The Song Dog

by James McClure

  MOON ACRE FARM—KEEP OUT warned the snazzy sign, and forced a quick turn to the left. The cattle grid between the gateposts clattered loudly under the Chev and then came the hiss of a wide drive, laid with gravel.

  Listen, Kramer told himself, you’ve already got too much on your mind to start worrying about this Short Arse nonsense, so just forget all about it until later, when there’s time.

  But he went on searching obscure corners of his memory for a matching mug shot until the farmhouse came in view, framed by the last rows of sugarcane. Beyond them stretched a lawn so green and neat a carpet would certainly have been cheaper, provided you cut holes in it for the trunks of the English trees scattered everywhere like in a park. Keeping the grass so green were more water sprinklers than Kramer had ever seen off a racetrack, and squatting kaffirs moved in lines, plucking out imperfections with watchmaker’s precision and placing them in burlap bags tied to their waists. The huge farmhouse itself was every bit as neat as the lawn, what with freshly painted columns holding up the verandah roof and bright, striped canvas making the deck chairs and other outdoor seating as cheerful as toffee wrappings.

  Kramer drove right the way up to the front steps, and switched off his engine after a quick, loud rev to announce his arrival. Two wolves—or rather, two creatures that looked very like wolves—immediately sprang over the verandah railing and hurled themselves at him, snarling with astonishing ferocity. He felled the first with his car door as he stepped out and got the other in the throat with his toe cap, snapping its head back.

  “Well, that’s buggered the bastards as watchdogs,” said a cool voice in English. “I’ll have them destroyed.”

  Kramer looked around. Coming down the front steps was a man in his early sixties, lean as a whip and with a beak-nosed head that seemed a sunburned version of the busts printed on the Roman-Dutch lawbooks at Police College. He wore an elephant-tail bracelet on his right wrist, a fiddly watch filled with little extra dials on his left, and carried a fly whisk. The rest of his appearance was standard English-speaking farmer: short-sleeved, open-necked white shirt; khaki shorts to midthigh; long khaki stockings and tan desert boots.

  “Mr. Bruce Grantham?”

  “The very same. You’re obviously a police officer—poor old Kritzinger’s replacement? I’d been hoping it wasn’t true, the guff I heard this morning on the bush telegraph.”

  “Depends on what it was you heard,” said Kramer.

  “That Maaties had become involved in some God-awful explosion or other at Fynn’s Creek, and that young Mrs. Gillets had died with him. He’d been trying to save her, I believe?”

  “It certainly looks that way,” agreed Kramer. “You’d say that would have been in character?”

  “Oh, utterly—brave as a lion! Maaties has saved my bacon more than once, I don’t mind admitting, when my laborer wallahs have got a trifle out of hand. But what happened to him exactly? I think I was enough of a chum to be entitled to a few details.”

  “There really isn’t much to add,” said Kramer, “which is why I’ve come to see you, hoping you can come up with some ideas.”

  “Damned if I can see how, but I’d be delighted to help where I can—er, what did you say your name was, Sergeant?”

  “Lieutenant Kramer, Trekkersburg Murder and Robbery Squad.”

  “A lieutenant! I do beg your pardon. They really are bringing in the big guns! We’ll pop up onto the stoop and I’ll see to some refreshments. But first, if you’ll be good enough to carry on ahead of me, I’ve a spot of tidying up to do …”

  Kramer, at ease in a comfortable verandah chair, lit a Lucky and watched Grantham supervise the removal of the two unconscious dogs by four of his kaffir weeding team, all of whom seemed to have difficulty in not grinning as they did so. This was especially true, he noticed, of one with a scarred left arm that hung slack.

  “So you see, Lieutenant,” said Grantham, raising his gin and tonic, “Maaties and I go back quite a way—a small toast to his memory …”

  Kramer nodded. “Did this mean you’d count yourself as a friend of the late lamented as well as a customer, hey?”

  “I’d most certainly like to think so! Many’s the time the pair of us have sat out here in the evening, just chewing the fat.”

  “How about food?”

  “Did we ever dine together, d’you mean? Oh, indeed yes, on any number of agreeable occasions.”

