The Song Dog

by James McClure

“Be that as it may,” said Terblanche, “it still looks to me as though you assume too much from too little, man—no offense intended!”

  “But that’s my point, Lieutenant,” said Dorf. “There is so little, even after a most intensive search, that I can be virtually certain the alarm clock could not have been modified, for instance, to give a time delay in excess of—”

  “Ach, I give up!” muttered Terblanche, raising his hands in mock surrender. “I’m going to see how Cassius is getting on, Tromp—okay?”

  And with that, he stumped off.

  “Hope it wasn’t me that upset him,” said Dorf.

  “It was the time factor,” said Kramer, lighting up a Lucky. “You’re one hundred percent certain the bomb could not have been activated any earlier? We have a possible suspect, you see, who could have done it at about eleven but not later.”

  “What did I tell you, hey?” Malan whispered to Suzman. “That’s why they went to the reserve! Gillets is obviously their number one—”

  “Malan!” barked Kramer. “Forgotten my warning?”

  “Sorry, Lieutenant! I’m really sorry, hey?”

  Then Dorf spoke, reclaiming everyone’s attention. “No, Lieutenant, nobody can be one hundred percent sure of anything in this world. Very early this morning, in another place, I lost a colleague who forgot that and clipped the wrong wire without first tracing its path properly. Therefore, I can only say that I’m ninety-nine point nine percent certain of the twelve-hour limit—unless, of course, an accomplice was used by the suspect you’ve mentioned.”

  “An accomplice?” echoed Kramer. “No, sorry, I can’t see it, not in this context.”

  “Tromp!” came a distant voice.

  “It’s Lieutenant Terblanche, sir!” said Malan, puppy-eager to make amends. “Shall I go and see what the matter is?”

  “No, I’ve a better plan, Jaapie,” said Kramer. “You take Field Cornet Dorf here to the Royal Hotel in Nkosala and see he has a bloody good meal with you. Only the best for one of the best, hey?—he’s more than deserved it. As for the rest of you, you can forget this little lot now and go home—bugger off!”

  That had been an uncharacteristically kindly gesture on his part, Kramer knew full well, but, at the close of what had turned out to be a miserable, balls-aching, frustrating day, he’d needed something to raise his spirits a little, such as the thought of what would happen to the Colonel’s piles the instant he spotted an extravagant dinner for two on expenses. With any luck, it’d probably be a full, merciless hour before his sphincter finally unclenched itself.

  “Tromp! Didn’t you hear me?”

  “I’m coming, man, I’m coming …” said Kramer, hopping over the last strand of taut thatching string. “What’s the problem?”

  “No problem, it’s just we seem to have solved the theft of the garments—only I’m afraid it isn’t good news.”

  “Oh, ja?” Kramer reached the bare patch outside the cook boy’s hut and saw a second Zulu squatting subserviently there, beside Moses. “Who’s this, then?” he asked.

  “Moses cook boy’s uncle from Jafini, my boss,” explained Cassius Mabeni. “He come to bring food because police say Moses cook boy must never-never leave this place.”

  “Uh-huh—and so?”

  “Well, Cassius was questioning the cook boy, just like you told him to,” said Terblanche, “when all of a sudden, the uncle here starts chipping in. They had just got to where Cassius was asking if the cook boy remembered anyone leaving the beer drink, and the cook boy had answered he could remember nothing, not even dropping the money that had been so kindly returned to him. Then his uncle says, ‘What money?’—and they started arguing.”

  “About what?” asked Kramer.

  “Uncle man say Elifasi Ndhlovu was not drinking beer with them that night, my boss,” said Cassius Mabeni. “He says it is all one damn big lie.”

  “Ja, that’s right,” continued Terblanche, “and so the cook boy here says to him, ‘Why would a man give to me money out of his own pocket that I had not dropped? That doesn’t make much sense, you old buffoon!’—or words to that effect.”

  “No, it doesn’t make sense,” agreed Kramer. “Unless—”

  “Ah, but the uncle had his own answer for that! He says that this Elifasi must have used the money as an excuse to come down here and see what he could steal. But, because there was a police guard on the property, he had stolen from the cook boy instead, taking his Sunday best.”

