The Blood of an Englishman (18 page)

“No, they did not,” said Zondi, with a grin. “That is one of many, many things that I have learned this morning. Hau, I am ready to be a garden boy. Lieutenant! I know now the names of every flower! I also have learned the meaning of the word ‘flak’ and what is signified by ‘coming out of the sun.’ ”

Kramer nodded. “And the bastard did come out of the sun, Mickey! Old habits die hard, perhaps! But Hookham could only have guessed that—all right, all right, subconsciously—if his mind had already started to put things together.”

“Hmmmm.”

“Look, man, this new ‘hmmmm’ habit of yours is beginning to get right up my nose, hey?”

“I was just wondering if Boss Hookham would not automatically say that, because as Timmy has taught me, that was the
only
easy way of attacking a fighter pilot.”

“Okay, I’ll accept that,” said Kramer, handing Zondi one of two cigarettes he had just lit. “But let’s go on from there. He also spoke of risking a ‘final sortie,’ and when you take that with the various descriptions of his behavior, how do you read it then? Do you think that flying club social simply ‘lifted him out of himself?’ ”

Zondi remained in silent thought.

“And remember, Mickey, his thoughts of his bereavement seemed pushed aside. Clear your mind of everything else! In a
nutshell, from then until he suddenly decided to get far away from here, how did he seem to behave? Ach, what makes
you
feel very alive?”

“Danger, boss,” replied Zondi without hesitation.

“Exactly, hey? Hookham smelled danger at that social! He went looking for these two other men, perhaps to find out if they felt the same way, and then he could be right when Bradshaw was shot. That’s what made him shake a bit! Probably it was the same men he saw again on the Monday night, and by the Tuesday he was wanting out. Then he saw how upset he’d made Mrs. Westford and Timmy, and must have wanted to stay a little longer. So what does he propose? That he will
risk
one more sortie! He will take one more look and see if a theory of his is correct.”

“And if it is wrong after all, then he need not escape a danger which isn’t real,” continued Zondi, nodding. “But one thing strikes me which is strange.”

“Uh huh?”

“Why didn’t Boss Hookham come and see you, Lieutenant? There was an appeal in the Sunday papers he took out to that house, and Colonel Muller had stated clearly that we knew of no motive.”

“Put yourself in his shoes, man. If he suspected some ordinary motive, okay! But what sort of motive connects two men whose only link is their membership of the RAF? A pretty crazy one, if you ask me!”

“But Boss Hookham wasn’t alive to make the—”

“Ach, Zondi, don’t start buggering me around, hey? I’m saying Hookham smelled a motive when he smelled danger, but it all seemed so fantastic he couldn’t be sure he was right, even after Bradshaw was shot. In fact, he was
never
sure, hence the final sortie which could have put his mind at rest, dispelling his fears and letting him stay on here.”

“Would a brave man run though, Lieutenant?”

Kramer grunted irritably. “He didn’t in the end, did he? He bloody took that risk, my friend, and it didn’t come off! Now he’ll never run anywhere. But there’s another thing about even brave men that you should remember: we can all fight an enemy if he is clearly marked out to us; only, when we can’t be sure who he is, whether he’s even real or not, then we can run away from our own imaginings, cursing ourselves for fools. Have you never been a child in a dark room at night?”

“Such poetry, boss,” chuckled Zondi. “What is the next step? The two men Boss Hookham went to see?”

“Damn right,” said Kramer, overtaking a traffic cop.

Zondi winced and slid down in his seat with his feet propped on the dashboard. “I feel very much alive, Lieutenant,” he murmured. “And you?”

