The Song Dog

by James McClure

  He looked all around him, and then back at the desk across the way from him. “Ah!” he said.

  How wonderfully simple: Kritzinger must have hidden his secret papers somewhere on Malan’s side of the room—not in a drawer or anything like that, of course, but somewhere just as easy to get to.

  “That looks an interesting idea, Mickey,” said Kramer, strolling back into the CID office. “What are you doing to Jaapi’s desk—changing the gearbox?”

  Zondi, flat on his back beneath the desk, began to extricate himself. “Just wait, boss,” he said, “I could have a big surprise for you …” Then he crawled round to the far side and started removing drawers.

  “Thought you’d like to know,” said Kramer, dropping the inquest docket on Kritzinger’s desk, “that Colonel Du Plessis has just approved your secondment to the Fynn’s Creek case. Mind you, he was in such a bloody tiz-woz, what with the chopper crash and the arrest of this Mandela character, he’d probably have given me permission to ravish his lady wife and the pedigree cocker spaniel.”

  “I am very happy for you, boss.”

  “You bugger! You’re not listening!”

  “Please, Lieutenant, I’m engaged in—”

  “Some bloody weird behavior! Ja, I’m well aware of that.”

  Zondi pushed both drawers back. “Ah,” he said, “another even more brilliant idea, boss! Will the Lieutenant please move over this side and use Boss Malan’s desk instead?”

  “Why?”

  “So I can test my brilliant idea, boss.”

  “Bloody hell,” sighed Kramer, doing as he was asked, taking the inquest docket with him. “I just hope you—”

  “My reasoning, boss, is based upon the fact that Boss Kritzinger had in his desk a Scottie dog key ring of special significance that he had not made any actual attempt to hide, or else such a person as Boss Bokkie Maritz would never have found it.”

  “So what?”

  “Surely that is the key to Boss Kritzinger’s handling of secrets, Lieutenant? He did not hide what was hidden. He simply relied on others being unable to grasp a special significance.”

  “Oh, ja? So he hid his notes by not hiding them either—is that what you’re saying?”

  “Precisely, boss! With the big advantage he could look at them very easily whenever he wanted.”

  “Hmmmm. Maybe you’re making a mistake by imagining things on Kritz’s behalf without having any real idea of how bright he was. Personally, I think you overrate him, kaffir.”

  “But what was it that cost Boss Kritzinger his life, Lieutenant?” asked Zondi. “What he knew—or what he did not know? Was it intelligence or stupidity?”

  “Ach!” said Kramer, sitting down behind Malan’s desk. “It’s your bloody theory, man—you prove it.” And he took up the next of the sworn statements.

  It had been made by Jacob Gerhardus Hendrik Geldenhuys, the Nkosala magistrate, and apart from the preamble, giving his race, age, and all the rest, it appeared mercifully brief, running to no more than two paragraphs:

  In my view the deceased was not inebriated to the degree it had affected his ability to drive a motor vehicle correctly at the conclusion of the evening, having imbibed his liquor slowly over a period of more than four hours in conjunction with the consumption of a considerable quantity of protein, which is known to alter the nature of alcohol and and inhibit its absorption into the system. (See State v. Koekemoor, et al.)

  Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he, the self-serving bugger, thought Kramer, for the magistrate must have been in exactly the same state when he drove Mrs. Geldenhuys home from the party.

  As a magistrate I am of course more ready than most to condemn drinking and driving, but here, I believe, we have seen occur nothing more than another inexplicable tragedy, such as has already befallen this concern this year and over which I had the sad duty to adjudicate.

  Kramer fell to pondering what Geldenhuys had meant by “another inexplicable tragedy” and the phrase “this concern.” When the penny finally dropped, it slid chill down his spine like a chip off an ice block, causing a reflex shudder that jerked him to his feet. “Christ, the toffee apple!” he said.

  Zondi looked up, a pencil clamped sideways between his teeth, and raised an eyebrow.

