The Song Dog

by James McClure

  “Promise, Colonel,” said Kramer. “Otherwise, things are starting to progress nicely, sir, I’m glad to report! The funny thing is, I was just about to phone you. Field Cornet Dorf of the Defence Force was here today, and has given us a few leads we can start working on.”

  “I’m very pleased to hear it, hey?” Du Plessis paused and cleared his throat. “Er, Lieutenant …”

  “Ja, Colonel?”

  “You make it sound as though all is well up at Jafini.”

  “So it is, Colonel! Your Press clampdown is working perfectly. Not one reporter in—”

  “No, it’s not that, Lieutenant. It’s, er, Bok … Just how are things with him, exactly?”

  “Oh,” said Kramer, then switched to speaking far too lightly and airily: “When did you last speak to him, Colonel? He’s just a bit, er—shall we say, feverish?—at the moment. Also been a bit out of sorts, a bit low, that’s all, but I’m sure he’ll soon get over it. He’s been telling you about his bad sore throat presumably?”

  There was quite a pause. “You say, Lieutenant, that Bok is, what—a bit low?”

  “Er, yes, sir, in a manner of speaking. Perhaps it’s because he’s, er, not used to being so far away from home, sir, and away from his lovely lady wife and all the usual restrictions—I mean, away from the usual routine, sir. Admittedly, I’ve been out all day, so I’m a bit out of touch with—”

  “You can’t, er, explain the situation a little more clearly, Lieutenant?”

  “Colonel?”

  “Listen,” said Du Plessis, “I respect a man for his loyalty, as you well know, Tromp, but perhaps in this instance it might—”

  “Look, sir, wouldn’t you like to have a word with Bokkie himself?” said Kramer. “He’s right here at Maatie’s old desk, playing with his little Scottie dog puzzle and—”

  “No, no, that won’t be necessary!” said the Colonel hastily. “Just tell him from me … Look, maybe it’s best since he’s, as you say, feverish, if Bokkie gets a lift back tonight, hey? There’s a Firearms Squad vehicle leaving Nkosala at eight for tomorrow morning’s conference. Then Bok can get that sore throat properly seen to and be in the bosom of his family, which is a man’s proper place when he’s sick.”

  “Colonel, sir, you’re one of the best, hey?”

  “It won’t leave you too short of men?”

  “Hell, no, we’ll manage, Colonel—good night, sir!”

  Kramer let the receiver slide from his fingers back into its cradle. Right, he thought, now I have you all to myself—although when, how, or where I’m going to be able to take wicked advantage of this, I don’t bloody know.

  He meant, of course, the Widow Fourie.

  “Look, I’ve managed to find that old dynamite theft,” said Terblanche, coming into the CID office. “Sorry, are you about to use the phone? Because I—”

  “No, just finished!” said Kramer, turning. “The Colonel wants Maritz back, so I’ve just arranged a lift for him. Any chance of the van taking him round to pick up his suitcase?”

  “Ja, I’ll fix that in a moment, hey?” said Terblanche, placing a bulging docket on Malan’s desk. “I thought it worthwhile a quick check, in case the dynamite has been stolen from the same place again.”

  “Good thinking,” said Kramer, moving to look over his shoulder. “Who investigated?”

  Terblanche pointed to the name at the foot of the list of exhibits: J. J. Mitchell. “Joe did, but in the end, he didn’t have much luck—Joe was Malan’s predecessor here, before he went on to higher things. All two dozen sticks of dynamite were recovered, as you can see from this list, but nobody was arrested and the case still lies open. Now, where was it that this happened exactly …? It’s on the tip of my tongue.”

  Kramer plucked a yellow form from the mess of papers. “Shaka’s Halt,” he said.

  “Ach, of course! A nothing sort of place way up, you know, near the mountains. Sort of a quarry, where they get gravel for roads.”