C
OLONEL
M
ULLER HAD
reached the point where he needed every square centimeter of space on his enormous desktop, simply to do his job. Information had been flooding in from all directions, sparked off by his brilliantly worded appeal in the
Trekkersburg Gazette
that morning, and he had enough stuff about gunshots, guns and giants to keep him busy for a week. That was the big snag, of course. None of the information had something so conclusive about it that his team of detectives had put a mark beside it in red. A typical example of this inconclusiveness was a report from an up-country farmer who had heard four gunshots on the night in question, only there had been a ten-minute interval between the first shot and the other three, and anyway, the first had sounded more like a rifle, while his wife was sure it was only three shots, fired at irregular intervals, and his son, a neighboring farmer, had claimed to have found some guinea-fowl feathers on his land. If one multiplied this sort of thing by fifty—and more reports were coming in all the time—the mind boggled at how long it would take to check all these stories out. And as for the tall tales of giants he was receiving, there the mind
cringed
; some people had quite missed the fact that the actual description was not bizarre at all, there were plenty of good, strong South African men that size. Yet the phones were constantly ringing with anonymous tips about gargantuan malcontents, rugby-players who could tear
the head off an ox, and one meter maid in Durban had been the subject of several more obviously malicious calls. That left the great pile of stuff on .32 Smith & Wesson revolvers, most of it plainly from people who didn’t know a revolver from a water pistol, and many of them seemed to have very dubious reasons for suggesting searches under so-and-so’s bed. Colonel Muller had, in fact, also reached the point where he was looking for an easy way out of all this—and for somewhere to put his tray, simply to have his lunch.

Galt appeared at just the right moment. “Allow me, sir,” he whispered, and lifted a pile of papers aside. “Curry and rice, sir? You have no idea how that stuff stains the stomach walls.”

“I’m glad I haven’t,” said Colonel Muller, sitting down and tucking the paper napkin into his collar. “I would also be glad, unless this is very important, to get my meal out of the way before you go any further.”

“Well, it
might
be very important, sir, provided we can support the notion with enough other factors.”

“What’s the topic, briefly?”

“Vegetable matter, sir.”

“Ach, then that’s okay, hey? You just fire away.”

Galt produced a number of small labeled packets. “These are all little snippets of things I have found on Hookham’s clothes,” he explained. “Of particular interest are the samples taken from here and there under the straps of his sandals where they attach to the sole. I have identified soil, dry horse manure, grass seeds and fragments of the wattle-bark chips they use on the soft-track around the racecourse. None of which is conclusive in itself, of course, but taken together they suggest something rather interesting. Now do you remember there was a little stream running near where Bradshaw was shot? My prize exhibit, Colonel Muller, is this.” And he handed over a tiny packet with a minute green speck in it.

“Salad?” speculated Colonel Muller, jovially.

“A water plant, sir—portion of its leaf. Moreover, from the condition of this specimen, we are confident that it was alive and growing within the last forty-eight hours. Had the period been any greater, then.… Well, it wasn’t.”

“And you are certain of that?”

“Totally.”

Colonel Muller bit a chunk from a piece of cheese, studied the even grooves his teeth had made in it, and willed himself to proceed with great caution. “They’ve got wattle-bark chips down at the show ground,” he said. “Horse manure is used on a lot of gardens, and soil—well, soil lies around everywhere. Is this water plant special to the stream by the race course?”

“It’s very common, Colonel—found in streams, dams and rivers all over the province. But, when all these things are taken in conjunction.…”

“They suggest Hookham was down at the racecourse on Tuesday night—the night he got murdered?”

Galt closed his eyes and opened them again.

“Well, there were one or two reports of gunfire around the course,” said Colonel Muller, digging back into a stack. “No, I’m wrong: three reports. A single shot heard in each case, and attributed at the time to some kid with a two-two after wood pigeon.”

“The ground on that side is very uneven, Colonel. We might have a little acoustic problem there.”

“Ja, but.…” Colonel Muller frowned at his plate. “I can’t understand what would make Hookham go there at that time of the day. Nobody has reported seeing his car or anything.”

“After dark,” replied Galt. “Has Lieutenant Kramer picked up anything that might make this seem more likely?”

“He could’ve done, I suppose,” Colonel Muller replied, getting up to pace restlessly. “I’ll just see if his car’s in the vehicle yard.” He peered out of the window. “No, dammit! Still not back. But I’ll grab him the moment he comes in.”

“Thank you, sir. I’d like to think my hunch is justified.”

Colonel Muller waited at the window for a little longer after Galt had left. Then, taking a grip on his impatience, he went back to finish his lunch. The curry and rice were excellent, the bowl of fruit salad wasn’t bad, but hunt as he might, he couldn’t find his piece of cheese anywhere.

The honorary secretary of the Trekkersburg Flying Club was a very businesslike young man. His name was Robert du Plooi, and when he wasn’t flying a Tri-pacer at the weekend, he managed a firm that hired out “bleepers” to people who were still on the long Post Office waiting-list for telephones of their own.

