“It isn’t, you know, it’s the truth.”
“But Hans and me have already been through all that—which you’ve obviously not troubled to do! Or are you trying to tell me that little arsehole would know how to make a sophisticated delay longer than twelve hours with an alarm clock? Christ, he wouldn’t know where to even begin, man! On top of which, I’ve already proved he couldn’t have been anywhere near—”
“You didn’t notice a pair of frog flippers, down at the Fynn’s Creek?”
“Of course. But what have they to do with—”
“Then obviously you never took a closer look at them,” said Claasens, with the trace of a smile, “before we realized our oversight and spirited them away. Because, if you had, Lieutenant, you’d have noticed they were navy issue. Gillets was at the Navy Gymn straight after leaving school, you see, to get his Defence Force training over and done with—he trained as a frogman.”
“Oh, shit …” said Kramer.
“Exactly. He learned practically everything a man can learn about the use and detonation of explosives, including improvisation behind enemy lines—we’ve checked on that. And what is a limpet mine except a kind of time bomb, ja? Stick it to the side of a ship and—”
“Ja, ja, no need to rub it in!” said Kramer, sick to the stomach now, as he remembered a reference also having been made to Gillets’ naval background by his boss, the game warden. “But how can you be sure he actually did it? There’s a bloody big difference between having the know-how and—”
“Don’t worry, we—”
“But have you interviewed bloody Gillets—or even seen him since that night? Because I have, and my instincts—”
“Tromp,” said Claasens, switching off the kettle, “how often have you had to deal with rich-kid English-speakers of that kind? Coming, as you do, from the Free State?”
“Well, never, I suppose, but—”
“Then wait until you know them better before thinking you could have anything in common to base a feeling on, hey? Christ, they’re a race apart, man! You know what they call an Afrikaner bloke like you? The nice ones say ‘hairy-back’—Gillets would say ‘fucking rock spider.’ ”
“Even so,” cut in Kramer, “my impression was of—”
“Listen,” said Claasens, “I’m just going to have to tell you the whole thing, but you mustn’t repeat it to another soul, not ever. Do you promise? Only the Colonel, me, and Suzman were meant to ever know this.”
“Why not Terblanche as well?”
“Huh! Hans is such a bloody Christian these days you can’t trust him with anything, hey? Do you promise?”
“Fine, not another soul,” said Kramer.
“Well, the start of it all was just after midnight on what was actually last Tuesday morning,” said Claasens, pouring boiling water into the two coffee mugs. “Sarel was out on patrol, three or four miles to the north of Fynn’s Creek, when there was this huge bloody bang and he saw the flash reflect off some low sea cloud. That’s how he knew straight off where to go, and he got to Fynn’s Creek, about twelve thirty.”
“Hey? I thought he got stuck in some sand, trying a shortcut, and it was four before he—”
“No, no, four was when he left again, having had a hell of a lot of things to see to first.”
“Ah,” said Kramer, “so that was what spoiled the crocodiles’ picnic!”
“Sorry?”
“No, no, nothing important—just you go on.”
“Ja, well, Sarel drove up, and you can imagine what a shock it was, finding the whole place blown to bloody pieces! Then he had a much bigger shock: poor old Maaties lying there, stone dead, in his headlights—but that wasn’t all: he was as bare-bummed naked as the day he was born, hey? Ja, all he had with him was his bloody gun! And not five yards away was the bedroom of the biggest little nympho Zululand had ever—”
“Five yards?”
“That’s right, man! I tell you, Sarel really had his work cut out, trying to quickly put a very different complexion on things! Can you imagine, a father of four and a senior SAP officer being found in such a situation? Never mind the fact Maaties had always been one of the Colonel’s favorites! But do you think Sarel could find Maaties’ clothes anywhere? Not a chance! There were fires all over, he didn’t know how much time he had before others reached the scene, none of Gillets’ stuff was big enough, and so he just—well, you’ve obviously somehow guessed that part already, hey? The hardest decision he took was to move the body back another twenty yards, and the Colonel nearly had a cardiac when he heard about this, but I told him not to worry, Doc wouldn’t be able to tell in a month of Sundays, especially not if I gave him the right books and—”
“You got to the body first, right?” said Kramer. “The same as you did a quick sorting job on the lady’s digestive-stroke-generative organs, trying to make sure the rest of us would never know what she’d been eating and bloody doing, just before blast-off?”
