Riotous Assembly (2 page)

“Killing a white cook can be murder. It’s unlikely but it can be. Killing a black cook
can’t. Not under any circumstances. Killing a black cook comes under self-defence,
justifiable homicide or garbage disposal.” Els permitted himself a giggle. “Have you
tried the Health Department?” he inquired.

It was obvious to the Kommandant that Els had lost what little sense of social
deference he had ever possessed. He pushed Els aside and took the call himself.

“Kommandant van Heerden here,” he said. “I understand that there has been a slight
accident with your cook.”

Miss Hazelstone was adamant. “I have just murdered my Zulu cook.”

Kommandant van Heerden ignored the self-accusation. “The body is in the house?” he
inquired.

“The body is on the lawn,” said Miss Hazelstone. The Kommandant sighed. It was always
the same. Why couldn’t people shoot blacks inside their houses where they were supposed to
shoot them?

“I will be up at Jacaranda House in forty minutes,” he said, “and when I arrive I will
find the body in the house.”

“You won’t,” Miss Hazelstone insisted, “you’ll find it on the back lawn.”

Kommandant van Heerden tried again.

“When I arrive the body will be in the house.” He said it very slowly this time.

Miss Hazelstone was not impressed. “Are you suggesting that I move the body?” she asked
angrily.

The Kommandant was appalled at the suggestion. “Certainly not,” he said. “I have no
wish to put you to any inconvenience and besides there might be fingerprints. You can get
the servants to move it for you.”

There was a pause while Miss Hazelstone considered the implications of this remark.
“It sounds to me as though you are suggesting that I should tamper with the evidence of a
crime,” she said slowly and menacingly. “It sounds to me as though you are trying to get
me to interfere with the course of justice.”

“Madam,” interrupted the Kommandant, “I am merely trying to help you to obey the
law.” He paused, groping for words. “The law says that it is a crime to shoot kaffirs
outside your house. But the law also says it is perfectly permissible and proper to
shoot them inside your house if they have entered illegally.”

“Fivepence was my cook and had every legal right to enter the house.”

“I’m afraid you’re wrong there,” Kommandant van Heerden went on. “Your house is a white
area and no kaffir is entitled to enter a white area without permission. By shooting
your cook you were refusing him permission to enter your house. I think it is safe to
assume that.”

There was a silence at the other end of the line. Miss Hazelstone was evidently
convinced.

“I’ll be up in forty minutes,” continued van Heerden, adding hopefully, “and I trust
the body-”

“You’ll be up here in five minutes and Fivepence will be on the lawn where I shot him,”
snarled Miss Hazelstone and slammed down the phone.

The Kommandant looked at the receiver and sighed. He put it down wearily and turning
to Konstabel Els he ordered his car.

As they drove up the hill to Jacaranda Park, Kommandant van Heerden knew he was faced
with a difficult case. He studied the back of Konstabel Els’ head and found some
consolation in its shape and colour.

If the worst came to the worst he could always make use of Els’ great gift of
incompetence and if in spite of all his efforts to prevent it. Miss Hazelstone insisted
on being tried for murder, she would have as the chief prosecution witness against her,
befuddled and besotted, Konstabel Els. If nothing else could save her, if she pleaded
guilty in open court, if she signed confession after confession, Konstabel Els under
cross-examination by no matter how half-witted a defence attorney would convince the
most biased jury or the most inflexible judge that she was the innocent victim of
police incompetence and unbridled perjury. The State Attorney was known to have
referred to Konstabel Els in the witness box as the Instant Alibi.

It was with these thoughts in mind that Kommandant van Heerden drove down the drive to
Jacaranda House. They interrupted only briefly the aesthetic pleasure he always felt
in the presence of relics of the British Empire, for Jacaranda House was pure Cecil Rhodes
and Bishop Colenso.

Rambling and stuccoed, the massive edifice had been jerry-built to last. In style it
managed to combine elements of both East and West. In Jacaranda House the twain had met. At
first sight it looked as though Windsor Castle had been used for the artificial
insemination of the Brighton Pavilion and from its crenellated gables to its tiled and
columned verandah it succeeded with an eclecticism truly English in bringing more than
a touch of the durbah to a building as functionally efficient as a gents. Whoever had
built Jacaranda House might not and almost certainly did not know what he was doing, but
he must have been a positive genius even to have known how.

