Riotous Assembly (9 page)

The Kommandant started to write again. “Claims he acted under the influence of
alcohol,” he said.

“No I don’t. I said I was too drunk to go anywhere. I couldn’t have got up to the gate if I
had wanted to.”

Kommandant van Heerden put down his pen and looked at the prisoner. “Then perhaps
you’ll be good enough to tell me,” he said, “how it was that sixty-nine tracker dogs when
put on your trail followed your scent up to the main gate and then back to the swimming-pool
where you were disposing of the murder weapons?”

“I don’t know.”

“Expert witnesses, tracker dogs,” said the Kommandant. “And perhaps you’ll explain
how your wallet and handkerchief came to be inside a blockhouse from which my men had been
shot down.”

“I’ve got no idea.”

“Right, then if you’ll just sign here,” said the Kommandant holding out the statement to
him.

The Bishop bent forward and read the statement. It was a confession that he had
murdered Fivepence and twenty-one police officers.

“Of course I won’t sign it,” he said straightening up at last. “None of the crimes you
mention there have anything to do with me.”

“No? Well then just you tell me who committed them.”

“My sister shot Fivepence …” the Bishop began, and realized he was making a mistake.
In front of him the Kommandant’s face had turned purple.

“You sordid bastard,” he yelled. “Call yourself an English gentleman, do you, and try
and shift the blame for a murder on your poor dear sister. What sort of a man are you?
Doesn’t the family name mean a bleeding thing to you?”

At a signal from the Kommandant the two konstabels grabbed the Bishop and hurled him
to the floor. In a flurry of boots and truncheons, the Bishop rolled about the floor of the
study. Just as he thought he was about to die, he was hauled to his feet in front of the
desk.

“We’ll continue this conversation when you feel up to it,” the Kommandant said more
calmly, and the Bishop thanked the dear Lord for sparing him another encounter with
Kommandant van Heerden. He knew he would never feel up to it. “In the meantime I am
sending for Luitenant Verkramp. This is clearly a political case, and in future he will
interrogate you,” and with this dire threat the Kommandant ordered the two konstabels
to take the prisoner back to the cellar.

As Kommandant van Heerden waited for Miss Hazelstone to be brought to him, he fingered
the bathing-cap thoughtfully and wondered what had happened to Luitenant Verkramp. He had
no great hope that the Luitenant was dead. “The crafty swine is probably holed up
somewhere,” he thought and idly poked his finger into the bathing-cap. He was beginning
to wish the Luitenant was around to consult about the case. Kommandant van Heerden was no
great one for theories and the cross-examination had not turned into a confession quite
as easily as he had expected. He had to admit, if only to himself, that there were
certain aspects of Jonathan’s story that had the ring of truth about them. He had been dead
drunk on the bed in Jacaranda House. The Kommandant had seen him there with his own eyes and
yet the shooting at the gate had started only minutes later. The Kommandant could not
see how a man who was dead drunk one minute half a mile from the blockhouse, could the next be
firing with remarkable accuracy at the plain-clothes men. And where the hell had Els
disappeared to? The whole thing was a bloody mystery.

“Oh well, never look a gift horse in the mouth,” he thought. “After all my whole career
is at stake and it doesn’t do to be choosy.”

The Kommandant hadn’t been far wrong in his assessment of Luitenant Verkramp’s
position. He was indeed holed up. Of all the people who slept in Piemburg that night,
Luitenant Verkramp was perhaps the least restless and certainly the least refreshed when
dawn broke. His sleep had been disturbed, very disturbed, but in spite of his discomfort he
had not dared to move. Below him and in some cases actually inside him, the dreadful
spikes made the slightest movement an exceedingly unrewarding experience.

Above him the moving finger of an enormous light swung eerily back and forth through a
great pall of greasy smoke. A nauseating smell of burning flesh filled the air, and
Luitenant Verkramp in his delirium began to believe in the hell his grandfather’s
sermons had promised for sinners. At intervals during the long night he woke and
considered what he had done to deserve this dreadful fate, and his mind was filled with
visions of the prisoners he had tortured by tying plastic bags over their heads, or by
administering electric shocks to their genitals. If only he were given another chance
in life, he promised he would never torture another suspect and realized as he did so
that it was a promise he would never be able to keep.

There was only one portion of his anatomy he could move without too much pain. His left
arm was free and as he lay staring up into the smoke and flames of hell, he used his hand to
feel about him. He felt the iron spikes and underneath him he discovered the body of
another damned soul stiff and cold. Luitenant Verkramp envied that man. He had evidently
passed on to some other more pleasant place like oblivion, and he envied him all the more a
moment later when an extremely unpleasant sound farther down the ditch drew his
attention to new and more horrible possibilities.