“Christ,” said Claasens very softly, his wary look back as he turned round with a mug of black coffee in each hand. “It really is a good thing we’re having this little talk, I can see that. Here, this one is yours—sugar’s in the tin there.”
“Ta,” said Kramer, accepting the mug. “Carry on, man—it can’t have taken Sarel until four just to do what you’ve described, can it?”
“Not the initial adjustments, no, but he still had old Maaties’ shoulder holster to find, and when still nobody came, he just carried on, looking and looking for it,” said Claasens, pausing to take a sip of coffee. “That’s when he got his next big shock.”
“Oh, ja?”
“His flashlight was getting really weak, but it caught a glint off something chrome like a holster rivet. Hell, no, it was just the thing in the middle of a gramophone you fit the hole in a record over. Annika had an old wind-up model, you see, because there was no electricity, and—”
“Ja, ja, I saw it lying there, all buggered and the wooden case split open. She’d stuck some pictures on the lid—weren’t they of that bugger Cliff Richards who got our police dogs in trouble down in Durban?”
“That’s the one,” confirmed Claasens. “Only when Sarel got to it, the first thing he noticed was—you know that sort of trumpet-thingy gramophones have inside them?”
Kramer nodded.
“Well, half sticking out of this one was a rolled-up school exercise book, as though that’s where someone had been hiding it. Not a bad place either! Only three little screws to undo and then you lift—”
“Ja, ja, but what was it? A diary, right?”
“But not like one Sarel had ever seen before! That Annika’s thoughts were worse than a man’s, he said—far worse. So dirty in parts—she wasn’t interested in length, she said, only in diameters—it made his hair stand straight up on end! Then, skimming quickly through, he noticed references to a certain ‘Martinus’ beginning to appear, which was Maaties’ proper name, of course, and that was another big shock he had. Only it had got so late by then, almost four o’clock in the morning, that he didn’t dare waste too much time on reading it, in case Hans or Jaapie turned up and caught him with it, so all he really took in were the very last things she’d recorded. These were to the effect that she was sure now that Gillets knew what had been going on between her and Maaties, every time he’d been called away, but that he actually liked the idea—it was what had been making him extra randy each time he came home again! Oh, ja, apparently he’d just kick the servant boy out, pull all her clothes off, and start sniffing for Maaties’ scent, like some bloody animal! He’d tell her she was a bloody bitch on heat who needed to be reminded who was master. You remember that big bruise on her arm at the postmortem?”
“Uh-huh,” said Kramer, “and how it made you squirm, you bastard! But ‘Martinus’ isn’t an uncommon name, not by a long chalk, so how certain are you that she was referring—”
“Completely certain, I’m afraid,” said Claasens, with a sigh and a shake of his head. “
Right at the end, on the very last page, she started wondering if she hadn’t made her husband too bloody jealous. And she said that perhaps she had better warn Maaties that Gillets had started to say some very strange things about her days of ‘fooling around with a certain cop’ being numbered. Presumably, she can’t have passed on that warning in the event, or Maaties wouldn’t have hung around the other night.”
Kramer shrugged. “Who can say? Maybe he liked a little extra bit of excitement—the bugger was always too perfect. There weren’t any other names that Suzman recognized?”
“No, as I explained, he just—”
“And where’s the diary now? Any chance of—”
“Christ, you can’t keep a thing like that hanging round—what if it fell in the wrong hands, hey? It wasn’t as though it was ever going to be needed as an exhibit. No, naturally the Colonel ordered Sarel to destroy it, the minute he heard of its existence!”
“So it’s gone, gone for good?” said Kramer, experiencing a sense of relief he had not expected.
