The Blood of an Englishman Page 22

  He was still rocking to and fro on the floor of his living room when he heard a cheery voice from above him.

  “My God, Meerkat! It must be some hangover you’ve got there!”

  Meerkat looked up and saw Basil “Silver Touch” Benson, a con-man who specialized in cleaning out stupid old women, in one of his best suits and happiest moods. “Go,” said Meerkat, unable to trust himself to say more.

  “Steady on, old thing,” murmured Benson, who also dabbled in porn films, dirty magazines and almost any other sudden yen felt by the mugs at his end of the trade, “I do think I’ve been frightfully patient.”

  “About what, hey? Because I’m not in a patient—”

  “That spot of commission you owe me—y’know, young gent making vague enquiries about a shooter. Well, it has been well over a month since then, and I was getting just a little concerned about our—er, little arrangement? Been looking for you everywhere. Been holed up, what? Pretty young thing, was she?”

  Meerkat sprang for Benson’s throat and sank his uncut nails into it. “You! You sent him here?”

  “Ste-steady on,” gasped Benson, collapsing backwards onto the sofa. “Not been involved in any jobs, y’know! Pure collector interest, every reason to believe—ugh!”

  “Basil,” said Meerkat, very softly, and Dynamite fled the room. “I’m not going to hurt you, Basil, but don’t try biting me again, hey? Just tell me who wanted—”

  “Gun-gun enthusiast, collects ’em, I only spoke to the chap in between, of course, very discreet, very very discreet, that I can assure you! Old ammuni—”

  “When?” demanded Meerkat, breaking a standard lamp. “And who?”

  “Mon-Mon-Monday just over a month ago! Oh God, I’m going to have a heart—”

  “Who?” screamed Meerkat.

  But Benson was out cold, blue-lipped and breathing like a pair of leaky bellows. Meerkat took his hands away, wiped them on the seat of his trousers, and picked up his jacket. He would have a cigarette to calm him down while the old fool completed his act. Once a con-man, always a con-man, and Meerkat Marais felt confident that his terrible revenge was only a matter of hours away now. He could afford to relax for a bit.

  22

  WHEN KRAMER ARRIVED at the mortuary that afternoon a little after four, he found Van Rensburg in such a deep sulk that he was spared the usual small talk. They simply nodded to one another, and Van Rensburg muttered, “The so-called district surgeon isn’t here yet.”

  “Uh huh. I’ll go through where it’s cooler.”

  There was a body waiting on each of the five slabs in the postmortem room. The nearest had to be very fresh, because the sheet covering it was a sticky scarlet. He took a look at the white male beneath it, saw a face mutilated beyond all recognition, and decided these were probably the remains of some young motorcyclist who’d tried to take a bite out of a lamp-post. The three corpses in the middle he ignored, and then flipped back the sheet on the fifth, exposing a white female of about twenty who had been murdered in the Blue Stream Motel the night before. What made it a potentially fascinating case was the ligature used to strangle her: a piece of knotted twine on which were threaded 113 keys. He had counted them personally.

  A movement two bodies away made him glance up sharply. There it was again. A bump in the sheet, which he had taken to be a protruding naval, was moving towards the chest. He approached the slab cautiously, half-amused by his own trepidation, and removed the sheet with one quick pull. It was a snail.

  “Bloody hell,” he snorted. “Come on, my friend, out you go!” And he tossed the snail through an open fanlight.

  “Hullo, Tromp!”

  It was Strydom, bustling in cheerfully, followed by a heavily built garden boy and Nxumalo, who were carrying four viscera buckets covered by wet towels. “Over there by the sink, Josiah,” he ordered. “Just put them down and wait for me by the car, okay?” The buckets were deposited and the two Zulus slipped out.

  “Having a busy day, Doc?” asked Kramer.

  “Ach, no busier than you, I’m sure,” replied Strydom, carelessly, “and you’re looking all right on it! Have you been putting on weight recently, by the way?”

  Kramer shrugged. “Never fitter.”

  “It was all that living on your nerves,” said Strydom, trotting over to see what lay in store for him. “This bloke’s still warm hey? Oh ja, this must be the lady with the faulty hair-curlers. And this?”