He thought at first that someone was being undressed in a great hurry, and by a person
with little respect for his clothes. Whoever was busy down there certainly wasn’t
bothering to undo buttons very carefully. It sounded as if some poor devil was having
the clothes ripped off him unceremoniously indeed. Luitenant Verkramp was sure they
would never be fit to wear again. “Probably preparing some poor devil for roasting,” he
thought and hoped that his camouflage would help to prevent them finding him for some
time.

Raising his head inch by inch he peered down the moat. At first it was too dark to see
anything. The sound of undressing had ceased and was followed by noises more awful than
anything he had ever heard. Whatever was going on down there didn’t bear thinking about,
but still horribly fascinated he continued to peer into the darkness. Above him the
great probing light swung slowly back towards the moat, and as it passed overhead
Luitenant Verkramp knew that his encounter with the wildlife of the hedgerow in the shape of
the giant spider had been as nothing to the appalling agonies death held in store for him.
Down the ditch a great vulture was up to its neck in plain-clothes policemen. Luitenant
Verkramp passed out yet again.

 When dawn broke over the varied remains of Konstabel Els’ defence of Jacaranda
Park, the policemen guarding the gate discovered the haha and its inhabitants living
and dead and clambered gingerly down to collect what had not already flapped gorged out of
the moat. They had some difficulty at first in recognizing Luitenant Verkramp under his
vegetation and when they had decided that he was at least partially human, they had even
more difficulty deciding whether he was alive or dead. Certainly the creature they
hauled onto the grass seemed more dead than alive, and was clearly suffering from a
pronounced persecution complex.

“Don’t roast me, please don’t roast me. I promise I won’t do it again,” Luitenant Verkramp
yelled and he was still screaming when he was lifted into the ambulance and driven down
to the hospital.

As Luitenant Verkramp was being admitted to Piemburg Hospital, Konstabel Els was
being discharged.

“I tell you I’ve got rabies,” Els shouted at the doctor who told him there was nothing
physically wrong with him. “I’ve been bitten by a mad dog and I am dying.”

“No such luck,” said the doctor. “You’ll live to bite another day,” and left Els
standing on the steps cursing the inefficiency of the medical profession. He was
trying to make up his mind what he should do next when the police car that had accompanied
the ambulance carrying Luitenant Verkramp to hospital stopped next to him.

“Hey, Els, where the hell have you been?” said the Sergeant next to the driver. “The old
man has been yelling blue murder for you.”

“I’ve been in hospital,” said Els. “Suspected rabies.”

“You’d better hop in. We’ll go by the station and pick up your little toy.”

“What little toy?” asked Els, hoping it wasn’t the elephant gun.

“The electric-shock machine. You’ve got a customer up at Jacaranda House.”

As they drove up the hill Els sat silent. He wasn’t looking forward to seeing the
Kommandant and having to explain why he had left his post. As they passed the burnt-out
Saracen, Els couldn’t restrain a little giggle.

“I don’t know what you’re laughing at,” said the Sergeant sourly. “Might have been you in
there.”

“Not me,” said Els. “You wouldn’t find me in one of those things. Asking for trouble they
are.”

“Safe enough normally.”

“Not when you’re up against a good man with the right sort of weapon,” Els said.

“You sound as though you had something to do with it, you know so much about it.”

“Who? Me? Nothing to do with me. Why should I knock out a Saracen?”

“God alone knows,” said the Sergeant, “but it’s just the sort of stupid thing you would get
up to.”

Konstabel Els cursed himself for opening his mouth. He would have to be more careful
with the Kommandant. He began to wonder what the symptoms of bubonic plague were. He
might have to develop them as a last resort.

 Kommandant van Heerden’s examination of Miss Hazelstone had got off to a bad
start. Nothing that he could say would convince her that she hadn’t murdered Fivepence.

“All right, suppose for the moment that you did shoot him,” he said for the umpteenth
time. “What was your motive?”

“He was my lover.”

“Most people love their lovers, Miss Hazelstone, yet you say you shot him.”

“Correct. I did.”

“Hardly a normal reaction.”

“I’m not a normal person,” said Miss Hazelstone. “Nor are you. Nor is the konstabel
outside the door. We are none of us normal people.”

“I would have said I was fairly normal,” said the Kommandant smugly.

“That’s just the sort of asinine remark I would expect you to make and it only goes to
prove how abnormal you are. Most people like to think that they are unique. You evidently
don’t and since you seem to consider normality to consist of being like other people,
in so far as you possess qualities that make you unlike other people, you are abnormal.
Do I make myself clear?”

“No,” said the Kommandant, “you don’t.”

“Let me put it another way,” said Miss Hazelstone. “Normality is a concept. Do you
follow me?”

