Riotous Assembly (3 page)

In the end the Kommandant was able to resume his interrogation of Miss Hazelstone to
the accompaniment of an old-fashioned tea with smoked-salmon sandwiches and cream
scones and the almost equally enjoyable observation of Konstabel Els suffering
severe vertigo some forty feet up the blue gum.

“Now about this cook,” the Kommandant began. “Can I take it that you were dissatisfied
with his cooking?”

“Fivepence was an excellent cook,” Miss Hazelstone declared emphatically.

“I see,” said the Kommandant, though he didn’t, either literally or metaphorically.
He had been having difficulty with his vision ever since he had been enveloped in that
ball of flame. It sort of came and went and his hearing was behaving erratically too.

“Fivepence was a culinary expert,” Miss Hazelstone went on.

“Was he indeed?” The Kommandant’s hopes were raised. “And when did he do this?”

“Every day of course.”

“And when did you first discover what he was up to?”

“Almost from the word ‘Go’.”

The Kommandant was amazed. “And you allowed him to go on?”

“Of course I did. You don’t think I was going to stop him, do you?” Miss Hazelstone
snapped.

“But your duty as a citizen-”

“My duty as a citizen fiddlesticks. Why in the name of heaven should my duty as a
citizen oblige me to sack an excellent cook?”

The Kommandant groped in the recesses of his shell-shocked mind for a suitable
answer.

“Well, you seem to have shot him for it,” he said at last.

“I did nothing of the sort,” Miss Hazelstone snorted. “Fivepence’s death was a crime
passionelle.”

Kommandant van Heerden tried to imagine what a Cream Passion Nell looked like.
Fivepence’s death had looked more like an exploded blood pudding to him and as for the
portions that Konstabel Els was still attempting to dislodge from the blue gum, even a
dog butcher would have been hard put to it to think of an adequate description for
them.

“A Cream Passion Nell,” he repeated slowly, hoping that Miss Hazelstone would come to
his rescue with a more familiar term. She did.

“A crime of passion, you fool,” she snarled.

Kommandant van Heerden nodded. He had never supposed it to have been anything else.
Nobody in his right mind would have inflicted those appalling injuries on Fivepence in
cold blood and without some degree of feeling being involved.

“Oh I can see that,” he said.

But Miss Hazelstone had no intention of allowing him to remain under this
comforting misapprehension. “I want you to understand that my feelings for Fivepence
were not those which normally obtain between mistress and servant,” she said.

Kommandant van Heerden had already reached that conclusion off his own bat. He nodded
encouragingly. Miss Hazelstone’s old-fashioned and formal way of expressing her
thoughts delighted him. Her next remark had quite the opposite effect.

“What I am trying to tell you,” she continued, “is that I was in love with him.”

It took some time for the full implications of this statement to sink into the
Kommandant’s overloaded mind. By comparison his experience of bodily dissolution
at the muzzle of the elephant gun had been a mere sighing of the breeze in distant meadow
grass. This was a bombshell. Speechless with horror he gazed unfocused in Miss
Hazelstone’s direction. He knew now what the face of madness looked like. It looked like a
frail elderly gentlewoman of illustrious and impeccable British descent sitting in
a winged-back armchair holding in her delicate hands a china teacup on which in gilt
transfer the crest of the Hazelstones, a wild boar rampant, was underlined by the family
motto “Baisez-moi”, and openly confessing to an Afrikaans policeman that she was in love
with her black cook.

Miss Hazelstone ignored the Kommandant’s stunned silence. She evidently took it for a
mark of respect for the delicacy of her feelings.

“Fivepence and I were lovers,” she went on. “We loved one another with a deep and undying
devotion.”

Kommandant van Heerden’s mind reeled. It was bad enough having to try, however
hopelessly, to comprehend what, in God’s name, Miss Hazelstone could have found in any way
attractive in a black cook, let alone trying to imagine how a black cook could be in love
with Miss Hazelstone, but when to crown it all, she used the expression “undying
devotion” while what was left of Fivepence was splattered over an acre of lawn and
shrubbery or hung sixty feet up a blue gum tree as a direct result of his lover’s passion
for him, then Kommandant van Heerden knew that his mind was seriously in danger of
utter derangement.

