The Blood of an Englishman (5 page)

“Tip of the iceberg,” said Kramer, and winked at the redhead on his way out.

N2134 N
XUMALO, THE
Zulu constable who assisted Sergeant Van Rensburg at the police mortuary, a small, redbrick building half-hidden down in the weeds behind the barracks, always had a welcome for Zondi. He slipped out of the side door, taking care not to allow the fly-screen to bang shut behind him, and wandered over with a big, happy smile.

“Greetings, Sergeant,” he said. “Many thanks for this.”

“For what?” Zondi echoed, vaguely.

He was watching Sergeant Fanie Prinsloo from Fingerprints examine the interior of the green Rover. The car had been towed to the mortuary by a breakdown lorry from the police garage, and Zondi had hitched a lift on it, hoping to see for himself how tightly the dead man’s wrists had been tied. It was just possible, he conceded, that the evidence of enormous strength might look more convincing than it sounded, but he had his doubts.

“Many thanks,” repeated Nxumalo, tearing a cigarette exactly in two—for he was a poor man with several wives—and offering Zondi one half of it. “Up until now, this morning has been terrible. Dr. Strydom was not coming in, so Sergeant Van, the old baboon, decided we must have what he calls ‘spring clean.’ Do you understand what ‘spring clean’ means?”

Zondi nodded, having a memory of some such thing from his early days as a domestic servant. “It is when the whites
untidy the whole house, make you wash even the walls, and then tell you to tidy up again.”

“Ah, so it is a custom,” sighed Nxumalo, as though this explained a great deal.

They lit up, sharing the same match, and watched the fingerprint expert transfer his attention to the exterior of the car, with special reference to the area around the boot lock.

“You’s an idle kaffir!” mimicked Nxumalo, almost fondly—he had worked with Van Rensburg for many years.”

“What’s this arm doing here, hey? How long have we had this arm?”

“Hau, boss, many many months—since the big train crash when it hit the petrol tankers.”

“Don’t give me excuses, hey? Chuck the bloody thing out! And this head? What about this head you’ve stuck down at the back of the fridge here? You thought I wouldn’t see it, hey?”

“That head, boss, is the one without a body—you remember, the patrol found the dogs fighting over it in Peacevale township, and Dr. Strydom said it was cut off with a penknife.”

“But it’s just some idle kaffir’s head, Nxumalo! You see what happens to idle kaffirs?”

“I do, my boss, only Dr. Strydom said I must not—”

“Look, Nxumalo, this is
my
mortuary, not so? If he wants this head so much, then he can take it home and put it in his deep freeze! Why should I have it cluttering up the place? The junk that man collects! Just chuck it out, you hear me?”

Zondi laughed, and blew a smoke-ring.

“On and on from eight o’clock this morning,” grumbled Nxumalo, “with not one minute’s rest.”

“Kaffir!”

“Yes, my boss?”

“Have you looked down this slit behind the sink, you bloody monkey? There’s old blood in there that’s
caked
. And what’s all these organs doing in these bottles under here? You’ve not been
making bloody preserves for your bloody family, have you? I want this slab so clean I can eat my lunch off it—you hear?”

“Yes, boss; straight away, boss—but where do I chuck these things, boss?”

“Chuck them where you bloody like! Put them in with the stiffs that are being collected this morning, down by the feet where nobody’ll notice! Only get your bloody finger out, do you hear me?”

“Yes, I hear you, my boss.…”

Another smoke-ring. “And now, my brother?” murmured Zondi, wondering when the car’s boot would be opened.

“And now that is all forgotten,” said Nxumalo, sighing gratefully. “Now all the old baboon can think about is this new body you have brought him. He says it comes of a good family, so we must quickly tidy and get the table set nicely for it. I put out the knives, then he told me to bugger off, the rest he would see to himself.”

“Uh huh,” responded Zondi, with a little unconscious mimicry of his own.

Sergeant Prinsloo had just laid aside his fingerprint equipment in apparent disgust and picked up his camera. He opened the boot of the car and recoiled, wrinkling his nose, then took a long, hard look that puckered his lips into a silent whistle. This was too much. Zondi sauntered across and stole a quick glance at the body.

“Hey, Mickey, this isn’t a non-white, you know!” protested Prinsloo. “What do you want here?”

“Does the Sergeant want me to hold his flashgun, sir?”

“No, I can manage—go on, hop it.”

