“Sorry, Dominee, but I think this man has a message for me.” The hovering constable proudly announced he had discovered what appeared to be the boy’s bicycle down at the bottom of the plantation, just off the footpath, and hidden outside the fence. Kramer noted the position on the map then dismissed him.
“Well, that’s something,” he said. “Boetie presumably met up with whoever it was at this spot. Tempted into the plantation—perhaps the bloke promised to show him a rare animal or the like—they headed up this way. Then, sensing trouble, Boetie made for the clubhouse. That’s why he was killed there—it’s just out of earshot; another fifty yards and you’re on the pitch-and-putt course.”
What he did not say was that the bicycle had been found very near to the point where the Land-Rover emerged in a manner so precipitate it seemed now the kind of thing a man with other things on his mind might do. Murder, for instance. Kramer silently cursed Traffic for taking all night to trace the owner.
The Dominee sighed.
“Beats me how you fellows work these things out,” he said.
“Ah, but so far it’s just guesswork. Would you agree with the reason I gave for Boetie going into the trees?”
“He always had an inquiring nature.”
“Too inquiring?”
“But what do you mean?”
“I’m trying to ask a question you won’t like but his parents would like less: have you ever had any reason to suppose that Boetie wasn’t—shall we say a normal, healthy boy with normal, healthy interests?”
“Lieutenant,” replied the Dominee most gravely, “as God Himself is my witness, this boy was all that is pure and divinely inspired about the Afrikaner people. Let me tell you—”
Again Kramer cut him short.
“No, it’s best I try to recap and you can check if I’ve got the main facts right. I’m pleased to hear what you say about Boetie, by the way; it’s just we must know as much as we can.”
“I understand. Please proceed.”
“Boetie went around to his friend Hennie’s house after school and the two of them went out shooting. They came back after five. Boetie said he’d better get home for supper, leaving on his bike. The parents were not at home, having left early to go to a meeting in the church hall. When the servant girl had waited up until eight without him returning, she imagined he’d stayed at Hennie’s for a meal. It was not until midnight that Mr. and Mrs. Swanepoel returned and found him missing. Normally he always informed them of his movements and this was why they contacted the police.”
“Correct. It was a very long meeting on the Synod resolutions.”
“Yet how do you explain him finishing up over on this side, a mile from his house that was just around the corner?”
“Very simple, I would think. The boys like to cut across the stream and take the footpath round here because it makes an exciting ride. That’s probably what Boetie was up to. There was still plenty of time for him to get home for his meal. He knew it was just the servant girl waiting.”
“Hmmm. How do they get back, then?”
“They push their bikes over the railway bridge. As a matter of fact, that’s why I know about this practice of theirs—some parents are very concerned about the hazards involved.”
“Understandably.”
“With the trains, I mean.”
Kramer got up to stretch.
“Boetie was a good pupil, a regular churchgoer, and a credit to his parents.”
“They trusted him implicitly.”
“Then this must have happened out of the blue. That’s basically what I needed to know.”
Sergeant Kritzinger was beckoning with a piece of paper from the far side of the hall. Traffic had finally surfaced.
“Thanks a million for your help, Dominee. I must go now—sorry.”
But the minister insisted on the last, pompous word.
“I would that it had only happened to an old sinner like myself,” he intoned. “Don’t smile, Lieutenant. I have known them all—and vanquished them, every one.”
Except perhaps gluttony. Someone had guzzled the sausage marker.
The Chevrolet was almost opposite the bulldozer on its way down again when the hair on Kramer’s neck lifted slightly: he was not alone. He thought about it for a fast quarter mile and then wound up his window. He sniffed carefully. The cheap pomade, so pungently sweet it was capable of fertilizing a paw-paw tree at forty yards, proved unmistakable. He found the other hamburger and tossed it over his shoulder.
“Fizz-bang, you’re dead,” he said.