As the police car drew up, the great Gothic front door was opened by an Indian butler,
wearing white gloves and a red sash, who led the Kommandant and his assistant through a
vast hall whose walls were patinaed with the mouldering heads of one wart-hog, sixteen
buffaloes, ten lions and numerous lesser fauna, which heads the late Judge Hazelstone
had purchased at an auction to sustain his totally unwarranted reputation as a
big-game hunter. To add to the impression that they were in the jungle a profusion of
potted plants and ferns reached their dusty fronds up to the plaster fan-vaulting. The
corridor and the great sitting-room through which they passed were similarly decorated
with the portraits of long-dead Hazelstones, and when at last they came out on to the
verandah at the back of the house, Kommandant van Heerden’s regard for Imperial
Britain had increased by leaps and bounds.

Miss Hazelstone had chosen the scene of her crime with a sense of propriety and
occasion which belonged to a distant and leisurely age. The body of Fivepence lay on an
immaculate lawn and was huddled in a suitably obeisant rigour at the foot of a pedestal on
which had stood the bust of Sir Theophilus Hazelstone, GCR, GCSI, GCIE, DSO, and one-time
Governor of Zululand and Viceroy of Matabeleland; which bust had been erected at the
conclusion of the Zulu Rebellion to commemorate Sir Theophilus’ victory at Bulundi
over seventeen thousand unarmed Zulus who had misguidedly assumed that Sir Theophilus
had invited them there for an indaba as the representative of the Great White Queen. The
ensuing massacre was noted in military history as the first occasion on which
ten-inch naval guns had been fired at the point-blank range of twelve yards with the
resultant deaths by shrapnel of half their gun crews. In later stages of the battle this
mistake had been rectified and the naval guns had been used at long range to decimate the
fleeing Zulus to such good effect that they had destroyed four farmhouses and a British
blockhouse on the Tugela River some seven miles beyond the actual battlefield. These
innovations in the art of military strategy had earned Sir Theophilus his knighthood and
a bar to his DSO, not to mention the admiration of his surviving officers and men, and
had added to his reputation for scrupulous honesty and fair play among the tribesmen who,
maimed and mutilated, managed to survive the holocaust. During his reign as Governor,
Zululand knew a decade of untroubled peace and on his death a generation of Zulu widows
came out of mourning.

It was on the reputation of such heroes as Sir Theophilus that Kommandant van Heerden’s
admiration for the British and their Empire had been formed. Reputation, it seemed to the
Kommandant, was all that remained to Sir Theophilus. Certainly his bust had disappeared
from its pedestal and lay fragmented over half an acre of otherwise spotless lawn. Beyond
the lawn the trunks of the gum trees were gashed and splintered and the azalea bushes looked
as though they had been the subject of the concentrated attention of some very large and
desperately hungry animal. Branches and leaves lay scattered and torn in a gap some
twenty yards across.

For a moment the Kommandant drew fresh hope that Fivepence’s sudden death must have been
the result not of any human agency but of some natural cataclysm in the order of a freak
tornado which had passed without a shadow of a doubt well noticed through Jacaranda Park
but unremarked in the rest of Piemburg. This brief spasm of optimism died almost as soon
as it was born. It was all too obvious that whatever other gifts Miss Hazelstone had
inherited from her illustrious Imperial forebears, Sir Theophilus had left her with a
marked propensity for enormous firearms and their use at quite unnecessarily close
range.

She sat, a thin, angular, almost frail, elderly lady dressed in dark chiffon with
lace to her throat, in a frail, elderly wicker chair complete with an unnecessary
antimacassar and cradled in her lap lay a weapon which startled Kommandant van Heerden
and even Konstabel Els and which explained all too readily the scene of devastation that
lay beyond the contorted figure of Fivepence and the bustless pedestal. It was a
four-barrelled rifle, some six feet in length and its bore was of a diameter so large that
it suggested one of Sir Theophilus’ favourite weapons, the ten-inch naval gun. Kommandant
van Heerden’s experienced eye told him immediately that this was no standard firearm
licensed for self-defence.