“Go on,” he gasped involuntarily. He had intended to say, “For God’s sake shut up,”
but his professional training got the better of him.

Miss Hazelstone seemed happy to continue.

“We became lovers eight years ago and from the first we were delightfully happy.
Fivepence understood my emotional needs. Of course we couldn’t marry, because of the
absurd Immorality Act.” She paused and held up a hand as if to silence the Kommandant’s
shocked protest. “So we had to live in sin.” Kommandant van Heerden was past shock. He
goggled at her. “But if we weren’t married,” Miss Hazelstone continued, “we were happy. I
must admit we didn’t have much of a social life, but then by the time you reach my age, a
quiet life at home is all one really wants, don’t you think?”

Kommandant van Heerden didn’t think. He was doing his best not to listen. He rose
unsteadily from his chair and closed the french doors that led out on to the stoep. What this
ghastly old woman was telling him must on no account reach the ears of Konstabel Els. He
was relieved to note that the redoubtable Konstabel had finally made it to the top of the
tree, where he seemed to be stuck.

While Miss Hazelstone mumbled on with her catalogue of Fivepence’s virtues, the
Kommandant paced the room, frenziedly searching his mind for some means of hushing the
case up. Miss Hazelstone and Jacaranda House were practically national institutions.
Her column on refined living and etiquette appeared in every newspaper in the country,
not to mention her frequent articles in the glossier women’s journals. If the doyenne of
English society in Zululand were known to have murdered her black cook, or if falling in
love with black cooks was to come into the category of refined living and the fashion
spread, as well it might, South Africa would go coloured in a year. And what about the effect
on the Zulus themselves when they learnt that one of their number had been having it off
with the granddaughter of the Great Governor, Sir Theophilus Hazelstone, in Sir
Theophilus’ own kraal, Jacaranda Park, freely, practically legally, and at her
insistence? Kommandant van Heerden’s imagination swept on from wholesale rape by
thousands of Zulu cooks, to native rebellion and finally race war. Luitenant Verkramp
had been right in his reports to Pretoria after all. He had shown astonishing
perspicacity. Miss Hazelstone and her Zulu bloody cook were indeed capable of ending
three hundred years of White Supremacy in Southern Africa. Worse still he, Kommandant van
Heerden, would be held responsible.

At last, after gazing long and prayerfully into the face of a moth-eaten hyena
which, in his distracted state of mind, he assumed to be a portrait of Sir Theophilus in
his younger days, the Kommandant mustered his last remaining faculties and turned back
to his tormentor. He would make one last attempt to make the old bitch see her duty as a
lady and a white woman and deny that she had ever entertained anything more lethal or
passionate than mildly critical thoughts towards her Zulu cook.

Miss Hazelstone had completed her catalogue of Fivepence’s virtues as a sentimental
and spiritual companion. She had begun to describe the cook’s attributes as a physical
and sensual lover, a sharer of her bed and satisfier of her sexual appetites which
were, the Kommandant was to discover to his disgust, prodigious and, in his view,
perverse to the point of enormity.

“Of course, we did have our little difficulties to begin with,” she was saying. “There
were little incompatibilities in our attitudes, not to mention our physical
attributes. A man of your experience, Kommandant, will naturally know what I mean.”

The Kommandant, whose experience of sex was limited to an annual visit to a
brothel in Lourenço Marques on his summer holiday, but whose experience of Zulus was
fairly extensive, thought that he knew what she meant and hoped to hell that he didn’t.

“To begin with Fivepence suffered from ejaculatio praecox,” Miss Hazelstone
continued clinically. For a brief, all too short moment the Kommandant’s lack of Latin
and his limited knowledge of medicine spared him the full implications of this remark.
Miss Hazelstone hastened to explain.

“He used to have emissions prematurely,” she said, and when the Kommandant ventured
to suggest incomprehendingly that, in his humble opinion, Fivepence could not have gone
to mission prematurely enough considering his filthy habits in later life, Miss
Hazelstone stooped to the level of the stable and explained in language the Kommandant
was forced, however unwillingly, to recognize as all too intelligible.

