Riotous Assembly (4 page)

Shaken by the appalling discovery of yet another corpse, the Kommandant staggered
into the gallery and leant against the wall. One body in an afternoon he could just about
cope with, particularly if it was black, but two, and one of them white, filled him with
despair. Jacaranda House was taking on the qualities of an abattoir. Worse still, this
second corpse destroyed any chances of hushing the case up. It was one thing to persuade
Miss Hazelstone that she hadn’t murdered her black cook. The disappearance of Zulu cooks
was a routine matter. The murder of a white man would simply have to be made public. There
would have to be an inquest. Questions would be asked and one thing would lead to another
until the full story of Miss Hazelstone and her Zulu cook came out into the open.

After a moment’s agonizing thought, Kommandant van Heerden recovered his nerve
sufficiently to peer round the door into the murder room again. The corpse was still
there, he noted miserably. On the other hand it had certain attributes which Kommandant
van Heerden found unique in his experience of corpses. One quality in particular struck
his attention. The corpse had an erection. The Kommandant peered round the door again to
confirm his suspicion, and as he did so the corpse stirred and began to snore.

For a moment Kommandant van Heerden was so relieved by this evidence of life, that he
felt inclined to laugh. The next moment he realized the full importance of his
discovery and the smile died on his face. He had no doubt at all that the man whose body lay
before him on the bed was the true murderer of Fivepence. The Kommandant peered down at
the figure on the bed and as he did so he became aware of the smell of brandy in the air. A
moment later his foot banged against a bottle lying on the floor. He reached down and
picked it up. Old Rhino Skin brandy, he noted with disgust. It was a brandy that Konstabel
Els was partial to and if anything was needed to confirm his suspicion that the fellow
on the bed was a dangerous criminal it was the knowledge that if he shared one of
Konstabel Els’ depraved tastes, he was almost certain to share others even more
vicious.

With the bottle still in his hand Kommandant van Heerden tiptoed from the room.
Outside in the passage he tried to consider how this discovery affected his plans. That
the man was a murderer, he had no doubt. That he was now drunk to the world, no doubt
either. What remained a mystery was why Miss Hazelstone had confessed to a crime she had
never committed. More of a mystery still, why she had embroidered her confession with
the gratuitous filth that she had been sleeping with her Zulu cook and injecting him with
novocaine. Kommandant van Heerden’s head reeled with possibilities and, not wishing to
remain in the vicinity of a dangerous killer, he made his way along the passage to the
landing at the top of the stairs. He wished now that he hadn’t sent Els off to guard the main
gateway and at the same time he began to wonder when Luitenant Verkramp would arrive with
the main force. He leant over the balustrade and stared down on the tropical mausoleum in the
hall. Hard by him the head of a stuffed rhinoceros peered myopically into eternity.
Kommandant van Heerden peered back and wondered which of his acquaintances it reminded
him of, and as he did so he had the sudden insight into the true meaning of Miss
Hazelstone’s confession which was to alter his life so radically.

He had suddenly realized that the face of the murderer on the bed reminded him of
someone. The realization sent him stumbling down the stairs to stare up at the great
portrait of Sir Theophilus. A moment later he was back in the bedroom. Tiptoeing to the
edge of the bed Kommandant van Heerden peered cautiously down at the face on the pillow.
He saw there what he had expected to find. In spite of the gaping mouth and the
bag-bottomed eyes, in spite of years of dissipation and sexual over-indulgence and
gallons of Old Rhino Skin brandy, the features of the man on the bed bore an unmistakable
resemblance to those of Sir Theophilus and to the late Judge Hazelstone. He knew now who the
man was. He was Jonathan Hazelstone, Miss Hazelstone’s younger brother.

With new understanding dawning on him, Kommandant van Heerden turned to leave the
room. As he did so the murderer stirred again. The Kommandant froze in his tracks and
watched with a mixture of fear and disgust as a bloodstained hand groped up the man’s hairy
thigh and grasped the great erection. Kommandant van Heerden waited no longer. With a gasp
he dashed from the room and hurried along the corridor. A man who could put away a bottle
of Old Rhino Skin and still survive in no matter how comatose a state was undoubtedly a
maniac, and if on top of all that he could lie there with an erection while his body fought
off the appalling injuries being inflicted on it by the brandy, he was undoubtedly a
sex fiend whose sexual appetite must be of such an intensity as to leave nothing safe.
Kommandant van Heerden remembered Fivepence’s posture at the foot of the pedestal and he
began to think he knew how the Zulu cook had died and in his calculations there was no
place for the elephant gun.

