The Song Dog Read online

  ALSO BY JAMES McCLURE

  The Steam Pig

  The Caterpillar Cop

  The Gooseberry Fool

  Snake

  The Sunday Hangman

  The Blood of an Englishman

  The Artful Egg

  Copyright © 1991 by James McClure

  First published in the United States by Warner Books, Inc.

  This edition published in 2013 by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  NewYork, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McClure, James, 1939-2006.

  The song dog / James McClure.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-61695-248-8

  1. Police—Fiction. 2. Afrikaners—Fiction.

  3. Zululand (South Africa)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9369.3.M394S66 2013

  823’.912—dc23

  2012034376

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Other Titles in the Soho Crime Series

  1

  LIKE A CAT she was quick and her hand slapped and the mosquito spread red on her thigh.

  “Christ, he’d done well out of you,” he murmured. “Look at all that blood …”

  “That’s never my blood,” she said, flicking away the dead insect. “I didn’t give the little bastard the chance! Must’ve been yours.”

  “Can’t be,” he said. “I’d have felt it also.”

  They lay back on the bare mattress. They lay side by side, no longer touching.

  He was glad of this: he was hot, the sweat streaming.

  “Phew!” she said, and they both laughed, before falling silent.

  Outside, mangrove frogs croaked; a crocodile slid with a lazy splash into the estuary; two owls hooted, one high and one low.

  Oh, ja, he was hot, bloody boiling, but awash with well-being. Even better, he seemed able to think straight again, now that she had stopped crowding his mind with voluptuous conundrums; now that he had all the answers to how each and every part of her young body felt, and to what she cried out when she came. Her hoarse cry had made him come also, that very same instant, and he looked forward to hearing it again, once they’d rested awhile.

  Then the candle flame, fast running out of wick, began to fluster, and this sent a tremble through the shadows it cast. Some shadows were long, looming right up the unpainted wooden walls of the room; others slunk across the floorboards into untidy corners that were heaped with fishing tackle and dirty clothing. Soon, even the exposed roof of river rushes overhead appeared to be moving uneasily, undulating in that wavering light.

  And he found himself going back over the events of the day, astonished, in a numb, remote sort of way, by how suddenly he had succumbed to a temptation fiercely resisted for five years or more, ever since he’d first known her. A temptation so strong that in the end only the words of a crazy black bitch had stood any chance of holding him back from the brink, from what he feared would be his eternal damnation. Beware, Isipikili, the spearhead in your veins and where you next plunge it! Beware, Isipikili, for the songs I hear are of death, and how my old heart mourns! But, great mother, he had replied, all my songs are of death, so what can you mean by this?—and he had been afraid when she refused to answer him. Yet, after long hours without eating and only one brandy, it had taken no more than the lightest of touches, brushing the back of his hand, for him to dismiss all this as the usual mumbo jumbo, meaningless, without context, and how easy the rest had been, how natural, how good and life-giving, a joyous thing happening between two unhappy people that nobody else would ever know about.

  He raised himself on an elbow. “Whose blood?” he said, looking again at the vivid smear left by the mosquito.

  She, her eyes closed, shrugged.

  “Listen,” he said, “a mozzie who’s sucked up that much blood doesn’t fly far—he’s too full.”

  “How would you know, hey?”

  “It stands to reason. So where did it get that much blood?”

  “Is it really a lot?”

  “Look for yourself!”

  Her eyes languidly opened. “You mustn’t frown like that,” she chided. “Makes your eyebrows meet in the middle, spoils your good looks.” And she touched a fingertip to his forehead.

  “You’re certain that your bloody cook boy isn’t still here? That there’s no one?”

  “How many more times?” she said. “Like I told you, I gave him the night off and he went to get drunk at his uncle’s. Ach, he’ll never be back before morning at the earliest.”

  He twisted round to look at the shuttered window. “That mozzie must’ve come from somewhere close by,” he said. “I know, what about poachers?”

  “That’ll be the day!” she said, and laughed. “No poacher ever comes within ten miles of this place—no kaffir in his right mind would ever dare to! You-know-who has given it too much of a reputation.”

  This made him glance at the bruise on her right shoulder: a big, lilac bruise that clearly showed three knuckle marks. He had found such evidence of brute violence curiously titillating earlier on, but now it troubled him.

  “Ach, come on, why the face?” she said, taking his hand and making it brush her right nipple. “There,” she said, “do you see how quickly it says hello to you?” She cupped his hand over her other breast, squeezing it. “Ja, nice,” she grunted, “only do it harder, hey? Harder!”

  His hand remained limp, his gaze back on her thigh. “You’d think,” he said, “a mosquito so loaded down like that would just want to sit somewhere quiet and digest.”

  “So what? Maybe that’s what he thought he was doing when he landed on me, only I was too—”

  “But where did he come from, so fat?”

  “Jesus!” she said, shoving his hand away. “What’s the matter with you? You’re the last person I would ever expect to act like he had a guilty conscience!”

  “It goes with the job.”

