The Blood of an Englishman (14 page)

“Ja, I was trying a trick,” Kramer admitted unashamedly. “I hoped you might slip into imitating the accent this time—sometimes that happens, you know. It’s the funny accent that really interests me, you see.”

“Not funny
—strange
,” snapped Digby-Smith, putting up a hand to close the door on him. “It wasn’t foreign, it wasn’t local—it was, at best, a mixture of both.”

“Someone trying to sound foreign then?” asked Kramer.

“Yes, or even vice versa.”

“Pardon?”

“Caesar would despair of you, officer! What that means is this fellow could just as well have been a foreigner trying to sound local.”

“Uh huh, I follow,” said Kramer, nodding.

“But let’s not make too much of that phone call—well, not tonight if you please! I really must leave off now, as I’ve the news still to break to his offspring in England, and dialing those endless codes—”

“You’ve not told them yet?” said Kramer, taken aback. “I thought it’d been arranged with you at lunch-time—you know, that it would be better than doing it through us and the English police?”

“Quite,” replied Digby-Smith, closing the door. “But you’ve been here all evening and, as you know, it’s cheaper after six.”

Anneline Strydom switched off the television set in the living-room and looked in on her husband in the kitchen. “Still playing with those horrible snails? Yiggg!”

The snails were distributed all over the enamel working surface of her smaller table, and Strydom was scraping at their slimy trails with a glass slide. Once he had a little of the slime collected, he transferred it to a small test-tube kept upright in a teacup, and then sought some more of the stuff. Even amassing as much as a thimbleful was obviously going to take all night.

“You’re not intending to—”

“Don’t start your nagging!” he growled.

“Chris, have you seen what time it is? It’s after ten.”

“And so? Am I a man of science, or aren’t I? Does Einstein have his wife telling him when to go to bed?”

“Maybe that depends,” said Anneline coquettishly, “on what mood Mrs. Einstein is in. Come on, Chrissy, put your snails away and—”

“Ach, I’m fed up with today! I’ve got nothing finished I wanted to do! First my snails got interrupted, then I couldn’t find an arm anywhere! You’d think one arm wouldn’t be asking too much! But no, not one morgue in the whole district has got an arm for my experiments. For weeks my fridges are full of paupers, unknowns, little bits and pieces, then suddenly—poof! What’s happening? Aren’t we meant to be in a recession?”

Anneline came up behind him and massaged his shoulders, bringing the smell of her bath salts well within range of his sensitive nose. “Now, now, my little lion, don’t roar and show your teeth to your Annetjie, hey?” And she planted a tiny kiss in his shaggy gray mane. “How long is it since you last said to me, ‘Come, my beloved, my queen of the veld, let us go into the long grass?’ ” The muscles in his shoulders lost some of their tension. “Tell me,” Anneline murmured, “has Mrs. Einstein long shiny black hair such as mine? Long enough for her to sit on it? Do you want to undo my bun?”

“How should I know what her hair is like!” muttered Strydom, in slow pursuit of a really slimy snail. “Hell, I don’t even know what
he
looks like!”

“Hey? But you said you’d met the new Jewish doctor at the medical center.”

“Bernstein! Bernstein! Don’t you ever listen?”

“I like that!” Anneline stepped back and stood with her fists on her hips, looking daggers at him. “I’ve spent the whole evening listening to you moaning about that stupid arm of yours! You know your trouble? You’re obsessed with bodies!” A sob caught her throat. “Oh, Chrissy, why does it have to be dead bodies all the time?”

“Anneline!” cried Strydom, coming slowly up out of his chair with a radiant smile. “Come, let me give you a big hug for that! Of course it doesn’t have to be a dead body—just so long as the arm is dead, that is all I ask!” Then he hurried through in his slippers to the telephone.

Kramer ducked his head, noted that the lights above Jonty’s salon were on, caught a glimpse of the man himself at a window, and then allowed the Chevrolet to pick up speed again. Two blocks further down, he braked outside a small park and looked to see if the statue of Queen Victoria had a white man’s burden in its vast maternal lap. But Zondi had already jumped down from his accustomed resting place, and was at the curb almost before the car had stopped.

“Hullo, Lieutenant!”

“Hullo, Mickey, old son!”

