The Blood of an Englishman (6 page)

“Yirra!” said Prinsloo.

“And the next thing he knew, he was coming round on the floor of his place. All he had was this small puncture mark, a bit of pain, and that was it. At first he looked all over for the bullet, thinking it had sort of ricocheted, then he gave up and just decided that the Almighty had stepped in and stopped his suicide plan—which was probably true enough. He didn’t personally connect the swelling in his scrotum at all, you see, and that didn’t start up for nearly a week. What had transpired, however, was that the bullet had been deflected downwards between the skin and bone, it had missed going into the peritoneum—the bag around your guts—and it had stopped in his left testicle.”

“He—he was all right after?” Prinsloo asked.

“Perfect!”

“Now there’s a thing! And could the bullet have finished up in his left foot just as easily, Doc?”

Strydom blinked. “Why?” he said, bewildered.

“Well, because it’s a fantastic true-life story to tell my class at Sunday School, only I—”

Prinsloo caught Kramer’s glare in the nick of time and shut up. Strydom hastily bent over the body again, stretched the skin around the incision and gave a pleased grunt, nipping up a spent bullet between thumb and forefinger. He dropped it into Kramer’s waiting hand.

“A thirty-two, I think, Tromp? Popped out as neat as a pea from a pod!”

“A
soft-nosed
thirty-two,” murmured Kramer, feeling another dull thud in the pit of his stomach, “just like the one they dug out of Archie Bradshaw.…” He tossed the slug and the original bullet from his top pocket at Prinsloo. “Get those to your kids out there and tell them they’re to be delivered to Ballistics, pronto! I want a full report by lunch-time.” Then he turned back to Strydom. “Nice going, Doc—now let’s see what else you can find for me.”

Zondi drove into the posh suburb of Morninghill in the Lieutenant’s Chevrolet which he had slyly removed from the mortuary yard some fifteen minutes earlier, synchronizing his departure with that of a clapped-out undertaker’s van leaving with a body. He parked the car around the corner from the Digby-Smith residence and proceeded on foot.

The Digby-Smiths lived in a wide, colorful avenue lined by flame trees in full blossom and small, bright notices which warned that burglar alarm systems had been installed in the respective properties. Like all the other houses in the avenue, theirs was set well back in park-like grounds, with lawns, terraces, formal flowerbeds, neat hedges and a tennis court. Instead of a swimming pool, however, they had a lily pond surrounded by a rockery, and presided over by curious white piccanins in cement, each potbellied and bare-bottomed, holding up heavy dishes filled with soil and flowers. These figures were possibly some sort of fertility fetish meant to encourage growth around them, but as their private parts were extremely vague, he couldn’t be too sure of this. There was only one way of reaching the house from the street, and that was up a long, crooked drive that was being resurfaced, so he kept to the verge, exchanged greetings with the workmen, and came presently to a walled yard leading off the garage area.

“Is your madam out?” he asked, when a skinny cook opened the kitchen door to his knock.

“Who asks?” she replied haughtily.

“CID.”

“Hau!”

And from there on the rest was easy. The cook invited him into the kitchen, switched the kettle on for a pot of tea, and listened with rapt attention to the description he gave of a known rapist recently seen in the vicinity. She soon had herself half-convinced that she’d actually seen a glimpse of him near the shops, and promised she would pass the word on among the other women servants thereabouts. By the time the tea had been poured, the conversation had turned to this and that.

“No, the work isn’t too hard here,” the cook admitted. “There is just the master and the madam.”

“And the madam’s brother,” added the housemaid, a buxom wench who had just joined them. “Such a small man!” And she giggled. “Small with gray hair that will not lie straight, and these brown knobs that grow on his head!”

“Shhhh!” cautioned the cook.

“It’s all right, he’s still asleep,” said the housemaid.

“Asleep?” Zondi feigned surprise.

“He was very late coming home last night,” explained the housemaid, “and the madam said we were not to disturb him. Look, there is his breakfast tray still waiting for him to ring his bell.”

The cook tut-tutted. “He has not rung his bell all morning.”

“I believe you,” said Zondi.

He stirred his tea and looked at the cook, wondering if her skinniness indicated she was bad at her job or whether she had worms.