  “That I believe!”

  “No, what I meant was, being on your guard all the—”

  “Just shut up a minute,” she said.

  And she reached out for her cigarettes on the orange crate by the bed, lit one and inhaled long and deep. The smoke drifted slowly from her nostrils, drawing his attention to the droplets of sweat on her upper lip, and to the beauty spot just to the right of it. From so close up, it was revealed as no more than a small mole from which two tiny hairs sprang, but it still gave him a small thrill for some reason or other—just as he liked licking the imperfection of her slightly protruding navel, neat as the knot sealing a pink party balloon.

  He touched his tongue to it again, on sudden impulse.


  “Don’t stop,” she said, her free hand moving to hold his head there. “And stroke me. Stroke me the way you did when we first started …”

  He began, facing the darkening bloodstain there beyond her plump, tawny mound on the surprising pallor of her thigh; a mark as vivid as a splash on the white tiles of an autopsy room. His eyes closed and he stroked more swiftly. His hand skimmed lightly over her breasts and then down, dipped and rose gently, flattened out along her smooth flank, and paused only when it reached the coarsened skin of her knees. Back again. Down again.

  “More,” she said, her cigarette hastily crushed out on the orange crate. “More …”

  There was no need. He was hardening against the movement of her insistent hip, and the great dizziness was again taking hold of him. Soon, he knew, he’d move round, mount her, strive for that ecstatic moment of release which would be sudden, like the give of a stiff trigger-pull, and he’d see her arch up, cry out, and then slump back, a deadweight beneath him.

  She stirred, moving her legs wide apart. “Now?” she whispered.

  “Just wait,” he whispered back, his hand skimming light as a feather, faster and faster.

  She waited, her whole body beginning to tremble.

  “Ja, now!” he said, rolling over to kneel between the clench of her thighs, his back to the window. “Quick, take it and—”

  A cough sounded right behind him.

  “A croc,” she said quickly, closing her fingers around him, making him feel ridiculous: a saucepan grasped by its handle. “Just a stupid old croc—they sometimes make noises like that.”

  He pulled away, sitting upright. “A croc?” he said, as though the word were entirely new to him.

  “Ja, you know,” she said, “only a crocodile—I’m sure of it. Sometimes they like to come up and lie in the gap under the house. Don’t ask me why.” She was trying to draw him down again.

  The space beneath the floor was hardly a gap, he thought, having noticed it earlier on his way across the dunes. The wooden piles supporting the house were easily tall enough to allow a fully grown man to crouch, eavesdropping beneath that floor, turning a deathly pale.

  “Listen,” he said, his voice uneven, for it had dropped very low, “there’re ashtrays everywhere in this place. Does, er, you-know-who also smoke? Well, does he?”

  She nodded. “Ja, but he hasn’t a—”

  “How many?” he hissed. “How many a day? Lots?”

  “Ja, quite a few—maybe thirty, forty. He—”

  “Be quiet!” he said. “Be dead quiet and lie still!”

  “Honestly!”

  Yet she lay still, apart from the slight jiggling of her right foot. He listened hard. He wondered if he should reach for his revolver, there in its shoulder holster where his clothes were neatly laid, underpants uppermost for a quick getaway. The candle flame dimmed and then flared in its death throes. He felt very, very excited.

  “Well, at least someone’s still interested,” she murmured with a sigh, taking hold of his extreme hardness to thumb its slippery tip daintily.

  And he could see that her own state of arousal had been heightened too. Her eyes now had a strange look in them, a stare that was snakelike in its fixed intensity. It made him twitch against the softness of her palm.

  “Ja, it’s time you stopped imagining things,” she said, her thumb even busier. “Do you honestly think that ten minutes ago either of us would’ve noticed a mozzie biting us? Jesus, it must’ve thought it’d landed a ride on a bucking bronco! I bloody did!”

  He laughed out loud, very loud, astonished to learn what a wonderfully dirty mind this young girl had. “Not bad for my age, hey?” he said, joining hands with her. “But that was only the curtain raiser, remember!”

  “Oh, ja?” she said, raising herself to him.

  The second cough came from directly below them, abrupt and chesty.

  Her skin goose-pimpled. It goose-pimpled all round the blood smeared on her right inner thigh, and he actually saw this happen.

  “Oh, no!” she said. “You’ve gone kerflop!”

  “Shut up!” he said.

  A giggle took hold of her. “Gone KER-FLOP, just like that!” she sputtered. “One second, it was looking me—”

  He struck her, frantic to halt her noise, and hit her perhaps a fraction too hard with the edge of his hand, as he occasionally did with people.

  “You okay?” he said.

  She said nothing, her blue eyes wide open.

  “We could be in bad trouble,” he said, dropping his voice even lower. “Stop fooling round …”

  Those blue eyes were unblinking.

  “Jesus wept,” he said. “A joke’s a joke, hey? Reach over and pass me my gun—you’re the nearest.”