“Our phone number is their phone number, in effect,” he explained, as he took Kramer through into his air-conditioned office. “If somebody wants them, the call comes into our control room, which is manned twenty-four hours a day, and we ‘bleep’ the client. After we have passed on the caller’s number, the client then uses a call box or the neighbors’ phone or what have you. Couldn’t you blokes use something like it?”

“Ach, not really, Mr. Du Plooi.”

“But surely it’s time the South African Police started carrying personal radios?”

“Ja, there’s a pilot scheme going on up in Johannesburg, but I sort of prefer my freedom.”

Du Plooi barked a short laugh. “I’m with you, Lieutenant! End of sales-talk. You want this list of names given their addresses?”

“If possible, hey?”

“Find a seat then, and I’ll run through it.”

Kramer sat down and watched Du Plooi pick up a gold Parker ballpen and start to write. He was a good-looking young Afrikaner; sandy hair, bottle-green eyes, dimpled chin, new suit, and his left ankle had a creak in it. The chrome-framed
photograph on his desk showed a very pretty girl holding a baby.

“There, Lieutenant,” said Du Plooi, briskly, handing the list back. “They’re all our ex-RAF members, I notice. This can’t be connected in some way with poor old Bonzo Hookham, could it?”

“Why leap to that conclusion, Mr. Du Plooi?” asked Kramer, checking the addresses and finding that three men lived in outlying districts.

“Why not? Blokes with something in common, up to a point.”

Kramer looked up. “Up to what point, exactly?”

“Well, Hookham was one of the glory boys we always hear about. You know the kind of thing: operating from an airfield in the English countryside, back to base in the morning, beer in the pub at lunch-time, a WAAF in a haystack before supper, cosy billets, all the home comforts. Four of the five on your list—that’s excluding old Ernie Wilson—were with 104 and 142 Squadrons of 205 Group. Not in Lancasters either, but Wellingtons.”

“Oh ja?”

“Sorry, I’ll explain properly. They carried on their offensive from Africa, lived in tents, had quite a rough time of it while they hammered away at Italy, Greece, places like Hungary and Yugoslavia, not touching Northern Europe. Ja, I’m sure I’m right in saying they never went anywhere near Germany, for instance. They did a fantastic job but, as you’ve shown yourself, hardly anybody seems to have heard of them.”

“Uh huh, that’s often the way,” murmured Kramer, tightening up. His mind had just been infected by the germ of an idea, and he needed a moment to run tests on it. “You’ve seen some service yourself?”

“A little. I flew a helicopter gunship in Rhodesia for a while, donated a foot to the cause and landed up here. If you’re
wondering why we have this gang of 104 and 142 blokes on our doorstep, there’s a little story to go with that. They all seem to have got a taste for Africa, like lots of people do, and—”

“This Ernie Wilson,” Kramer broke in, “where was he based?”

“Scotland, I think.”

“But bombing Germany as well? A ‘Terrorflieger?’ ”

Du Plooi laughed. “Good God, where did you pick that one up? Have you been reading Deighton’s novel?”

“I got it from a man,” replied Kramer, “who told me that Germans would butcher a ‘Terrorflieger’ on sight.”

Young Du Plooi was no fool; he sat forward in his chair and the lobes of his ears went white. “All right,” he said, “Ernie flew over Germany, and so did Hookham and Bradshaw. But if you’re trying to tell me that there’s a link between that fact and what’s happened—”

“Since your club social?” said Kramer.

There was a bemused silence while Du Plooi tried to adjust. A copy of that morning’s
Gazette
lay on his desk, and he turned it round to read the main headline:
WAR HERO SHOT BY
“
MAD GIANT
”
—Random Killer At Work, Warns Police Chief
. Then he sank back into his black leather, executive’s swivel chair and shrugged.

“You obviously know far more about all this than I do,” he said apologetically. “I just thought it was a bit of a fluke, that’s all. Perhaps you’d better just ask me questions—if you’ve got any more to ask.”

“Can we start with the social, Mr. Du Plooi?” said Kramer, more certain than ever now that no fluke was involved.

“I didn’t see much of that. As secretary, I’m organizing a lot of the time—seeing the drinks don’t run out, that sort of thing.”