The Blood of an Englishman (2 page)

“My boot’s stuck—it’s absolutely infuriating. I’d just bought a
mountain
of things to put in it, but I simply can’t get the key to work. It won’t even go in.”

“I’ll leave you to it,” said Sam, turning away to his office.

“Here,” the woman said, handing over her key-ring. “I’ve left it over there, and now I must dash, or I’ll be late for my hair appointment.”

Droopy wandered out and down the road a short way. The first thing that struck him about the car was that dogs had been peeing all over the back tires and the back bumper. This was a bit strange, but shouldn’t have affected the lock. Then he crouched down and inspected the keyhole.

“Hi, Droopy!”

He jumped. It was Glenda, bursting forth out of a thin blouse and quite unrepentant. His grip tightened on the shaft of the No. 8 ring spanner, which he still had with him.

“You wanted to talk to me, Auntie says. I hope it’s not going to be so embarrassing like the last time!”

“Look!” said Droopy, before words failed him.

It was no good, his common sense insisted. There was nothing he could say that would change what she’d done. All he could pray was that something else would come along to take people’s minds off it, although that was the trouble with a back street, nothing ever happened.

“Forget it,” mumbled Droopy.

Glenda crouched beside him, nudging his left shoulder with her right. “What’s the problem?”

“You’ve got eyes, haven’t you?”

“Ja. There’s a bit of matchstick stuck in there.”

Droopy hadn’t noticed that. He squinted, put down his spanner and felt in his pockets.

“Hairpin,” said Glenda, handing him one of her own.

“That’s no bloody good.”

“You haven’t tried it.”

He tried it. The matchstick only became wedged more firmly. “Bloody kids!” he grunted. “Trust them to.…”

“Oh ja, it’s always kids—blame the kids! How do you know?”

“Who else?”

“Let me try, Droopy.”

“You can push off, as far as I’m concerned!”

Glenda stayed right where she was. She sniffed. She wrinkled her nose and made a face. “Hell, there’s a horrible smell around here,” she said, disgustedly. “Where does this car come from—a farm? Must be stuck to the wheels.”

“I said, push off!”

“Ach, Droopy man, you mustn’t be like that, hey?” She laid her soft hand on his gnarled fist, and a tingle shot right through him. “You must learn to take a joke!”

“What joke?” he scoffed. “Since when is what you did a joke?”

“You mean me telling everyone about the tomatoes?”

Her audacity took his breath away. “You need your panties pulled down and your bottom spanked, young lady!”

“Are you offering?”

“Glenda Koekemoor!”

“But naturally it was a joke,” she went on blithely, taking the hairpin from his nerveless fingers and trying her luck with the lock. “It wouldn’t have been funny if you was
really
a dirty old man, would it? But you’re not—in fact, you’re probably the most
unsexy
man in the whole of Trekkersburg.”

“Hey?”

“Do you think anyone would dare to play up to you if you weren’t—you know, sort of a nice nothing? They’d run a mile first!”

“I—I—”

“My boyfriend could open this easy—he just gives it a boot, and the thing flies up.”

“I—”

“Mind you, it’s got him in trouble with the cops before!”

“God Almighty,” gasped Droopy, hurt as he’d never been hurt before, “who are you calling a ‘nice nothing,’ hey? Who are you to judge a man—?”

“Ah!” Glenda laughed delightedly. “So you’re admitting now that there
was
some guilty feeling in the way you blushed red as a beetroot?”

That did it. Droopy found the No. 8 ring spanner back in his grasp, and all he wanted to do was hit her and hit her, to hurt her just as she was hurting him with every lash of her wicked tongue. More than that, he wanted to smash her whole head to pieces, splattering the brain that could think such things, penetrate so deeply into him, all over the road.

“Droopy!” cried Glenda, jumping up in alarm.

And he struck, delivering a terrible blow to the lock. The boot of the car sprang open, a frightful smell choked the air, and there before them lay what was undoubtedly the dirtiest old man either of them had ever seen. He was covered in mud, excrement and blood, and he had his hands tied behind him in a knot tightened by some hideous strength, for the bones were broken. Lastly, he was dead.

Glenda screamed and screamed and the whole street rushed to her rescue.