  “You’re right,” said Kramer, studying the form. “There’s the name of the contractor here, Barney Sherwood, Umfolosi Quarry Company—and a phone number. I’m going to try him …”

  The dialing tone lasted for barely two rings. Sherwood thought at first that the police were calling to tell him that the case had at last been solved, then became irritable when he realized they hadn’t. He said that nothing further had been taken from his explosives store, thank you, and pointed out that this was undoubtedly just as well, considering how totally incompetent the police had proved themselves to be. Furthermore, he wanted to lodge a complaint about the police seizure of a man’s lawful property, leaving him seriously out of pocket.

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, sir,” said Kramer. “And I don’t want to know. Just see you go and check your store once more, right now, and ring us back by half past eight, confirming it is secure, or there’ll be trouble, hey? I’m the world expert on examining gravel lorries for serious infringements of roadworthiness regulations.”

  “That’ll put him in a panic!” said Terblanche, as the receiver clattered down.

  “Never failed yet with one of those bastards,” said Kramer. “You’ll see, he’ll ring again by eight-fifteen at the latest.”

  The contractor rang at eight, just as Maritz, looking most bemused, made his maudlin farewell and departed in the company of three very silent Firearms Squad officers, temporarily stationed at Nkosala.

  “Well?” said Terblanche, turning his attention back to Kramer. “Any luck at Shaka’s Halt?”

  Kramer shrugged. “Nice idea of yours, Hans, but a big fat zero, the man says—all his dynamite is accounted for. Best we put that dynamite docket away and stop buggering about, hey? Our job tonight is to catch Short Arse. Nothing else must get in the way of that—nothing.”

  “Ja, but how, Tromp? Where do we begin?”

  “We could try a ride around, see if—”

  “But what if he spots us doing that, and—”

  “True. Ach, we’ll just have to sit down and do some hard thinking first, see if we can’t come up with a better plan.”

  16

  THE WIDOW FOURIE came out of the kitchen, carrying a glass of water, just as Kramer opened her front door at a quarter after midnight, doing his best to make not a sound.

  “Hello,” she said. “You’re up late …”

  “And you.”

  “Ach, no. I was fast asleep until a minute ago—little Piet woke up, wanting a drink.”

  “I could bloody do with one,” muttered Kramer, before adding: “Good night, hey?”

  “Top shelf, pantry,” she said. “Behind where the box of birthday-cake candles is kept.”

  Kramer watched her go down the corridor. She looked tired, but walked with none of the unsteadiness normally associated with someone just roused from slumber, which intrigued him.

  Then he found, behind the box of birthday-cake candles, a large, untouched bottle of Oude Meester brandy, its seal still intact. There was a holly-leaf label attached to the neck of the bottle which read: To my beloved Pik, Happy Christmas! XXX.

  Kramer poured a good measure into a tumbler and sat down at the kitchen table, propping his feet up. He saw no harm in drinking a dead man’s booze. He had read somewhere that people did this to Napoleon’s brandy all the time—and then boasted to their friends about it.

  “So you found the bottle okay,” said the Widow Fourie, returning to the kitchen with an empty glass.

  “Like some?”

  “No, not for me, thanks.”

  “Have just a drop,” he insisted. “One tiny drop! It’ll help you get straight back to sleep again.” And he looked her in the eye.

  “No, honest,” she said, turning quickly away.

  “Suit yourself!”

  “You sound upset,” she said, rinsing the glass in the sink. “Why’s that?”

  “All right if I have another?”

  “It’s there to be drunk.”

  “S
o am I,” said Kramer.

  She sat silently with him, sorting the children’s freshly laundered clothes into four neat piles on the tabletop, while he sank that first tumblerful. His gaze kept returning to her and especially to that wide, generous mouth with its bracketing of laughter lines.

  “If you’re staring at these spots,” she said, “it’s my time of the month, that’s all. You don’t have to be so blatant about it.”

  Kramer dug out a Lucky. “Ach, no!” he said. “I was thinking of something else entirely: Short Arse.”

  “I beg your pardon!”

  “Hell, not you, hey? Just some kaffir.”

  “What kaffir?”

  So he told her, speaking freely, too freely maybe, but he’d hardly eaten all day and the brandy was coursing strong through his veins. He let slip that he had a hunch about this kaffir that made the hairs at the back of his neck stand up, a sort of destiny thing.

  “Oh,” she said, and became silent again.

