“It would have been hard on the man to say no. Zondi has never done less than his best.”
“Nobody’s arguing. But you know that it’s my duty to report on the fitness of all CID staff, and that I depend on all senior officers for help with my assessments. Not once have I had anything from you, and that is making my position with Colonel Muller very difficult. I can’t keep writing ‘Progress as expected’ week after week without him wondering when all this progress is going to stop, and he has an A-l Bantu again. You do know that he insists on every member of CID being 100 percent fit, hey?”
“I heard it was 100 percent efficient.”
With an uneasy laugh, Strydom said, “And I’d always understood that the two went together.”
“So what do you want me to say? Chuck him on the scrap-pile?”
“We didn’t say that when you got yourself shot up in that Portuguese café, Tromp. Please don’t get unreasonable.”
It was on the tip of Kramer’s tongue to point out how unreasonable a comparison that was, and to do this very forcibly, when a much simpler solution occurred to him.
“Doc, just listen,” he said gruffly, like a man baring his soul. “I’ve had that boy for how many years now? Do you know how many hours I’ve spent training him? You should know what slow learners some of them are, man, even if you’ve never had to work with them. But I tell you, and others would say exactly the same, that when you get a good boy, then you want to hold on to him. You must know as well as I do what could happen if mine was—”
“Say no more,” Strydom interrupted. “I’ve got the same thing with Nxumalo down at my morgue. And besides, you sound like my wife, when the cookboy wants to give in his notice! But seeing as we are talking like friends again, the way we ought always to talk, then please take some friendly advice. Your noncooperation in this matter could have far-reaching effects, and I wouldn’t want to be party to that.”
“Up to you, Doc.”
“Damn and blast, Tromp! You don’t seem to appreciate what I’m trying to do for you off the record. Very well; I make out my next report on him this coming Monday. You send me a memo anytime before that you like. But if I don’t get your memo, then you and the Colonel can argue the toss over what it is he requires. And I don’t envy you trying to prove your version either!”
Kramer felt he’d gone some small way towards providing that proof when Zondi, looking very chipper, if in need of a good dry-clean, flagged them down at the picnic spot. He clearly had something useful to impart—which, as it turned out, far exceeded any expectations.
“Let’s hear it,” Kramer said, winding down his window.
“Two things, Lieutenant.”
“Shoot.”
“Number one, I have reason to believe,” replied Zondi, who was such a flagrant mimic most of his subjects never noticed, “that the body of the deceased was brought to this place after his demise.”
“What?” said Strydom, leaning across. “Did someone see this?”
“Not in as many words, Dr. Strydom, sir, but observations were indeed made. My witnesses stand over by the fence.”
Two potbellied, small Zulu boys, possibly aged five and eight, dressed in a man’s ragged shirt and a woman’s torn
summer shorts, respectively, peered at them from behind hands shyly raised.
“Part of the raiding party here today,” Zondi explained, a smile flickering. “I thought it expedient to have them return with me, and to discuss exactly what they had seen upon arrival. They told me it is their custom to hide behind a tree while they ascertain whether the occupant of any parked vehicle—they had, of course, seen the deceased’s car from a distance—will take exception to their presence.”
“Uh huh, so they hide behind tree
A
—it’s the farthest back,” said Kramer, trying to speed this up.
“Correct, Lieutenant. Except when the sun comes out and the day grows hot, then they may wait by another one.”
“Why?” asked Strydom.
“The ants, Doctor, sir.”
“Oh, ja.”
“This has some bearing?” Kramer grumbled. “Come on, I can see you’re enjoying this, but get to the bloody point.”
“May I speak without reservation, sir?”
“You heard what I said, man!”
“Then I must confess shamefully that the children of my people have very crude natures,” Zondi went on, and Strydom nodded. “Urination affords them many primitive delights. It gives them a true sense of power to see the creature upon which they have committed this act hop so swiftly away. Then there is the pleasure they take in seeing a man doing such a babyish thing as to wet down his trousers when he is drunk. For them to see a European—”
“Zondi! You’re a bastard, aren’t you?” Kramer laughed, his memory of an investigation in which ants had provided vital evidence, along with a caterpillar, suddenly restored. “History repeats itself?”