  “He was a hell of a bloke for a certain dish, wasn’t he?”

  “I can’t remember his having a particular preference for anything,” said Grantham, shrugging. “Always ate what was put in front of him. Very partial to a brandy to round things off with, though, now I come to think of it.”

  “Oh, ja? And when was it he last ate here, Mr. Grantham?”

  “Let me see … Tuesday last week? We went on until after midnight. I could always double-check with my cook boy if it’s important. Servants tend to remember this sort of thing rather better, God knows why.”

  “Ach, no, forget it for now. All I wanted was to be able to put a tick on my list of the nights when his movements aren’t accounted for. That’s our problem, you see—and here I’m trusting you to keep things to yourself—we don’t know the reason for Maaties being out and about last night. We’ve nothing to connect it with.”

  “And an explosion of all things! How bloody bizarre! What was it? A homemade bomb?”

  “Something of the kind.”

  “Intended for the Gilletses?”

  “Must have been, only Lance Gillets had been unexpectedly called away. Talking of Tuesday, though, I don’t remember Maaties’ list of recent cases saying anything about trouble here at Moon Acre last week …”

  “It wouldn’t,” said Grantham, taking Kramer’s empty glass to refill it with another bottle of Castle lager. “A purely social call on his part. If you ask me, he was simply escaping that frightful, neurotic wife of his. Poor chap seemed a bit down.”

  “In what way?”

  “Well, our conversations are usually fairly lively and wideranging—were, I should say—and touch on many topics of local interest. For once, Maaties hadn’t much to say for himself, and I was left scraping the barrel a bit. Mark you, he cheered up a fraction when I told him about my little clash with the Parks Board and that jumped-up box wallah they’ve brought in to boost, as they call it, the tourist trade in these parts. Sent him packing, by Christ! I’m having nobody bugger about with my cane fields.”

  “Ta,” said Kramer, taking his refilled glass and having a sip from it. “That sounds interesting.”

  “Far from it: a lot of bureaucratic balls. That’s also my land you see, down there between Nkosala road and this ridiculous game reserve they’re creating, and they wanted to do something about widening the track leading through. Only it’s my road, a private road, and I’m damned if I’m prepared to lose two feet off either side for improvements out of sheer public spiritedness. Have you any idea how much land those two strips would add up to in acres? So I simply named my figure, watched him go an ungodly green, and that was the end of the bastard. Maaties had a damned good laugh over that, and so did I. He said he must take a look at the reserve sometime, now his curiosity had been aroused in it—Good God, something’s just struck me …!”

  “Fire away,” invited Kramer. “What is it?”

  “There was a point, toward the end of the evening,” said Grantham, glancing at that cockpit of a watch of his, “when dear old Maaties, frightfully pissed by then, started to tell me something he didn’t finish. He was obviously upset by it, but started getting bolshy when I couldn’t follow his drift and said never mind, I was too damned drunk to understand and we’d best change the subject. I said, ‘The hell with you, Kritzinger!’—and said I’d show him which of us was too damned drunk by thrashing him at snooker. I think we’d reached the third frame when he put up his hands, was sick into a spittoon, and toddled off home.” Grantham paused, shook his head, and gave a three-gins sigh. “Last tim
e I ever saw the poor sod.”

  Kramer frowned, slightly confused. “So you’d left here and driven to some hotel somewhere?” he said. “At approximately what time did this—”

  “Hotel? What hotel? Don’t quite follow …”

  “You know, where they had the snooker table, hey?”

  Grantham laughed. “What a sheltered life you’ve led in the Orange Free State, Lieutenant,” he said. “I’ve a full-size table of my own in the billiards room immediately behind you, should you ever feel up to a frame!”

  Now that, thought Kramer, is what you really call posh, and it called to mind the jokes he’d heard told about Natal farmers driving Rolls Royces because the glass partition behind the driver stopped livestock breathing down your neck on the way to market. He was also beginning to see why Maaties Kritzinger had felt so attracted to Grantham’s company, having only a detective sergeant’s pay and a large family to provide for, yet a chance here to share in the good life whenever he fancied it. What else was on offer at Moon Acre, he wondered—and what did Grantham himself get out of this unusual liaison of the cop and the sugar baron? Some bending of the law, when it came to his labor force, that much was already apparent … But was that all? And what was it about Grantham’s coons that they caused so much mayhem?