  “Hmmm, not a bad theory. It wasn’t until today that Moses noticed his suit had gone, was it?”

  “Exactly,” said Terblanche. “So the garments could have still been here in his hut on the night of the explosion, only to be taken the following night, when Elifasi came by.”

  “Hell, I was here myself then,” said Kramer. “No wonder the bastard took off like a clockwork meerkat! You remember that, Cassius?”

  “Yebo, my boss—too very-very damn quick!”

  “But didn’t you tell me he was a good bloke, this Elifasi character?”

  Mabeni looked embarrassed. “That is true, my boss,” he admitted. “A man who had caused no trouble.”

  The cook boy started shaking his head and making a long protest in Zulu.

  “Ach, no, what’s that all about now?” demanded Kramer, his patience wearing thin. “Just tell this Moses that, as far as I’m concerned, the matter is no longer of any interest to me, and that he can sort it all out with Cassius in the—”

  “He’s saying,” interpreted Terblanche, “that he is certain the garments were not taken by Elifasi, who did not have the eyes of a thief but sat with him the whole time and just talked and asked questions and everything.”

  “Questions? Such as what?”

  “Oh, I suppose the usual kaffir things, how many children he had, how many wives, but I’ll ask him,” said Terblanche, and did so with some abruptness, as though intent on keeping the cook boy’s answer short.

  Moses could not have kept it shorter: he said nothing in reply, just looked suddenly very uncomfortable and played dumb.

  “Hau!” said Mabeni, looking at Kramer and Terblanche in surprise. “Cassius now kick this cheeky kaffir, my boss?”

  “Ja, I think that’s an excellent idea,” said Terblanche, drawing his truncheon. “What the hell does he think he’s playing at?”

  “Yega, yega!” pleaded Moses, crossing his arms over his face and backing away. “No hit, boss, no hit!”

  Mabeni bellowed at him in Zulu, grabbed his arms, pulled them down, and yelled in his face, making him screw up his eyes. Still with this eyes tight shut, the cook boy began a babble, holding Mabeni’s huge hands at bay.

  Terblanche listened briefly, then turned to Kramer: “Ach, it’s nothing,” he said. “He’s just worried that we will inform Gillets he’s been disloyal, telling personal details about his master and madam, the way servants do. Apparently, this Elifasi character once worked for a boss just as hard, and this gave them much in common, stories to joke about.” Terblanche paused, listened again, and said: “Now he’s even more worried that we will not be too pleased with him also telling his visitor about the CID sergeant who came here, plus what action he’d seen the police taking since the explosion. As I said, normal servant’s tittle-tattle, only we’ve really scared him and he—”

  “Hold it!” said Kramer, so sharply that not only Terblanche but the cook boy, too, were stopped in their tracks. “I thought the word ‘questions’ sparked this off, hey? Tittle-tattle just flows, but questions are another bloody matter entirely! It’s a point that needs clearing up.” A very nasty feeling was beginning to emerge, like a maggot hatching in the pit of his belly.

  Between them, Terblanche and Mabeni interrogated the cook boy, changing tactic and addressing him quietly, allowing him to squat beside his uncle. His replies were faltering and he frequently seemed to have difficulty in grasping what was required of him.

  “Ach, come on,” Kramer growled, flicking aside a half-smoke
d Lucky. “I can’t wait half the—”

  “Yirra, Tromp,” said Terblanche, looking shaken now as he turned to him. “He says they just talked at first, anything and everything. The questioning itself seems to have started when he began asking the cook boy about us, the police, hey? All very casual, ja, but the coon wanted to know the description of who was in charge of the case, what had been found, where we were looking—luckily the cook boy’s such a raw kaffir he couldn’t tell him much. But what does this all mean, hey? Was this Elifasi Ndhlovu spying on us? I tell you, it’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced in the whole of my service before!”

  Kramer shrugged, his mind racing.

  “You know what, Tromp?” said Terblanche. “I’m beginning to think this case could be political … Don’t you think we’d best stop and call in the Security Branch?”

  “And make fools of ourselves if it isn’t? You heard Dorf say it couldn’t be. No, Hans, first we find this Elifasi bastard ourselves and have a little chat with him.”

  “But—”

  “His name probably means bugger all, so what we need now is a description—have you got one?”

