The Blood of an Englishman (3 page)

“Hey?”
gasped Meerkat, almost toppling from his perch.

“Unless, of course, you can prove in some way that I’ve got it wrong somewhere.”

Kramer heard running on the stairs and glanced towards the door. Two seconds later, a trim, neatly built Zulu, dressed in a zippy black suit with silver threads in it, and wearing a snap-down trilby, skidded to a halt on the verandah and put his
head in the door. It was his assistant, Bantu Detective Sergeant Mickey Zondi.

“Don’t tell me,” sighed Kramer, “let me guess. Her husband came home unexpectedly and didn’t believe a—”

“There has been a murder, Lieutenant. The Colonel was trying to get you on the phone, but all the time it is engaged.”

Kramer replaced his receiver in its cradle. “What kind? Black on black?”

“A white boss—the body has just been found.”

“Where?”

“Gillespie Street.”

Meerkat watched Kramer pick up his jacket and slouch towards the door. “Just a sec, Lieutenant!”

“Ja, old friend?”

“What’s going to happen to me?”

“That,” said Kramer, as he left with Zondi, “is a question you must ask yourself over and over.”

The traffic was heavy for a Wednesday, and Zondi was forced to keep his speed down. They traveled two blocks without speaking, each man absorbed in private conjecture over what awaited them in Gillespie Street, then the Chevrolet stopped at a red traffic light.

“That reminds me,” grunted Kramer. “How are you making out on that clown who was knifed down at Mama Bhengu’s whorehouse?”

“Not so good, boss. I’ve found the murder weapon, that’s all. It was an old hacksaw blade sharpened up.”

“Uh huh. At least that’s a start. Me, I’ve got nothing.”

Zondi clucked with his tongue and shook his head sympathetically. “Maybe I should go to Boss Bradshaw’s house again and talk more with the servants.”

“Waste of time.”

“What about that lead on the thirty-two?”

“Waste of time as well. And do you know the only dirt on Bradshaw I’ve been able to come up with so far? That once he swindled an old lady over some gold coins she had, only her son found out and Bradshaw paid up. Great, hey? Tell me one antique dealer who doesn’t try little tricks like that from time to time.”

The lights changed and they rolled forward. “But what about the silver that Housebreaking traced to his shop, boss?”

“He had a good explanation, they tell me, so they didn’t press charges. Make no mistake, Mickey, this Bradshaw’s a hard man, and there’s lot of people in this city who’ll call him a bully, a bastard, but there’s not one of them who can say why anyone would want to kill him.”

“And so?”

“And so I’m coming round to the Colonel’s idea that it must have just been some loony that took a pot-shot at Bradshaw. You tell me what other theory makes sense.”

“Maybe this man will try again.”

Kramer snorted. “Christ, have a heart! Haven’t I got enough on my plate already, now this new one’s come up? No, it was a loony, I’m certain of it, and lightning doesn’t strike in the same place twice.”

“Boss Bradshaw is a tall tree,” Zondi remarked primly, “and there is a saying among my people—”

“Bullshit,” interrupted Kramer, “you’re making this up!”

They laughed together, then peered over the cars in front of them, searching for the lane that provided a short-cut to Gillespie Street. This was nearly always a good moment, Kramer thought, and not unlike the feeling a man had just before meeting a blind date. It carried the same catch clause, however, or perhaps he was simply becoming jaded, but it had been a long time since a body had come up to his expectations.

“You should bloody see it!” enthused Sergeant Bang-bang Bronkhorst, who could swear in court he’d never once hit a
prisoner, because he always hit them twice. “Yirra, Lieutenant, this one is
disgusting
—it could make a hyena vomit.”

“You look all right to me, Bang-bang.”

“Sorry? But as I was saying, this old bloke is covered in his doings, there’s blood about an inch thick, and a big hole—same size as my fist—in the back of his head!”

“Uh huh. Who is he?”

“Hell,
I
don’t know, Lieutenant! I’m really a replacement here because Fritz went native and bit old Willem on the bum, and there was shambles till HQ radioed through to me in my van.”

Kramer frowned. He didn’t know about the police dog, still less that its name was Fritz, and his faith in the level-headedness of the uniformed branch was being severely shaken. He started to walk towards the green Rover parked on the other side of Gillespie Street, but Bang-bang caught his arm.

“Can that wait a minute, sir? I thought maybe you’d like to see this witness first, seeing as he’s being taken to hospital.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

“Deep shock, Lieutenant.”

“Not another one,” Kramer muttered, shaking off the restraining hand. “All right, where is he?”

