The Song Dog (11 page)

“Could that have led to his death, do you think?” asked Kramer.

“In what way?” asked the Widow Fourie, looking round.

“Ach, let’s say somebody told Maaties a sob story. That she alleged, for instance, her man was beating her.”

“Ja, that would probably make him want to rush to the rescue. You must mean Annika Gillets, I take it?”

“Why say that?”

“Ach, rumors,” said the Widow Fourie, “about Lance and what he’s prepared to do to people. He has a terrible temper, you know, and really runs amuck when he’s upset. Even my maid knows that the worst kaffirs won’t go anywhere near where he lives, he’s given it too much of a reputation. Just after they first moved in, he caught a burglar on his front steps, tied him with rope to the back of his Land Rover, and towed him all the way to Moon Acre, where he came from. My maid says that kaffir’s never been seen since.”

“Hmmm,” said Kramer. “Then perhaps it’s no surprise Annika didn’t seem afraid to stay out there overnight on her own, especially as his Land Rover was still parked there, making it look like he was at home.”

“She’d have felt safe as houses! But where was he, hey?”

“He’d been picked up by plane earlier in the day to go catching rhino. What else did these rumors say? That he was knocking Annika about?”

The Widow Fourie nodded. “Before they were moved to
Fynn’s Creek, they were up at the main rest camp. We had one of the other rangers’ wives in with amebic dysentery—I work at the hospital—and she let slip there’d been trouble based on Lance suspecting Annika of flirting with guests. She often wore long sleeves on boiling hot days, as though she was hiding marks or something. In fact, the
real
rumor is that they got moved to Fynn’s Creek to keep her out of trouble, and if this didn’t work. Lance was facing the sack from the Parks Board.”

“Had she kept out of trouble, do you know?” asked Kramer.

“I don’t see what option she had,” said the Widow Fourie. “There haven’t been any guests yet at Fynn’s—”

“Ja, but blokes must come fishing along the beach—and what if I told you her body had bruises on the left shoulder?”

“Interesting,” said the Widow Fourie, sitting down on a stool. “Although, personally, I’m still not a hundred percent convinced she was as bad as some make out. It could all have been just in Lance’s mind, couldn’t it?”

“That we’ll have to try and find out,” said Kramer. “Okay if I ask a few more questions? This is the first time today I’ve started to get somewhere, hey?”

The Widow Fourie glanced up at the kitchen clock. “Just five minutes more,” she said, “or I’ll feel a total wreck at work in the morning!”

“Any idea how the two of them got together in the first place?”

“Oh, that,” she said, getting up and going back to the sink. “The story is, Lance met Annika when she was hitchhiking to Eshowe—she was always doing mad things like that!—and the pair of them finished up instead two hundred miles away in Durban that night, going to a show and getting drunk on the beachfront. Her father nearly went berserk when she got back next day—he thought kaffirs must’ve raped her on the road and thrown her in the sugarcane—and went straight to Lance’s boss, wanting him sacked. But Lance turns up at the
camp in the game reserve, tells his boss it’s okay, it was just a little engagement party, and in no time at all they’re married! The whole district was amazed because of her reputation and the fact this Lance bloke comes from a good Durban family—his pa’s a posh lawyer and his ma was an Oppenberg. I know Hans tried to stop the marriage. He said he’d only met Lance the once, but he wasn’t good enough for Annika; that he was a spoiled, private-school kid with a mean streak in him.”

“Terblanche always seems very quick to rise to Annika’s defense,” said Kramer, lighting a Lucky. “Think there could have been something on the go between those two?”

The Widow Fourie gave a surprised laugh. “That’s like asking if I think Santa does rude things to little kids!” she said.

Kramer smiled. “What’s got me puzzled,” he said, “is why Annika didn’t take the advice of an old family friend—why she allowed herself to become entangled with such a well-established little bastard.”

“You get people like that,” said the Widow Fourie, with a shrug. “I don’t know whether it’s the excitement, the risk, or what, but it could also be they want someone else to take charge of them, someone who will not put up with promiscuity, say. She was wild, of that there is no doubt, and maybe it scared her, this wildness, because she knew she couldn’t properly control it.”

“Man,” Kramer said, with a laugh, “have you noticed the irony? What sort of husband did this wild creature choose to look after her?”

“A game ranger!” said the Widow Fourie, laughing too, as she turned from rinsing the sink. “No, I’d never thought of that before …”

Their smiles locked, lingered, then faded together.

