Riotous Assembly

by Tom Sharpe

  ‘No,’ said the Kommandant, ‘you don’t.’

  ‘Let me put it another way,’ said Miss Hazelstone. ‘Normality is a concept. Do you follow me?’

  ‘I’m trying to,’ the Kommandant said despairingly.

  ‘Good. As I have said, normality is a concept. It is not a state of being. You are confusing it with the desire to conform. You have a strong urge to conform. I have none.’

  Kommandant van Heerden groped his way after her. He couldn’t understand a word of what she was saying but it didn’t sound very complimentary.

  ‘What about motive?’ he asked, trying to get back on to more familiar ground.

  ‘What about it?’ Miss Hazelstone countered.

  ‘If you killed Fivepence you must have had a motive.’

  Miss Hazelstone thought for a moment. ‘It doesn’t follow,’ she said at last, ‘though I suppose you could argue that a motiveless act is an impossibility because it inevitably presupposes an intention to act without motive which is a motive in itself.’

  Kommandant van Heerden looked desperately round the room. The woman was driving him mad.

  ‘You didn’t have one then?’ he asked after counting to twenty slowly.

  ‘If you insist on my having one, I suppose I’ll have to supply it. You can say it was jealousy.’

  The Kommandant perked up. This was much better. He was getting on to familiar ground again.

  ‘And who were you jealous of?’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘No one?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  Kommandant van Heerden peered over the edge of an abyss. ‘No one,’ he almost screamed. ‘How in the name of hell can you be jealous of no one?’ He paused, and looked at her suspiciously. ‘No One is not the name of another Kaffir, is it?’

  ‘Of course not. It means exactly what it says. I was jealous of no one.’

  ‘You can’t be jealous of no one. It’s not possible. You’ve got to be jealous of somebody else.’

  ‘I haven’t, you know.’ Miss Hazelstone looked at him pityingly.

  Beneath him the Kommandant could feel the abyss yawning. It was the abyss of all abysses.

  ‘No one. No one,’ he repeated almost pathetically, shaking his head. ‘Someone tell me how somebody can be jealous of no one.’

  ‘Oh it’s really quite simple,’ Miss Hazelstone continued, ‘I was just jealous.’

  ‘Just jealous,’ the Kommandant repeated slowly.

  ‘That’s right. I didn’t want to lose dear Fivepence.’

  Teetering above the unfathomable void of abstraction the Kommandant clutched at Fivepence. There had once been something substantial about the Zulu cook and the Kommandant needed something substantial to hang on to.

  ‘You were frightened you were going to lose him?’ he pondered aloud, and then realized the terrible contradiction he was stepping into. ‘But you say you shot him. Isn’t that the best way of losing the brute?’ He was almost beside himself.

  ‘It was the only way I had of making sure I kept him,’ Miss Hazelstone replied.

  Kommandant van Heerden pulled himself back from the void. He was losing control of the interview. He started again at the beginning.

  ‘Let’s forget for the moment that you shot Fivepence so that you wouldn’t lose him,’ he said slowly and very patiently. ‘Let’s start at the other end. What was your motive for falling in love with him?’ It was not a topic he particularly wanted to investigate, not that he believed for a moment that she had ever been in love with the swine, but it was better than harping on about no one. Besides he felt pretty sure she would give herself away now. The Hazelstones couldn’t fall in love with Zulu cooks.

  ‘Fivepence and I shared certain mutual interests,’ said Miss Hazelstone slowly. ‘For one thing we had the same fetish.’

  ‘Oh really. The same fetish?’ In his mind the Kommandant conjured up a picture of the little native idols he had seen in the Piemburg Museum.

  ‘Naturally,’ said Miss Hazelstone, ‘it provided a bond between us.’

  ‘Yes, it must have done, and I suppose you sacrificed goats to it,’ the Kommandant said sarcastically.

  ‘What an extraordinary thing to say.’ Miss Hazelstone looked puzzled. ‘Of course we didn’t. It wasn’t that sort of fetish.’

  ‘Wasn’t it? What sort was it? Wooden or stone?’

  ‘Rubber,’ said Miss Hazelstone briefly.