Zondi hopped it. He went back to where Nxumalo was standing, gave a shrug and leaned against the wall again. One glance was less than he had hoped for, but it had been enough to give him the same feeling in the pit of his stomach as the Lieutenant had told him about. Whether this was because of the terrifying strength implicit in the tightness of the knot, or
because there was indeed a link between the Bradshaw case and this murder, he couldn’t tell, yet either way his interest was aroused.

“Nxumalo, be a big friend,” he said, handing over half of a Lucky Strike that he’d tactfully torn in two, “and get me the telephone directory out of the old baboon’s office—there’s an address I want to get from it.” Although Zondi didn’t know a great deal about white people’s surnames, he did know that he’d never heard of a Digby-Smith before, and felt that this should narrow things down a bit. His real problem was hijacking a car.

When Kramer drove his Chevrolet into the gravel car-park outside the mortuary, the only people visible were three youngsters from Forensic, gagging and going green over their minute examination of the Rover’s boot. The body had been removed, and they were placing samples of earth and other, less agreeable manifestations of Mother Nature into plastic envelopes; none had anything of particular note to report so far.

“In fact,” said one of them, “Sarge Prinsloo only managed to lift two sets of prints from the inside, and he says that the ones at the back were all smeared.”

“He’s where? Gone into the mortuary?”

“Correct, sir. Doc Strydom started work about ten minutes ago.”

Kramer nodded and went through the double doors, across the lobby where Nxumalo was fiddling with three coffins, and then through another set of double doors into the post-mortem room itself. He had noticed on previous occasions that the district surgeon bore something of a resemblance to a garden gnome. It was a description that seemed particularly fitting that morning, for Doc Strydom was hopping up and down at the side of a dissecting table exactly like a garden gnome who, after dangling his line in a goldfish pond for ten years, had just had his first strike.

“Trompie!” Strydom exclaimed. “Man, this is the most fascinating one you’ve brought me in a long time!”

“Glad you like it, Doc.”

“Look at these wrist fractures!”

“I’ve seen them. What else is there?”

“Three bullet wounds and a skull fracture!”

“You don’t say?”

Kramer approached over the clatter of wooden duckboards. Prinsloo, with whom he’d fallen out recently, gave him a nervous nod, while Van Rensburg turned on his 300 lb charm with a wide, ingratiating smile, which was like seeing a rent appear in a hot-air balloon. Regrettably, this was not followed by a sudden deflation, a loud rude noise, and the disappearance of his rapidly diminishing form out through the nearest window.

“Morning, Lieutenant!” they said.

He ignored them and turned to the deceased.

Edward “Bonzo” Hookham was lying on the first of five ceramic post-mortem slabs with his head supported by a U-shaped wooden block. The first and most striking thing about him was his pristine cleanliness. The filthy clothing he had been wearing was packed away in plastic bags on the next slab along, and Van Rensburg had obviously been applying his hose assidiously, flushing away the last trace of unpleasantness from the naked form. The next most noticeable thing about him was the relatively small area of the slab he occupied. Kramer put his weight at about 120 lb and his height at no more than 5 ft. 5 in. As for the overall impression he made, it was difficult to choose between a Siamese cat and a bar of coconut ice. Three weeks’ exposure to the South African sun had turned Hookham’s head, hands and feet (save for the marks of his sandal straps) a darkish brown, while the rest of his body was very pale, as became someone from northern climes. Furthermore, it amused Kramer to observe that Hookham’s eyes were a deep blue and frozen in a slight squint. Viewed another way, however,
longitudinally from the feet, Hookham’s right half was white and his left half was pink, giving him that coconut-ice look.

“Hypostasis,” confirmed Strydom, prodding the discoloration with his thumb. “All the blood’s drained to the side we found him lying on, so we can draw two conclusions from that. A: That he’s been dead at least six hours, and B: That he wasn’t left lying around for long before being put in that boot. If you take a look at his shoulder here, you’ll see the clear impression of a bolt-head from the car’s bodywork.”

The octagonal white shape was as decided as a paper cutout. Other pressure points along Hookham’s left side were similarly free of accumulated blood.

“You say at least six hours, Doc, but what’s the upper limit?” asked Kramer. “You’ve taken his temp?”

“Ja, but under the circumstances, it isn’t much help. It was like an oven in that boot, Trompie, and rigor must have set in damn quick—we’ve even got decomposition.”

“No time of death then?”

“I’d say within the last twenty-four hours.”

“You’d say right. It happened last night.”