“Lieutenant?”
But Zondi hadn’t recalled the case; his bewilderment was as great as that being shown by Doc Strydom, who was becoming very irritable, too.
“Just get on with it,” Kramer sighed.
“Well, sir, all that happened was that these children expressed some surprise to find the ants still in their home beneath the place where the deceased was hanging. Ngidi had told me of the unfortunate condition of the trousers in question, and I could see what they were saying was true. It is common knowledge that ants will take away their eggs if someone makes water on them. But those ants are all happy—as you may come and see.”
They did just that, to suppressed giggling from the far side of the fence, and Strydom finished up on his hands and knees, grinning down the ant hole.
“So who gets the Nobel this time?” he said over his shoulder to Kramer. “Yet those umfaans are quite right. These little chaps would have still been in there before eight, having their kip, and that’s why none of this occurred to Sergeant Arnot—he was here too early.”
“It also clinches your theory, Doc.”
“Too right, it does!”
Kramer helped him back onto his feet, and checked to see what time it was: five on the dot, and getting pretty late, considering he and Zondi hadn’t stopped in more than twenty-four hours.
“Now, what about the other thing you mentioned?” he asked, lighting a Lucky. “Let’s hear it, then get the hell out of here.”
Zondi lost some of his confidence, and pointed to the taller child.
“I am not so sure if this is important, Lieutenant, but that one picked up a bag near the stone this morning. He didn’t tell Ngidi because the question put to him was had he taken from the deceased’s car or person?”
Familiar with how literal the illiterate poor could be in their interpretations, Kramer found nothing remarkable in this, but he did wonder why Zondi was being so half-hearted. And he said so.
“It is a worthless cloth bag, sir. The only thing special is that it was not here yesterday, although I could not see a connection between—”
“Not perhaps a bank’s bag?”
“Oh, no, Lieutenant—proper trash, and not strong enough to carry money, even notes. I will get it for you, as I left it in his possession.”
The bag that Zondi brought back to them was black and made of a cheap cotton fabric, hand-stitched clumsily up the sides. There was no drawstring, nor any indication of what it might have been used for. Kramer looked down into it and saw, as Zondi must have done, that there wasn’t even a little fluff at the bottom. Then, noticing the material was slightly stiffer at one point, he turned the thing inside out. The saliva stain wasn’t all that became visible then—so did several blond hairs, fairly obviously from the head of Tollie Erasmus.
“God almighty,” gasped Strydom. “It’s a hood! A proper executioner’s hood!”
“Boss?” said Zondi, startled into forgetting himself.
Very briefly, Kramer filled him in on the post-mortem results, and then, because this recital revived the initial impact of their bizarre discovery, stood in a brown study, his gaze fixed farther along the fence. When he focused again, he found himself looking at the desiccated forms of two finches, pinned onto the barbed wire by a shrike.
“If this bloke knows all about drops,” he said quietly, “and wanted to fake a suicide, then he’d have easily found another tree with a platform the right height beneath it. But he didn’t. He didn’t even bother to find out where the hood had got to.
Just stuck his kill up there for all the world to see, as if he couldn’t give a bugger.”
“Gives me the bloody creeps, Tromp. I get visions of a first-class scaffold, with provisions for half-inch adjustments and all the rest of it. Pit, steps going down. Hell.”
This was too much for Kramer, and he snapped out of his reverie. “Ach, steady on, Doc! If you ask me, some bastards tried to screw the cash out of Tollie with a little homemade third degree, and it all went wrong. Must have been at least two of them involved, so that one could drive his Ford here.”
“I disagree,” Strydom said huffily.
“Well, something like that. Can’t guess any better until we know where he’s been the last three months. Probably got up the nose of a Jo’burg mob.”
“I’m objecting to you treating this fracture as a fluke, Lieutenant. Hell, the flukes themselves are rare enough, without hoods and metal rings and God knows what else. Do you want me to prove that to you?”
The Colonel was scrutinizing his ceiling, where he had a favorite lizard that caught flies for him. But the hour was late and it had probably left the office.