“He used to ejaculate almost as soon as I touched him,” she continued remorselessly,
and mistaking the Kommandant’s look of abject horror for an indication that he still
didn’t grasp her meaning, she administered the coup de grâce to his dumbfounded
sensibilities.

“He used to come before he could get his prick into me,” she said, and as she said it, the
Kommandant seemed to be aware, as in some ghastly nightmare, that the corners of Miss
Hazelstone’s mouth turned upwards in a slight smile of happy remembrance.

He knew now that Miss Hazelstone was clean out of her mind. He was about to say that she
had blown her top, but the phrase, being all too reminiscent of Fivepence’s disgusting
propensity, not to mention his ultimate fate, was throttled on the threshold of his
consciousness.

“In the end we got over the problem,” Miss Hazelstone went on. “First of all I got him to
wear three contraceptives, one on top of the other, to desensitize his glans penis and
that was quite satisfactory from my point of view though it tended to restrict his
circulation a teeny bit and he did complain that he couldn’t feel very much. After an
hour I would get him to take one off and that helped him a bit and finally he would take the
second off and we would have a simultaneous orgasm.” She paused and wagged a finger
mischievously at the stupefied Kommandant who was desperately trying to raise enough
energy to call a halt to these appalling disclosures. “But that wasn’t the end of it,” she
went on. “I want you to know that I finally arrived at an even better solution to dear
Fivepence’s little trouble. I was having my six-monthly check-up at the dentist and Dr
Levy gave me an injection of local anaesthetic to deaden the pain.” She hesitated as if
ashamed to confess to a weakness. “Of course in the old days we never bothered with such
nonsense. A little pain never hurt anyone. But Dr Levy insisted and afterwards I was so
glad I had had it. You see I suddenly realized how I could stop Fivepence being overcome
by the intensity of his feelings for me.” She paused. There was indeed no need for her to
continue.

Kommandant van Heerden’s lightning intellect had raced ahead and had grasped the point
quite firmly. Besides he was beginning to understand, though only fitfully, the train
of thought that Miss Hazelstone was bound to follow.

At this moment he visualized the scene in court which would follow the disclosure
that Miss Hazelstone had made it a habit to inject her black cook’s penis with a
hypodermic syringe filled with novocaine before allowing him to have sexual
intercourse with her. He visualized it and vowed that it would never happen, even if it
meant he had to kill her to prevent it.

Despairingly his gaze wandered round the assembly of long-dead Hazelstones adorning
the walls of the drawing-room and he hoped they appreciated the sacrifices he was
prepared to make to save their family name from the shame that Miss Hazelstone seemed
hell-bent on bestowing on it. The bit about the novocaine injections was an innovation
in sexual techniques of such a bizarre nature that it wouldn’t just hit the national
headlines. The newspapers of the world would splash that titbit in foot-high letters
across their front pages. He couldn’t begin to think how they would actually word it, but
he had every confidence in their editors’ abilities to make it sensational. He tried to
imagine what sort of sensation Fivepence had found it to be and reached the conclusion
that the cook’s death at the muzzle of that awful elephant gun must have seemed a
relatively comfortable release from the continual practice of Miss Hazelstone
plunging the needle of her hypodermic syringe into the top of his cock. The Kommandant
wondered idly if Fivepence had had a foreskin. It was a fact that they would never be able
to ascertain now.

The thought caused him to glance out of the window to see how Konstabel Els was getting
on. He noted, with what little astonishment Miss Hazelstone’s confession had left in
him, that Els had regained his head for heights, not to mention Fivepence’s, and had somehow
managed to reach the ground where he was busily seeking promotion by kicking the Indian
butler into collecting the scattered remains of the Zulu cook and putting them into a
pillowcase. Els was, as usual, the Kommandant thought, being a bit optimistic. They
didn’t need anything as large as a pillowcase. A spongebag would have done just as
well.