Without a moment’s hesitation he hurried down the stairs and left the house. He must
fetch Konstabel Els before he tried to arrest the man. As he strode up the drive, he
understood why Miss Hazelstone had made her outrageous confession and with this
understanding there grew in the Kommandant’s breast a new and deeper respect for the old
family ties of the British.

“Chivalry. It’s pure chivalry,” he said to himself. “She is sacrificing herself to
protect the family name.” He couldn’t quite see how confessing to murdering your black
cook was saving the family name, but he supposed it was better than having your brother
confess to having buggered the said cook into an early grave. He wondered what the
sentence for that sort of crime was.

“Deserves to be hanged,” he said hopefully, and then remembered that no white man had
ever been hanged for murdering a black. “Buggery’s different,” he thought. Anyway they
could always get him for “actions calculated to excite racial friction”, which crime
carried with it ten strokes of the heavy cane, and if buggering a Zulu cook wasn’t
calculated to excite racial friction, then he for one didn’t know what was. He would have
to ask Konstabel Els about it. The Konstabel was more experienced in that sort of thing
than he was.

At the main gateway to Jacaranda Park, Konstabel Els was not finding the afternoon as
enjoyable as he had expected. Nobody had tried to enter or leave the Park and Els had had
very little to shoot at. He had taken a pot shot at a native delivery boy on a bicycle,
but the boy had recognized Els in time and had thrown himself into the ditch before Els
had time to take proper aim. Missing the native hadn’t improved Els’ temper.

“Miss one and you miss the fucking lot” he said to himself, and it was certainly true
that once word got round that Kaffir-Killer Els was in the district, white housewives could
scream blue murder at their servants and threaten them with every punishment in the book,
and still no sane black man would venture out of the house to water the lawn or fetch the
groceries.

So, for want of anything better to do, Els had explored the area round the gateway and
had closed and bolted the great wrought-iron gates. In the course of his explorations he
made the exciting discovery that what he had at first sight taken to be a well-clipped
square privet hedge concealed in fact a concrete blockhouse. It was clearly very old and
just as clearly very impregnable. It dated in fact from the days of Sir Theophilus who had
ordered its construction after the Battle of Bulundi. The Governor’s victory on that
occasion had done nothing to diminish his natural cowardice and the accusations of
treachery levelled against him by the Zulus and by the next of kin of the officers killed
by their own shells had turned what had been previously natural anxiety into an
obsessive phobia that thousands of vengeful Zulus trained in the use of ten-inch naval
guns by the surviving members of his old regiment, the Royal Marines Heavy Artillery
Brigade, would storm Jacaranda Park one awful night. Faced with this imaginary threat, Sir
Theophilus had begun the collection of weapons that had so startled Kommandant van
Heerden in the gallery of Jacaranda House, and also the construction of a series of
formidable blockhouses around the perimeter of the Park, all of which had been designed to
withstand a direct hit from a ten-inch naval shell fired at point-blank range.

It was a tribute to the Governor’s skill as a military engineer that the blockhouses
were still standing. Judge Hazelstone, as great a coward as his father but more convinced
of the deterrent effect of capital punishment, had once employed a demolition firm to
remove the blockhouses. After blunting scores of drills, the demolition crew had
decided to try blasting, and conscious that the bunker was no ordinary one they had
practically filled it to the roof with dynamite before lighting the fuse. At the
inquest that followed the survivors of the demolition crew described the resulting
explosion as being like four gigantic tongues of flame issuing from the gun ports of the
blockhouse and the noise had been heard in Durban thirty-five miles away. In view of Judge
Hazelstone’s legal standing the firm had replaced, free of charge, the gateway their zeal
had destroyed, but had refused to continue the work of demolishing the blockhouse. They
suggested hiding the unsightly building by planting a privet hedge round it as being a
less costly way of getting rid of the thing, and contributed to the cost of the operation
as a tribute to the men they had lost in the dynamite explosion.

Konstabel Els knew nothing of all this, but having found the doorway to this
impregnable fortress, amused himself by mounting the elephant gun in a gun port and
aiming it down the road. He wasn’t optimist enough to suppose that anything worthy of the
fearful weapon was likely to try to enter the Park, but the tedium of his duties
persuaded him that there was no harm in being prepared for the most unlikely
eventualities.