  “Ach, Pik Fourie!” said Kramer. “Hubby of the landlady where I’m staying? He worked at the sugar mill, too, until he fell in a vat of bloody boiling sugar.”

  Taking the pencil from his mouth, Zondi asked: “Is the boss saying we have now another murder that links up?”

  “I bloody hope not!”

  “But was Boss Fourie’s death in any way suspicious, Lieutenant?”

  “His widow certainly doesn’t act that way. She’s just very sad, that’s all; it shows in her laughter sometimes—but only when the kids are about.”

  Zondi suddenly averted his eyes, as though he might have been looking too thoughtfully at Kramer.

  “Er, listen, Mickey,” said Kramer, “I’m going to go and find this other inquest, hey?” And he left the office in a state of embarrassment he had never known before.

  He was reminded slightly, however, of the day his silent nurse had first beckoned to him, showing she was aware that there might be more to Tromp Kramer than just the big bad cop the rest of the world seemed to see—kaffirs especially.

  Unsettled, for some reason he could not identify, Zondi lit a Texan and picked up the Cloete docket, curious to see for himself what it contained. After glancing at the sketch plan and at the photographs, he skimmed through all seven statements. Five were by the Cloetes’ fellow partygoers, and each testified to the mill foreman’s apparent sobriety at the end of a quiet, very civilized evening. The remaining two statements were more down-to-earth and had been submitted in written form, as opposed to being dictated, coming as they did from experts asked to express an opinion.

  In one, a qualified examiner from the Government Garage in Durban gave his findings regarding the roadworthiness of the Renault Dauphine before impact, and said in his summary:

  As to be expected in a company-owned and maintained vehicle, everything including brakes, lights, and steering was in good order, suggesting human error was the deciding factor.

  And in the other, the district surgeon, Dr. Abrahams, had written:

  Mr. Andries Cloete was a private patient of mine although I saw little of him, his health being excellent for a man of his age, as was evidenced by the fact he had been on another of his long hunting trips only a week before his demise, bagging his thirty-seventh elephant, also a leopard at night, which speaks volumes for his reflexes and eyesight. He had no drinking problem that I was aware of; his liver and kidneys supported this view on postmortem examination.

  “Hmm,” said Zondi, now sharing Kramer’s perplexity, for he could see nothing in the inquest report to suggest there had been foul play whatsoever—nor why there might have been cause for even suspecting any.

  Then he heard a white woman’s voice out in the corridor, surprising him a little, and he hurriedly swept the crash pictures out of sight, extinguished his cigarette, and wondered if it would not be discreet of him to slip quickly through the open window.

  “Mickey, you’ll never guess who that was, hey?” said Kramer, returning to the CID office moments later. “Kritz’s sister-in-law has just called by quickly to hand this in before taking the family down to Durban.” And he placed a battered imitation-leather briefcase on Malan’s desk. “She said my phone call had set her thinking—‘a man must have somewhere for his personal papers’—and she came up with this.”

  “Is there anything in it which—”

  “Christ, kaffir, give us a chance!” said Kramer, as eager as he was to discover what the case contained. He undid the clasp and began removing everything tucked into its three divisions. “This year’s income tax form, mortgage agreement, insurance policy, insurance policy, pension details, more pension details, birth certificate, same, same, same, same, same, marriage certificate, fi
rearm license, savings bank, Barclays Bank statements—ah, what’s this?”

  “A statement from an accused in a stock theft case, taken down in Zulu, boss,” said Zondi, looking over his shoulder. “And that next one is another old case concerning a grave opened up to make muti from the corpse. They look to me like unsolved cases.”

  “Uh-uh, and what have we here?” Kramer took out a heavy, lumpy, sealed envelope that had a couple of Zulu words scrawled on it. “More of the same?”

  “That reads ‘His’ and ‘Mine,’ boss.”

  “Oh, ja? I hope it’s nothing rude, hey?” said Kramer, slitting open the envelope with Malan’s paper knife.

  “How strange …” said Zondi.