“Gone for good, Lieutenant,” confirmed Claasens. “As soon as Sarel could hand the scene over to Hans, he went straight back home—not to the police station, where he could have been overheard—and got through to the Colonel. The diary went into his mum’s kitchen stove straight after, it’s an Aga.”
Kramer nodded. “And then you were roped in? An old and trusted friend, to bugger about with the forensics?”
Claasens smiled. “That’s broadly it, Lieutenant,” he said, with a nod. “But no hard feelings, hey? You must be able to see by now that you have had a very vital role to play, even if it was just going through the motions for appearance’ sake. In fact, it’s a role far from over! Can you think of some way of passing a few more weeks up here?—because I don’t think we can consider the case ‘unsolved’ much sooner than that?”
“Ach, a man can always find ways of killing time,” said Kramer, suddenly quite determined not to leave Jafini before he and the Widow Fourie had become better acquainted. “What if I switch to helping look for this mission rapist that my kaffir’s been trying to track down?”
“The perfect solution!” said Claasens. “I’ll tell the Colonel that it’s certain to keep you out of mischief from now on, hey?”
I bloody hope not, thought Kramer.
31
ZONDI, DOZING IN the late afternoon sun, his feet propped on Kritzinger’s desk, sat up with a jerk, looking in some puzzlement at the empty doorway. “Lieutenant?” he said.
“Ach, I’m right behind you!” said Kramer, addressing him through the yard window. “I just gave you an order: get the hell out of there—we’re going for a drive, hey?”
“Sir!” said Zondi, coming straight out over the windowsill and landing neatly, heels together. “Hau, there is a great urgency in your voice, boss!”
“Oh, ja? And for good reason, let me promise you, but first we need someplace to talk where no bastard’s going to start sticking his nose in.”
“But, boss—”
“Just get in and shut up, hey?”
Zondi slid down in his seat, tipped his hat forward right over his eyes, and sighed. As the Chevrolet left the police station and plunged out into the road, Kramer slowed down for a moment, flipped a coin in his head, and turned right. Just beyond the Bombay Emporium, he swung left, traveled five shady blocks, and then entered the driveway of the Widow Fourie’s house, taking the car right round the back and onto the lawn there. Dingaan the iguana shot out of sight, and so did two white rabbits, but otherwise there were no signs of life, even though it was after five o’clock.
“Must’ve taken the whole tribe out with her someplace, hey?” murmured Kramer, switching off the engine. “Even better than I’d hoped.”
Zondi sat up and looked around him. “It’s okay for me to speak again, Lieutenant?”
“Ja, fine,” said Kramer, pulling his tie loose and undoing his collar. “But be prepared, hey, to answer the Big Question …”
“Which is, boss?”
“Tell me, when the Almighty made kaffirs, did he give them souls, hey?”
“The boss means the same as the white man?”
“Uh-huh, of course.”
“Hau, God would never do such a terrible thing, Lieutenant.”
“Excellent,” said Kramer, “no man who likes to break a solemn promise. Now you just listen to this, kaffir, and don’t you bloody interrupt until I’m finished, you hear?”
Dingaan the iguana ventured out some twenty minutes later, so quiet had everything become, and went over to where various fly-covered scraps of meat lay scattered in the far corner of his run. The rabbits were already out, wrinkling their pink noses at him like upper-crust neighbors watching the street’s recluse on his way to browse through downtown trash cans.
“But, boss,” murmured Zondi, ending a long, reflective silence in a voice so low that barely an ear twitched in his direction, “we have thought all along that Boss Kritzinger was killed because of what he knew—now we are being told it was because of what he was doing …”
“Couldn’t it have been a mixture of both? Couldn’t it have been through Kritz’s investigations into the Cloete business that he grew to be on intimate terms, shall we say, with their daughter, little Annika?”
“That could well have been the case, Lieutenant,” agreed Zondi. “But the point I am trying to make, based on all you have just told me, is this: it seems we are no longer hunting one killer here in Jafini, as we previously thought—but two killers, boss.”