He had no sooner done this than he spotted an Alsatian dog which had stopped for a pee
against one of the gateposts. Konstabel Els was not one to miss opportunities and
besides he was still feeling the effects of his encounter with the Dobermann Pinscher.
One well-aimed revolver shot and the Alsatian lost all interest in the events of the
afternoon. Other people in the neighbourhood of Jacaranda Park were not so fortunate.
Five plain-clothes detectives whom Luitenant Verkramp had sent straight up to Jacaranda
Park, and who were walking with the utmost discretion and at intervals of twenty-five
yards between them, heard the shot, consulted together and began to approach the main
gate with drawn revolvers and a degree of furtiveness calculated to excite the
suspicions of Konstabel Els in the blockhouse.

Kommandant van Heerden, trudging happily up the drive, also heard the shot, but he
was so engrossed in calculating the exact number of strokes Jonathan Hazelstone would
receive before being hanged that the sound of one shot coming from Els’ direction hardly
penetrated his consciousness. He had besides never solved a case before with such
rapidity and he had just discovered fresh reasons for justifying his assumption that
Jonathan Hazelstone was the murderer. He had recalled that Luitenant Verkramp’s report on
the Hazelstone family had included the information that Miss Hazelstone’s brother had
a criminal record involving embezzlement and fraud, and that the family had paid him to
live in a remote part of Rhodesia.

It was only when the Kommandant heard a volley of shots ring out from the direction of
the gate, followed by the screams of wounded men, that he began to suspect that Els was
exceeding his instructions. He hurried on in an attempt to reach the gate before the
situation got wholly out of hand, but the density of the firing had by that time reached
such dangerous proportions and its aim was so wild that he was forced to take cover in a
hollow beside the drive. Lying there out of sight Kommandant van Heerden began to
regret that he had given Els permission to shoot to kill. The agonized screams suggested
that Els was having at the very least some moderate degree of success. As stray bullets
ricocheted overhead, the Kommandant racked his brains to imagine who on earth was trying
to shoot it out with his assistant.

In the blockhouse Konstabel Els was faced with the same problem. The five sinister
figures who had crept round the corner of the road with revolvers in their hands had been so
clearly bent on entering the Park illegally that he had shot the first two without
hesitation. The answering spatter of bullets through the privet hedge had seemed fully
to justify his action and, safe within the blockhouse, Konstabel Els broke open the
ammunition packs and prepared for a long battle.

After ten minutes the plain-clothes men were reinforced by a dozen more and Els
settled down to the business of defending the gateway with a relish that fully
justified his early expectations that the afternoon would prove interesting.

 Luitenant Verkramp had been having his own troubles. In trying to put into
effect Kommandant van Heerden’s orders he had run into a host of problems. It had been
difficult enough to marshal the entire complement of the Piemburg Police force,
including the sick and the walking wounded, at the barracks on their rugby afternoon.
But when that had been accomplished he was faced with the problem of explaining where they
were going and why, and since Kommandant van Heerden had omitted to explain the purpose
of the expedition he was left to draw his own conclusions. The only two certain facts he
had gleaned from the Kommandant’s garbled instructions were that an outbreak of rabies
at Jacaranda Park had coincided with the appearance of bubonic plague, a combination
of disease so lethal that it seemed positively insane to send six hundred healthy men
anywhere near the place. Far better in his opinion to send them in the opposite
direction. Nor could he understand why six armoured cars were necessary to help abate
the outbreak unless it was that the Kommandant thought they might be useful to control
the riot that would certainly break out when the news became public knowledge. The order
to bring the searchlights added to the Luitenant’s confusion and he could only suppose
that they were to be used to search out any infected animals at night so that they could be
hunted across country by the armoured cars.

The speech that Verkramp finally made to the assembled policemen was not one to
inspire them with any confidence in their own futures and it was only after he had
stamped out several incipient signs of mutiny that the column of lorries and the
expedition finally got under way. As it was the entire force, headed by six armoured
cars bedecked with signs announcing the epidemic of bubonic plague and the rabies
outbreak, wound its way slowly along side roads and through the country town of
Vlockfontein exciting a degree of attention exceedingly gratifying to the
policemen crowding the lorries, but hardly achieving the purpose Kommandant van
Heerden had hoped for.