As their greetings had been strangely effusive, perhaps a touch embarrassed somehow, neither said anything until on their way out of the city. Then Zondi began by showing the prepuce-cover to Kramer, and a sketchy plan was made to bring in Banjo Nyembezi the next morning.

“And now you, boss?” said Zondi. “Have you also had good hunting?”

“So-so, Mickey. I’ve been up at the Digby-Smiths’ nearly all night—Jesus, their cook is bloody useless, hey?—and I’ve learned quite a lot. I also think that some of the time Mr. Digby-Smith was trying to play games with me.”

“Hau! On the day his kin is found murdered?”

“You’ve heard nothing yet, just wait.…”

Kramer went back to the beginning and repeated all the main points of the interview, before, during and after dinner. By the time he had finished, they’d passed through the high security fence surrounding Kwela Village township, and were dodging pot-holes in the grid of dirt roads that divided up the thousands of identical houses.

“A strange, strange man,” murmured Zondi, shaking his head. “But tell me again the part when he said Boss Hookham was made frightened by the newspaper.”

“Ja, I cornered him on that,” said Kramer. “I asked him why, if there was no special connection between his brother-in-law
and Bradshaw, that he should be scared when the bugger got shot. He just shrugged. So then I asked directly. I said to him, ‘Can you connect these two shootings in any way?’ What I didn’t realize at that stage was Digby-Smith had no knowledge of it being the same gun used each time. No, he couldn’t connect them, he said—after all, Hookham only knew Bradshaw because of the party, and it’d been him, Digby-Smith, who’d suggested it.”

“What happened when you did tell him about the bullets coming from the same gun?”

“He went almost human for a while.”

“He was surprised?”

“Very.”

Zondi touched Kramer’s arm and they came to a stop outside a house indistinguishable from any other in the street; once there had been a path edged by condensed-milk tins, but they had rusted away. Kwela Village had no electricity—apart from that supplied to a few street lamps and the white superintendent’s house and offices—and a small, friendly candle glowed at the kitchen window. Kramer switched off the engine.

“In what way human?” asked Zondi, as they lit up their last smokes of the day.

“Well, first he said that Hookham was almost bound to react with the shakes to the news of Bradshaw getting shot—after all, the bastard had very nearly been killed, and Hookham was in a highly sensitive state concerning death and people he knew.”

“Only very slightly, Lieutenant.”

“Ja, but I think there’s a lot in that. Do you remember when Gawie Willems got his head blown off last year during that drugs raid up near Bergville? Hell, I hardly knew old Sarge Gawie, but I got the twitch in the mortuary next morning, and there wasn’t one corpse there that I knew.”

Zondi conceded the point with a nod and flicked his ash out of the window. “But still I wish to know why he said such a thing about Boss Hookham. There is malice in it.”

“Oh, definitely. I think he’s taken a hammering all his life about his hero of an in-law, and it amuses him to say he looked scared. He gets some sort of kick out of it.”

Again Zondi nodded, satisfied with that reply, yet ready with another question. “Okay, he has explained all this. Now how did he describe the time after the newspaper, up until last night?”

“Haven’t I told you?”

“No, not with details, boss.”

Kramer sighed but didn’t much mind repeating the whole thing again blow by blow. Having gone to a mission school which shared about ten textbooks between two hundred pupils, Zondi had cultivated for himself a photographic memory, and this facility had extended itself to conversations as well. Telling Zondi something was, in effect, as good as feeding it into a small brown computer; it freed one’s own mind to deal with the broader issues, while every snippet was reliably retained, ready to pop up at the appropriate moment—or, and this no computer could do, at an imaginatively inappropriate moment, which was often just as effective in solving a crime.

