The Song Dog

by James McClure

  “Then don’t bugger about, man! Out with it!”

  “The Lieutenant knows those carbon papers I had in my hand from Boss Kritz’s desk? If I may make a suggestion, the boss should maybe check them to see if he hid—”

  “Nine out of ten, Smart Arse,” said Kramer, adding, just before he put the receiver down: “Come straight back here right away, you hear me?”

  And had to find his place again, beginning that paragraph afresh:

  I am driving back from near Mabata that night when a thought occurs to me. I ask myself why has Bhengu brought ME a problem that has to do with spirits? He knows I am not a witch doctor and cannot give him a charm to protect him even though I know a lot about the subject and study it at first hand in my spare time. No it must be because Bhengu knows full well what I am and because he does not really believe in this spirit either or he WOULD go to a witch doctor.

  It is late but I head straight for G’s farm. G is not there so I ask the induna to fetch Bhengu out of bed. I take him to one side and say I have come to drive out an evil spirit for him and tell him to get in the car. We go to where the crash was and I make him follow me over to where the two trucks still are lying on their side. I say to him fine show me where these trucks were when you left them and before the spirit moved them to here. Bhengu says they are not the trucks he is talking about. The trucks moved by the spirit are the upright ones on the other side of the road.

  Show me what you mean I say. We start to cross over the road but Bhengu stops in the middle and points to the railway line the trucks go on. He says that the upright trucks had been moved to this spot and then moved back again. I naturally ask him how he can possibly know this and he asks me to put on the headlights of the car.

  Bhengu then shows me all the small slugs and similar creatures that come out at night and crawl over the railway lines to get to the other side. Cane has millions of slugs in it as I know from boyhood and they all seem to like cold surfaces. Bhengu tells me that when he came to work at this place in the morning he had felt sure the trucks were not standing in the same place as the day before because some firewood he had left propped against one end had fallen over and was now separate from it by two strides. That had made him look at the railway and he had seen slugs squashed flat to smithereens where the truck wheels had passed over them. He had followed the squashed slugs to a point just past the center of the road and had seen from this that the trucks had been there the night before and then pushed back again to almost their original spot.

  I felt sure I was looking at Mr. C’s brick wall in the middle of the road. No wonder he had tried to steer around it only to hit the other trucks hidden by the cane.

  But naturally I wanted to be sure of this so I asked Bhengu what other proof he had the trucks were moved. He said he could show me a mark made by the spirit. He showed me a footprint pushed in the mud by a man straining to start the trucks moving. This footprint was between the two lines near his firewood. I noted that it was the print of a man wearing a shoe and quite like my own footprints I had made in the mud.

  I thought I knew then why Bhengu kept calling this a spirit. No cane boy wears shoes so this must have been a print made by a white man but he could not bring himself to say it to me being of the old school. I thanked him and told him to tell no one and dropped him off at G’s compound.

  That footprint really worries me but I don’t know why. I do not want to report this matter until I have more time to think. I have not handled a white-on-white murder before but somehow this could be even more serious. It has begun to rain again and soon the footprint could disappear. Perhaps I should make plaster casts which is easy enough.

  In the morning I do not ring De Klerk. I have not enough evidence yet to support what I am thinking. It is best the inquest just goes ahead because if I am right that will not matter and at least I will not have made a fool of myself by speaking out too soon.

  Okay now I think I know how the crime was planned. As the noise of C’s car approached the bend the trucks were put in the road. If he had hit them then a cane boy could have been blamed for leaving the brakes off. If he did not hit them but went round then he would hit the trucks in the cane instead and the other trucks could be put back again. The perfect murder because it was only an accident happening to a terrible driver who had been drinking and it worked lovely.

  But what worries me is that I do not know WHY it was planned. What could the motive have been? I need also to supply the motive if I am to be believed. I do not believe myself sometimes and my wife has started to shout at me. She wants to know why I go to G’s so much. It is strange but I have a feeling that there I will find the answer.

  I delve into C’s past. I learn he was once farm manager to G but they had different views on how boys should be handled and there was a big bust-up only this was 28 years ago. Too long I think for a grudge. I think G is letting his boys brew illicit liquor in some room under his house and distilling it properly. He looks at the young ones too much. Perhaps this is what upset C and for that I cannot blame him.

  I also delve into C’s life at the time of his decease. His main concern seemed to be finding enough cash to pay for a big wedding for Annika and I learn from G that he has been to him asking for a loan which was turned down flat. C apparently ended up using threats and this gave me the idea it could be blackmail. I have

  The telephone was ringing again.

  Plucking the tennis ball from the air, midflight, Zondi smiled as the boiler boy spun round, exclaiming: “Yeee-ba-bor! I thought you were—”

  “Who, my brother?”

  The boiler boy became immediately tongue-tied, shrugging so emphatically that his bony shoulders almost touched the plugs in his earlobes.

  “I see,” said Zondi, beginning to bounce the ball off the ground, stepping up the rhythm, “you would have me believe you are too stupid to answer a simple question, is that it?”

  The man smiled idiotically.