“Very nice, too,” replied Bantu Detective Sergeant Mickey Zondi, who fitted exactly across the back seat but chose, for reasons of his own, to lie on the floorboards.
“And what are you doing in my car?”
No answer. Merely a steady munching.
“Were you questioning the Bantu staff in the kitchen?”
“No, boss. I got a lift up with Dr. Strydom.”
“He didn’t say anything about that.”
“He didn’t, boss?”
Kramer saw the point and laughed.
“You’re going to get me into trouble one of these days—you know that?”
“Hau! I am very sorry.”
Then they laughed together, as they often did when on their own.
“Is this a Bantu case, boss?”
“Since when have kaffirs gone around committing sex killings on white kids? Of course not. Perfectly straightforward and I think we’re already on to the bugger that did it. Want to get off here and go back to Central?”
“I’ll come with.”
Kramer ignored all the traffic lights through the city center—it was still very early in the morning—and took the Durban road, watching the street names on the left. He swung into Potter’s Place. The homes round about were modest bungalows succumbing, in their middle age, to an ill-becoming trendiness; bright colors had been painted over the exterior woodwork and all sorts of rubbish, old street lamps and wagon wheels, littered the small frontages. No. 9 Potter’s Place was untidier than most and a child had been scribbling on the garage door. This door was closed, but the chunky tracks of a Land-Rover could be seen clearly in the dried mud of the short driveway.
The Chevrolet stopped two houses further on. Kramer and Zondi walked back and up the path. Somebody was singing in a low bass on the walled veranda.
“Stay here,” Kramer ordered, mounting the steps.
A Zulu houseboy jumped up, his knees red with the floor polish he had applied so lavishly, and went bug-eyed. He did it very well, considering the hour—which was, according to the grandfather clock in the hall passage, a minute after six.
“Police,” Kramer cautioned. “You shut up or I’ll call my boy.”
The Zulu peered over the wall at Zondi, dropped to his knees again, and slipped a hand under the brush strap. He went on scrubbing away.
“Every man to his job,” Kramer remarked with satisfaction, stepping into the house.
All was quiet; but nobody would think of stirring until the veranda shone like a tart’s toenail and the tea was brought in. There was ample opportunity for a preliminary survey.
Behind the door, where they had been dimly visible through frosted glass panels, were a collection of coats and other outdoor garments. The driver of the Land-Rover had been wearing something greenish. A scruffy sports jacket came as near to the color as any—and it had been hung up last of all.
Kramer lifted one sleeve to inspect the cuff. What he noticed there halted his breathing.
He wet a finger and dabbed at one of the brown specks, seeing his spittle turn pink. He gave it the nose test.
The same with the other cuff.
Blood.
It was too easy. Too easy and too like what happened when the gods played silly buggers. An alert sounded within.
Right then someone behind him said, “Stick ’em up.”
4
KRAMER STUCK THEM up. He waited a moment and then turned
around, lowering one hand to lay a finger on his lips.
“Don’t shoot,” he begged in a whisper.
Bang.
“I said—”
“You’re dead,” the small boy informed him. “And when you’re dead, you can’t talk.”
“Quite right.”
“I know. I’m not stupid like Susan.”
“Who’s that?”
“My baby sister. She’s three.”
“And you are?”
“Fi—no, six. It was my birthday yesterday. Guess what I got?”
“A cap gun?”
“And a microscope.”
So this was how a mad scientist appeared during his formative years.
“I say, Mungo?” The sleep-slurred voice came from behind a door on the bedroom side of the house. “What in heaven’s name are you doing? Not trying to frighten poor Jafini, are you?”
“No, Daddy, it’s a man.”
“What man?”
Mungo appraised Kramer, sizing him up thoroughly the way children do when they can see how tidy a fellow keeps his nostrils. Then he paused to wrinkle his brow and select a category.
“It’s an uncleish sort of man with very short hair and big front teeth like a rodent.”
Kramer snorted.
“Aren’t you an uncle?” inquired Mungo politely.
