“You—!” began Suzman, starting forward.
“Watch it!” warned Kramer. “My nerves are so shot it’s not going to take much before I blow your bloody head off, hey?” But he left his Walther PPK inside his jacket, seeing no need for it while Suzman’s Smith & Wesson was still buttoned down in its holster.
“Excuse me a moment,” said Suzman. “You won’t mind if I put this out?” And he crushed the end of the fuse between a paperweight and the desktop.
“We’re arresting you on a charge of murdering Detective Sergeant Martinus Kritzinger,” said Kramer, “and of course, Annika Cloete, Andries Cloete, his wife, those four Santa Claus people, and—”
“Santa Claus people?” said Suzman, picking up a metal wastepaper bin and calmly sweeping the mess he’d made on the desk into it. “What sort of—”
“The Simpsons and Gardiners!” snapped Terblanche, bringing his revolver out surprisingly quickly. “Don’t you try anything funny with that bloody bin, hey?”
“What, this?” said Suzman, with a mocking smile. “You have quite an imagination, sir, if I may say so! Oops, you’ve made me go and drop Stoffel’s pen into it …”
“Who else?” demanded Terblanche. “Who else have you crossed off snaps you took?”
“You don’t know, Lieutenant?” said Suzman, reaching into the bin. “Hell, I’d have thought you’d have at least recognized old—”
“Shoot, Hans!” said Kramer.
The bang was deafening.
Hans Terblanche dropped dead like a poleaxed bull in a butcher’s yard, half his head torn away by the .357 Magnum that Suzman had fired through the bottom of the waste bin. The next instant, the huge muzzle had swung round, perfectly steady.
“Oops,” said Kramer, bitterly regretting what he’d just done, quite inadvertently, to one of the best, all because he simply didn’t want to hear something.
“Your gun—out!” ordered Suzman. “Out and on this bloody desk right now, or you get it, too, Mr. Murder Squad!”
The last time Kramer had been spoken to this way, he had dawdled, and two seconds later a sniper from the Security Branch had punctuated the trite little melodrama with a big, red period mark in the middle of the hostage-taker’s forehead. That, however, had been by prior arrangement.
“Good thinking!” said Suzman, grabbing up the Walther PPK as it clattered across the desktop.
Then he fired again, and the duty Bantu from the charge office, who must have rushed to the doorway to see what the noise was all about, fell face-forward, hit low in the gut somewhere, to die almost at once in Terblanche’s wide-flung arms.
“Blood brothers,” sniggered Suzman, “wouldn’t you say, Lieutenant?”
“Shit, I’d say anything while you’re still pointing that cannon at me,” said Kramer.
Suzman smiled his thin smile. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You will. There are quite a few things I want to ask you.”
“I can ask a few questions, too?”
“Why not, Lieutenant Clever-Dick? I think I’m in a position to see no harm comes of it! What’s on your mind, hey?”
“Hell, a whole lot,” said Kramer. “Such as, how did you know how to make a proper, long-delay time bomb, using your ma’s traveling clock? You look too bloody thick for that.”
“Not too thick to fool you, though!” said Suzman, with a laugh that could curdle viper’s milk. “That was never a time bomb, you arsehole. I just tied the clock any old how to the dynamite, stuck on some wires and a battery, and lit the fuse by hand. I reckoned the blast would take care of the details and any—”
“Jesus,” said Kramer, “that was genius. You must’ve planned all this bloody cleverly—so how come you buggered it up by killing old Maaties by accident? Your accidents had never been accidental before then.”
“Ach, that dirty bastard had me properly fooled!” said Suzman, his grip tightening on the Magnum’s butt. “I never knew Gillets was away, see? I thought him and Annika might start talking and I’d better do something quick. When I got under their house that night, and heard the bloody slut making the sound she always did when coming in a big way, it never crossed my mind it wasn’t Gillets—Christ, Kritzinger was ten years older than she was, which is disgusting enough in itself, but his pockets were always full of his kiddies’ photographs, and he—”
“Ach, no,” said Kramer, shaking his head. “That’s bullshit and you know it! Maaties never laid a finger on—”
“What?” said Suzman, turning very pale. “You’re saying I’m a liar, hey?”