  “Ja, I know about that one,” Kramer confirmed. “Unidentified Bantu male, aged around fifty, found with his head on the main line this morning. Apparent suicide.”

  “Really? No papers or anything?”

  “He was in rags,” said Kramer, puffing a stray lash out of the eyesocket of the motel victim. “If you look closely at her nose, she may have had plastic surgery. Do you think you might be able to give us some sort of lead from that? She’s also unidentified.”

  “Are you in a big rush? There’s something.…”

  “Go right ahead, Doc.”

  While Strydom was out of the room, Van Rensburg came in and glared at the buckets. “Not more,” he muttered darkly.

  “Not more what, Van?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me, Lieutenant,” said Van Rensburg, and went out again.

  Kramer was about to go over and examine what was in the buckets, when Strydom returned, carrying an electric-kettle flex and with Nxumalo in tow.

  “Now this won’t take a minute,” said Strydom, baring the body of the apparent suicide. “I’ve been waiting weeks for a chance like this—the last one I tried wasn’t the right build or age, you see.” He lifted the arms, knotted the flex around the wrists and held out the ends to Nxumalo. “You know what to do?”

  “Two rand, my boss?”

  “Four,” said Strydom.

  “Ach, no!” laughed Kramer, realizing what the district surgeon had in mind. “Isn’t it time all that was finished and forgotten? You know Frans de Klerk nearly ended up a basket case because of it.”

  “This is something of a personal matter, Tromp—although not between you and me, you understand. Proceed, Nxumalo.”

  The Zulu wound the ends of the flex around his fists, braced his massive shoulder muscles, and gave a sudden, sinew-cracking jerk. The wrists bounced on the abdomen and lay there, bound unbelievably tightly together.

  “But the bones aren’t bust,” observed Van Rensburg, who had joined them unnoticed. “I’ve already said it a million times, Doc—it’s bloody impossible.”

  “What was that about the nose?” Strydom asked Kramer, turning to face the table behind him. “Out you go, Nxumalo! This is a white lady here.”

  Nxumalo left crestfallen, and Van Rensburg indulged a lofty expression until he caught sight of something on the spring-balance above the sink. Kramer noticed it too. It was a snail.

  “Look at that!” protested Van Rensburg. “I tell you, Dr. Strydom, this can’t go on! Yik!”

  “Science doesn’t recognize your petty prejudices, Sergeant,” said Strydom, taking up his biggest knife. “If you organized things better, it wouldn’t happen anyway.”

  “Science, the man calls it!” said Van Rensburg, addressing a despairing appeal to Kramer. “It’s scientific to have slimy creepy-crawlies all over a State mortuary? Leaving their trails everywhere? That’s not scientific! That’s how mistakes are made!”

  “Rubbish!” snapped Strydom, transferring his aggression by slitting the murdered woman open from pubis to mandible.

  “Oh ja?” retorted Van Rensburg. “And who was it last week who thought he found the glisten of semen stains on that poor income tax inspec—”

  “De Klerk’s back in Housebreaking, I hear,” said Strydom, changing the subject. “I must say he did a first-class job on following all those early leads until they petered out, but his basic premise couldn’t have been right.”

  “Maybe he should have used snails, hey Doc?”

  “Which theory was that?” asked Kramer, lighting a c
igarette to ward off the smell of the motel’s cooking. “He went through quite a few near the end, hey? The best one was when he tried to pin it all on Digby-Smith.”

  “Never!” gasped Strydom. “What had Hans Muller to say to that?”

  “He cried for a whole afternoon, Doc.”

  Van Rensburg felt the edge of his bone-saw. “If I could get them all in one long line,” he said, “then maybe I could cut through the lot in one chop.”

  “Quiet!” growled Strydom, snipping the ribs. “But why? What happened exactly?”

  “Well, for a start, he went out to Morninghill and challenged Digby-Smith to deny his allegations.”

  “Before he’d consulted Hans?”

  “I think he was hoping to surprise him,” said Kramer, smiling at the memory of that particular afternoon. “Mind you, it was all fairly logical except for one or two details.”

  “Go on.”

