The Blood of an Englishman (15 page)

Euphoric, he tugged undone his dressing-gown cord, tiptoed down the passage to the bedroom, and paused just inside the door to give a low, rather regal growl. And from the long grass, a delighted lioness coyly answered him back.

B
Y MIDNIGHT
M
EERKAT
Marais had beaten up three people whom he considered retarded enough to have entered his flat while he was away having his oats with the nympho. People that stupid were in a decided minority, and no matter how much thought he gave to the matter, he just could not think of a fourth. This was very upsetting because, as he knew from the blubberings of the ones he had put in a confessional mood, he was no nearer to finding the culprit and exacting his revenge.

Except that he had, to all intents and purposes, eliminated complete idiots from his list.

“Ja, that’s a start anyway,” he consoled himself, as he crossed Leeman Street and approached the dry-cleaning depot. “I wonder, I wonder.…”

A flash of inspiration struck him outside the wig shop. What would Kramer do in this situation? How would he begin to solve a puzzle like this? With a lot of boring, routine questions, no doubt. But it was late, and there didn’t seem to be anyone left around in the innocent-bystander class.

Dynamite was skulking in the tall weeds on the edge of the empty lot leading to the fire-escape stairs. For a cat that had made off with an entire roast chicken, Dynamite still had a lean and hungry look, which was both lacking in gratitude and deceitful. Meerkat kicked out as he went by, and
Dynamite protested. Over against the far side of the vacant patch, someone grumbled in his sleep.

“Ho, ho!” said Meerkat, coming to a dead stop.

The epileptics: he’d forgotten about them. Five women and two men, old to middle-aged, all black, who had been discharged from hospitals and left to fend for themselves. They had somehow grouped together on the lot five months ago, and had dwelt there quietly ever since, rain or shine, with the crippled woman tending the fire while the others scavenged in garbage bins for food. They would almost certainly keep a sharp eye on anyone who came near them, fearing eviction or something worse.

Meerkat stumbled over the uneven ground towards where they lay huddled round their dying fire, clothed in sacks and rags. The legless man was clutching an iron pipe—perhaps he was good at throwing—and one of the women, not the cripple but the defective, was cradling a crazy sort of doll made out of a nylon stocking and stuffed with black horse-hair. Meerkat’s first thought was to kick over their eating tins, and wake them up that way. His foot, however, stopped just in time.

It wasn’t that he feared them in the slightest, but he did have a horror of unwanted publicity and, for the last three days or so, these horrible objects had been very much in the news. Some Christian kind of black or other had discovered them, told his minister about their way of life, and since then the
Gazette
had been digging up all sorts of excuses to drag the thing out. Even after the city council and the Bantu Affairs office had both said they weren’t responsible for them, some people hadn’t been satisfied. Yesterday a city businessman had offered them accommodation in Peacevale, provided he could be assured they were “genuine cases”, and in the meantime a smart lady from Morninghill way was coming down each day with a hamper of food. That was the snag: no doubt she was the type who would make a fuss if she found them a bit stiff
in the morning, and he would have to tread lightly, no matter how difficult it might prove to make them remember things.

“Wakey, wakey, my friends! Wakey, wakey!” said Meerkat, very sweet and low indeed. “Would you like some cigarettes?”

Dynamite, who was poised to retrieve a chicken bone out of a crumple of tin foil, and looking fairly self-righteous about it, flattened his ears at that hiss of sound and fled.

T
HURSDAY DAWNED BRIGHT
and clear, bringing a zip to the morning in two houses out of three.

Zondi woke at six, shook his head to see if Mama Bhengu’s gin had done any damage, felt nothing, and slipped out of the double bed that he shared with his wife Miriam and their three youngest. Placing his feet carefully, for the next ones up had graduated to sleeping on mattresses spread on the rammed-earth floor, he made his way over to the door leading into the other room of their house, the kitchen. The twins, so big and strong now, were stretched out one under the table and the other on the settee that the Widow Fourie had given them. She had also given them an old electric kettle and an old electric iron; only the latter was any use—although it didn’t retain heat too well, it could be warmed up on the stove—but they had not returned them for fear of hurting her. It was really, mused Zondi, as he glanced at them with Bradshaw on his mind, a little like displaying upside-down antiques. Then, humming to himself, his mood sweetened and made proud by the beautiful faces of his sleeping children, he gave the Primus stove a few pumps and lit it. Miriam, who had worked as a housemaid for many years, knew no better treat than to be served a cup of tea in bed.