“Hell, no!” said Kramer. “It’s just—”
“Oh, ja? So why had he hidden his car, hey? And why—”
“Fine, fine,” said Kramer. “Let’s not argue about this. I wonder what little Annika was like in bed, hey?”
“Nothing like the Widow Fourie, I bloody bet,” said Suzman, his sneer back. “A bit of an old boot, isn’t she? Too many snotty-nosed kids too fast? Isn’t that why you had to get your nerve up by drinking all that brandy the other night? Don’t think I didn’t see you follow her out of the—”
“Bastard!” said Kramer, feeling a wild lurch in his belly, and only just stopped himself from taking a suicidal lunge at him.
Suzman truly laughed for the first time. “Ja, that you didn’t like!” he said, grinning. “Don’t worry, there will be more before your time is up! Man, it’s a shame, you and her could have made such a happy couple …” And he gave another laugh, but it emerged as a very bitter sound, jagged with rage and envy.
“Just like you and little Annika would have done, given a fair chance, hey?” said Kramer, with sudden insight so close to sympathy that it shocked him, but only until he realized that the same insight offered him one last chance of creating a diversion. “No wonder you hated happy couples so much! If you ask me, you had a very raw deal, Sarel. Hell, being just a humble, uneducated cop myself, I can imagine how you felt when Andries Cloete—”
“Turn!” Suzman screamed at him. “Hands behind your head! You think I don’t bloody know what you’re trying to do? Stand absolutely still or you’re dead meat!”
Kramer waited, back turned, hands behind his head, never more vulnerable in his life—but worse than that, quite without any idea of how he was to survive this predicament very much longer. He heard Terblanche’s corpse sigh, as it was rolled over on the floor behind him, the rubber duck squeak, and then the faint clink of the handcuffs being take from the dead man’s tunic pocket. Next moment, hard and surprisingly cold, the bands of metal closed around his wrists, biting into them deeply until the rachets stopped clicking.
“Keep those hands exactly where they are!” ordered Suzman, punching his gun muzzle against Kramer’s spine so hard it might have chipped a vertebra. “We are going out now to your Land Rover.”
“What am I, hey? Your guarantee of safe passage?”
“Jesus, how long has it taken you to work that out?”
“I’ve had other things on my mind,” said Kramer.
“And the jokes can stop, too, you hear? Start walking. We go out through the charge office.”
“Ah, but what about the other Bantu cops up here?”
“Huh! They’re all out with the squad looking for the kaffirs who crashed that chopper this morning. Walk faster!”
Just for one wild, irrational moment, Kramer then hoped he would step through into the charge office and find those patient, waiting figures still seated on the bench, eager to leap to his assistance. There was no one in the charge office; one of the waiting Bantu had fled so quickly he’d left his boots and a mouth organ on the bench behind him.
“Carry straight on,” said Suzman, knocking the receiver off the charge office telephone, so it would give a busy signal should anyone try to call in. “Out onto the verandah …”
The moon was bright again, making Mabata police station seem only all the more isolated and deserted, a bleak platform jutting out above the night mists, gathering like shroud cloth in the valleys bel
ow.
“Start walking toward the vehicle,” ordered Suzman. “But move slowly, a count of two between each step, same as a funeral march.”
“Man, you’re weird,” said Kramer.
“Shut up!” snarled Suzman, smashing his gun barrel down on Kramer’s clasped hands from behind. “When you reach the vehicle, climb in the cage on the back, so I can put the padlock on …”
“Now, that’s a little twist I hadn’t expected! The cage? Do I get to black-up with burnt cork and everything?”
“Move!” shouted Suzman, kicking him in the back. “Keep moving! Do exactly as I say!”
“I can do quite a nice drunken kaffir impression, or would you like me to—”
“Stop that! Stop it! My patience is running out fast! Back against the vehicle! Now turn around slowly—more slowly than that!”
“Which way will we be heading?” asked Kramer. “North? Over the border into Mozambique?”