  Kramer was bored with the story, having already told it to Tish and to the Widow Fourie, before she took her children down to the beach for their holidays, but felt the effort might be worth Van Rensburg’s silence. “Ach, De Klerk’s basic theory was that Digby-Smith had suddenly gone snap, being a strange sort of bloke filled with ‘pent-up’ emotions—his phrase. There was the resentment he’d felt for Hookham over the years, coupled with the humiliation he’d suffered at the hands of Bradshaw. It all began, De Klerk decided, when Hookham came back from the flying club social and, instead of being grateful to Digby-Smith for suggesting such a nice evening, he’d drunkenly teased him about Bradshaw—probably said far too much. Digby-Smith could have imagined, for instance, that Bradshaw had told Hookham how he’d rooked his stupid brother-in-law, and they’d been laughing at him behind his back. It’s true enough that Digby-Smith said to me it was a pity the bloke hadn’t emerged to shoot Bradshaw properly, and Colonel Muller had passed this on.”

  “I see—so he just went on the warpath generally?”

  “No, it was only Bradshaw to begin with, De Klerk worked out. A sort of blind rage made him want to kill him, even though he was a pacifist, didn’t know anything about guns, and—”

  “Was a terrible marksman,” chortled Strydom, catching the drift. “After all, he did miss two times out of three in effect!”

  “Uh huh. Hookham may have told Digby-Smith about the conversation regarding walking dogs on the racecourse, and so he found himself an old gun—probably a revolver left by his father or something—and went after him. He thought the first shot had killed him, left him lying there and rushed home, maybe already terrified of what he had done. What happens next? The paper the following day says that Bradshaw isn’t dead after all! And Digby-Smith gets the shakes, thinking Bradshaw must have identified him.”

  “But I thought it was Hookham who got the shakes?” said Strydom.

  “Only according to Digby-Smith’s evidence, Doc. Mrs. Digby-Smith saw a reaction in her brother-in-law, and De Klerk ascribed that to the likelihood Hookham had half-guessed who’d done the deed.”

  “You know something, Tromp? This makes better sense than anything I’ve heard so far!”

  “It lacks one or—”

  “No, no; you carry on, and I’ll see if I can guess.” Kramer lit a fresh cigarette off his first and wished he’d thought to bring a cigar along. “Okay, so De Klerk puts himself in Digby-Smith’s shoes and imagines what a hell of a time he had until the Sunday papers gave Bradshaw’s description of a ‘giant.’ Digby-Smith is quite tall, but he doesn’t look too well-built, and so he must have thought Bradshaw had failed to recognize him entirely.”

  “Phew!” said Strydom.

  “Ja, but what happened that night, Doc? Hookham starts to act strangely and suddenly wants to go home. He behaves like a man who finds himself in a nasty situation; he isn’t sure of his facts, but just wants to have nothing more to do with it. Digby-Smith begins to feel certain that Hookham suspects him, and takes a look in his diary. Hookham has stopped adding comments. Why? Because he can no longer trust his thoughts to paper? Digby-Smith encourages him to leave. Then comes Tuesday night, when Hookham visited Mrs Westford, and said he’d go on a final ‘sortie’ that would decide whether he stayed on or not. Was this a confrontation with Digby-Smith? More than likely, and Digby-Smith decided the time had come to rid himself of this terrible danger. He’d never liked the man anyway.”

  “Good, good, good,” approved Strydom, peeling away the scalp to give Van Rensburg something to do. “But this time he tied up the victim, so as to have a sitting target and to get his shots in from closer?”

  “Uh huh. Not only that, but De Klerk found that Digby-Smith had a small workshop for his hobby of ship-modeling, and deduced he’d used it to make a silencer. By now, he said, Digby-Smith could afford to take no chances, and had to be extra careful with everything he did. Not knowing where to find Hookham when he went off at night, he’d simply hidden in the back of the green Rover until, reaching an isolated spot, he’d made Hookham stop by pushing the gun in his ear. After killing him, satisfied he had suspected him of Bradshaw’s shooting, Digby-Smith had brought the car back home for three or more reasons: firstly, it would complicate the investigation; secondly, it would pay his wife back for years of the ‘blue-eyed boy’; and thirdly, how else was he to return from to-hell-and-gone without transport?”