There was very little fat on Hookham, corroborating what Jonty had said about his being an energetic type, although the only energy left in him now was kinetic. The face was rather boyish, quite pleasant, and dominated by a mustache that Kramer recognized as typically RAF, upswept and cocky, while the thin mouth looked made for laconic remarks.

“Which bullet did he get first, Doc? This hole in his head?”

“Possibly. I was just about to try probing these others in his chest.”

“Fire away then.”

Both entrance wounds were slightly to the right of Hookham’s breastbone. Each was about three-eighths of an inch across and had a dark collar of abrasion, giving them an overall width of half an inch.

“One thing I can tell you right away,” said Strydom, “is that the shirt showed no sign of fouling by smoke or tattooing by unburnt powder grains, so all of these definitely came from over a meter away.” He paused and frowned. “That’s funny, I can’t seem to find the track on this one.…” He tried increasing the angle of the probe to the body, and moved it around gently. “Ah, in we go! It looks as though he took these lying on his back.”

“So the first went through the forehead, and these were added afterwards?” asked Kramer.

“From the angle they went in at, yes, I’d say that was a reasonable assumption.”

“Don’t know why anyone would have bothered,” mumbled Van Rensburg. “The bloke already didn’t have any brain left.”

“That isn’t a handicap to some people,” snapped Strydom, who detested the mortuary sergeant. “And it’s just as well the killer
did
bother, you clown, because there’s no slug for us to recover from the head wound—it went right through.”

“You mean we might have something for Ballistics?” said Kramer, perking up. “No exit wounds in the back?”

“Look for yourself, Tromp—come on, Van Rensburg, get your finger out!”

While the body was being turned over, Prinsloo cleared his throat in the key of a man hoping to make amends. “Lieutenant, sir,” he said respectfully, “can I make a suggestion? There’s this talk that you think this business and the Bradshaw case could be connected. Now if that is so, and the killer made a mess of it with Bradshaw because he used only one shot, then maybe he has pumped in these extra ones this time just to make sure.”

“Ja, that’s possible.”

Strydom ran his hand lightly over Hookham’s back. “Do you know, I think we’re in luck!” he chuckled. “Put on that rubber glove and feel here, Tromp. Sort of a lump, like a cyst.”

Kramer found it easily. “That’s one of the slugs?”

“Pretty sure it is,” said Strydom. “As you know, after bone, skin offers the biggest resistance to a bullet—in fact, only about half those who try to shoot themselves in the heart are successful. The bullet just hits the sternum, and skids off round the rib cage under the skin.”

“Scalpel?” promoted Van Rensburg, officiously, and held one out to him.

Strydom disregarded it and chose another that was identical. “How many times have I got to tell you this isn’t a bloody operating theater, Sergeant? If I’d wanted that life—instead of peace and quiet—then I’d have made sure my chief nurse was many times prettier than you!”

Van Rensburg, whose crewcut and everything else about him seemed calculated to underline his strident masculinity, went very red, then purple, and finally a sort of muddy brown. He muttered something about having an idle kaffir to kick, and withdrew.

“Er-hum,” said Prinsloo, clearing his throat again. “Do you want me to take a snap of this as well, Doc?”

“No, but you can get out of my light if you like.”

“Sorry, Doc! Hell, that was interesting about skin, hey?”

Kramer groaned inwardly. Here they came: Strydom’s endless supply of pertinent anecdotes based on the case histories he so avidly consumed—while all that mattered right then was the size of the bullet used on Hookham. The difference between an entrance wound made by a .32 and one made by a .38 was, of course, impossible to judge with the naked eye, especially as caliber ratings were such nonsense anyway. A .38 Special was, in fact, a .35, which was how he came to have Specials in the .357 Ruger magnum under his left arm.

“Let me tell you,” said Strydom, pausing with the scalpel poised in his hand, “about a case reported by a Dr. LeMoyne Snyder in America. This bloke was sent along to him with this swollen scrotum—know what that is?” Prinsloo nodded and
pointed to one in a glass jar on a nearby shelf. “Ja, but just a normal one in other respects, not piebald. Anyway, Snyder feels this hard lump inside, and so he gives him a shot of Novocain and makes a little slit the same as this.…” The incision opened in Hookham’s back like a bloodshot eye with a lead-gray cornea. “And what popped out? A thirty-eight slug! Hold on a sec, Tromp, let me finish, hey? Well, finally the bloke explained what had happened. It seems that ten days previously he’d tried to shoot himself by putting his gun to his breastbone and pulling the trigger.”