Suzman frowned. “You can be bloody too clever for your own good sometimes, you know that?” he said, bringing the Magnum up, aiming it right between Kramer’s eyes.
“So can you, shit-brains,” said Kramer. “If you hadn’t invented a dirty diary that’d never existed, just to totally box in poor old Maaties, then I’d never have gone looking for it and you’d not—”
“Enough!” seethed Suzman. “You’ve been asking for this, doing everything you can to really goad me! This is as far as you go, you hear? Christ, why the big look of surprise, all of a sudden? You’ve pushed and pushed me until—”
“Because I’ve just had a big surprise, all of a sudden, you bloody idiot,” said Kramer, shrugging. “Why not look behind you, and see for yourself what—”
“Not that old trick! You must think—”
“Ja, but same as with old dogs, it’s not easy to teach certain types of people any new ones, hey?”
“Hau, how very true, boss!”
“Wha—” began Suzman, startled into spinning round so quickly that he momentarily lost balance, and his handgun swung wide for an instant.
In that same instant, there was another loud bang, only this time it was Suzman who probably never heard it, because the 9mm steel-jacketed slug, discharged at point-blank range, had already passed through his brain and was heading due south again, very relieved to be well out of it.
Or so Kramer thought it reasonable to suppose, as he looked up from the slumped body and said: “I see, self-defense, was it, kaffir?”
“Indubitably, Lieutenant,” said Mickey Zondi.
36
THERE WAS A languor in Kramer the following morning that was wholly new to him. Even though the Widow Fourie said he’d grow used to it, and further assured him that his work would not be affected, he had his doubts about this. For a start, he felt as though every question he’d ever want to ask had already been answered. On top of which, he had never felt so relaxed, so filled with a sense of well-being, nor quite so poorly equipped to go hunting a potentially dangerous killer wanted on a multiple murder charge.
But a promise was a promise, and long before Colonel Du Plessis—or any of the rest of the half-witted headquarters mob, who had booked in overnight at the Royal Hotel, Nkosala—could possibly expect him to make an appearance, he was on the move again, watching out for the turnoff to the native reserve just south of Jafini.
Zondi was waiting there, spruced up and in his silver-threaded zoot suit, flip-brim hat, the lot, just as he’d first seen him, smoking a Texan. “Many thanks, Lieutenant!” he said, climbing into the Widow Fourie’s battered old station wagon. “I had wondered where we would get a vehicle from. This is a fine choice, not in the least like a police car.”
“The state I’m in, we need every bloody advantage we can get,” said Kramer, stifling a yawn.
“The Lieutenant did not sleep well last night?”
“No, I didn’t get a lot of it, that’s true. And you?”
“Me neither, boss. Hau, I had so much to think about!”
“Such as?”
“Where I would find the money for ten head of dairy cows, first-class, boss,” said Zondi. “I may even have to give up smoking.”
“Shit, what’s this? You’re chucking the bloody job to go farming, hey? In that suit? Huh! And I’m supposed to believe you?”
Zondi smiled, shrugged, and settled back in his seat, while Kramer struggled to bring the speedometer needle up to the fifty mark and hold it there.
“By the way,” said Kramer, “we’re not going to that mountain mission you first told me about.”
“You mean St. Francis, boss?”
“Uh-huh. Matthew’s moved on. I gave it a ring before I left Jafini. That’s the one good thing you can say about the Roman Peril: its priests have to be up bloody early for their six-o’clock mass-thingy. I wanted to find out how crowded the church might be, things like that, ‘so an arrest could be made,’ unquote. But I was told he had appeared at another of their places yesterday, down here on the coastal strip. If you look at the map by your feet, you’ll see where—I’ve put a circle around it.”
“Hau, that was most fortuitous, Lieutenant!”
“Bloody lucky, you mean, although not really.”
“Boss?”
“The thing is, he seems to be going downhill, and had fainted or something, right there in the church. The priest had rung the clinic at St. Francis to ask what to do, and that’s how the connection was made. Are you still sure you want to—”
“I must, boss,” said Zondi, nodding. “His suffering, and the suffering of the spirits of our ancestors, is clearly now truly terrible.”
“Uh-huh,” said Kramer.