“Just give me an outline to be going on with,” he told Kramer, “as you’re too bloody shagged out to talk any proper sense this evening. So let’s stop psychoanalyzing Doc’s little obsession and concentrate on what action you’re taking.”
“Firstly, sir, I don’t want this getting to the press before we understand it better. You can see the effect it’s had on a supposedly mature—”
“Consider that done.”
“Ta. I’ve already handed the firearms over to Ballistics, and they’re sending specifications to every gun squad from here to Cape Town. Not much of a lead, I admit.”
“Worth trying.”
“The usual forensic checks are going ahead on Erasmus’s clothing, vehicle, and so on. Also the hood we found.”
“Good.”
“We were too late to dust the car for fingerprints—Arnot’s mob had already been through it. I get the Bible back in the morning—nothing on it so far, except Erasmus’s own—and we’ll see where that takes us.”
“You never can tell.”
“Lead kindly light, sir?”
“Trompie,” admonished the Colonel, a full elder of the Dutch Reformed Church, who wore a black frock coat and white bow tie on Sundays, “you mustn’t think being shagged out is any excuse for that kind of behavior! Now push off home, you hear?”
“One other thing: I’ve put out a description of Erasmus as a reminder to those in the big cities who didn’t think this was a matter which concerned them. I bet you he was in Jo’burg the whole time, getting himself a nice tan at Zoo Lake, right under their bloody noses.”
“Tomorrow, man. When you can also get all excited about what this same playboy was doing twenty kilometers south of Doringboom.”
The man had a point there.
Kramer rose from the corner of the desk and started to leave.
“Oh, by the way, Tromp.…”
“Colonel?”
“I believe you and the DS had a little chat together this afternoon.”
“Did we, sir?” Kramer said, suddenly having had a stomachful of devious old bastards.
“I fully realize it was confidential,” Colonel Muller added hastily, as though the last thing he’d think of would be to pry, “but I just wondered.”
“Uh huh?”
“Well, how it had gone down.”
“Like a glass of cold puke, sir.”
It didn’t seem possible that a final touch had still to be put to that day, but Kramer, who’d seen two sunsets and no sleep, should have known better.
He should also have been paying more attention to Zondi’s droll account of the afternoon’s adventures, because just after taking the turnoff to Kwela Village, he was aware of having missed a bit somewhere.
“Go back to not knowing how to catch them,” he said, flicking away a half-smoked cigarette.
“That was easy, boss. You remember what I said about the excited state of these kids? All I had to do was to lie very still. Soon they came crawling to see what the matter is this time, and they come right up close to hear if I am breathing. Pah! Two hands, two kids! The rest run like—”
“You mean little sod. Thought you were too damn perky for a ten-kilometer round trip.”
“They are happy, boss. By the way, twenty cents on expenses?”
“Fine.”
“You know that bacon?”
“Don’t tell me: Ngidi scoffed it.”
“No, the sergeant”—Zondi laughed—“while Ngidi was chasing the kids.”
This made a good note to end on. Kramer just added that he didn’t want Zondi under his feet until at least the following afternoon, and then they drove in silence toward the smoky spread of the municipal township. Almost in the center of the serried rows of two-room dwellings, all as neatly placed as a thousand bureaucratic rubbers, the Chev stopped at one distinguished by a pathway edged in rusty cans. Zondi waved his thanks, and the Chev, which knew what to do, rumbled
off down the corrugated dirt road and found the quickest way to Blue Haze.
Kramer had bought the old farmhouse, with its meter-thick shale walls and wraparound verandah, to put in his will. Pending the implementation of this will, he rented the property, at the cost of a Trekkersburg apartment, to the ultimate beneficiary, the Widow Fourie, and her family of young children. It was really a very uncomplicated arrangement, which allowed him to pursue his chosen career without any thought of irresponsibility, and to be able to sleep the odd night in the country when the mood took him. As it had, against his better judgment, done now.
But the children’s lights were out by the time the Chev finally nosed into the driveway and came crunching to a stop outside the front door. And the Widow Fourie, whose ample mind and body had drawn Kramer there, came out alone to greet him, tying back her yellow hair.
“You caught me just going to wash it,” she scolded, her kiss pleased and quick. “So what’s been happening in the world I haven’t heard about?”