N
EWS OF THE
horrifying discovery in Gillespie Street, momentous as it would prove, did not reach CID headquarters in Boomplaas Street as quickly as it might have done. There were several reasons for this. When uniformed officers of the South African Police first arrived on the scene, they were faced by a considerable public order problem. And then, once they had brought the crowd under control, one of their dogs had disgraced itself by biting the sergeant in charge, whose over-excited manner apparently aroused its suspicion. So for a time, while all this was being sorted out and a new chain of command established, it was a case of the
status quo
in the CID building. Some detectives grumbled over their paperwork, others chatted up the typists, and a few doggedly pursued enquiries.

He must have been sitting there so long and so still that the fly thought it would be okay to come and lay some eggs in him. What the hell else was it doing, poking its nose up his left nostril? And then having a dither, none too sure if the other nostril wasn’t the better bet. It was in his right nostril that Lieutenant Tromp Kramer, of the Trekkersburg Murder and Robbery Squad, had his cold, and there was certainly less of a draught in there. As a matter of fact, he hadn’t breathed through that particular nostril in three days. The fly moved across.

The prisoner plainly found all this fascinating. He sat pretty still himself, and just stared and sweated a lot.

Kramer stared back and didn’t sweat at all. His fever had left him overnight, and now his sore throat had almost gone too. He felt the fly move upwards and pause. Paper handkerchiefs, each guaranteed softer than the kinky alternative of a baby’s bum, had rubbed his upper lip raw, giving it an unusual sensitivity, and Kramer found it easy to picture what was happening. The fly was standing on five of its legs, scratching its horrible hairy head with the sixth, and wondering if it should toss a coin or something. Another shuffle. It had opted for the left nostril after all, and was tickling its way in against the hairs.

This brought a small, sly smile to the prisoner’s narrow face. Meerkat Marais—Mongoose to his English associates—always liked to think he knew more than you did, and it didn’t much matter what.

Kramer reached for the tissue box without any hint of this movement reaching his head. He spread the tissue out over his right hand. He pinched his nose suddenly, quite hard, and then blew the dead insect into the exact center of the paper square.

“It never fails,” he murmured.

Fully five minutes went by before the prisoner finally stopped thinking about the fly, and broke the silence to ask, in a thin, strained voice, why he had been made to sit on top of the filing cabinet.

Kramer shrugged, and dropped the crumpled tissue into the waste-paper bin at his side. “I heard you have this fear of heights, Meerkat old son.”

“Hey?”

“Ach, I thought we might as well start off in a small way, and see where we go from there. Okay?”

Meerkat went ashen and gave a short, shocked laugh. “This is too way out for me, man!” he said. “I don’t understand! What heights?”

Across the far side of the CID vehicle yard they were building an eighteen-story office block for the Mutual Insurance Company, and the top floor was almost finished. Kramer turned away from his window and looked at the flashily dressed figure perched in handcuffs on his filing cabinet. Meerkat understood all right. He was trembling like a church elder unwrapping dirty photographs of himself.

“Come,” said Kramer, getting to his feet. “I know where there’s a nice stiff breeze.”

“No!”

“Pardon?”

“Be fair, Lieutenant,” Meerkat pleaded. “How many hours have you had me here? Three? And you’ve—”

“Just the two, Meerkat.”

“Two then, but what have you asked me? Nothing! How am I supposed to know what you want? How am I supposed to guess? Hell, it could be
anything
, couldn’t it?”

Kramer sat down again behind his bare desk. “No, man, it couldn’t,” he said. “Personally, I only deal in murder and robbery, so if I bring a guy in to talk to me, the topic’s already decided. If I don’t say anything, hell, that’s just because it’s not nice to interrupt.”

“Interrupt what?”

“Your flow, Meerkat. Your outpouring. The cleansing of your soul, your great unburdening. Believe me, Meerkat, you will feel a whole lot better for it.”

Meerkat relaxed slightly. “I’m supposed to have something to confess?” he asked with a jittery smile. “This is the first I knew of it!”

“Ja, that’s possible,” agreed Kramer.

The prisoner was a proper little psychopath of the kind that starts at three by pissing in his granny’s hot water bottle, and after that there’s no holding him. People just didn’t matter to Meerkat, and he’d done things to people that didn’t bear
thinking about, all without turning a hair, sometimes without even noticing.

“You’re still not putting me in the picture, Lieutenant.”

“Maybe it’s the other way round.”

“Sorry?”