“Unless, of course, Gillets was also responsible for the Cloetes’—”
“I’m sorry, that I cannot believe, Lieutenant, with all due respect! True, there is an obvious connection between Boss Gillets and Boss Cloete, that I admit, but in what possible way could those deaths have benefited him? We know Boss Cloete had given the marriage his blessing, because of how hard he tried to see it began in fine style. And what about Boss Fourie, who also suffered the same kind of strange accident? I tried hard this afternoon to see if Moses Khumalo knew whether he was known to either Boss Gillets or the young madam, but a definite link I could not establish. We do not even know if Boss Gillets ever knew Boss Fourie, so why should he want to—hau, now I see!”
“See what, Mickey?”
“The Lieutenant thinks Boss Fourie might also have been a name in the young madam’s schoolbook?”
“God forbid!” said Kramer. “When he had a lady like the Widow to go home to? The thought had never crossed my mind, man!”
But Zondi plainly had the bit between his teeth now. “I thought Boss Fourie’s wife was heavily pregnant shortly before his death. Lieutenant? Perhaps he had not been able to lie with her for many weeks, and so, maybe he sought release with—”
“Ach, no! That’s bullshit, I’m sure of it!”
“One hundred percent sure, boss?” asked Zondi, raising an eyebrow. “Or is the Lieutenant doing what Boss Suzman did on Monday night? Trying to protect the deceased’s widow and family from—”
“You fight dirty, kaffir!” protested Kramer. “And if I had that diary, I’d bloody prove to you how wrong you are!”
“It’s just a theory, boss.”
“What is? The idea Fourie died for the same reason that Kritz did? Do you realize man, you’ve just talked yourself right round in a complete circle—and we’re back to the belief there’s only one murderer involved?”
“Not quite, boss. What of the Cloete case? I cannot get that to fit.”
“Hmmmm,” said Kramer. “If you consider the methods used in each case, that gives us two killers again: one using ‘accidents,’ the other being a bit more blatant—you can’t call a time bomb a bloody ‘fatal,’ can you?”
“Boss, boss, boss,” said Zondi, with a long sigh. “One minute, so many things make sense; next minute, so much totally contradicts!”
“Which could mean we’re probably wrong about everything, couldn’t it, hey?”
Zondie nodded.
<
br /> “Ach!” said Kramer. “You know what I’m beginning to think? It’s high time we stopped buggering about, playing these guessing games, and got some bastard just to give us all the right answers.”
“But how, Lieutenant?”
“By getting hold of bloody Gillets and making him tell us what he did and didn’t do!”
“A fine idea, Lieutenant! Only how exactly—”
“Ja, that’s the other Big Question,” admitted Kramer, and accepted one of Zondi’s proffered Texans.
But he didn’t seem able to give his mind to the problem as he should; he simply couldn’t concentrate. He was still very distracted by the idea that Pik Fourie might have been one of little Annika’s lovers. On one hand—chiefly for the Widow Fourie’s sake, although not entirely—Kramer utterly repudiated the notion; on the other hand, an element of gnawing doubt persisted, fed by the deep cynicism that came with the job he did. Once again, how he wished he could have seen that bloody diary, just to put his mind at rest. Because what Kramer feared most in this world, he suddenly realized, was the Widow Fourie having her illusions shattered by some chance revelation, and then finding that she had lost her capacity for placing her trust in a bloke again, henceforth and forever. In fact, rather than risk this ever happening, he would kill any bastard who harbored such knowledge—and this brought him back to Gillets, only with a greater sense of urgency.
“Mickey, man, the hell with the Colonel, Claasens, the lot of them!” he said, turning to him. “We’ve got to think of some way of getting to Gillets chop-bloody-chop, hey? Are you game?”
“Er, right. Lieutenant …”
“You don’t sound too happy—why’s that?”
“No, no, boss, a different matter,” said Zondi, with a shrug. “I have just realized that the boiler boy will think me a great liar. I had promised him that if he told me everything, he would not be prosecuted for the technical theft of the belt and shoes. Lieutenant. But if you’ve revealed to—”
“Hell, the boiler boy’s got no worries!”
“But I thought the Lieutenant had told Boss Claasens about the clothing? How the shoes—”
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