“No, I’m a policeman.”
“Oh, good! Then show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”
“Hey?”
“Your gun, of course!”
He damn nearly did.
“Get your father!”
“Will you?”
“Scoot!”
Mungo retired with dignity and there were whisperings. Kramer stepped back onto the doorstep. Things had got out of hand. Nor did they add up. Still, there was undoubtedly blood on that jacket and some family men had been known to live extremely private lives.
From the bedroom emerged a shock-haired, bearded weirdo in a tartan dressing gown and Wellington boots. He was about thirty-five, slightly built except for the hands, and like a tick bird in his movements—jerky yet enormously precise.
“Yes?” he said, bringing to his face a half-smile which never left it again. Kramer was immediately reminded of the anxious expression worn by travelers being addressed in a foreign tongue.
“CID. I’m Lieutenant Kramer.”
“Yes?”
“Phillip Sven Nielsen?”
“Correct.”
“You are the owner of a long-wheelbase Land-Rover registered as NTK 1708?”
Nielsen nodded.
“And you were driving this vehicle in the vicinity of the Trekkersburg Country Club at 12:30 a.m. this morning?”
“But—”
“Were you?”
“Oh, yes. I was out collecting.”
“What exactly?”
“Excreta.”
“Pardon?”
Nielsen looked to one side as if sneaking a peep at a phrasebook.
“Shrew shit,” he said.
Now there was something to conjure with.
Danny Govender did the job because his father, mother, three sisters, two brothers, widowed uncle, half-cousin, and half-witted grandfather needed the money. It was as simple as that, they told him, and would hear none of his protests.
Such was the price of success, limited though that might be for a twelve-year-old Indian.
In the beginning, Danny had been fired with ambition. Something all too obvious to the dispatch foreman at the Trekkersburg Gazette who gave him his first newspaper round. A bleak, slothful man himself, he had hoped to break the persistent little bastard’s spirit by awarding him the Marriott Drive area. This toy-block scattering of multistory apartment houses, with very few auxiliary lifts marked for non-whites, was generally too much for a full-grown coolie, let alone a bandy-legged runt.
But somehow the foreman’s plan had gone wrong—or right, depending on which way you looked at it. All of a sudden there were no more calls from irate subscribers down Marriott Drive way. Danny was getting up and down those stairs like a rock rabbit.
And more. He was rolling his papers neatly, being careful not to upset milk bottles, whistling silently, and winning the affection of every housewife up early enough to return one of his betel-nut smiles through her kitchen window. Someone even wrote a Letter to the Editor, saying what a joy it was to encounter a child who so loved his work.
That inadvertently chucked a handful in the fan, all right; the foreman was summoned to the dispatch manager’s office and there upbraided for squandering such an asset on mere flat dwellers. After all, he was forcefully reminded, it was the manager who dealt with the irate Greenside subscribers who invariably began their calls with: “I would have you know that the managing director of your paper is a personal friend of mine….”
Danny shot to the top overnight—the Boxing Day hand-outs in Greenside were enough to keep you in Cokes for the year. But, curiously, the boy he deposed seemed only mildly aggrieved. Perhaps there was a snag.
There was.
Danny discovered it the hard way: the bigger the property, the longer the drive leading up to the house, and the meaner the dogs—creatures so incredibly stupid they could not distinguish between an aquiline profile and a flat one. If it was two-legged, dark-skinned, and not employed on the premises, they attempted a disembowelment.
The big house coming up now on his right retained one of the most serious threats to his survival; an enormous, long-fanged, tatty-eared hellion called Regina by the family.
He called her “nice doggy” and ran like hell.
That was on the first day, and he got all of fifteen paces before going down screaming. Luckily the head garden boy was out early, dampening the lawns before the sun got going, and he had called the bitch off with a casual, almost regretful, word of command.