  Kommandant van Heerden leant back in his chair angrily. He had had about as much of Miss Hazelstone’s leg-pulling as he could take. If the old girl seriously supposed that he was going to believe some cock-and-bull story about a rubber idol, she had another think coming.

  ‘Now listen to me, Miss Hazelstone,’ he said seriously. ‘I can appreciate what you are trying to do and I must say I admire you for it. Family loyalty is a fine thing and trying to save your brother is a fine thing too, but I have my duty to do and nothing you can say is going to prevent me doing it. Now if you will be good enough to get to the point and admit that you had nothing whatever to do with the murder of your cook and were never approximately in love with him, I will allow you to go. If not I shall be forced to take some drastic action against you. You are obstructing the course of justice and you leave me no alternative. Now then, be sensible and admit that all this talk about fetishes is nonsense.’

  Miss Hazelstone looked at him icily.

  ‘Are you easily stimulated?’ she asked. ‘Sexually, I mean.’

  ‘That has got nothing whatever to do with you.’

  ‘It has got a lot to do with this case,’ said Miss Hazelstone, and hesitated. Kommandant van Heerden shifted uneasily in his chair. He had come to recognize that Miss Hazelstone’s hesitations tended to augur some new and revolting disclosure.

  ‘I have to admit that I am not easily aroused,’ she said at last. The Kommandant was delighted to hear it. ‘I need the presence of rubber to stimulate my sexual appetite.’

  The Kommandant was just about to say that in his case the presence of rubber had quite the opposite effect, but he thought better of it.

  ‘You see I am a rubber fetishist,’ Miss Hazelstone continued.

  Kommandant van Heerden tried to grasp the implications of the remark.

  ‘You are?’ he said.

  ‘I have a passion for rubber.’

  ‘You have?’

  ‘I can only make love when I am dressed in rubber.’

  ‘You can?’

  ‘It was rubber that drew Fivepence and me together.’

  ‘It was?’

  ‘Fivepence had the same propensity.’

  ‘He did?’

  ‘When I first met him he was working in a garage retreading tyres.’

  ‘He was?’

  ‘I had taken my tyres in for a retread and Fivepence was there. I recognized him at once as the man I had been looking for all my life.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘I might almost say that our love affair was cemented over a Michelin X.’

  ‘You might?’

  Miss Hazelstone stopped. The Kommandant’s inability to say more than two words at a time and those two in the form of a question she had already answered was beginning to irritate her.

  ‘Do you have any idea what I am talking about?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ said the Kommandant.

  ‘I don’t know what more I can do to make my meaning plain,’ Miss Hazelstone said. ‘I have tried to explain as simply as I can what I found attractive about Fivepence.’

  Kommandant van Heerden closed his mouth which had been hanging open and tried to focus his mind on something comprehensible. What Miss Hazelstone had just told him so simply had not, he had to admit, been in the least abstract, but if just before he had hovered over a void of unfathomable abstractions, the simple facts she had placed before him now were so far beyond anything his experience had prepared him to expect that he began to think that on the whole he preferred the conceptual abyss. In an effort to regain
his sense of reality, he resorted to healthy vulgarity.

  ‘Are you trying to tell me,’ he said, picking the bathing-cap off the desk and dangling it from his finger a few inches in front of Miss Hazelstone’s face, ‘that this rubber cap gives you an overwhelming desire to lay me?’

  In front of him Miss Hazelstone nodded.

  ‘And if I were to wear it you wouldn’t be able to control your sexual impulses?’ he went on.

  ‘Yes,’ said Miss Hazelstone frantically. ‘Yes, I would. I mean, no, I wouldn’t.’ Torn between a raging torrent of desire and an overwhelming aversion for the person of the Kommandant, she hardly knew what was happening to her.

  ‘And I suppose you’re going to tell me that your Zulu cook had the same taste for rubber?’

  Miss Hazelstone nodded again.

  ‘And I suppose all those rubber clothes I found in the bedroom upstairs belong to you too?’ Miss Hazelstone agreed that they did. ‘And Fivepence would put on a rubber suit and you would wear a rubber nightdress? Is that right?’

  Kommandant van Heerden could see from the expression on Miss Hazelstone’s face that at long last he had regained the initiative. She was sitting mute and staring at him hypnotized.