He’d had a few unhappy moments with spirits himself, the night before. Sarel Suzman’s had proved the least welcome, clouding the face of the Widow Fourie as soon as he’d been mentioned.
“Jeeeez, so he was the killer?” she had said, with a shudder, as she cleaned and dressed Kramer’s shoulder wound. “Yet when Pik died, he was so kind, kept coming round here! Almost like poor, poor Hans did—mind you, I began to wonder if there wasn’t more to his visits.”
“Just a minute, whose uncle is Herman’s?” asked Kramer, suddenly remembering something little Piet had once said to him. “Was it Hans?”
“Ach, no, Sarel Suzman.”
“Damn!” said Kramer, realizing how close he had come, what seemed like an eternity ago, to having first established a link with the murderer.
“You know what, Trompie?” the Widow Fourie added. “After a time, I think I knew what his game was: he was trying to hang up his cap in my hall, thinking all I wanted was another man to look after me and the kids, that I’d not be too choosy. I had to discourage him hard after that, and finally he stopped coming.” Then a horrified look crossed her face. “My God,” she said, “you’re not going to tell me he had anything to do with—you know, with what happened to my Pik?”
“Hell, no,” said Kramer firmly, knowing his denial would have the ring of truth because this was an issue which, thank Christ and H. Terblanche, had never been finally settled.
Then another spirit, entirely benign by way of contrast, although equally disturbing, had intruded. Kramer noticed the Widow Fourie had kept her eyes closed at first, when his palm skimmed lightly down her belly, then had flinched, as though caressed by a memory that had fooled her for a moment. After that, she had kept her eyes wide open, intent on him, craning to see that it was indeed his hand she felt, and sometimes placing her hand over his hand, further reassuring herself.
But when they began to make love again in the morning, each slowly becoming aware of the warmth of the other, finding it fuse them together, arouse them, finding their limbs had minds of their own, moving, sliding, touching, thrilling in the singularity of their contact, there were only two people in that bed, and a smoothed-out dent in the pillow.
“Boss?” said Zondi, looking back at a vanishing signpost. “Did not that say it led to the place we are looking for?”
&nb
sp; “Damn, I was daydreaming, man!” said Kramer, using the handbrake to effect an astonishing U-turn.
Within minutes, they were traveling down a rough track toward a small collection of buildings that lay huddled in a slight dip, built around a simple little church, the doors of which stood wide open.
“Listen, Mickey,” said Kramer. “Two shootings on two consecutive days, both by the same Bantu detective sergeant? People could start talking. But there is a way around this: I owe you one—I’ll do it.”
Zondi looked tempted, but shook his head. “My thanks, boss,” he said, “but that would please only the spirit of the law, not—”
“The spirits of your bloody ancestors! Ja, ja, I know! But at least borrow my PPK, so Forensic is fooled into thinking it was me, hey? How does that thought appeal to you?”
“Hmmmm,” said Zondi.
“Alternatively,” suggested Kramer, “last night was mine, today’s is yours—we swap guns and avoid a lot of bullshit and soul-searching on the part of the Colonel. White on white, black on black, no explanations to make to the Brigadier in Pretoria.”
“Done, Lieutenant!” said Zondi.
They continued down the slope and had just reached the first mission building when something made Kramer laugh softly. “I’ve just been thinking,” he said, “about the nonsense the bloody Song Dog tried to get us to believe: that we would be wrong and yet right about Maaties’ murder! Can’t see where we’ve ever been wrong in our deductions—can you, hey? Hell, the poor bugger just went to Fynn’s Creek to ask some bloody questions, got blown to buggery by accident, and forced Suz into making up every kind of allegation against him!”
“Uh-huh, boss,” agreed Zondi, shaking his head but keeping his eyes fixed on the church, now only a few hundred yards away, and smelling the scent of eucalyptus trees. “In truth, the Song Dog said quite a few ridiculous things; some so very silly I did not bother to repeat them to you.”
“Such as?” said Kramer, beginning to throttle back.
“The Song Dog said we must beware of the wife of the prisoner who was captured this week, Lieutenant.”
The Song Dog Page 28