  “Two shoe-print casts,” said Kramer, laying them side by side. “Both right shoes, sunk in soft mud or clay, and plaster of Paris poured in. Could this ‘his’ be the bastard we’re looking for, hey?”

  “But which is which?” asked Zondi. “If one of those shoes is supposed to be Boss Kritzinger’s?”

  “They look almost identical to me, except one’s a bit longer.”

  Zondi examined the casts more closely. “A strange thing for a detective to do, boss: put his own shoe forward for comparison.”

  “Not really. Kritz could have been plodding around in a certain area, looking for clues, and then suddenly noticed there was another set of prints there, forcing him to make some distinction between them.”

  “Then surely the first step. Lieutenant, is to clear up the ‘which is which’ problem by getting one of Boss Kritzinger’s shoes and measuring it?”

  “True,” said Kramer. “Only his house will all be locked up, now that his sister-in-law’s moved everybody to Durban—and I bet she’s taken even the servant’s bloody keys with her.”

  Zondi shrugged. “Wouldn’t it be simpler, boss, to put a ruler to one of the shoes Boss Kritzinger was wearing when he was blown up the other night?”

  “You don’t understand, man—that’s not simpler at all,” replied Kramer. “The mortuary at Nkosala is run by Bud Abbott and bloody Lou Costello: all Kritz’s things got chucked in the bloody incinerator!”

  “Hau! Is the Lieutenant sure that—”

  “Listen, I was present when the boiler boy swore on his God’s oath that ‘all clothes’ had been chucked in his fire.”

  “The boss believed him?”

  “Jesus, what would you do if you were handed a stinking pile of rags like that, all soaked in blood and shit and Christ knows what else?”

  Zondi screwed up one eye, while he appeared to calculate the odds of something. “Lieutenant,” he said, “it is time for a kaffir to do a bit more kaffir’s work. Have I your permission to borrow the Chevy?”

  27

  KRAMER TOOK VERY little notice of the Chevrolet leaving the yard. He wasn’t even quite sure why he had agreed to Zondi using it. Ever since the name of Pik Fourie had come up, his mind had been fighting off a thought he really did not want to think, and all else had become a little unreal.

  For once, upon first opening an inquest docket, he did not start by looking at the set of police photographs, tucked into their glassine envelope. Neither did he stop to examine the reason.

  Kramer began instead with the postmortem report, immediately flipping over it so that the details of the deceased’s height, weight, hair color, eye color, and general physical condition vanished from sight.

  Then he zeroed in on: Death would have been instantaneous due to vagal inhibition alone, setting aside asphyxiation, shock, etc.

  “Thank Christ,” he said.

  Zondi had left both desks in a mess, but Kritzinger’s looked the quicker to tidy. So Kramer sat himself down at it, swept some picked-over rubbish back into the top drawer, slammed it, and then pushed aside the litter of used carbons to make room for the Fourie docket.

  More muddle. Some of the statements had been put back upside down, and the pro forma had wandered off into the middle somewhere, instead of acting as the introduction. Kramer licked a fingertip and started searching through Kritzinger’s carbon copies of the statements. They were all rather faint, something he had always found intensely irritating.

  “Ach, no!” Kramer muttered under his breath. “What the hell were you bloody playing at, Kritz?”

  He was certain he’d just seen several perfectly good, hardly used sheets of carbon paper on the man’s desk, and looked round for one to prove his point. Noticing that the once-only typed impression was not reversed in its black, waxy surface, he had to smile; Kritzinger had plainly made the same mistake he himself kept on making. You put the damned carbon paper the wrong way into your typewriter, typed away unaware of this, and ended up with a blank copy, a mess on the back of your top sheet, and having to start all over again from the beginning.