  Zondi switched to bouncing the ball off the wall of the boiler house. “Pretend what you like about yourself to the whites,” he said. “But because a man is a boiler boy that does not mean he is also a damned baboon—take good care you do not insult the memory of my father!”

  That brought a second look of surprise to the boiler boy’s face. “Your father, chief?”

  “Of course! Was he not head boiler at Trekkersburg General from before he was married until the day we carried him to his grave in the high hill?”

  “ ‘General’ is a hospital?”

  “Where else does a man get a death-house contamination so bad his whole arm swells up before the poison grips his heart?”

  “Hau, hau, hau! It pains me to hear this, chief!”

  “Good,” said Zondi, directing the ball at the wall so that it would bounce back toward the boiler boy. “Perhaps we can now converse in a more sensible fashion.”

  “Your esteemed father, chief,” said the boiler boy, catching the ball and using the wall to return it to Zondi, “had opened up a bag sent for incineration? Is that how he contracted—”

  “Eh-heh. You know how it is, the job pays so very poorly.”

  Then Zondi appeared to become absorbed in the movement of the ball, as it bounced back and forth off those baking red bricks, traveling faster and faster between him and the boiler boy.

  28

  YOU SOUND DISTRACTED, Tromp,” said Terblanche, barely audible on the crackly telephone line from Mabata. “Did you get all that?”

  “Ja, ja, Stoffel’s still a total, gibbering wreck and you’re about to take him to the hospital at Nkosala. Fine, then, if that’s all, I’ll—”

  “The Bantu I left in charge is coping all right?”

  “He’s doing a great job, Hans—honest!”

  “And you? Are you likely to be there for a while yet?”

  “I’ve plenty of paperwork to keep me busy, of that I can assure you!

  “Well, in that case, I’d best leave you to—”

 
“Ja, do that,” said Kramer, slamming the receiver down. “Jesus Christ—and I called Dorf an old woman? I’ll bloody kill the next bastard who interrupts me!”

  This time, however, he had kept his place on the carbon.

  blackmail. I have to find out the nature of these threats. My only hope of this is finding some way of getting to talk to G’s servant boy Nyembezi who brings the drinks out onto the verandah. I have noticed the way he often hangs around close enough to hear when G wants him to fetch more and must be able to hear other things as well although I do not know how good his English is. The trouble with Nyembezi is that he never seems to leave the farm. I don’t want to question him with G’s knowledge for obvious reasons.

  !!!!! have suddenly realized I could be finding the answers I need by looking somewhere else for the person who could have done this thing to 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

  Unwilling to believe he had come to the end, Kramer re-examined the sheets of carbon paper he had discarded and then started searching all three desk drawers again.

  Nothing. “Shit!” he said, thumping a fist down.

  Then he went through the charge office and out onto the verandah, wondering what the hell had become of Zondi. With a lot to discuss and some fast planning to do, it was hardly the time to start buggering about, ignoring a simple, straightforward order to return to base and creating further, quite unnecessary problems. If he had hoped to see Zondi arriving back at that very moment, then he was disappointed, although in all truth he wasn’t at all sure what he was doing, striding about the place, fit to be tied, achieving absolutely nothing.

  So he returned to the CID office, took up the first statement to hand from the Fourie inquest, and began reading it, seating himself only as an afterthought. The statement had been made by George Wauchope Sullivan, a white adult male of forty-three whose occupation was described as industrial chemist at Jafini Sugar Mills Ltd.

  I have known the deceased for the past six years ever since his appointment. He was a dedicated family man of sober habits at all times. With so many kiddies to provide for he had to be. He could make one bottle of brandy last from Christmas to Christmas he once told me. I say these things because it is just not true he must have been drunk to be at the mill on a Saturday and to have fallen into Primary Cauldron Three. I was the one who discovered the body. The mill is usually not operative at the weekend. We leave everything on tick over and just the night watchman on guard. However I am occasionally required to make a special sample check and for this purpose I proceeded to the mill at approximately 3 p.m. on the Saturday in question. I left my wife two children mother-in-law and our neighbor seated outside in my station wagon thinking I would only be a minute. I noticed on arrival that the door to the wages office was standing open and my curiosity was therefore immediately aroused. I knew no large sums of money were kept on the premises but I still wondered if someone had tried to burgle the safe. I entered the wages office and saw Pik’s jacket was over the back of his chair. So that is it I thought. Pik has come in to do some overtime as it was near the end of the month. It is true that near the end of the month the deceased often put an extra couple of hours in. We had met on several such occasions in the past. My assumption at the time was that he had gone to relieve himself leaving his jacket behind. I went out of the office and along the catwalk leading to the cauldrons to get my sample. One and Two were switched off. My interest was Cauldron Three. It was sticking out above the surface just a hand with a ring on looking hard and shiny. I recognized the ring instantly. I said My God Pik what are you doing here. My imagination said that he must have been working in the office when he thought he heard a noise or something and came to Three to take a look and slipped and fell in or something. There is no proper rail around Three and it could happen I suppose although the Bantu workers seem to manage OK being barefoot. I then returned to the wages office to use the telephone to ring the authorities as this seemed to be a business call and not a personal one and in compliance with company regulations.