“Look at the time!” said the Widow Fourie, snatching up a tea towel to dry her hands, turning from him. “I don’t know what I think I’m doing still up at this hour.”

“Suggesting a few answers that could go a long way to solve a mystery,” said Kramer, rising from his chair. “If there was still trouble between Annika and Lance, and it was now threatening his whole livelihood, a man could find in that a motive for murder—especially a violent man, who might have reasons of his own not to want evidence given in the divorce court.”

“But,” said the Widow Fourie, with a final glance at the clock, “although I can see what you’re getting at, Lance Gillets must have been miles away when the whatsit went off.”

“Which is surely the whole point of using a timing device,” said Kramer. “It allows the killer to get to hell and gone from the scene, and concoct himself a cast-iron alibi.”

“You mean it was a
time bomb
that went off last night?”

“No proof as yet, but ja, I expect that to be confirmed tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow is today,” said the Widow Fourie very firmly, moving to the passage doorway, “and I’ve an early start with masses of bed linen to check at the hospital, so—”

“You do
what
there?”

“Ach, you know, supervise the linen rooms, count the pillows—all of that. Let me see, is there anything else you need? I’ve put a towel in your bedroom and the maid’ll give you breakfast in the morning.”

“N-no, I’m fine, thanks!”

“Good,” said the Widow Fourie, adding a quick, impersonal smile. “Sleep well, hey?”

“That wasn’t you singing in the shower was it, Lieutenant?” Bokkie Maritz croaked hoarsely, peering into Kramer’s room at seven thirty the next morning.

“Me? Sing? That’ll be the day, Bok! How goes it?”

“I’ve got a sore throat you wouldn’t believe,” said Maritz, clutching his pajama collar even more tightly. “Also, my forehead is hotter than—”

“Straight back to bed for you!” said Kramer.

“Ach, no, I can struggle on, hey?”

“Bullshit, man! I need you well again quick. You get yourself under a pile of blankets, sweat it out, and I’ll get the DS to come and see you, give you some stuff.”

“Er, I’m not too happy about seeing a doctor I don’t know,” said Maritz.

“Doc Mackenzie’s one hell of a good bloke, Bok—all the cops around here swear by him.”

“Oh, ja?”

“You couldn’t be in better hands,” said Kramer, and went off to breakfast, whistling.

“I’m Piet,” said a small boy seated at a table on the back verandah, eating toast and marmalade. “What’s your name?”

“Tromp,” said Kramer, sitting down opposite him. “And in answer to your next question, I was four hundred and ninety-one last birthday.”

“I’m six
and
a half,” said Piet.

“Uh-huh. Where’re your brothers and sisters?”

“They’ve gone. Ma’s taken them to the hospital to play with the other little kids in the
nursery
.”

“Real baby stuff, huh?”

Piet nodded. “I’m the man of the family,” he said. “Ma told me.

“So how will you spend your day? Mending tractors or doing some accounts?”

“First,” said Piet, “I’m going to feed my animals.” He paused while the maid placed a plate of fried eggs and bacon in front of Kramer, and then said, “All right if I have your bacon fat?”

“Of course.”

“Ta,” said Piet. “Ma’s already given me hers, so I’ve got quite a lot.”

“What sort of pets eat bacon, hey?”

“Animals, not
pets
,” said Piet, using the same note of scorn
he had reserved for the word
nursery
. “Dingaan the iguana is my biggest. Smallest, I’ve got some cane mice, and in between all sorts: rabbits, guinea pigs, a tortoise, and three mole snakes. Dingaan’s the one who likes the bacon.”

“I had a pig once,” said Kramer. “He hated bacon.”

“But they usually eat anything!” exclaimed Piet in some surprise. Then he laughed. “You tried to trick me,” he said, getting down from his chair to go out into the backyard. “Or was it a joke?”

“My third of the day,” confirmed Kramer.

And his mood was still uncommonly good when he drained his coffee cup, lit a Lucky, and decided to wander out and see how Dingaan was enjoying his tidbits.

Piet was standing under an avocado tree that gave shade to a crudely built hutch of sorts in the center of a chicken-wire enclosure.

“Where’s Dingaan?” Kramer asked.

“Hiding,” said Piet. “Watch …”

He tossed a morsel of bacon fat into the enclosure, there was a pause, and then out from under the hutch came an iguana, its little bent legs scurrying beneath a long, tail-lashing body. In a trice, the bacon had been snapped up, and the iguana was back under cover again.