What a morning! thought Kramer. Sun streaming in; the smell of bacon frying; the Widow Fourie just in her bra and pants bending over him. Bliss.

“Trompie,” she said, shaking him by the knee. Trompie, it’s after eight and even the kids are out of the house—I’ve sent them to school with the maid this morning, just so I could make sure you ate your breakfast for a change. Trompie?”

A gentle snore.

“Ach, stop fooling, hey? You’re the one who woke me up to say you’d a lot to do today!” She leaned over to blow in his ear, and her long blonde hair tickled his bare chest excruciatingly. “Tromp! Now listen! Time to get up!”

“Time to get up?”

“Ja, I—Trompie Kramer!”

“Orders are orders,” he said, pulling her struggling form down on top of him, and then rolling over to sink into a pneumatic heaven. “I’m yours to command, hey?”

“You don’t,” she giggled, “have to take me so literally!”

“Lady,” replied Kramer, “I’m going to take you right now, any way I want, so you better grab hold of the bedposts!”

But it wasn’t like that. It was slow and gentle and, above all, familiar.

“Chrissy!” said Anneline Strydom, stripping the sheet off his unaccustomed nakedness. “
I want you, Chrissy!
”

His eyes opened, blinked at the strong sunlight, and then widened in disbelief. “Not again,” he mumbled. “Not when there are servants—”

“Servants! And what do you think those servants are doing? You want to know? Get your dressing-gown on and I’ll show you!”

Strydom suddenly realized his wife was in the most terrifying rage. He cupped a hand over himself and hopped smartly
out of bed, getting his slippers on the wrong feet at first, and putting on his dressing-gown inside out, so that he couldn’t find the cord. Out of the corner of an eye he noticed the time on their dressing-table clock was eight-twenty.

“Look at the time!” he gasped. “Why haven’t I been woken up before? Dr. Meyer is operating at—”

“Christian Strydom, say one more word and that will be it,” Anneline warned between clenched teeth, and gripped him firmly by the elbow. “You and me are going to take a look at my kitchen.”

Strydom stood in the kitchen doorway and looked. He looked left, he looked right, he looked at the floor and at the ceiling. In fact everywhere he looked there were snails, and behind each snail was a long, silvery trail, making the room appear, if you weren’t a conscientious housewife, surprisingly pretty and unusual. The cook and the garden boy were going round with wet cloths and a bucket.

“Never, never again!” said Anneline Strydom.

And he was a little too apprehensive right then to ask her exactly which of two dire possibilities she meant by that.

Kramer’s second start to the day was every bit as satisfying as his first, and again he had the Widow Fourie to thank.

“Can I see that list of names of his friends?” she asked, setting down a huge plate of fried eggs, farm sausages and tomatoes. “You say there’s nobody called ‘A.K.’ on it?”

“It’s in my top pocket in my jacket over there,” replied Kramer, tucking in hurriedly.

The Widow Fourie looked through the list and set it aside while buttering herself a ladylike small piece of rusk. “I know where you should begin,” she said. “You should ring the Digby-Smiths and ask them if they’ve been able to—”

“Done that, while you were in the bathroom.”

“And?”

“Digby-Smith claims that the list contains every single acquaintance, friend, companion, et cetera that Hookham ever had. His wife couldn’t sleep last night, so she got out all his old school photographs, the letters of congratulation her mother received when he won the DFC, everything; and she went through the lot. Net result was those nine new names on the bottom.”

“Ah, I wondered why they were in your handwriting.” She crunched into the rusk. “There could be a simple answer, you know, Tromp. These letters ‘A.K.’ could stand for the name of a place or a thing, instead of for a person.”

“Uh huh, that’s not bad.”

“Haven’t you done any thinking about this yet?” she teased, and poured him his coffee.

“None. I’m starting fresh this morning, and I’m taking one thing at a time.” He wolfed down his second sausage. “As for ‘A.K.,’ it could be also the initial letters of two words he didn’t want someone else to poke their nose into, or even a mixture of words and names.”

“Like ‘Alert Kramer?’ ”

Kramer laughed; the Widow Fourie often surprised him with her quickness and, as in this example, her command of English. “But I still go for it being a name,” he said. “My hunch tells me I’m right. And, besides, Hookham uses initials for names in his diary in other places.”