“Archie Bradshaw—tell me about him.”

Meerkat blinked. “Hell, if you think I had anything to—”

“Tell me!” snapped Kramer. “Tell me everything you know about Archie Bradshaw or two minutes from now you’re going for a ride in a cement bucket.”

Meerkat swallowed hard and squirmed, as though his arse-hole was so tight it was pinching him. “Someone tried to wipe Bradshaw,” he said. “Six days ago, am I right? He was taking his dog for a walk, up by the racecourse, and the shot caught him here in the collar-bone. It stopped inside. He woke up and his dog was licking him. Myself I think it was the blood the dog was—” He cleared his throat nervously, seeing Kramer’s fists bunch. “Ja, well anyway, he got in his car and went home. It was automatic drive so that was all right. His wife saw all the blood and she asked him what happened. He wouldn’t tell her. Even when the doctor came, he wouldn’t say. Then they took him to hospital and he had an operation. After he came round, he saw the cops here because they’d found the bullet, and still he wouldn’t come out with it. The doctors all said he was in deep shock, most probably. It wasn’t till the next morning that his wife heard his story the first time. Bradshaw said he had been walking by the trees when he heard this noise in the bushes. He looked round, and all he caught sight of was this massive bloke—like a gorilla, he said, or maybe a giant—with this silver gun in his hand. He had never in his life seen anyone so huge, he said, and it was such a shock he just stayed turned like that. Then he saw the gun go off, before he had a chance to say anything, and it was like a—”

“Meerkat!”

“Ja, Lieutenant?”

“You’re telling me what was in the papers!”

“But—but—”

“Come on, man,” said Kramer, getting up again and walking round to face Meerkat at close range, “let’s hear what the whole town doesn’t already know about. Let’s hear what you—”

“Now, listen, please listen to me, Lieutenant Kramer sir, all I know about this matter is what I have also read in the
Gazette
—and that’s the honest truth.”

Kramer took a small plastic bag out of his pocket and dangled the contents an inch from Meerkat’s nose, making his eyes cross. “What’s that, hey? A point-thirty-two revolver bullet.”

“And so?”

“A point-thirty-two isn’t really so common, is it?”

“Maybe not, but—”

“Bear that in mind,” said Kramer, and returned to his seat behind the desk. “There has been talk going round that a certain individual is in illegal possession of a point-thirty-two silver-plated, hammerless, five-chamber—”

“Me?” Meerkat tried to make his laugh sound incredulous. “Things must be bad if you’re looking my way, man! Firstly, I’ve never even met this bloke Bradshaw, and—”

“He swears he’d never seen this bloke before either.”

“Oh ja? And do I look like a giant?”

“The mind can exaggerate these things, as you can imagine. In my opinion, Meerkat,
anybody
pointing a gun straight at you can look a big bloke. I remember a kaffir that came for me and Zondi one time, out at Peacevale after an armed robbery, and he was as big as King Kong till we put some holes in him.”

“Even so—”

“He was twelve.”

Meerkat looked at the calendar on the wall with the blood spots. “Six days ago would be the tenth,” he said. “I’ve got an alibi for the tenth.”

“What’s her name?”

“Staff Nurse Turner.”

“And where were you and Staff Nurse Turner at the time in question? In the sack?”

“I was. I was going to have a wisdom tooth out.”

“Impossible,” said Kramer.

Another fly came to trouble him. He swatted it with the docket on
Archibald Meredith Bradshaw, Attempted Murder
, and wished he had chosen some other way of making a living. In the six days he had been in charge of the case, he had done nothing but chase up one blind alley after another, getting nowhere. Soon his boss, Colonel Muller, would have the right to start asking awkward questions. Had any possible motive for his attack been established?—No. Had anyone been found who had also seen a hulking stranger near the golf course?—No. Had the firearm involved been traced?—No. Had the investigation moved forward one inch since last Friday?—No. Had Kramer begun to lose his grip?—Very possibly, yes.

“Meerkat.…”

“Ja, Lieutenant?”

“I’m going to be very straight with you. I’m in trouble over this case, and my boss is beginning to say a lot of things that are cruel and unkind. So the best plan for me is just to write out a statement—which you will naturally sign—saying that you sold this thirty-two of yours to a kingsize loony you’d never in your life seen before. I know that’s not the whole story, but—”