“This is the murder weapon,” said Miss Hazelstone, evidently reading his thoughts. She
patted the four barrels and van Heerden noted that she was obviously determined to
leave no part of the gun free of fingerprints.

The Kommandant eyed the rifle cautiously. “What is it?” he inquired at last.

“It’s a magazine-loaded multi-barrelled elephant gun,” Miss Hazelstone replied. “It
was designed by my father, the late Judge Hazelstone and made to his own specifications.
Its rate of fire is forty bullets a minute and it can incapacitate a charging elephant at
a thousand yards.”

Van Heerden volunteered the opinion that it seemed unnecessary to kill elephants at
a thousand yards. He couldn’t bring himself to use the word “incapacitate”. It seemed
inappropriately modest. Evaporate seemed more likely.

“My father was a lousy shot,” Miss Hazelstone continued. “Besides, he was a dreadful
coward.”

“No man who fired that gun could be called a coward,” said the Kommandant both
gallantly and truthfully. He was beginning to find the interview quite relaxing.
Murder had evidently brought a new touch of humanity to Miss Hazelstone. She was
treating him with unaccustomed civility. The Kommandant decided that the time had
come to resume his defence of Miss Hazelstone’s innocence.

“That rifle is far too heavy for a woman … I beg your pardon … for a lady to use,” he
said and regretted the remark almost as soon as it was made. It was evident that Miss
Hazelstone would respond to any challenge. She rose from her chair and aimed the great
rifle into the garden.

The Kommandant had discounted any possibility that she might fire the thing.
Konstabel Els, for once, acted with greater resourcefulness and threw himself to the
ground. That the ground he chose was already occupied by a large Dobermann Pinscher and
that the dog chose to dispute the right of Konstabel Els to lie prone on it and that in any
case all South African dogs are trained to bite persons of Negro extraction and that
Konstabel Els was of sufficiently mixed blood to justify biting on suspicion, all
this was lost to Kommandant van Heerden as Miss Hazelstone, aiming now at the ground and
now at the sky, pulled the trigger.

The Kommandant, who was standing some eighteen inches to the right of the four barrels
and almost level with their muzzles and who, but an instant before, had been a
rational-thinking human being in full possession of his senses, found himself as it
seemed to him, in a vast and rapidly expanding bubble of flame. The sensible world of
garden, sky, twittering birds, even the screams of Els being savaged by the Dobermann,
all disappeared. Kommandant van Heerden knew only the absolute silence at the still
heart of an enormous explosion. There was no pain, no anxiety, no thought, only the
certain realization, not that the end of the world was at hand, but that it had already
been irremediably accomplished. For one brief, illuminating moment Kommandant van
Heerden experienced the highest form of mystical understanding, total bodily
dissolution. It was some time before he returned to the world of physical sensation and
too late for him to hear anything of the thunderclap that volleyed forth from Jacaranda
Park in the direction of the Drakensberg Mountains. With the glazed eyes of an awakened
sleepwalker and the singed moustache that comes from standing too close to an enormous gun
barrel, he looked at the scene around him. It was not one to reassure a man doubtful of his
own sanity.

Konstabel Els’ contretemps with the Dobermann had been exacerbated, to put it
mildly, by the broadside. It was doubtful which of the two animals had been more maddened
by the roar of the elephant gun. The dog, which had at first bitten Konstabel Els’ ankle
to the bone, had transferred its attentions to his groin and once there had developed all
the symptoms of lockjaw. Els, conservative as ever, and having nothing else to bite on
except the Dobermann’s backside, was applying his knowledge, gained in several
thousand interrogations of Africans, of what he cheerfully called “ball-bashing” but
which in the autopsy reports on some of his patients was termed severe contusions to the
testicles.