  “Lieutenant?” prompted Grantham. “We appear to have become sidetracked …”

  “Maaties was getting ‘bolshy,’ you said, because you couldn’t follow what he was talking about.”

  “Well, I’m damned if anyone could have made sense of it, and that’s why, until now, I’d dismissed the whole thing as a bit of drunken nonsense. Thing was, Maaties muttered something about some native whose name I didn’t catch and then started getting worked up over something he kept saying in Zulu. I’ve had a fair knowledge of the lingo myself, but the best I could make of it was: the song dog. I’d just asked him whether this was a flowery sort of reference to the jackal, with its well-known weakness for howling at the moon, when he lost his temper with me, silly sod, and now we’ll never know. I’d like to have, though, because as fearless as he was, this brute had very definitely put the wind up the poor fellow.”

  Hell, I’m going to be dreaming bloody dogs tonight, thought Kramer.

  9

  THE POLICE STATION at Jafini looked a lot better after dark, almost welcoming, in the way its unshaded bulbs thinned the thick surrounding hedge of Christ-thorn, filling it with speckles of bright light.

  Terblanche must have heard the Chevrolet, which had somehow lost part of its exhaust pipe, approaching from quite a distance, for he was there to meet it, hands on hips and his mouth pursed tight, more than ever a picture of utter fatigue.

  “I must get that exhaust fixed for you in the morning, Tromp,” he said. “You can’t go sneaking up on bad guys with that!”

  “Ja, it’s a bit obvious,” agreed Kramer, climbing out. “The last place I visited, they thought I’d come to bloody bulldozer the house.”

  “Oh, ja, that’d be those poor white squatters awaiting eviction down on the edge of Ma Murdoch’s place—what is their name again?”

  “Bothma. Man, you only had to take one look at their cooking arrangements to know Kritzinger never ate there! Christ, he’d have been dead long before midnight.”

  Terblanche gave a weary chuckle. “We shouldn’t really make jokes,” he said, “but, to be honest, I thought something very similar a couple of times myself. Listen, I’ve got bad news for you. I came up with nothing from my eight, and the same goes for the others; both Malan and Suzman scored a duck. Apart, that is, from one family who told Malan they are sure they saw his car pass by at about seven thirty last night.”

  “They did? Whereabouts was this?”

  “It’s easier if I show you on the map …”

  As they started walking up the path to the police station, Kramer asked: “Ever heard of something called the song dog, Hans?”

  “Sorry?”

  “The song dog.”

  “Meaning a jackal or something?”

  “No, it appears not.”

  Terblanche turned to him. “Has someone been pulling your leg?” he asked.

  “Hmmmm, I’m beginning to wonder about that myself,” said Kramer. “This place has gone bloody quiet!”

  “Oh, I hope you don’t mind, but I said to the others they could get off home once I’d heard they had nothing to report. They’d been on their feet for more than—”

  “Fine,” said Kramer, glancing into the white CID office. “The same went for Bokkie Maritz?”

  “No, Bok had already gone by the time I got back. Left a note to say he’d found out where I fixed you two up with rooms and that he didn’t want to miss supper there.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What about you, Tromp?” asked Terblanche, opening the door to his office. “Any luck with your eight addresses?”

  “Not really,” said Kramer. “Apart from getting a bit more background on this thing Kritzinger had going with Grantham. I’ve a feeling that another visit to Moon Acre could produce a few interesting details about both of them, but I doubt how relevant they’d be to the case. Now, show me this spot on the map and then get yourself off home—you’re so buggered you’re walking like a bloody hippo with a hernia.”

  “Here’s where our only witnesses live,” said Terblanche, positioning a grimy forefinger on the wall map. “As you see, their homestead isn’t anywhere special, apart from being near the junction of where all these cane-lorry tracks go through the fields, and not far from the little railway line which carries cane, too. Maaties was traveling south in this direction, they say, and fast.”