“Well, after Hookham had seen the newspaper, he took the dogs out for a walk. He had lunch with the D-Smiths and a friend, spent the afternoon reading in his room, writing to his grandchildren, and then, after a light supper, he went out again. On the Sunday he read the papers, and D-Smith and him laughed at Bradshaw’s ‘giant’ story, which Colonel Muller had released by then. He seemed in a much happier mood all round, then there was a row with his sister over various arrangements they’d made for the following week—this week, in fact. It ended up with her saying he should just please himself what he did, and she canceled a bridge party and all the rest of it. On Monday two of the ex-RAF blokes came round to see him, and they ended up very drunk on the lawn. On Tuesday he complained of a hangover—that would be yesterday—and stayed
in his room nearly all day. Digby-Smith says his manner at table last night was a bit jumpy and peculiar, and he kept looking at his watch. He also apologized to them for being ‘such a bolshy guest’ and admitted that leaving familiar surroundings so soon after his wife’s death had probably been a mistake. The truth of the matter, he also told them, was that he was homesick, disoriented and miserable. Finally it came out that he wanted to cut short his stay and go back home to England this coming Saturday—or sooner, if he could change his ticket. Mrs. Digby-Smith got very upset, and said it was all her fault, and what would her friends think of her if he walked out. Digby-Smith—ach, in a way, you’ve got to like him for what seems his honesty—told Hookham that he thought it was a perfect plan. Nevermind about anything else, he said, any man takes a chance with his happiness when he tries to revisit his past. And that’s how they left it, although Mrs. Digby-Smith was determined to make him stay, and this morning she was writing to tell the family what a good time he was having. End of story.”

“Did you speak with her again?”

“No, she was a bit too upset, and I accepted that.”

Zondi chuckled. “You’re a bad bugger, boss! You must have given that woman a terrible shock this morning.”

“Expedient at the time, kaffir! We white men don’t like to sit around all day on our bums like
you
people, hey?”

They laughed together, and Kramer was reminded of the conversation he had had with Backchat outside the Aquarius. Zondi matched it with Jiji Govender’s tale, and after turning the information this way and that, they agreed that it must have been a rumor started by their own activities that week.

“So forgetting all that,” said Kramer, “what are we left with, Mickey?”

“Indubitably some progress, Lieutenant.”

“Oh ja?”

“We have learned much about Boss Hookham, as to his character and his heavy heart.”

“Is that all you can say? Christ, do you want me to spell it out for you?” Kramer started counting on the fingers of his left hand. “One: we have some initials that are a mystery. They could be part of the same mystery as where Hookham went to on his own at night.”

“That doesn’t connect the cases.”

“Two: if that bloke on the phone was our man,” Kramer went on, gritting his teeth, “then we know it was premeditated, and we know how the killer learned that nobody would expect to see Hookham until late in the morning. Added to that, whichever way you think about the ‘strange accent,’ it must have been fake.”

“That doesn’t connect the cases.”

“Three, you cheeky bastard: there was a significant change in Hookham after he attended that party where the RAF were—he says so himself in the diary. There also seems to have been a change in him after seeing and talking with those RAF who visited him.”

“Hmmmm.”

“You can’t see that the RAF connects everything?”

“With respect, boss, I see nothing in Boss Hookham’s behavior that would have been different if
Boss Bradshaw
had
not
been in the RAF, but just a man he met first time that night.”

Kramer flicked his cigarette into the road, and searched his jumble of thoughts for the right answer to that. “It’s what got them talking together, man!”

“And what did they talk about? Fishing? Weren’t they fishermen, too?”

Kramer slumped. The rats of sweet reason had enjoyed a field day with this hunch of his, nibbling and gnawing and shredding it until very little remained. Now Zondi had gone and added another cageful, and he’d had enough.

“Look, you can’t bloody argue that the bullets don’t connect Bradshaw and Hookham!” he said angrily.

“The bullets are the connection between the man with the gun and the people he shot,” said Zondi. “They prove nothing else. God gave us both red blood in our veins, but that does not make us brothers.”

Such dispassionate logic was irrefutable. “You win,” sighed Kramer, his voice tired and dull.

“No, Lieutenant, maybe you are right,” said Zondi, as he slipped out of the car and closed his door quietly. “Tomorrow we must check those initials,” he continued at Kramer’s window. “I cannot explain it either, for there is so much more we must have in our heads first, but I am beginning to have that same feeling you spoke about.”

Strydom’s Thursday also seemed to hold fresh promise from the moment he snatched up his hall telephone at its very first ring. “Hello? Dr. Meyer? Don’t say it! You’ve rung back so quick because you can’t—
you have?
Gas gangrene? And when are you going to amputate? Hell, that’s marvelous, hey? No, no, don’t get anybody to deliver it, I’ll come round myself personally. Ja, it could be crucial to the case. Leave no stone unturned, as they say! No, what I’m actually doing is confirming an expert opinion. Mine. Ja, ja, absolutely! Can’t be too careful—it’s a thing laymen never appreciate. And many, many thanks again, you hear? Good night!”