  ‘Is that what used to happen?’ he continued remorselessly.

  Miss Hazelstone shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘it was the other way round.’

  ‘Oh really? What was the other way round?’

  ‘The clothes were.’

  ‘The clothes were the other way round?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Inside out I suppose, or was it back to front?’

  ‘You could put it like that.’

  Kommandant van Heerden’s experience of rubber clothing during the night hadn’t induced in him any desire to put it like anything.

  ‘Like what?’ he said.

  ‘I wore the men’s suits and Fivepence wore the dresses,’ Miss Hazelstone said. ‘As you’ve probably noticed I have some marked masculine characteristics and Fivepence, poor dear, was a transvestite.’

  The Kommandant staring at her with increasing disgust could see what she meant. Masculine characteristics indeed! A taste for tall and revolting stories for one thing. And if for one moment he really believed that a fat Zulu cook had been dressing up in his missus’ clothes then he was a very lucky Zulu to have gone the way he had. The Kommandant knew what he’d do to any houseboy of his he found prancing around in ladies’ clothes, rubber or not, and it included pulling more than his vest tight too.

  He dragged his attention back from the prospect and tried to think about the case. He had known there was something sinister about the bedroom with the rubber sheets, and now Miss Hazelstone had explained its purpose.

  ‘It’s no good your going on trying to cover up for your brother,’ he said. ‘We’ve enough evidence to hang him with already. What you tell me about the rubber clothes merely confirms what we already know. When your brother was arrested last night, he was wearing this cap.’ He held it up in front of her again.

  ‘Of course he was,’ said Miss Hazelstone. ‘He has to when he goes swimming. He has trouble with his ears.’

  Kommandant van Heerden smiled. ‘Sometimes listening to you, Miss Hazelstone, I fancy there’s something wrong with my ears too, but I don’t go around with a rubber bathing-cap on all the time.’

  ‘Nor does Jonathan.’

  ‘No? Well then perhaps you’ll explain how it came about that when he was brought before me this morning, he was still wearing it. Your brother evidently likes wearing rubber things.’

  ‘He probably forgot to take it off,’ Miss Hazelstone said, ‘He’s very absent-minded you know. He’s always forgetting where he’s left things.’

  ‘So I’ve noticed,’ said the Kommandant. He paused and leant back in the chair expansively. ‘The pattern of the case seems to go like this. Your brother comes home from Rhodesia, probably because things got too hot for him up there.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ interrupted Miss Hazelstone. ‘Barotseland does get very hot, I know, but Jonathan’s used to the heat.’

  ‘You can say that again,’ said the Kommandant. ‘Well, whatever the reason, he comes home. He brings with him all the rubber clothes he’s so fond of and he starts trying to seduce your Zulu cook.’

  ‘What utter rubbish,’ said Miss Hazelstone. ‘Jonathan wouldn’t dream of any such thing. You’re forgetting that he is a bishop.’

  The Kommandant wasn’t forgetting anything of the sort since he had never known it.

  ‘That’s maybe what he has told you,’ he said. ‘Our information is that he is a convicted criminal. There is a file on him down at the station. Luitenant Verkramp has the details.’

  ‘But this is insane. Jonathan is the Bishop of Barotseland.’

  ‘Probably his alias,’ said the Kommandant. ‘Right. We’ve got to the part where he tries to make Fivepence. The cook objects and runs out on to the lawn, and your brother shoots him down.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ Miss Hazelstone shouted and stood up. ‘You’re quite mad. My brother was in the swimming-bath when I shot Fivepence. He came running when he heard the shot and tried to administer the last rites.’

  ‘Last rites is one way of putting it,’ said the Kommandant. ‘And I suppose that’s how he got blood all over himself?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And you honestly expect me to believe that a nice old lady like you shot your cook, and that your brother whom I find dead drunk on a bed, naked and covered with blood, is a bishop and had nothing to do with the killing? Really Miss Hazelstone, you must take me for an idiot.’

  ‘I do,’ said Miss Hazelstone simply.