They skirted the rear of the crowd and went into a small garage workshop, where a bald-headed, rosy-cheeked man of about fifty was sitting on an upturned oil drum in soiled overalls. Around him hovered a blustery type with a big mustache, another mechanic who was young and mean about the eyes, and a scatty-looking female of eighteen or so. He was humming.

“See what I mean about deep shock?” whispered Bang-bang. “His name’s Stephenson.”

“CID, Mr. Stephenson—I’m Lieutenant Kramer, Murder and Robbery Squad.”

“You’ve come to the right place!” said the blusterer. “I’m Sam Collins, by the way, and this is my place of business.
Droopy here—er, Mr. Stephenson—is the mechanic I put on the job, and he’s the one who found it, you know! The body.”

“You’re going to have your picture in all the papers, Droopy!” giggled the girl.

“I knows,” murmured Stephenson. “That’s what I’ll be famous for. It’s a miracle.” And he went on humming.

“Can you tell me exactly what happened?” Kramer asked Stephenson.

“Simple,” said Collins. “I was outside checking the petrol pumps when this lady comes up and says she’d just been to the discount warehouse, and she can’t open her boot. You know the discount just round the back of here?”

“Naturally the Lieutenant knows!” snapped Bang-bang. “He’s CID, isn’t he?”

“Keep your hair on, hey? I’m only trying to help! So I said to Mr. Stephenson here, ‘Go and take a look, Droopy,’ and no sooner is my back turned than this lady goes rushing off. To tell you the truth, I thought to myself at the time that her behavior seemed suspicious. Didn’t I even say to you, Doreen, how suspicious I was?”

“I don’t—well, I can’t remember, Mr. Collins.”

Collins patted her shoulder and looked soulfully at Kramer. “She’s in a terrible state, poor Doreen,” he said. “Terrible.”

“Uh huh. Then I take it you have no idea who this woman was? She wasn’t a regular customer?”

“With a Rover?” remarked the other mechanic scornfully. “Can’t you see all we get in here are old crocks?”

“We get
Land
-Rovers,” Collins cut in huffily. “That’s true,” confirmed Bang-bang.

“Jesus,” said Kramer.

There was a hush, and Stephenson looked up at him with a bland smile. “The lady’s name is Mrs. Lillian Digby-Smith,” he said. “Or at least that’s the name inside the leather thing on her key-ring.” He dug the key-ring out of his pocket.

“Evidence!” said Bang-bang. “Pass it over, man.”

Kramer intercepted the pass, checked the name on the tag, and dropped the key-ring in with his tissues. “Can you describe Mrs. Digby-Smith to me?”

“Tall and skinny with red lips,” said Stephenson.

“Young? Old? Middling?”

“Er, oldish really.”

“Hair?”

“White hair. She said she had a hair appointment.”

“Anything else?”

“No, not really.” And he went back to humming.

Kramer turned to the scatty-looking girl, who was squirming uneasily under her employer’s comforting caresses. “How many places are there for hair near here? Could you give a list of them to this sergeant?”

“Well—er, yes, I suppose so.”

“Good. When the young lady’s done that for you, Sergeant, I want you to organize a search.”

“Gladly, Lieutenant,” said Bang-bang, self-importantly. “Just you leave that to me, sir!”

Kramer thanked Stephenson for his help, received a sunny smile in return, and went to take a look at the deceased, ignoring a curious delaying tactic on the part of Bang-bang Bronkhorst.

The crowd, which included an old lady carrying a doll of all things, parted willingly, avid for another glimpse.

“Bloody Bronkhorst,” a young constable was muttering, as he struggled to open the boot. “Why did you have to shut it again so hard, you old fool? Hell!
Hello
, sir!”

Kramer could see that the battered lock was probably the problem. He took a step closer, raised his right foot and kicked, expertly springing the boot open. Immediately a group of uniformed officers gathered round to screen the boot’s contents from the public gaze, and he crouched down to peer inside.

At first, it looked much like any other dead body—breathtaking in its own way, of course, but nothing special, and he had the advantage of a blocked nose. Then he saw that it far exceeded his expectations. He saw the arm bones fractured by a knot that must have been tightened by nothing less than a giant of a man, a human gorilla—the same sort of monster, in fact, as Archie Bradshaw had described.

With an instinctive shudder, Kramer closed the boot, thought for a moment, and then went to tell Zondi.