The bubonic plague signs caused a degree of alarm in Vlockfontein only surpassed by the
rabies billboards which immediately preceded the lorries containing the untrained
German guard dogs, one of which in the excitement broke loose and leapt from the lorry to
bite a small boy who had been pulling faces at it. In the panic that ensued the guard dog
went berserk, bit a number of other people, several other dogs and finally
disappeared up a back alley in pursuit of a cat. Within minutes the convoy had been
halted at the request of the Mayor who had insisted that the dog be shot before it could
infect anyone else. Verkramp’s assurances that the animal was perfectly healthy
convinced no one and there was a delay of some twenty-five minutes until it was finally
shot by an irate householder on the other side of town.

By that time its desperate search for safety had driven it through back gardens and
across lawns, and for almost all the time it had managed to stay out of sight so that its
pursuers could only judge its probable whereabouts by the barks and snarls of the dogs
belonging to the householders of Vlockfontein. It was therefore not altogether
surprising that the notion gained ground that the guard dog had infected the entire
canine population of the town, a belief that was confirmed beyond any shadow of doubt by
the strange behaviour of the Vlockfontein dogs who, sharing in the general excitement,
yelped and barked and strained at their leashes and in general behaved in just that
unusual manner that the rabies notices had warned people to look out for.

As the police convoy moved out of Vlockfontein the afternoon quiet was punctuated
by the sound of shots as the massacre of the entire dog population began, while the boy
who had caused the whole business was testifying to the extremely painful nature of the
anti-rabies injections by adding his screams to those of the dying dogs. The discovery
later that evening of several dead rats, which had been killed by dogs desperately
trying to prove their utility, only added to the general sense of impending disaster
among the Vlockfonteiners. Dead rats, they had learnt from the bubonic plague notices, were
the first sign that the Black Death had arrived. By nightfall Vlockfontein was a ghost town
littered with the corpses of unburied dogs while the roads into Piemburg were jammed with
cars whose drivers were exhibiting all the symptoms of mass hysteria. It was clear that
the aim that Kommandant van Heerden had hoped to achieve by the detour was not being
realized.

 The same thing could hardly be said of Konstabel Els. His aim, always accurate,
had by this time become positively unerring. The casualties among the plain-clothes men
were mounting so rapidly that they fell back from their more advanced positions and
huddled in the hedgerow trying to think of some way of circumventing the deadly privet
bush which was obstructing them so successfully in the course of their duty. Finally
while some of them crept into the thick bushes that covered the hillside directly facing
the gateway and far enough away to ensure the deadly revolver couldn’t reach them, others
decided to try to outflank the murderous bush.

To Konstabel Els it was beginning to become fairly clear that this was no ordinary
gun-battle, but something quite new in his experience as an upholder of law and order.
He listened with quiet confidence to the hail of bullets that flattened themselves
against the walls of the blockhouse. Every now and again he peered out of the gun port that
overlooked the Park to make sure that no one had worked his way round behind him, but the
Park was clear. He need not have worried. Sir Theophilus had prepared for such an
eventuality by constructing an extremely deep ditch which ran between the blockhouses
that fringed the Park. As with so many of the Governor’s devices this defensive haha was
unexpectedly treacherous and so well camouflaged that anyone approaching it from the
road was quite unaware of its existence until he was already impaled on the terrible
iron spikes that lined its concrete bottom. The plain-clothes men lost two of their number
in the haha before they gave up the attempt to outflank the concealed blockhouse.

The screams that followed this attempt heartened Konstabel Els who imagined that he
had scored two new hits in what he had no doubt were extremely painful portions of the
human anatomy. He was a little surprised at his success as he had not fired for several
minutes and certainly not in the direction from which the screams came. He decided to
check his rear again, and peering out of the gun port that overlooked the Park was just in
time to see Kommandant van Heerden leave his hollow and scuttle towards the house with an
astonishing turn of speed for a man of his age and sedentary habits. Kommandant van
Heerden had also heard the screams that came from the haha and had reached the frantic
conclusion that the time had come to leave the security of his hollow at no matter what
cost to life and limb and return to Jacaranda House to try to find out what had happened to
the cretinous Luitenant Verkramp.

Whatever the Kommandant’s reasons, and they were unknown to Konstabel Els, the sight
of his only possible ally scuttling away and leaving him in the lurch convinced the
desperate Els that the time had come to use the elephant gun if he were not to die alone and
deserted at the hands of the desperados down the road. He could see movement in the
bushes on the hillside opposite him and he decided to try a volley there. He mounted
the great multi-barrelled rifle in the gun port, aimed at the bushes concealing the
plain-clothes men and gently pulled the trigger.