“Man, that was quick!” said Kramer. “Have you ever timed it?”

Piet shook his head. “I haven’t got a watch,” he said. “But you couldn’t time it anyway, Dingaan’s too quick once there’s meat near him.”

“Hmmm,” said Kramer.

“You want a turn feeding him?”

“Er, no, I’d best be getting to work,” said Kramer. “But thanks, hey? See you later …”

“Bye, Tromp,” said Piet, carefully selecting the next piece of fat.

Kramer walked away with a smile that died in seconds. He
still couldn’t put a finger on it, but something was wrong, very wrong, in the way he was seeing things—and now somehow young Piet had just drawn his attention to this.

A
N OVERNIGHT SHOWER
had done for Jafini, in Kramer’s opinion, what embalming did for a corpse. The dead-end dump didn’t look any less dead, but at least its coloring had much improved, now all the dust had been washed off; the faint odor of decay had gone too, swept down the storm drains.

Two vehicles attracted his attention the instant he turned into the main street. He saw that his Chevrolet was already at the garage, having its damaged exhaust pipe repaired, thanks no doubt to Hans Terblanche. He also saw Grantham at the wheel of a diesel Mercedes pickup, and that he had one of his mad, bad kaffirs seated right beside him in the cab, and not on the back among the cornmeal sacks, where he properly belonged. Didn’t the man know that the only whites and blacks who ever rode together were cops? Was he really so thick, or just trying to be bloody provocative?

“Lovely day, Lieutenant!” Grantham shouted across, as they passed, adding something Kramer missed.

He’d been distracted that same instant by a glimpse of an inside-out jacket, vanishing into the Bombay Emporium. “Short Arse!” he said to himself, gunning the Land Rover over to the curb, ready for another hard look at the bastard when he came out. But the coon who emerged six long minutes later in an inside-out jacket was elderly, rather
stooped, grinning idiotically, and had the fast shuffle of an advanced syphilitic.

“Shit,” said Kramer, and drove on.

He parked round the back of the police station and used the rear entrance to reach Terblanche’s office.

“Morning, Tromp!” said the station commander, pouring the stale water from his carafe out of the window. “Guess what—we’ve got the army with us!”

“So that’s it,” said Kramer. “You’ve been given until two hundred hours to clean up, or face a court-martial, hey?”

Terblanche looked quite hurt. “I
always
do a tidy when I get a moment,” he said. “Besides, Field Cornet Dorf hasn’t been in here yet. He’s been down at Fynn’s Creek since first light with Jaapie Malan, getting his bearings. Oh, ja, he’s not one to stand twiddling his thumbs, this explosives expert of ours—he arrived about four, straight from some sabotage.”

“Good,” said Kramer. “This could speed up things, now I’ve a few ideas to work on.”

“You have?” said Terblanche. “I thought you were looking a bit more cheerful this morning! Did you discover something new at Fynn’s Creek last night?”

“I learned that Kritz was there yesterday afternoon and had a long, intimate chat with the female deceased which seemed to lift a big weight off her shoulders.”

Terblanche frowned. “Just him and little Annika?” he said. “An
intimate
chat? This is news to me. I didn’t know that he was—”

“Ach, no, I think it happened quite by chance,” said Kramer. “Grantham told me he’d suggested to Kritz that he ought to take a look at the reserve some day, and from what the kitchen boy states, it sounds to me as if Kritz simply pitched up there. As for intimate, he wasn’t to know Lance wasn’t also going to be there—not with his Parks Board Land Rover parked in full view.”

“Ja, ja, I get you,” said Terblanche, losing some of his troubled look. “But what was this long chat about?”

“Here, read my notes of the interview with the cook boy,” Kramer invited him, “and then you’ll know as much as I do about it.”

Terblanche worked his way ponderously through the three pages. He had just finished, and was looking up to say something, when there came a rap at the door and Jaapie Malan poked his unlovely head round the jamb.

“Morning, Lieutenant!” he said. “Morning, sir! I’ve got the army bloke waiting to speak to you about the—”

“Ach, send him in, man,” said Terblanche. “Send him in.”

Field Cornet Sybrand Dorf of the South African Defence Force looked like an experiment carried out by a mad zookeeper. He had the head of a bat-eared fox, shoulders like a gnu, and his long, spindly legs gave him the gait of a giraffe. His camouflage fatigues did nothing to hide any of this, but at least his army boots had a reassuring, un-hoof-like high shine to them.