“I’m trying to,” the Kommandant said despairingly.

“Good. As I have said, normality is a concept. It is not a state of being. You are
confusing it with the desire to conform. You have a strong urge to conform. I have
none.”

Kommandant van Heerden groped his way after her. He couldn’t understand a word of what
she was saying but it didn’t sound very complimentary.

“What about motive?” he asked, trying to get back on to more familiar ground.

“What about it?” Miss Hazelstone countered.

“If you killed Fivepence you must have had a motive.”

Miss Hazelstone thought for a moment. “It doesn’t follow,” she said at last, “though I
suppose you could argue that a motiveless act is an impossibility because it
inevitably presupposes an intention to act without motive which is a motive in
itself.”

Kommandant van Heerden looked desperately round the room. The woman was driving him
mad.

“You didn’t have one then?” he asked after counting to twenty slowly.

“If you insist on my having one, I suppose I’ll have to supply it. You can say it was
jealousy.”

The Kommandant perked up. This was much better. He was getting on to familiar ground
again.

“And who were you jealous of?”

“No one.”

“No one?”

“That’s what I said.”

Kommandant van Heerden peered over the edge of an abyss. “No one,” he almost screamed.
“How in the name of hell can you be jealous of no one?” He paused, and looked at her
suspiciously. “No One is not the name of another kaffir, is it?”

“Of course not. It means exactly what it says. I was jealous of no one.”

“You can’t be jealous of no one. It’s not possible. You’ve got to be jealous of
somebody else.”

“I haven’t, you know.” Miss Hazelstone looked at him pityingly.

Beneath him the Kommandant could feel the abyss yawning. It was the abyss of all
abysses.

“No one. No one,” he repeated almost pathetically, shaking his head. “Someone tell
me how somebody can be jealous of no one.”

“Oh it’s really quite simple,” Miss Hazelstone continued, “I was just jealous.”

“Just jealous,” the Kommandant repeated slowly.

“That’s right. I didn’t want to lose dear Fivepence.”

Teetering above the unfathomable void of abstraction the Kommandant clutched at
Fivepence. There had once been something substantial about the Zulu cook and the
Kommandant needed something substantial to hang on to.

“You were frightened you were going to lose him?” he pondered aloud, and then realized
the terrible contradiction he was stepping into. “But you say you shot him. Isn’t that
the best way of losing the brute?” He was almost beside himself.

“It was the only way I had of making sure I kept him,” Miss Hazelstone replied.

Kommandant van Heerden pulled himself back from the void. He was losing control of the
interview. He started again at the beginning.

“Let’s forget for the moment that you shot Fivepence so that you wouldn’t lose him,” he
said slowly and very patiently. “Let’s start at the other end. What was your motive for
falling in love with him?” It was not a topic he particularly wanted to investigate,
not that he believed for a moment that she had ever been in love with the swine, but it was
better than harping on about no one. Besides he felt pretty sure she would give herself
away now. The Hazelstones couldn’t fall in love with Zulu cooks.

“Fivepence and I shared certain mutual interests,” said Miss Hazelstone slowly. “For
one thing we had the same fetish.”

“Oh really. The same fetish?” In his mind the Kommandant conjured up a picture of the
little native idols he had seen in the Piemburg Museum.

“Naturally,” said Miss Hazelstone, “it provided a bond between us.”

“Yes, it must have done, and I suppose you sacrified goats to it,” the Kommandant said
sarcastically.

“What an extraordinary thing to say,” Miss Hazelstone looked puzzled. “Of course we
didn’t. It wasn’t that sort of fetish.”

“Wasn’t it? What sort was it? Wooden or stone?”

“Rubber,” said Miss Hazelstone briefly.

Kommandant van Heerden leant back in his chair angrily. He had had about as much of
Miss Hazelstone’s leg-pulling as he could take. If the old girl seriously supposed that
he was going to believe some cock-and-bull story about a rubber idol, she had another
think coming.

“Now listen to me, Miss Hazelstone,” he said seriously. “I can appreciate what you
are trying to do and I must say I admire you for it. Family loyalty is a fine thing and
trying to save your brother is a fine thing too, but I have my duty to do and nothing you
can say is going to prevent me doing it. Now if you will be good enough to get to the point
and admit that you had nothing whatever to do with the murder of your cook and were never
approximately in love with him, I will allow you to go. If not I shall be forced to take
some drastic action against you. You are obstructing the course of justice and you leave
me no alternative. Now then, be sensible and admit that all this talk about fetishes is
nonsense.”

Miss Hazelstone looked at him icily.

“Are you easily stimulated?” she asked. “Sexually, I mean.”

“That has got nothing whatever to do with you.”