On the second day and thereafter, Danny never arrived at the high wooden gate without a bone cadged from the butcher’s near the market that opened at five. Regina still pursued him, all right, but, being so incredibly stupid, kept the offering clenched in her jaws and this took care of her bite.
Danny leaned his bicycle against the gatepost. He unwrapped the bone and tossed it over.
There was an indignant yell. Then the head garden boy came charging out, rubbing his shoulder.
“What you do that for, you damn fool?” he demanded.
“Me?” said Danny, quick as a flash.
So the Zulu hurled the bone at him and missed. It hit the bicycle lamp instead and broke the glass. Now came Danny’s turn for indignant histrionics.
“You damn fool!” he shouted. “That bike he belonging newspaper Europeans. Big trouble for you now.”
A lie, but all the lovelier for it—vendors were required to provide their own transport.
“Hau, sorry, I buy new one—you not say,” the Zulu urged, very shocked.
“Maybe, we see. But you better having it tomorrow, my boss he is a terrible man. Worse than the dog by this place.”
“The dog is dead.”
That took a few seconds to register.
“A car hitting it?”
“No.”
“God’s truth?”
The Zulu nodded.
“Why are you waiting by the gate, big chief? Did they send you to bite me?”
This bared the big bully’s teeth but he knew what was good for him.
“Me for paper,” he muttered. “Want quick today.”
Danny handed it over with a flourish.
Then, as he pedaled on up the hill to make his last delivery, he looked back and noted that the curtains in the big house were still drawn across every window. When the servant had said the paper was wanted in a hurry, he thought it must be later than he imagined, but here was evidence to the contrary. Which posed the interesting question: Who had asked for the Trekkersburg Gazette so early and why?
He was freewheeling downhill past the big house again when a second question occurred to him
: why had the dog, in such robust health two days before on the Saturday, died so suddenly?
Danny decided to have a word with the lad from the Central News Agency who delivered the Sunday papers.
Mungo had to take most of the credit for saving the situation, Kramer acknowledged generously—he himself had only made certain that a respectable citizen would not be protesting an infringement of rights.
“Because that’s bloody nearly what happened,” he told Zondi as they drove back into the center of Trekkersburg. “I was committed, you see. I was in the bloke’s house and he wanted to know the reason. You can’t go fooling with people like that even if they are polite face to face. The Colonel does not like that kind of trouble. He can tell them to get lost but he doesn’t like it.”
“Who could say you were in his house without asking first, boss?”
“This kid Mungo. He told them.”
“But you could have said you were just talking to him.”
“The trouble was I was stroppy with Nielsen when he came out. I came on hard—Phillip Sven Nielsen? You know.”
“Why, boss?”
“Because I’d already found blood on his jacket sleeves.”
That took ten miles an hour off the speedometer.
“Boss Nielsen’s?”
“Uhuh. That’s where Mungo stopped me making the all-time boo-boo. Thing was I said to Nielsen I wanted to ask him some questions and we’d better go somewhere and sit. He said he’d have to tell his wife what was happening because she’d got a fright, and put me in his study. In the meantime Mungo comes in and wants to look at my gun. I let him and ask if he knows what his father’s job is. Of course, he says—not like a normal kid at all, this Mungo; bloody microscopes, hell! His dad’s an ecologist and he catches things. Kills them, too. Rabbits, mainly, he tells me, just as his old man walks in.”
“And then?”
“He hears what the kid is saying and he adds, I need the blood, you know. Really, I say. He explains he uses it to catch meerkats, carries it around in one of those plastic bowls with a lid—like you put in the fridge. Splashes it all round his traps with a rag.”
“His jacket, too.”
“Yes, that’s about it. By now I’m getting the picture. I tell him we believe he was up in the plantation catching things for ecology, and he says you could put it that way. He is doing a study of one small section and learning all he can about how the food goes from one animal to another. Like what the shrews eat and what eats the shrews. That’s why he was working so late; shrews die if they are kept in a trap for too long and he has to empty them every eight hours.”
The Caterpillar Cop Page 4