  “Ja, I asked for it earlier,” said Terblanche, nodding and taking out his notebook shakily. “It’s not much, hey? Bantu adult male, average height, slim build, speaks country-boy Zulu, late twenties maybe, wears old tennis shoes, inside-out jacket, matches in his ears, and—”

  “Short Arse! I can’t tell you why, but I bloody knew it!” said Kramer.

  15

  THE DAY CHANGED note then, like a guitar string breaking.

  Another went as the Land Rover reached the point, just south of the Moon Acre turnoff on the Nkosala road, where Short Arse had disappeared in a cloud of the Chevrolet’s dust the previous day, not to be seen again.

  “That sly little bastard!” muttered Kramer, making Terblanche and Mabeni, who sat between them, look round. “He’s been playing silly buggers with me the whole time!”

  “You mean Elifasi has?” asked Terblanche.

  But Kramer was too preoccupied by the exact science of hindsight, as he’d once heard it described, to reply.

  How painfully obvious it now seemed to him why Short Arse had done his vanishing trick. Wary that he could be stopped and questioned, as might any kaffir male when a white woman had been murdered, he had taken a nosedive through the dust cloud into the dense sugarcane and hidden there. Then, once it had seemed safe to do so, he’d emerged again and continued on his way to Fynn’s Creek to see Moses the cook boy, much amused to note, no doubt, that the law was elsewhere, wasting its time on bloody Grantham.

  On top of which, it had now also occurred to Kramer that his first encounter with Short Arse, within only a minute or so of his arrival in Jafini, could not have been the coincidence it had seemed at the time. Rather, the cunning bastard had been bent on making an immediate check on every newcomer who looked as though he might be part of police reinforcements.

  “This Short Arse, this Elifasi bugger,” said Kramer, “must be caught before this night is over—understood?”

  “But how?” asked Terblanche. “I’ve already asked Cassius here if he can remember his current address from his pass book, and he—”

  “Forget it, it’ll be a fake anyhow,” said Kramer. “Our main advantage is that presumably he doesn’t know we’re on to his little game, or we’d have been out looking for him sooner. My bet is, he’ll be still hanging around somewhere, trying to find out what we—”

  “But why, Tromp?” said Terblanche. “Why is he doing this?”

  “My guess is that he’s somehow part of what happened at Fynn’s Creek,” said Kramer. “He may even have been the bloody accomplice that Sybrand Dorf believes could have been involved, the one with the petrol lighter that got dropped.”

  Terblanche gave a low whistle. “You mean Lance Gillets could have paid this kaffir to plant the bomb for him? But that’s terrible!”

  “Been done before, using kaffirs as murder weapons,” Kramer reminded him. “You remember that cop in Pretoria whose wife hired two wogs to—”

  “Ja, I know, but to think little Annika was …”

  “Say that is what went on here,” said Kramer. “And now Short Arse, alias Elifasi, is shitting himself that he could be caught and held solely responsible. Hence he’s tried to find out the state of the game from the cook boy, hence he’s—ach! I don’t know all the ins and outs yet, but I do know this: that little black bastard is mixed up somehow in this business.”

  “Only …” began Terblanche.

  “Only what?” said Kramer, changing down to go into the last bend before the long straight leading to Jafini.

  “We’re still left with the basic problem, Tromp. Who stole the cook boy’s clothes? Shouldn’t we also be looking for another coon who—”

  “Elifasi could have stolen them himself after all,” said Kramer. “The same night he planted the bomb—simple, man.”

  “But why would he want to?”

  Mabeni stirred, clearing his throat. “My boss?” he said.

  “You have an answer for the Lieutenant?” said Kramer. “Good, then speak up, let’s hear it, man!”

  “Elifasi maybe need new clothings description, my boss,” he said cautiously. “Maybe last night he run far-far away.”

  “Now, there is a thought,” said Kramer, not liking it one bit. “You haven’t seen him today, for instance?”

  Mabeni shook his head.

  “I thought I had, just for a moment,” admitted Kramer, “outside the Bombay Emporium early this morning, but it turned out to be this ancient kaffir with syphilis. Same type of jacket, same shiny lining.”

  “Syph …?” repeated Cassius Mabeni.