  ‘And another thing,’ the Kommandant continued hurriedly, ‘some maniac shot down twenty-one of my men yesterday afternoon up at the gate to the Park. Now you’re not going to try to tell me that you murdered them too, are you?’

  ‘If the wish were father to the thought, yes,’ said Miss Hazelstone.

  Kommandant van Heerden smiled. ‘It’s not, I’m afraid. I wish I could hush this whole case up and if it were simply the death of your cook, I daresay it would be possible, but there is nothing I can do now. Justice must run its course.’

  He swung his chair round and faced the bookshelves. He was feeling quite pleased with himself. Everything had sorted itself out in his own mind and he had no doubt that he would be able to convince the State Attorney. Kommandant van Heerden’s career had been saved. Behind him Miss Hazelstone acted promptly. Seizing both the opportunity provided by the back of the Kommandant’s head, and the brass paperweight, she brought the two together with as much strength as she could muster. The Kommandant slumped to the floor.

  Miss Hazelstone stepped nimbly across to the door. ‘The Kommandant has had a stroke,’ she said to the two konstabels on duty there. ‘Help me take him up to his bedroom,’ and she led the way upstairs. When the two konstabels had deposited Kommandant van Heerden on the bed in the blue bedroom, she sent them downstairs to ring the hospital for an ambulance and the two men, accustomed to obeying orders without question, dashed down the corridor and told Sergeant de Kock. As soon as they had gone Miss Hazelstone stepped to the door of the bedroom and whistled. A Dobermann Pinscher that had been asleep on the rug in the drawing-room heard the whistle and left its sanctuary. Silently it climbed the stairs and loped down the passage to its mistress.

  By the time Sergeant de Kock had telephoned Piemburg Hospital and had arranged for an ambulance to be sent up to the house, a call which necessitated explaining to the telephonist that Kommandant van Heerden was white and didn’t need a non-European ambulance, it was clear that van Heerden’s condition had taken a turn for the worse.

  The Sergeant found Miss Hazelstone waiting for him at the end of the passage. She stood demurely and with that air of melancholy the Kommandant had so much admired the day before, and in her hands she held something that was decidedly melancholy and not in the least demure. It was not the size of the elephant
gun and it quite clearly couldn’t incapacitate a charging elephant at a thousand yards, but in its own small way it was suited to the purpose Miss Hazelstone very clearly had in mind.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said as the Sergeant stopped on the landing. ‘Stand quite still and you won’t get hurt. This is a scatter gun and if you want to find out how many cartridges the magazine holds I suggest you try to rush me. You’ll need a lot of men.’ Beside her the great Dobermann growled encouragingly. It had obviously had enough of policemen to last it a lifetime. On the landing Sergeant de Kock stood very still. It was obvious from the tone of Miss Hazelstone’s voice that whatever the capabilities of the scatter gun, she was not in the habit of repeating herself.

  ‘That’s right,’ she continued as the Sergeant stared at her. ‘Have a good look and while you’re about it have a good look at the weapons on the walls. They are all in working order and I have enough ammunition in my bedroom to last me quite some time.’ She paused, and the Sergeant obediently looked at the guns. ‘Now then, you trot off downstairs and don’t attempt to come up again. Toby will tell me if you do.’ The dog growled again knowingly. ‘And when you get down there,’ she went on, ‘you are to release my brother. I shall give you ten minutes and then I shall expect to see him walk up the drive freely and without let or hindrance. If not I shall shoot Kommandant van Heerden. If you have any doubts about my ability to kill I suggest you look at the gum trees in the garden. I think you’ll find the evidence you need there.’ Sergeant de Kock needed no such evidence. He felt sure she could kill. ‘Good, it seems you understand me. Now I will remain in intercourse with Kommandant van Heerden until I receive a telephone call from my brother in Barotseland. When I receive that call I will release the Kommandant. If I hear nothing from Jonathan within forty-eight hours I will release the Kommandant dead. Do you understand me?’

  The Sergeant nodded.

  ‘Now then, get out.’

  Sergeant de Kock dashed downstairs and as he went Miss Hazelstone fired one shot by way of warning down the passage. Its results justified every expectation the Sergeant had entertained about the gun’s lethal capacity. Sixty-four large holes appeared suddenly in the bathroom door.