Behind him Miss Hazelstone, evidently exhausted by her confession, sat back silent
in her armchair and gazed happily into her memories. Kommandant van Heerden slumped
into a chair opposite her and gazed with less satisfaction into his immediate
future. What Miss Hazelstone had revealed to him he had no doubt she would reveal to the
world if he gave her half a chance and at all costs those revelations had got to be stopped
in their tracks. His own career, the reputation of Zululand’s leading family, the whole
future of South Africa clearly depended on Miss Hazelstone’s silence. His first duty was
to ensure that no word of the afternoon’s events leaked out of Jacaranda Park. Kommandant
van Heerden had little faith in his own ability to prevent that leak. He had none
whatsoever in Els’.

The Kommandant knew from bitter experience that Konstabel Els was incapable of
keeping anything, money, wife, penis, prisoners, let alone gossip, to himself. And what
Miss Hazelstone had to recount wasn’t in the nature of mere gossip. It was political,
racial, social, you name it, dynamite.

It was just at this point in his musings that the Kommandant caught sight of Konstabel
Els approaching the house. He had the air of a good dog that has done its duty and expects
to be rewarded. Had he possessed a tail he would undoubtedly have been wagging it.
Lacking that appendage he dragged behind him a terrible substitute which, Kommandant
van Heerden noted thankfully, he had the decency not to wag. What remained of Fivepence
were not things that anybody, not even Els, would wish to wag.

Kommandant van Heerden acted swiftly. He stepped out on to the stoep and shut the door
behind him.

“Konstabel Els,” he commanded. “These are your orders.” The Konstabel dropped the
pillowcase and came to attention eagerly. Tree-climbing and body-snatching he could
do without, but he loved being given orders. They usually meant that he was being given
permission to hurt somebody.

“You will dispose of that … that thing,” the Kommandant ordered.

“Yes sir,” said Els thankfully. He was getting tired of Fivepence.

“Proceed to the main gate and remain there on guard until you are relieved. See that
nobody enters or leaves the grounds. Anybody at all. That means Europeans as well. Do you
understand?”

“Yes sir.”

“If anyone enters you are to see that they don’t get out again.”

“Can I use firearms to stop them, sir?” asked Els.

Kommandant van Heerden hesitated. He didn’t want a bloodbath up at the main gateway
to Jacaranda Park. On the other hand the situation was clearly such a desperate one and
one word to the Press would bring hordes of newspapermen up - that he was prepared to take
drastic measures.

“Yes,” he said at last. “You can shoot.” And then remembering the fuss there had been
when a wounded reporter had been taken to Piemburg Hospital, he added, “And shoot to
kill, Els, shoot to kill.” Complaints from the morgue were easier to refute.

Kommandant van Heerden went back into the house and Konstabel Els started off to
guard the main gate. He hadn’t gone very far when the thought crossed his mind that the
elephant gun would certainly ensure that nothing larger than a cockroach got out of
Jacaranda Park alive. He turned back and collected the gun from the stoep and then, after
adding several packets of revolver ammunition from the police car. set off up the drive
with a light heart.

Back in the house Kommandant van Heerden was glad to see that Miss Hazelstone was still
in her stupor in the armchair. At least one problem had been solved. No word of the
injections would reach Konstabel Els. The thought of what would follow should Els get wind
of that diversion had been haunting the Kommandant’s mind. There had been enough
complaints lately from local residents about the screams that came from the cells in
Piemburg Police Station without Konstabel Els practising penal injections on the
prisoners. Not that Els would have been content to use novocaine. He would have graduated
to nitric acid before you could say Apartheid.

With Els out of the way, the Kommandant decided on his next step. Leaving Miss
Hazelstone in her chair, he made his way to the telephone which lurked in the potted jungle
in the hall. He made two calls. The first was to Luitenant Verkramp at the Police
Station.

In later life Luitenant Verkramp was to recall that telephone conversation with the
shudder that comes from recalling the first omens of disaster. At the time he had merely
wondered what the hell was wrong with his Kommandant. Van Heerden sounded as though he
were on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

“Verkramp, is that you?” his voice came in a strangled whisper over the phone.