  A strange warmth enveloped his knees. He glanced down; her bladder was voiding. Recoiling violently, he landed on his feet beside the bed with a loud thud.

  Cough

  The two owls hooted, one high and one low.

  “You bastard!” he exploded, snatching up his revolver. “YOU BASTARD! I’ll get you for this! FUCKING GET YOU!!”

  And, not thinking, not caring, but berserk, he hurled his empty holster aside to go charging, stark naked, from the room. He knocked over chairs, barged a table aside, and went crashing, shoulder-first, through the fly screen over the front door, before taking a wild, windmilling leap from the verandah to the ground below.

  Where he landed badly and fell, sprawled facedown, with his left hand over the toe cap of a fishing boot.

  He whimpered.

  Just once, never having felt so vulnerable before, and froze.

  It went on and on, that wait for the unimaginable. That craven grovel in the stinking, filthy mud beside the estuary. Until something slimy suddenly slithered over his right calf, making him flinch involuntarily and jerk his hand—the fishing boat toppled sideways.

  It was empty.

  “Oh, Christ …” he sobbed, getting clumsily to his feet and having to stoop to pick up his gun again. “All for what, hey?”

  Because he just knew, even before looking around him, that he would see nobody in the vicinity, nothing untoward under the house.

  The moon reappeared at that moment, slipping free of a sea cloud, and its cold, steady light confirmed at a glance just how right he was: the place was totally deserted. And when he heard a sort of cough, he was able to turn in time to see a huge crocodile heave itself into the estuary from a nearby mud bank, plainly outraged at having its peace disturbed.

  “You bastard,” he said weakly, and tried to laugh.

  But no sound came. Because, in his mind’s eye, he could still see her so vividly, her hair seemingly askew like a wig, her breasts not rising and falling. Perhaps a nightmare hadn’t just ended—perhaps it had barely begun.

  “Rubbish!” he said to himself, starting up the wooden steps to the verandah. “Time you stopped imagining things! It’s a concussion—that’s all! Do you hear me?”

  He drew open the fly screen in a much improved frame of mind. First of all, he would find a big bucket of cold water and dash that over her, then light her one of her cigarettes. There was bound to be a bucket somewhere in the kitchen, probably under the sink. Then he would fetch her a towel from the bathroom, a big, fluffy one—on second thought, perhaps he’d best fetch the towel before bothering about the cigarette. Ach, no, she was all right, she was fine: she had just struck a match to light a fresh candle.

  Or so he imagined, for a millisecond, when there was a sudden flare of light from the room where he’d left her. A sudden flare that blossomed instantly to a blinding brilliance, filled with hurtling particles of glass, wood, fishing tackle, dirty clothing, mattress, bone, tissue, and a great deal of blood that wasn’t his own.

  The explosion itself was heard up to twenty miles away.

  2

  LIEUTENANT TROMP KRAMER of the Trekkersburg Murder and Robbery Squad was in no mood for a confrontation with fifteen head of dozy kaffir cattle. So in
stead of braking and waiting until they moved leisurely off the dirt road ahead, he swerved out into the veldt and went round them, shedding a hubcap in the process.

  “Yirra, Lieutenant!” protested Detective Sergeant Bokkie Maritz, bracing himself against the dashboard. “Please remember this car was booked out in my name, hey?”

  “I won’t forget, Bok,” said Kramer, accelerating hard over the corrugations, which hammered the shock absorbers unmercifully.

  “I mean, it is almost a new car,” added Maritz.

  “True,” said Kramer. “Any of those candies left?”

  He had never encountered barley sugars before—never having had an associate prone to car sickness before either—and was finding them very much to his taste, especially now his cigarettes had run out. That was one of the hardships a man faced when traveling through Zululand, he’d learned: as many as thirty miles could go by without even a trading store.

  “Er, there’s actually only one barley sugar left,” Maritz disclosed reluctantly. “And to tell the truth, I’m beginning to feel a tiny bit queasy again. Perhaps if—”

  “Ach, don’t bother to take the paper off—I can undo it for myself, ta,” said Kramer, taking a hand from the wheel.

  “No, I’d rather!” said Maritz, hastily ripping off the wrapper before passing the barley sugar over.

  Kramer flipped the sweet into his mouth, crunched hard just once, and swallowed.

  “Worse than a dog,” Maritz muttered.

  “You said?”

  “Nothing, Lieutenant—nothing! I was just thinking what a hell of a business this was. According to Colonel Du Plessis, Maaties Kritzinger had only—”

  “Bok, didn’t I say I don’t want to discuss the case?”

  Maritz nodded. “Ja, but I can’t help—”

  So Kramer diverted him by jerking on the handbrake as they entered the next bend, high above a great, brown river, and sent the Chevrolet skidding in a four-wheel drift that slid them sideways on into the straight.

  “Bus!” screamed Maritz.

  “I see it, I see it,” said Kramer.

  And then he had to go all the way back to the start of an official communiqué he was trying to compose in his head:

  7 August, 1962

  Dear Colonel Du Plessis,