  “Oh, Jesus!” said Kramer, sickened by such arse-crawler’s mentality, and reached for the next statement.

  I am an adult white female aged 28 and the wife of the deceased. On the Saturday in question the deceased informed me that he had his usual end of month bookkeeping to do at the mill. The deceased said he would be gone only an hour or two, after which we could take the kids to the beach for a picnic. The deceased left the family home in Jacaranda Avenue at 2 p.m. exactly. Up until that time he had consumed three cups of coffee and then one cup of tea with his lunch. I know this for a fact. At 2:15 p.m. approximately he rang me from the mill. He said he had been thinking about the picnic on the beach and wondered if the kids would not prefer going to the game reserve as that at least would be something a bit different. I agreed with him and he said he would be back to get us at 3 p.m. He sounded his normal self. At 3:50 p.m. I was contacted by Sergeant Suzman of the SAP who came to the house with the news of the accident. The deceased had

  “Hello, boss,” said Zondi.

  “Listen, you bugger!” exclaimed Kramer, swinging round on him. “Where in Christ’s name have you been for so bloody long? I’ve been coming up with all kinds of things, hey?”

  “Me, too, boss,” said Zondi. “Here …” And held out a brown-paper shopping bag.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “The shoes Boss Kritzinger was wearing the night he died—also his belt, boss.”

  Kramer took the bag. “But the boiler boy swore to me that he’d—”

  “Lieutenant,” said Zondie, “with respect, there is white man’s rubbish and there is black man’s rubbish—and the poorer the black man, the bigger is the difference. A boiler boy, boss, is a very poor man indeed.”

  “And so?”

  “The boiler boy swore he had destroyed the rags, boss, but I wondered about the rest of what Boss Kritzinger had been wearing. Leather is not cut the same as clothing in a mortuary, and no matter how dirty it had become—blood, excrement, anything—it is also very easy to clean up and make pure again. Does the Lieutenant know how many months a boiler boy would have to work to save up for one pair of shoes from the trading store?”

  “He had these hidden in his sleeping quarters?”

  “Uh-uh, the boiler boy had given them, boss, to his mother for his brothers to borrow and help them find work. That is why it took me a little longer to recover the goods, or else I would have been back much sooner and—”

  “Ach, never mind,” said Kramer. “You did well there, hey? Now we’ve got the shoes, that gives us the same start as Kritz had when he was shown the print at the murder scene.”

  “What print at what murder scene, Lieutenant?”

  “Here, take a look at this stuff on the Cloete fatal and tell me what you think,” said Kramer, passing him the four sheets of carbon. “I’m going to go and get us a couple of meat pies, hey? For once in my life, I feel bloody starving.”

  “Hello, Tromp!” said someone at waist level. “How goes it?”

  “Piet!” he said, suddenly becoming aware of the Widow Fourie’s eldest, standing right there at his side in front of the counter at Jafini Bakery along the main street. “Shopping for your ma, hey?”

  Piet shook his head. “For me,” he said.

  “Fine. Best you go ahead, then—the lady’s waiting.”

  “Two bubble gums, please,” Piet piped up in English, holding out his money.

  Surprisingly, the bakery sold the horrible stuff, plus “nigger balls” and the equally strangely named “tickey sherbets” that made up the rest of Piet’s order. It did, however, appear to be clean out of toffee apples.

  “Tell your ma,” said Kramer, as Piet was handed his purchase, “t
hat—well, that I’ll be along later, hey?”

  “Good,” said Piet. “She was very grumpy last night and didn’t read to us properly because she kept looking out the window for your car. Got bloody fed up with it.”

  “Language, young man!” remonstrated the snooty-looking old cow behind the counter, slamming shut the drawer of her cash register.

  “Well, that’s what my ma said,” added Piet, before disappearing.

  Kramer bought two meat pies and two bottles of coke, topping off his order with two jam doughnuts.

  The bakery woman possibly made an attempt to engage him in conversation—there were noises-off of a coquettish and inquisitive nature—but apart from noting her breasts were so covered in talc that the exposed part of them looked like two unbaked loaves stuffed down her dress front, he ignored her.

  He just put down his money instead, and went striding back, feeling purposeful at last, to the police station.

  Zondi was one hell of a fast reader. He had already gone through the four sheets of carbon, and having set them aside, had made a start on the Fourie file.

  “Well?” said Kramer, handing him his pie and doughnut. “What did you think of Kritz’s little message to us?”

  “Hau, Lieutenant, I do not think there can be any doubt left that the Boss Cloete fatal was definitely a murder!”

  “Uh-huh, and would you agree that the shoe print should provide us with a shortcut to whoever did it?”

  Zondi nodded. “But so far, boss, I have not seen anything in this other matter, concerning Boss Fourie, to make me feel as certain that—”

  “Ja, ja, I haven’t either, apart from it being another so-called accident which seems a bit inexplicable,” said Kramer, opening the Cokes on the edge of the desk. “I suggest we put that business to one side for the moment and concentrate on the shoes, hey? They’re our one solid lead among so much talk and bloody supposition. Here, this drink’s yours—see you don’t spill it on anything!”