A shadow passed fleetingly over the Widow Fourie’s face. “So you’re working with a hunch this time? Be careful about that, Tromp—it’s got you into trouble before.”

“Zondi agrees with me.”

“Well, a native would. They’re full of that kind of thing.”

Kramer’s involuntary expression was less fleeting.

“All right,” agreed the Widow Fourie, puzzled but making her voice jolly again, “let’s say your hunch is right about this being a name. Whose name? The name of the person he went to see the night he was killed?”

“It’s as good a guess as any, my girl.”

“And you’ve not one clue who it was? Even what sort of person?”

“Through Jonty the hair man I heard that Mrs. Digby-Smith thought it was an ‘old flame’ of his, but she won’t repeat the same to me.”

“No, not now she knows he’s been murdered,” said the Widow Fourie. “We get her kind in the shop sometimes, and they can’t take any sort of scandal. An ‘old flame’ is an old girlfriend in Afrikaans, isn’t it?”

“Correct.”

“And Hookham left here when he was only a teenager?”

“Correct.”

The Widow Fourie picked up the list again, trying not to get butter on it. “One, two, three, four—hmmm, there are nine names starting with an ‘A’; take away the men and you are left with four again. It could be one of those, you know.”

“Hey?”

“Well, doesn’t it stand to reason, if he’s been out of touch for so long, that he’d know her by her maiden name? People didn’t get married as teenagers in those days, hey?”

“Phone,” said Kramer, sinking his coffee at a gulp.

The Widow Fourie followed him through into the sitting room and unearthed the Trekkersburg and District directory.

“Er, ’ullo, lady,” Kramer said, when there was a reply to the first number he dialed. “Ah’s giving you a bell about your income tex form, hey? Certain irregularities.”

There was a giggle behind him, and the Widow Fourie, who had never heard his civil servant routine before, which was an Afrikaner speaking English with a terrible accent, bit on a thumb.

“Ja, income tex office—tex, same as you puts in carpets to keep them flat. You got it. Now Ah’ll jist come rart out with it, hey? You’s has totally failed to print in your maiden name
in block capital letters. Hell, Ah should know what’s on the blerry ding! Come again?”

Kramer clicked his ballpoint pen, and scribbled quickly on a message pad. Then he nudged the Widow Fourie, and she read out in an excited whisper, “Angela Elizabeth Kendall!”

“Ach, that’s all rart, lady! Heppy to oblige, hey? Bye-bye now.…”

“We did it!” whooped the Widow Fourie. “First shot too!”

“Ach, it was a four-to-one chance,” said Kramer, going back into the breakfast room for his jacket. “And who knows? We could easily be wrong still.”

Zondi lounged against the side of the Chevrolet and waited to see whether curiosity would compel Mrs. Westgate’s gardener to find some excuse for conversation.

It was a curious garden, come to think of it. From a distance, as he and the Lieutenant had bowled along through the dry, yellow scrub to the south of the city, it had looked like a green mat left lying on the sear hillside. There was this definite edge to its regular shape, a sharp contrast of gentle growth against harsh survival, which could be simply explained as the difference between irrigation and the mean annual rainfall. And yet, when one arrived at the conventional small bungalow, with its pink brick, corrugated asbestos roofing and burglar guarded windows, there was something else about the garden that seemed to cut it off even more. Zondi looked carefully at the arrangement of meandering, stone-flagged paths, at the various kinds of trees, and at the choice of well-tended plants, flowers and shrubs. It seemed slightly strange to see a willow tree so far from running water, and there were some clumps of bullrushes too, but quite a few whites appeared to regard such things as essential, without ever using them to weave something useful. He also noted there were very, very few weeds. But further than that, never having been a garden boy himself,
he felt too ignorant to venture. Until he looked again at the rockery a few yards in front of him, and realized that, quite unlike any other rockery he had ever seen, this one had no little cacti growing on it. There were no saw-toothed aloes with their fine yellowy-red flowers in the garden either—although they grew wild on the slopes all around—and no rose bushes. Never, on reflection, had he ever come across a garden of this type without rose bushes. And then it dawned on him: what made this garden so subtly at odds with its thorn scrub surroundings was that, as far as he could tell, there wasn’t a prickly thing in it.