on his share of the list. He’d been warned that half a mile short of Fynn’s Creek turnoff, he should start watching out for a sign which came and went rather suddenly, pointing the way to Moon Acre Farm, the property of a Mr. Bruce Grantham.

  Grantham, so Terblanche had explained, was about as close as anyone had ever become to being a friend of Maaties Kritzinger, chiefly on account of the particularly savage bunch of coons living in his farm compound. Kritzinger had spent many hours—even whole days—at Moon Acre, dealing with everything from murder to serious assault, petty theft, and arson. Afterward, he and Grantham would often booze half the night away, talking it all over and coming, more often than not, to a mutually satisfactory arrangement. “Mind you,” Terblanche had added, “those boys of his do some really crazy things, even for kaffirs, and I often wonder what goes on up at that big house of his. He sometimes goes so far out of his way to look after their interests you’d think he was a kaffir-lover.”

  Kramer narrowed his eyes. An oddly familiar figure had come in sight, back turned, walking along the verge of the road ahead of him. Then, an instant later, the inside-out jacket and the pair of tennis shoes registered. Short Arse was on the move, as jaunty as ever, chewing on a length of sugarcane. He took absolutely no notice as the Chevrolet went by, enveloping him in a cloud of red dust that hung in the air for several seconds before disappearing.

  By then, Short Arse appeared to have disappeared himself, but the Chev was into the next corner before Kramer knew it, making it too late to verify this fleeting impression without reversing.

  “Ach, no, the bastard can’t have vanished,” Kramer told himself, not dropping speed, “but one thing’s for certain: I have seen that same walk before somewhere—and it wasn’t some other coon doing it …”