“It has got a lot to do with this case,” said Miss Hazelstone, and hesitated.
Kommandant van Heerden shifted uneasily in his chair. He had come to recognize that
Miss Hazelstone’s hesitations tended to augur some new and revolting disclosure.

“I have to admit that I am not easily aroused,” she said at last. The Kommandant was
delighted to hear it. “I need the presence of rubber to stimulate my sexual
appetite.”

The Kommandant was just about to say that in his case the presence of rubber had quite
the opposite effect, but he thought better of it.

“You see I am a rubber fetishist,” Miss Hazelstone continued.

Kommandant van Heerden tried to grasp the implications of the remark.

“You are?” he said.

“I have a passion for rubber.”

“You have?”

“I can only make love when I am dressed in rubber.”

“You can?”

“It was rubber that drew Fivepence and me together.”

“It was?”

“Fivepence had the same propensity.”

“He did?”

“When I first met him he was working in a garage retreading tyres.”

“He was?”

“I had taken my tyres in for a retread and Fivepence was there. I recognized him at once
as the man I had been looking for all my life.”

“You did?”

“I might almost say that our love affair was cemented over a Michelin X.”

“You might?”

Miss Hazelstone stopped. The Kommandant’s inability to say more than two words at a
time and those two in the form of a question she had already answered was beginning to
irritate her.

“Do you have any idea what I am talking about?” she asked.

“No,” said the Kommandant.

“I don’t know what more I can do to make my meaning plain,” Miss Hazelstone said. “I have
tried to explain as simply as I can what I found attractive about Fivepence.”

Kommandant van Heerden closed his mouth which had been hanging open and tried to focus
his mind on something comprehensible. What Miss Hazelstone had just told him so simply
had not, he had to admit, been in the least abstract, but if just before he had hovered
over a void of unfathomable abstractions, the simple facts she had placed before him now
were so far beyond anything his experience had prepared him to expect that he began to
think that on the whole he preferred the conceptual abyss. In an effort to regain his
sense of reality, he resorted to healthy vulgarity.

“Are you trying to tell me,” he said, picking the bathing-cap off the desk and dangling
it from his finger a few inches in front of Miss Hazelstone’s face, “that this rubber cap
gives you an overwhelming desire to lay me?”

In front of him Miss Hazelstone nodded.

“And if I were to wear it you wouldn’t be able to control your sexual impulses?” he went
on.

“Yes,” said Miss Hazelstone frantically. “Yes, I would. I mean, no I wouldn’t.” Torn
between a raging torrent of desire and an overwhelming aversion for the person of the
Kommandant, she hardly knew what was happening to her.

“And I suppose you’re going to tell me that your Zulu cook had the same taste for
rubber?”

Miss Hazelstone nodded again.

“And I suppose all those rubber clothes I found in the bedroom upstairs belong to you
too?” Miss Hazelstone agreed that they did. “And Fivepence would put on a rubber suit and you
would wear a rubber nightdress? Is that right?”

Kommandant van Heerden could see from the expression on Miss Hazelstone’s face that at
long last he had regained the initiative. She was sitting mute and staring at him
hypnotized.

“Is that what used to happen?” he continued remorselessly.

Miss Hazelstone shook her head. “No,” she said, “it was the other way round.”

“Oh really? What was the other way round?”

“The clothes were.”

“The clothes were the other way round?”

“Yes.”

“Inside out I suppose, or was it back to front?”

“You could put it like that.”

Kommandant van Heerden’s experience of rubber clothing during the night hadn’t
induced in him any desire to put it like anything.

“Like what?” he said.

“I wore the men’s suits and Fivepence wore the dresses,” Miss Hazelstone said. “As you’ve
probably noticed I have some marked masculine characteristics and Fivepence, poor dear,
was a transvestite.”

The Kommandant staring at her with increasing disgust could see what she meant.
Masculine characteristics indeed! A taste for tall and revolting stories for one
thing. And if for one moment he really believed that a fat Zulu cook had been dressing up
in his missus’ clothes then he was a very lucky Zulu to have gone the way he had. The
Kommandant knew what he’d do to any houseboy of his he found prancing around in ladies’
clothes, rubber or not, and it included pulling more than his vest tight too.

He dragged his attention back from the prospect and tried to think about the case. He had
known there was something sinister about the bedroom with the rubber sheets, and now Miss
Hazelstone had explained its purpose.

“It’s no good your going on trying to cover up for your brother,” he said. “We’ve enough
evidence to hang him with already. What you tell me about the rubber clothes merely
confirms what we already know. When your brother was arrested last night, he was wearing
this cap.” He held it up in front of her again.

“Of course he was,” said Miss Hazelstone. “He has to when he goes swimming. He has
trouble with his ears.”