“These white people,” sighed the housemaid. “It is a good life they live, is it not? Just because you are out enjoying yourself
until one in the morning, you are then allowed to sleep all the next day.”

“How do you know it was one o’clock?” asked Zondi, winking at her. “What was keeping you up so late?”

She giggled, and so did the cook.

“You saw him come home?” Zondi persisted. “How could you see anything in that position?”

“She goes into the garden with the—” began the cook, then muffled her own words with a clasp of her hand.

“I had got up from my bed to go to the lavatory,” said the housemaid with ill-kept dignity. “I heard a car coming and I looked down to the street.” Then she giggled again. “No, I am only joking with you,” she confessed. “There was a car that stopped outside here at one, but the man who got out from it was big.”

T
HE
L
AST
G
REAT
journey into the unknown had properly begun now for Edward “Bonzo” Hookham. He lay unzipped from pubic arch to jaw bone, and looked as though he was passing through Customs. Zealous rummaging had left his colorful contents in gay disorder; his heart, lungs, liver and gullet had been seized and sliced open on the sink’s draining board, his kidneys rested in a kidney bowl on the third table along, and his intestines awaited further inspection in an enamel bucket.

“So far, so good,” commented Strydom, drawing his knife point over the head from ear to ear, and then tugging free the flaps of scalp down either side. “Your bone saw, if you please, Sergeant.”

“Oh, so I have my uses after all?” muttered Van Rensburg.

“Don’t sulk,” said Strydom, turning aside to Kramer. “Well, Tromp, have you made anything of that interesting piece of cord?”

Kramer was toying with the length of cord taken from the dead man’s wrists. “The only thing unusual about it is that both ends have been recently severed. You say it wasn’t much of a knot under all that muck?”

“That’s right. Once over and once under—half a granny knot, you might say. But what about that slightly frayed section in the middle?”

“Ach, it looks like the cord was once looped round—or slung over—something that caused friction.”

“A pulley, perhaps?”

“Ja, I’d thought of that myself. It can’t be a sash-cord from a window though, because it’s a little too thick really. We’ll have to see what Forensic can come up with.”

Strydom nodded. “Of course, but what’s got me going is how strong a man would have to be to cause fractures like that. Could
you
pull so hard?”

“Not a chance.”

“Er-hum,” ventured Prinsloo.

“Go on, Fanie,” sighed Kramer. “Let’s hear it.”

“What if it wasn’t so much a case of strength as the bloke having a lot of weight behind him, Lieutenant? If I can make a suggestion, why not get Van here to—”

“Watch it!” snarled Van Rensburg, who was struggling to make both ends of his saw-cut meet.

The telephone rang in the outer office, and Prinsloo slipped away to answer it. Kramer went on examining the length of cord. It seemed logical that one end of it should be cut, because God alone knew how long the thing had been in the first place, but why the other end as well?

“That was Ballistics,” Prinsloo reported back. “The youngster I sent with the bullet has just arrived.”

“And?” said Kramer, suspicious of a message so inane.

“Well, there could be a bit of a hold-up, Lieutenant.”

“
Hey?
”

“Until they’ve found their comparison microscope or something. They had a promotion party in the lab for Mitchell last night, and some practical joker—”

“Jesus!” Kramer cut in. “What sort of delay? If they think I’m going to—”

“They promise some sort of result by tonight, sir, so if you.…”

But Kramer was already striding across the duckboards, stuffing the length of cord into his jacket pocket as he went. Thanks to the formalin fumes in the mortuary, his sore throat had returned with a vengeance; the feuding between Strydom and Van Rensburg was beginning to make his nerves scream; and now, just as some progress seemed to have been made, this had to happen. He almost tripped straight over a body being removed by a tearful black family.

Nxumalo hastened to his side. “Boss? Can the boss please ask Sergeant Van to come and give these people the papers for them to put their mark on?”

“In a minute, man! Can’t you see I’m busy?”

Kramer went into the office off the refrigerator room and dialled Ballistics. While he waited for them to answer, he explored the cluttered drawers of Van Rensburg’s desk, found his half-jack of Cape brandy, and took a nip of it for his throat. Then, having waited a full three minutes—it wasn’t his morning for telephone calls—he lost patience, slammed down the receiver and almost tripped over the same family again. They had the body in a long electric appliance carton that they’d salvaged from somewhere.