“Of course it’s me. Who the hell did you think it was?” Verkramp couldn’t hear the answer
but it sounded as if the Kommandant was trying to swallow something very unpleasant.
“What’s going on up there? Is something wrong with you?” Verkramp inquired hopefully.

“Stop asking stupid questions and listen,” the Kommandant whispered
authoritatively. “I want you to assemble every single officer in Piemburg at the
police barracks.”

Luitenant Verkramp was appalled. “I can’t do that,” he said, “the rugby match is on.
There’ll be a riot if-”

“There’ll be a fucking riot if you don’t,” the Kommandant snarled. “That’s number one.
Second, all leave including sick leave is cancelled. Got that?”

Luitenant Verkramp wasn’t sure what he had got. It sounded like a frantic
Kommandant.

“Assemble them all at the barracks,” continued the Kommandant. “I want every man
jack of them fully armed up here as soon as possible. Bring the Saracens too, and the guard
dogs, oh and bring the searchlights too. All the barbed wire we’ve got, and bring those
rabies signs we used in the epidemic last year.”

“The rabies signs?” Luitenant Verkramp shouted. “You want the guard dogs and the rabies
signs?”

“And don’t forget the bubonic plague signs. Bring them too.”

Luitenant Verkramp tried to visualize the desperate outbreak of disease that had
broken out at Jacaranda Park that necessitated warning the population about both
rabies and bubonic plague.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked. It sounded as if the Kommandant was
delirious.

“Of course I am all right,” snapped the Kommandant. “Why the hell shouldn’t I be all
right?”

“Well, I just thought-”

“I don’t care a stuff what you thought. You’re not paid to think. You’re paid to obey my
orders. And I’m ordering you to bring every bloody sign we’ve got and every bloody
policeman and every bloody guard dog …” Kommandant van Heerden’s catalogue continued
while Verkramp desperately searched his mind for the reasons for this emergency. The
Kommandant’s final order trumped the lot. “Come up here by a roundabout route. I don’t
want to attract any public attention.” And before the Luitenant could inquire how he
thought it possible to avoid public attention with a convoy of six armoured cars,
twenty-five lorries and ten searchlights, not to mention seventy guard dogs, and
several dozen enormous billboards announcing the outbreak of bubonic plague and
rabies, the Kommandant had put down the phone.

Kommandant van Heerden’s second call was to the Commissioner of Police for
Zululand. Standing among the flora and fauna of the hall, the Kommandant hesitated
some time before making his second call. He could see a number of difficulties looming
up ahead of him when he made his request for Emergency Powers to deal with this
situation, not the least of which was the sheer disbelief that was certain to greet his
considered opinion as a police officer that the daughter of the late Judge Hazelstone
had not only murdered her Zulu cook but that prior to this act had been fornicating with
him regularly for eight years after rendering his reproductive organs totally numb
and insensitive by intramuscular injections of massive doses of novocaine.
Kommandant van Heerden knew what he would do to any subordinate officer who rang him up
in the middle of a hot summer afternoon to tell him that sort of cock-and-bull story. He
decided to avoid going into the details of the case. He would stress the likely
consequences of a murder case involving the daughter of an extremely eminent judge who
had, in his time, been the country’s leading exponent of capital punishment, and he
would use Luitenant Verkramp’s report to Pretoria on Miss Hazelstone’s subversive
activities to justify his need for Emergency Powers. Plucking up courage, Kommandant
van Heerden picked up the telephone and made his call. He was surprised to find the
Commissioner raised no objections to his request.

“Emergency Powers, van Heerden? Of course, help yourself. You know what you’re doing.
I leave the matter entirely in your hands. Do what you think best.”

Kommandant van Heerden put down the phone with a puzzled frown. He had never liked the
Commissioner and he suspected that the feeling was reciprocated.

The Commissioner in fact nourished the ardent hope that one day Kommandant van
Heerden would perpetrate an error so unforgivable that he could be summarily reduced
to the ranks and it seemed to him now from the Kommandant’s hysterical manner on the phone
that his day of vengeance was at hand. He immediately cancelled all appointments for the
next month and took his annual holiday on the south coast, leaving orders that he was not
to be disturbed. He spent the next week lying in the sun in the certain knowledge that he
had given van Heerden enough rope with which to hang himself.