Kommandant van Heerden turned what remained of his attention away from this
unpleasant spectacle and tried to look at Miss Hazelstone who lay stunned but satisfied
in the wicker chair where the kick of the rifle had thrown her. Through his singed
eyelashes the Kommandant could partially see that she was addressing him because her
lips were moving but it was some minutes before he recovered his hearing sufficiently
to be able to make out what she was saying. Not that he found her remarks at all helpful. It
seemed positively gratuitous to repeat, “There you are. I told you I could fire the gun,”
and the Kommandant began to wonder if he had not been a trifle unjust to Luitenant
Verkramp. Miss Hazelstone was after all a woman who would stick at nothing.

Her second firing had destroyed what remained of the pedestal on which Sir Theophilus’
bust had stood and, being aimed at ground level, had almost obliterated all traces of
Fivepence’s recently obeisant corpse. Almost but not entirely, for the fragmentary and
dispersed remains of Sir Theophilus’ bust had been joined on their widely separated
patches of lawn by the no less fragmentary and dispersed remains of the late Zulu cook,
while patches of black skin had attached themselves limpet-like to the blasted trunks of
the gum trees that fringed the once-immaculate lawn. Kommandant van Heerden couldn’t
bring himself to focus on the round black object that kept trying to draw attention to
itself by swinging wistfully from a branch in the upper reaches of an otherwise
attractive blue gum. Down the centre of the lawn the elephant gun had cut a straight trench
some eight inches in depth and fifteen yards long from whose serrated edges arose what the
Kommandant despairingly hoped was steam.

Feeling that the afternoon’s work and his recent transcendental experience had
released him from the standards of politeness he had previously maintained in Miss
Hazelstone’s company, the Kommandant sat down uninvited in a chair well outside any
likely arc of fire from the terrible elephant gun, and watched Konstabel Els’
gladiatorial conflict with the Dobermann with the air of a connoisseur.

On the whole he thought they were pretty well matched both in physique and in
intellectual grasp of the situation. Certainly Els suffered the disadvantage of a
smaller jaw and fewer teeth, but what he lacked in biting power he made up for in
concentration and experience in castration. The Kommandant did think, momentarily,
of intervening but Miss Hazelstone had already acted with that decisiveness he had
always found so admirable in persons of her class. She sent the Indian butler into the
house and a moment later he returned with a bottle of ammonia and a large wad of cotton
wool.

“The best way of separating dogs,” she shouted above the growls and groans, “is to hold a
pad of cotton wool soaked with ammonia over their muzzles. They gasp for air and you pull
’em apart,” and so saying she clamped the wad over Konstabel Els’ already purple face. The
Kommandant wondered at her choice of Els as the first to be forced to release his grip, but
he put it down to the English love of animals and, to be fair to Miss Hazelstone, he knew
her to be particularly fond of the Dobermann.

It was immediately apparent that the method was remarkably efficacious. With a
muffled scream and all the symptoms of imminent asphyxia, Els released his grip on the
dog’s reproductive organs and was assisted in discontinuing the struggle by the
Indian butler who, hanging on to his ankles, attempted to drag the Konstabel away.

Unfortunately for Els the Dobermann was less intimidated by the threat of death by
suffocation, or else it had developed an immunity to ammonia and it took several
minutes to persuade the beast not to pursue the advantage it naturally assumed it had
won by the intervention of its mistress. It may well have thought that Miss Hazelstone had
joined it on the ground because Konstabel Els had transferred his quite appalling mandible
attentions to her, which would at least have been more natural although, considering her
age and lack of physical charm, not altogether understandable. Whatever the reasons
for the Dobermann’s continuing attachment to Els’ groin, the interval allowed the
Kommandant to concentrate his attention, interrupted only by the agonized screams of
his assistant, on the case he had been forced to investigate.

By the time peace and tranquillity had once more been restored to Jacaranda House and
Miss Hazelstone had sent Oogly, the Indian butler, to serve tea in the drawing-room,
Kommandant van Heerden had sufficiently recovered his faculties to begin the
investigation of the case. But first he ordered Konstabel Els to retrieve the remains
of Fivepence from the lawn and from what was clearly an unscaleable blue gum, an order which
the Konstabel tended to dispute on the grounds that he was in need of immediate and
prolonged hospital treatment for multiple and severe dog bite, not to mention battle
fatigue and shell shock.