A
FTER A HECTIC
twenty minutes chasing round all the hair salons within easy walking distance of Gillespie Street, Mrs. Lillian Digby-Smith was finally run to ground at Jonty’s, a high-class establishment offering a wide range of beauty treatments. It was rumored that a tarantula had once strayed in there, to emerge three hours later with a blue rinse, eight colors of eye shadow and legs like Betty Grable. It was also rumored that the husbands of half the socialites in Trekkersburg had received the bill—and, what was more, that they’d paid up without demur, looking grateful.

Kramer liked the feel of the plush purple carpet beneath his feet, the svelte look of the dollies who worked there, and the mildly aphrodisiac effect induced by the smell of hot hair and henna. He especially liked the way one petite redhead studied him with sly approval in a mirror, running her cornflower eyes over him like fingers. Jonty wasn’t much to his taste though.

The proprietor wafted over to him. “So
you’re
the detective chappie we’ve all been waiting for?
Super
.” And he gave the chiffon scarf around his neck a flip with the back of his hand.

“Listen, cuddle bunny,” said Kramer, “where’s the lady?”

“Listen,” lisped Jonty, leaning intimately towards him, “one more crack like that, you bastard, and you get my knee in your balls.” Then he gave a fairy wave towards the innermost
row of curtained cubicles. “She’s down at the end there, poor darling—I
do
hope this is nothing serious!”

Grinning, Kramer continued on his way; he had caught a hint of heartlessness in Jonty that appealed to him. Two uniformed constables slipped out of the last cubicle and gave nervous nods of welcome.

“You haven’t approached her yet?” asked Kramer.

“No, sir,” they whispered in unison.

“Fine. Tell you what, go and get yourselves a shampoo or something, but stay on the premises.”

Mrs. Digby-Smith was lying on a low couch in the cubicle, leafing through a copy of
Vogue
in search of distraction. Her expression didn’t alter one jot when she was told that the body of a man had been found in the boot of her car. She sat up, that was all. But when Kramer added that, to the best of his recollection, the body was that of a man in his late fifties, with wavy gray hair and a big brown mole behind his right ear, fine cracks began to appear in the wax mask she was wearing.

“The point is, lady,” Kramer went on, “have you any knowledge of such an individual—or of how he came to be there?”

“Who?”

Kramer repeated the description, which was rather a limited one as he wanted the district surgeon to see the stiff
in situ
before anyone touched anything. “Oh ja, and he has on these beige trousers, sandals, and a sports shirt with an unusual label on it. Let me see … St. Michael?”

“Dear God.…”

Kramer waited. He waited what felt like a very long time. “You know this man?” he asked eventually.

Still Mrs. Digby-Smith made no reply. Then she began to weep—not to cry, for there was no sound with it. Her staring gray eyes, fixed on the lilac curtain behind him, simply welled up and spilled over. Kramer had seen this kind of thing happen before; one way or another, it had been his lot in life to go
round upsetting quite a few women. Naturally, each time it was slightly different, and this time was no exception. The tears usually brimmed the lower lid, fell, slid slowly down the cheeks, and then slipped out of sight below the jaw-line. These tears, however, brimmed the lower lid, fell, shot off the yellow wax, and made a pattern of splotches in the light green smock protecting her dress.

Mrs. Digby-Smith was raining.

“Look, lady,” said Kramer, sitting down on a manicurist’s stool beside the couch, “I can appreciate this might not be so nice for you, but if you know the identity of—”

“No!”

“No, what? No, you don’t know his name?”

The eyes went on staring. They dried up and took on a glaze. The mouth, cleansed of lipstick and bloodless as well, set hard in an irregular line across the gap in the wax, like an appendix scar turned sideways. It certainly didn’t look any more likely to unseal itself suddenly.

Kramer glanced about him. He noticed, on the little locker at the head of the couch, a pad of air-mail paper, a packet of airmail envelopes, half a letter and a small pile of color prints with writing on the back of them. The uppermost photograph had this scrawled behind it in ballpoint:
Bonzo and me in the game reserve—that’s Jack’s shadow!
He turned it over and saw that Jack, a hunched elongation in the foreground, had been the photographer. Posed against the guest huts of a Zululand rest camp, and squinting into the sun, was a couple in outdoor clothing. The person on the left was tall, skinny, white-haired and immediately recognizable as the woman sitting bolt upright before him. The person on the right was a man in his late fifties with wavy gray hair, the same St. Michael shirt, and a pair of very new leather sandals. There was an obvious conclusion to be drawn straight away, but Kramer made a closer scrutiny of the photograph before returning it to the pile on the locker.
By then there was no doubt in his mind that the couple shared too many facial characteristics for their likeness to one another to be coincidental.