“Boss?” begged Nxumalo.

“Ja, Ja, I won’t forget.”

Van Rensburg, who had just completed his chore, was picking pink sawdust from the teeth of his saw. Prinsloo was focusing his camera, and Strydom was easing off the vault of the skull, which came away with a sloppy pop.

“Beautiful!” cried the district surgeon, delving about. “A classic of its kind! Look how the bullet passed through here like a rock through a trifle, toppling as it went so it hit the occiput sideways on, smashing a big hole in the back. And this fracture’s quite a size, too, hey?” He drew up the flap of scalp and looked into the hair. “Good God.…”

“What?” asked Kramer.

But Strydom remained silent until he had quickly shaved the area with a scalpel, revealing three round bruises in a row, followed by a fourth, much fainter contusion.

“I can’t believe it,” he mumbled. “The skull is normal thickness, the bone isn’t soft.…”

“Could he have fallen backwards on an exposed tree root?” suggested Prinsloo.

“Part of the car’s bumper maybe?” suggested Van Rensburg.

“Or on some stones?” suggested Strydom.

Kramer said nothing. He could see the awe in their faces, and knew what none of them was willing to admit to himself. Those bruises on the scalp looked exactly like the knuckle marks left by a single blow with the fist. A fist so powerful it had shattered the skull beneath it. The fist of a Goliath.

“You know, I think we’d better make an experiment,” Strydom remarked quietly, moving over to take another look at the fractures above the dead man’s wrists. “The difficulty is, just how do we.…” And he fell into a brown study.

“By the way,” Kramer said to Van Rensburg, “Nxumalo wants you to get rid of a body for him.”

“And while you’re out there,” added Strydom, “see if you can’t find a piece of cord like the one that was tied round here. Okay?”

Van Rensburg left with a grunt, and Prinsloo made some close-ups of the bruise marks. Strydom wandered round the room.

“Ah, this should do it,” he said, taking the spring-balance from its peg above the sink and discarding the metal dish for weighing organs. “If we tie one end of the cord to this hook, and watch where the needle gets to along this scale, then we’ll get a reading of the required pull in kilos!”

“Very clever, Doc,” said Kramer. “Only what is that going to prove?”

“Hmmmm? The
real problem
is, of course, finding something to conduct this experiment on. It’s a pity both arms have been fractured, or we’d be able to.…”

“Have you any wog paupers in the fridge?” asked Prinsloo, eager to build on his reputation as an ideas man.

“No such luck, I’m afraid. Still, as Ma always used to say, where there’s a will there’s a way!”

Kramer had suddenly had enough. Whatever the reading in kilos, it wasn’t the sort of data kept on file at the CID—or anywhere else for that matter—so this fooling around wasn’t going to contribute a damned thing to the investigation. On top of which, he was sure he’d just heard his car drawing up outside the frosted windows, and that was a phenomenon that required an immediate explanation.

“Hey, hang on a sec, Tromp!” Strydom called out. “I’ve just had this inspiration, and it won’t take Van two minutes to—”

But Kramer had gone.

There was a decided air of the morning-after in Ballistics when Mitchell, who never suffered hangovers himself, popped in for a quick word shortly before noon. Like in the other offices he had visited on his round of thanks, everyone there looked ready to leap out of their seats at the slightest sound, even that of a pencil dropping, as though it were a pistol shot. In fact, when directly compared, this lot seemed twice as twitchy, tense and sickly pale. A pistol shot rang out from the test-firing bench in the corner.

“Life,” grumbled Johan Botha, shuddering, “can be very unfair.” Then he bent once again over the comparison microscope. “What can we do you for, Mitch?”

“I just came to say thanks for a great party!”

“Oh ja? I don’t suppose you know who took this thing and hid it in the darkroom, hey?”

“As a matter of fact, I—”

“What?” said Botha, looking up and narrowing his eyes.

“No, no, I don’t mean it was me, man! I was just going to ask if you’d spoken to Japie from Traffic Enquiries about it.”

“You saw him take it from here?”

“Not exactly, but I did see him go into the darkroom with that new typist from CID, and she’s so flat-chested I reckon a bloke might need a comparison scope to—”

“
Out
,” said Botha.