  Strydom looked up from the throat. “Ah! But what about the schoolgirl? She doesn’t fit into this!”

  “You’ve got it in one, Doc.”

  “Hey?”

  Kramer shrugged. “De Klerk actually gives me the credit for her role in all this, because of my obsession about the RAF. By another of life’s coincidences—like Digby-Smith’s mistake of sending Hookham to the social, which I’m sure was genuine—he had decided around that time to hire some bleepers from Robert du Plooi, thinking they’d be useful for keeping in touch with the office while out visiting sites. De Klerk discovered that Du Plooi had told him of my interest in what’d been said at the social, and Digby-Smith had seen how dangerous this could be, by way of providing a possible motive et cetera.”

  “That also makes excellent sense,” remarked Strydom, “but you still haven’t—”

  “Digby-Smith realized he’d have to destroy this link-up of mine. De Klerk had told Colonel Muller he was being tortured by hearing Mrs. Baksteen saying over and over, why had anyone wanted to kill her little girl? And suddenly, instead of feeling bad about it, he’d felt marvelous. The answer to Mrs. Baksteen’s question was simple: nobody had tried to kill Classina—they’d just tried to make it look that way! Digby-Smith broke two links in this fashion: the incidental RAF link, much more important one, which made what Bradshaw and Hookham had in common—a man who hated them both.”

  “Ah!”

  “When he pulled the trigger out at Six Valleys, bang went any chance of the suspicion coming back to him. De Klerk was sure he could find out where the skipping rope came from, the stocking and everything else, once he’d seen that look of guilt in Digby-Smith’s eyes.”

  “All very plausible,” applauded Strydom, removing the hyoid bone, which was fractured. “Especially the part about the schoolgirl.”

  “I agree,” said Kramer, “but what De Klerk should have done first was to ask the servants a question or two.”

  “Their coons? Why?”

  “Because they were able to provide Digby-Smith with a cast-iron alibi every time there was a shooting, nevermind what Mrs. Digby-Smith had to say after De Klerk visited them.”

  “Yirra!” exclaimed Van Rensburg, smiling his evil smile. “What a clanger to drop, hey? So he never got round to giants?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s—” Strydom got out.

  “He did in the end,” said Kramer, smiling again. “He rang Colonel Muller at his house at two in the morning, and said it was so simple he could kick himself. He was reminded he’d been put back into Housebreaking, and that the case was being stamped ‘unsolved,’ but insisted on having his say. The silencer was the key, h
e told Colonel Muller, and pointed out that Digby-Smith was easily rich enough to buy expensive skipping ropes and to hire a Jo’burg hitman to do his dirty work for him. A real pro, who not only used a proper silencer, but had a build like a giant, which explained the fractured wrists that he’d not been able to fit into everything before. Clearly a foreigner with a funny accent, and Digby-Smith had taken the precaution of telling me that—”

  “Oh no, I can’t take any more!” laughed Strydom. “Poor old Fransie, hey? That’s always the trouble with these loony cases: there is no shape to the thing, just a lot of bits and pieces, and the imagination runs riot trying to fit them together. By the way, did Galt ever find out what that pink stuff inside the stocking was?”

  “Some kind of complexion cream,” said Kramer.

  “Ladies’ complexion cream?”

  “Ja, but people also use it for sunburn, apparently. I don’t think they’ll be reopening the docket to look for a six-foot-four lady wrestler with paranoid schizophrenia.”

  “God forbid!” said Strydom, taking up one of his knives. “Isn’t it about time you got sawing, Sergeant?”

  “Even a wrestler couldn’t do it,” mumbled Van Rensburg. “Not even two wrestlers trying their—”

  “There’s a thought!” said Strydom. “Would you mind, Tromp?”

  “Be my guest,” said Kramer.

  But try as they would, Nxumalo and Josiah could not synchronize their separate tugs into one simultaneous, bone-shattering explosion of force, and a great deal of time was wasted on several other improvisations. Kramer suggested what was missing was the sort of surge of adrenalin that gave housewives the strength to carry washing-machines out of blazing kitchens, then lost all interest when his offer of inducing such a surge in Van Rensburg was rejected.