  Then, with a jolt, he suddenly registered what those lines of typed words actually said:

  Cloete and his wife. But if I am wrong? That could be my job and MY wife and family right down the drain! So check and double check and take no action until you are one hundred percent absolutely certain you hear. The main trouble is I can’t work out the reason although I am pretty sure this wasn’t the first time he

  Kramer could read no further. He had first to stand up, light a Lucky, start pacing about, get himself under control, stop his hands shaking so bloody much that he had difficulty extracting a match from its box without spilling the others.

  “Jesus, Mickey, you choose your bloody moments to disappear, hey?” he muttered.

  There proved to be eight sheets of carbon paper, scattered about on Kritzinger’s desktop, that had been used only once; one was a CID requistion list, broken off halfway through, and another three were ancient duty rotas. Setting these aside, Kramer took the remaining four sheets and placed them in sequence, by noting how the sentences broke between one page and another. That done, he lit a fresh Lucky off the cigarette he was about to stub out, and began again at what looked like the beginning.

  De Klerk phones me and says the magistrate has been going over the Cloete fatal statements and he wants a theory in them checked out. Taylor’s put forward the idea C crashed because he tried to avoid a native or animal in the road. I say a bloke that kills so many animals as he does is not going to think twice about what he runs over. De Klerk says ja but we’re interested in finding the native so we can prove it wasn’t drink that caused the accident. I say I can’t see what difference running down a native would make to C who has shot a few of them also in his time besides elephants. I tell De Klerk that the only thing that would make C swerve in my opinion is seeing something in the road he can’t hit and hope to live like a brick wall maybe.

  He tells me that isn’t my worry. I am the man with the native contacts so he has been instructed to tell me to find the native and see he gives the right evidence. I am sorry for little Annika regarding her ma and pa but I am too busy with genuine cases to bother with a nonsense like this and so I do nothing.

  De Klerk bells me again. To get him off my back I go to G’s farm. We have a few beers then I go to the compound. Naturally none of his boys owns up to staggering around drunk in front of C’s car. Do you think we are MAD Isipikili? That is NOT the way home Isipikili! And so on. G and me had some more beers. We agree C was unlucky there were those two cane trucks hidden in the cane because otherwise no real harm would have been done by leaving the road at that point. We also agree C can’t really complain because he had always been a terrible driver and had got away Scot free far too many times already. G says surely my time is being wasted and I tell him too right it is.

  Next morning De Klerk rings up and says cancel the order. The case will be heard by a magistrate specially brought in so that Geldenhuys can give evidence and make sure no slur is left on the memory of C and Annika won’t have any trouble getting paid the insurance. I say fine suits me.

  I have almost forgotten about it two days later when I am on foot in the street and Bhengu greets me near the Bombay. He is the oldest b
oy G has got with some wonderful memories of Zululand before the sugar came. He calls it The Sweetness That Turned Sour A People’s Dream and had better watch out the SBs don’t hear him. A long salutation and then he starts talking in a big mumble. I put him in my car and I ask him what the problem is.

  He tells me that he was the boy in charge of the cane trucks at the side of the road where the accident happened and now he is much troubled. I say he is being an old fool and to just put the whole thing from his mind. He says he cannot do this because that is the section where G appointed him to work and he is afraid of the evil spirit which has come to dwell there.

  I ask him to describe the form the evil spirit takes but he says he has not seen it yet. He knows it is there though because at night it moves the cane trucks about. My reaction is to laugh and ask how often this has happened. So far only once is his reply. The night Boss Cloete left this world he says and expects me to believe that.

  I tell Bhengu that there was nothing the matter with where the trucks were left but if he wants to blame an evil spirit for putting them there it is fine with me. He wants to go on talking about the spirit but I get cross and put him out of my car as I have lots of work to do.

  I am driving back from near Mabata that night when a thought occurs to me. I ask myself why has Bhengu

  The telephone rang, and with a growl of irritation, Kramer broke off to snatch up the receiver: “Ja? Who is it? Speak quick because I’m bloody busy right now!”

  “It is only Zondi, boss, at Nkosala police—”

  “And so?”

  “I have just had another idea, Lieutenant, that I thought I must tell you very fast.”