  “Don’t just sit there—talk!” he said. “Keep on talking. Tell me how bloody stupid I’m being!”

  “I can’t,” she said. “The day that Pik got killed, he kissed me good-bye at the door, same as usual, then he came back and kissed me and the kids again, a second time. There seemed to be no reason.”

  They were both quiet after that, while the kitchen clock kept its ponderous loud ticking.

  “This native,” said the Widow Fourie, abruptly brisk and businesslike, pouring herself a small tot of brandy. “You’ll just have to look for him, find him, see for yourself how plain and ordinary he is, and put an end to—”

  “Look for him?” echoed Kramer. “What the hell else do you think Hans and me have been doing half the night?”

  “You didn’t tell me that. How am I supposed to know?”

  “We searched everywhere, high and low. Gone! Vanished, just like that …”

  The Widow Fourie downed her brandy in one, grimacing at the taste, then placed the glass very carefully on the tabletop. “You say,” she said, “that he’s probably changed by now into the suit of clothes he stole from the kitchen boy at Fynn’s Creek. Were you able to give people a good description of them?”

  “Oh, ja,” said Kramer. “Excellent.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Cassius got it directly off the kitchen boy. One black jacket, black pants with shiny seat, and a white shirt that has a patch on the left shoulder made out of the shirttail. A belt that’s black on the outside, grey on the inside, and the buckle has a five-pointed star on it, real trading store. Also, a pair of size eleven, black, imitation lace-up shoes. Thick soles with a crisscross pattern, a nick in the left toe cap from a falling penknife, and a blemish on the right shoe that’s an area of roughness in the shape of a half-moon. Oh, and the shoes hadn’t been dyed evenly: the left one had a bit of purple in the black, when you held it to the light”

  “Yirra,” said the Widow Fourie, “that really is a description! The cook boy told you all that? He must’ve been in love with those blessed shoes of his!”

  Kramer nodded. “My reaction was the same,” he said. “Only Cassius pointed out that there are over three hundred words in Zulu you can use to describe the different colors of a cow. On top of which, there are even more words for every kind of horn, hoof, et cetera. I think what he meant was, when a coon around here is too poor to own any cattle, then a shoe—even one that’s not real hide—just has to do, hey?”

  “Hmmmmm,” said the Widow Fourie. “So this native hasn’t been seen since—can’t he just have gone? Y’know, back to wherever you think you first saw him?”

  “Ja, outside the magistrate’s court,” muttered Kramer, then realized what he had just said.

  And he was back in Trekkersburg, on his very first morning, in the alley beside the courthouse, which had been thronged so solid with worried kaffir wives and their families that you had to force your way through them. Then, all of a sudden, the crowd had parted of its own volition, and through it had come a coon version of Frank Sinatra making with the jaunty walk. The snap-brim hat, padded shoulders, and zootsuit larded with glinting thread were all secondhand ideas from a secondhand shop. Yet with them went the feeling that here was an original, even if someone, somewhere else, had thought it all up before. The man walked that way because he thought that way, and the crowd had sensed this—just as it had sensed that something special, perhaps even deadly, walked with him.

  “Tromp?” said the Widow Fourie, sounding very concerned. “Trompie, are you all right?”

  “Ach, fine!” he said, blinking, reaching for more brandy. “You think the kaffir’s gone back? Why the bloody change of clothes if he was going to do that? No, my feeling is that he’s still around, lying low, still keeping a watch on what we’re—”

  “But why?” asked the Widow Fourie. “That’s the part I don’t get. I can’t see how a native could possibly have been mixed up in—”

  “Then I’ll have to just bloody ask him!” said Kramer testily, needing time to think, feeling the pressure. “Find a way to get my cuffs on him, and ask him lots of things—ask the two-faced bastard what the hell’s going on here!”

  “I know a way,” she said.

  “Pardon?”

  “I know a way of catching him, if he’s still in the area,” said the Widow Fourie. “It’s what my Uncle Koos did, that time he had all the trouble with the leopard. You know what sly, cunning creatures leopards are, hiding away so you never see them—leaving you just to find another of your flock has been taken in the morning? Well, Uncle Koos knew the leopard was out there somewhere, hiding in the foothills, and so he just got a goat and—”

  “Ja, ja, set a trap!” said Kramer, nodding.