  Terblanche translated for him, and the Bantu constable gave a short, merry laugh. “Mad-mad, that one,” he said. “He say he is Prime Minister of South Africa two times over.”

  “Oh, ja, old Two Times?” said Terblanche, chuckling. “He used to do some odd-job garden work for me, until the day he decided he was going to take out all my roses and return them to this tribal homeland he had set up for them. Can you imagine? Holes left all over the place, and my poor roses struggling to grow, stuck in a pile of broken bricks I had?”

  Mabeni laughed, covering his mouth politely with his hand, but Kramer still turned to frown at him. “What the hell’s the matter, kaffir?” he said. “I want you thinking, not playing at silly buggers, hey?”

  And if Terblanche, now a bright red, liked to consider himself also rebuked, all well and good, thought Kramer.

  Bokkie Maritz was sitting in the brightly lit CID office, slurring into the telephone, watched by a gleeful Sergeant Sarel Suzman, looking a lot less angular and morose for once.

  “What’s going on?” Kramer paused to ask him.

  “I think Bok’s had too much of his sore-throat mixture,” said Suzman. “You’ve got to watch Doc Mackenzie, hey? He’s a terror for prescribing lots of alcohol in everything—when Lieutenant Terblanche had flu, his cure for it nearly gave him the DTs, hey?”

  “Ja, but who’s Bok talking to?”

  “The Colonel, Lieutenant.”

  “Didn’t I order you to go home?”

  “Ja, but—”

  “Then go!” hissed Kramer, impatient to strike while the iron was hot.

  Suzman went, glowering but obedient, one of nature’s lapdogs.

  “Hey, Bok!” Kramer said loudly, advancing on him. “Man, don’t tell me it’s whiskey now! And only half the bottle left? What the hell are you doing? First it was gin, then it was—”

  “Shorry, hold on jush a sec,” said Maritz to the Colonel, turning round in utter bewilderment.

  “Oh, Christ!” said Kramer. “You’re not talking to that same lady again? The one you upset this afternoon with your remarks? For God’s sake, stop now, Bok! That kind of call can be traced, man, and this is a police station! Here, give that to me—!”

  And he whipped the receiver from Maritz’s hand, bef
ore the idiot had time to stop boggling, and said into the mouthpiece: “Hello? Operator, here—sorry, madam, we seem to have a crossed line. Replace your phone on its hook, please!” And he did just that himself, knowing the Colonel would ring back as fast as he could be reconnected.

  “Hey, wash you think you’re—” began Maritz.

  “Out!” snapped Kramer. “Go and wait in the station commander’s office, where we will find out what you’ve been up to today! And that is an order, Sergeant—so move!”

  “But I—”

  “Go, before my boot does the job for you!”

  Maritz stumbled to his feet, wide-eyed, looking as though he now believed every canteen story ever told about this lunatic from the Free State, and fled the room, bumping into two desks and a chair on the way. He had just lurched from sight when the phone gave a shrill ring.

  “Jafini CID, Kramer speaking …”

  “Lieutenant, is that you?”

  “Good evening, Colonel! Hell, it’s nice to hear your voice again—I thought we’d been totally forgotten up here!”

  “Hey? Didn’t you get my messages? What the hell is going on, man? Bok’s—”

  “Messages, Colonel?” said Kramer.

  “Ach, you know! To ring me about Advocate Gillets and his complaint about—”

  “News to me, Colonel! What has he got to complain about?”

  “So you haven’t been using threatening tactics on his son Lance, then? Only Mr. Gillets alleges—”

  “Hell, no, Colonel! Me and Hans pick on a poor kid still in deep shock under the doctor? Ring Mr. Mansfield, the bloke in charge at Madhlala, and he’ll tell you that we only paid a courtesy call, ten minutes at the most. Mansfield in fact thanked us for our discretion, Colonel—honest. You could try reminding him of that and see what he says.”

  “You were accompanied by Hans Terblanche, you say?”

  “Every minute of the time, sir! We work as a team.”

  “You do?” said the Colonel, unable to keep the surprise from his voice. “A good, steady fellow, Hans, although Maaties found him a bit slow. But, listen, no more visits without a call to me first, okay? Advocate Gillets is not a man we want to—”