  “Why the hell should he being doing that?”

  “Well, while I was waiting for you, I stood and stared at the map for a while,” said Terblanche, “asking myself the same question. The only sense I could make of it was that he had been over here, on the Mabata road, and had decided to take a shortcut right over to the other properly made road down here, connecting us with Muilberg.”

  “At about what time was this, did you say?”

  “Approximately seven thirty.”

  Kramer rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Kritz could also have been going to meet someone down any of these tracks that branch off into the cane,” he said. “It grows high, so it would have hidden them from the road, and there’d be no kaffirs still out working to see them …”

  “That’s true,” agreed Terblanche. “You couldn’t wish for better countryside—a big crisscross maze.”

  “This investigation doesn’t get any easier, does it?” remarked Kramer. “But, look, it’s high time you called it a day, Hans. In fact, I’ll even drive you home, because I want to borrow your Land Rover and take another look at Fynn’s Creek.”

  “Tonight? Out of the question, Tromp! Not only have you also done enough for one day, but the lady wife has prepared a very special meal of welcome just for you, and—”

  “Hell, really? A special meal for me? You mean, someone has tipped you off I’m vegetarian?”

  “Vege—” echoed Terblanche, the acute dismay in his face as plain as custard pie. “Ach, look, if you’d really rather not come round tonight, that’s okay, hey? Louise will surely understand, and we can have—er, the um, pumpkin fritters another time, never worry!”

  “On second thoughts, seeing she’s gone to …”

  “No, no man! Here are my Land Rover keys—don’t even bother to drive me round! I’ll get the van boy to take me!”

  And Terblanche was already half out of his office, when he hurried back to scribble quickly on a scrap of paper. “Er, that’s the widow woman’s name and address where your room is, okay?”

  “Perfect,” said Kramer.

  Fynn’s Creek also looked different after dark, but hardly welcoming. Instead, it lay bleak and forbidding, making it inevitable that Kramer should ponder the character of Annika Gillets, who had felt sufficiently undaunted by it to send her kitchen boy off on an all-night drinking
spree, leaving herself entirely on her own out there. Not many white women that he knew would do that, not unless they lived in bloody great castles with fiery dragons to guard them against the terrifying Black Knight. Granted, Mrs. Gillets had boasted crocodiles in her moat, so to speak, but her house, as amply demonstrated, had rated little better than that built by the first little pig, the huff-and-puff bugger.

  “It was one hell of a huff-and-puff, though,” Kramer reminded himself, picking his way through the outer ring of debris by moonlight. “Where’s the bloody twenty-four-hour guard this place is meant to have?”

  Then he heard a rumbling laugh, and looked inland beyond the razed house to where he recalled having seen the cook boy’s hut. There, two figures sat crouched over a small fire, obviously the kitchen boy and the errant Bantu constable, passing a beer pot back and forth between them and having a fine old time of it. Well, that lazy bloody cop was definitely in for a shock, Kramer decided, and began moving silently toward them.

  That was a mistake, perhaps, for the move brought with it a nasty shock of its own. Suddenly, what Kramer had taken to be just a heap of roof thatch, a yard or so to his right, heaved itself up on short, bent legs, gave a hissing cough, and propelled its armor-plated length with astonishing swiftness toward the estuary, followed by five or six others. These dark shapes plunged heavily into the water, one after another, with a sound like a false start at a swimming contest for paralytic drunks.

  “Bastards!” exploded Kramer.

  Then came his second shock, when a deep Zulu voice, right at his elbow, said: “Bantu Constable Cassius Mabeni reporting, my boss!”

  “Jesus!” said Kramer, turning. “Where the hell did you spring from?”

  “By the beach, my boss. Boss Terblanche say I must be very strict and let no fishing men come by that side—I was looking carefully-carefully for them, but there are no men present, my boss.”

  “Then who was that sitting over there a second ago with the …” said Kramer, turning back toward the hut. “Shit, now there’s no one! What exactly is going on around here?”