  He did not sleep much after that. Every time his eyes closed, and his mind lost its grip on the day, slipping into strange half-dreams, mostly seascapes, it took only the slightest sound to jolt him wide awake again. Then he would lie staring at the ceiling, trying to grasp the actual implications of Short Arse and Zoot Suit being one and the same bastard, until eventually his eyelids drifted shut once more, restarting the cycle.

  “Can Dingaan have your fat, please?” Piet asked him at the breakfast table.

  “I’d sooner he had my head,” said Kramer, waving aside the milk that the maid had been about to add to his coffee. “Ja, of course he can—he can have the whole of my bacon, if he likes. I’m not in the mood for it.”

  “Ja, my ma warned me,” said Piet, forking the bacon over onto his bread plate.

  “Warned you about what?”

  “She said you’d probably be like a bull who had backed into a big cactus this morning.”

  “That ma of yours …”

  “She’s nice, isn’t she?” said Piet. “Sometimes I think Fanie Kritzinger’s got a better one, but not always.”

  “Oh, ja? Any view on his pa, then?”

  “He’s dead. Kicked the bucket. Everyone knows that.”

  “Who told you, hey?”

  “I don’t know—one of the kids, down by the river.”

  “Was his pa a nice man?”

  Piet shrugged.

  “Come on,” said Kramer. “What was he like?”

  “He wasn’t like that other policeman who used to come and see my ma a lot, Herman’s uncle. He was like … well, a bit like you, I suppose, and they didn’t let him have a uniform either.”

  Kramer wasn’t sure why, but as he drove to Jafini police station shortly before nine, he kept thinking about that little conversation.

  Then he became preoccupied by other things, and in particular by the trap he would set that day for Short Arse. Try as he might, he had not been able to improve on the trick that the Widow Fourie’s uncle had played on the leopard, and had finally decided there was probably no need to. Just as the leopard had been attracted by the sheepfold, Short Arse had his own known center of interest: the Fynn’s Creek murder scene. Granted, now that all the activity had died down there, most of its appeal must ha
ve gone, too, but some form of tethered goat could soon change this.

  “Goat, goat, goat …” Kramer murmured, trying to think of something simple.

  Simplest of all would be to renew police activity at Fynn’s Creek and then make a mystery of what exactly they were up to. But how? Now that Field Cornet Dorf had been over the site with such care, it was difficult to see what there was left to act as a fresh focus of attention. Hell, the whole place had been scrutinized and every last morsel of possible evidence had—no, wait! There was still one part of the scene as yet unexamined: the hut of Moses the cook boy, where Short Arse himself had come calling!

  “Perfect,” said Kramer.

  Terblanche had on his harassed look. “Morning, Tromp!” he said, scraping a splash of maize porridge from his tie. “Goodness, what a start to the day …”

  “You should try eating slower, Hans.”

  “No, no, not this! I’ve just had the station commander at Nkosala on the phone, reminding me I’ve got to be in court there at ten in the middle of all else! And if I don’t find my statement soon to memorize, I won’t know what to say! I did try for an adjournment on account of assisting you in this matter, but—”

  “That’s fine, man! I’ll see you after. I just need to borrow one of your blokes and a boy.”

  “Take Malan—I prefer Sarel to be in charge of the station whenever I’m away—and any Bantu that’s going. What’s this in aid of?”

  “To help me find Short Arse.”

  “Ach, I’m sorry, of course! Just shows what a muddle I’m getting myself into. Let’s hope today our luck changes, hey?”

  “Man, I know it will.”

  “How can you be so sure, Tromp?”

  Kramer almost told him about the trap, then realized something just in the nick of time. Above all, the renewal of activity at Fynn’s Creek had to appear wholly authentic in order for his plan to work, but if transparent rustics like the station commander and his little gang of half-wits were allowed to know what was really going on, they’d be very unlikely to play their roles convincingly enough to fool a blind man tied up in a sack with carrots stuck in his ears.