Armed now with Emergency Powers that made him the arbiter of life and death over 70,000
Piemburgers and gave him authority to suppress newspaper stories and to arrest,
detain and torture at leisure all those he disapproved of, the Kommandant was still not a
happy man. The events of the day had taken their toll of him.

He turned for relief from his problems to a full-length portrait of Sir Theophilus
Hazelstone in the full panoply of his regalia as Knight of the Royal Victorian Order and
Viceroy of Matabeleland that hung at the foot of the great staircase. Sir Theophilus stood,
robed in ermine, his scarlet uniform encrusted with jewelled stars and the medals of
disastrous campaigns, each medal representing the deaths through their General’s
incompetence of at least ten thousand enlisted men. The Viceroy’s left hand rested
arthritically upon the hilt of a sword he was far too pusillanimous ever to have
withdrawn from its scabbard, while his right hand held the thonged leash of a wild boar which
had been specially imported from Bohemia to share the honour of representing the
Hazelstone family in this great work of art. Kommandant van Heerden was particularly
struck by the wild boar. It reminded him of Konstabel Els and he was not to know that the
poor beast had had to be strapped to an iron frame before the Viceroy would enter the same
room as the animate family emblem, and that only after being cajoled by the artist and
the administration of half a bottle of brandy. All this escaped the Kommandant and left
him free to hold firmly to his faith in the great qualities of the Imperial statesman
whose granddaughter he had made it his mission to save from the consequences of her own
folly. Spiritually resuscitated by his perusal of this portrait and a similar one of
the late Judge Hazelstone looking as remorseless as the Kommandant could remember him
to have looked in court on the day he had sentenced eleven Pondo tribesmen to death for
stealing a goat, the Kommandant slowly ascended the staircase to look for somewhere to
rest until Luitenant Verkramp arrived with reinforcements.

Once the Park had been isolated from the outside world, he would set about the business
of convincing Miss Hazelstone that she had never murdered her cook and that she had
invented the whole business of the injection needle and the love affair. He felt sure
that he could bring the old lady to see reason and if that failed the Emergency Powers
entitled him to hold her indefinitely and without recourse to a lawyer. If need be he
would invoke the Terrorist Act and keep her incommunicado for the rest of her life,
which life could be shortened by suitable treatment and a regimen of necessary
harshness. It was hardly the method he would like to have applied to a lady of her descent
but for the moment he could think of nothing better.

He paused at the top of the staircase to regain his breath and then made his way along the
gallery that ran the length of Jacaranda House. If the hall downstairs had been filled with
stuffed heads and portraits, the gallery walls were likewise lined with trophies of past
battles. On either side of him the Kommandant was startled to find weapons of all shapes
and sizes, weapons of all ages and types, united by only one common feature as far as the
Kommandant could make out, that they were all in perfect working order and lethal to a
degree he found positively hair-raising. He stopped and examined a machine pistol.
Well-oiled and complete, it hung beside an ancient blunderbuss. Kommandant van Heerden
was amazed. The gallery was a positive arsenal. Had Miss Hazelstone not telephoned to
acknowledge her contretemps with Fivepence and had she decided to defend Jacaranda
House, with these weapons at her disposal, she could have held the entire Piemburg police
force at bay for weeks. Thanking his lucky stars for her cooperation, Kommandant van
Heerden opened one of the doors that led off the gallery and looked inside.

As he had expected, it was a bedroom and was furnished with a sense of taste and
delicacy appropriate to the home of South Africa’s leading expert in soft furnishings.
Chintz curtains and a matching bedspread gave to the whole room a gay and floral air. What
lay on the bed had the opposite effect. There was nothing tasteful or delicate about it
at all and nobody could call it furnished. For there, its incongruity emphasized by the
daintiness of the other appointments, lay the body of a large, hairy and completely
naked man. Worse still, for the Kommandant’s disturbed state of mind, the body bore all the
signs of having only recently bled to death. It was practically coated with blood.