The Song Dog (25 page)

“He was troubled, boss, and the
songoma
was afraid for him. His shadow was growing faint, she said.”

“Oh, ja, the finest prophecies are the bastards of hindsight, not so?”

Zondi grinned. “
Hau
, you too could be a great
songoma
. Lieutenant, famous for your wonderful sayings!”

“Watch it, kaffir—a bit of respect now!”

Their laughter drove the crow away.

Kramer rose and looked at his watch. “Christ,” he said, “it’s only just gone nine. I’m buggered if I’m sitting here, twiddling my thumbs until twelve for Aap and his bloody helicopter. How about you, man?”

It was a good thing Zondi had spent so much time staring at the ground during the flight from Mabata to the sorcerer’s mountain. Without the mental map he had made, the confusion of footpaths, especially in the many deserted valleys where there was nobody to help with directions, would have led to a great deal of wasted time and energy.

As it was, it still took them more than two hours of steady trudging, up slopes and down slopes, over wild country and through occasional semi-cultivated areas, to come within sight of Mabata. The second helicopter had disappeared from in
front of the little stone police station, and the only sign of life, detectable at such a distance, was some movement at the rear of two white vehicles parked beside the flagpole.

Zondi, who had been leading the way in companionable silence, paused and glanced round, his eyebrows raised as though asking whether Kramer wanted to stop and rest for a minute or two.

Kramer shook his head. He had ceased talking, ceased thinking to a degree; now was the time for action, and all he cared about was getting back to Jafini. Sweating profusely and with his jacket slung over his back, he kept his eyes on the flip and fall of Zondi’s heels, no longer bothering to look up. He’d had more than his fill of picturesque rural scenes typifying Zululand: the mud huts and the aloes, the drought-stunted maize and the potbellied piccanins, the donkeys with rocks tied to their tails, which was said to inhibit nocturnal braying. His legs, which had begun protesting, found themselves having to work harder and harder as the incline grew steeper.

Then he noticed some empty Casde lager bottles, glinting in the dry grass on either side of him, and seconds later he and Zondi reached level ground again, only yards from where they had left their Land Rover, outside Mabata police station.

In front of it stood the station commander, Stoffel Wessels, still in slippers, his shoulders slumped, staring vacantly at the horizon behind them.

“Stoffel, what’s up, hey?” asked Kramer, then realized that the two long white vehicles in the background were ambulances. “Somebody’s been injured?”

Wessels turned to him, refocused slowly, and said, with an odd sort of chuckle: “Chopper chop-chop!” he said.

“I’m not with you, man,” said Kramer, glancing at Zondi, who responded with a shrug, indicating an equal sense of bewilderment.

“Got the chop!” said Wessels, striking himself on the back of the neck with the edge of his hand. “Chop, chop, chop!”

“Listen, uncle,” said a young ambulance driver, hastening over and putting an arm around Wessels’ shoulders. “You must come and sit inside quietly for a while—you are in shock, hey? Don’t worry, everything is being taken care of, and there is more help on its way.”

“That’s nice,” said Wessels, nodding.

“You’ll come with me, uncle?”

“So long as I don’t have to see those—”

“No, uncle; promise, uncle; we’ll go round into your house the other way, uncle. Here we go, no need to hurry …”

The second ambulance driver, a burly middle-aged man with an Elvis haircut, long sideburns, the lot, came over to Kramer, sized him up, and said in foreign-sounding English, “You all right, guv? Bit of blood there on yer shirt, I see.”

“Ach, no, that’s nothing! What the hell’s going on here? Do you know?”

“Simple enough, squire. According to your lads in the other helicopter, who saw the whole thing, the first one down landed in a bit of a hollow, with a steep bank to one side, like. This was right where them wogs was fighting, see? Bullets and bleedin’ spears flyin’ all over the place, and some nig-nog givin’ it the old one-two with a flippin’ shotgun, dancing around up on a rock. Score was about Shabalalas fifteen, Sitholes fourteen, playin’ for a draw, and the crowd’s
lovin’
it, the women all making that special you’ve-got-no-balls sound, eggin’ ’em on. Y’know, the usual, and normally, no problem. Only it looks like nobody in the copter realized how close to that bank they’d come, and so when the first three jumped out and legged it for cover, they went straight up the bank and
whack, whack, whack
, rotors caught ’em, decapitated the lot! Oh, aye, dead nasty but they’d not have known what hit them, mind. Trouble is, the copter tipped a bit as this happened and rotors
caught the ground on t’other side. Next thing, these other lads see, is the whole caboodle doing a sort of a cartwheel, up out of that hollow and straight over this bloody cliff them Shabalalas had got their backs to!
Boom!
One big ball of flame and every nig-nog for miles is leggin’ it, fast as their feet’ll carry ’em. Second copter goes in, gets through to our control via its radio, and brings out the first three. It’s gone back now for the others before bits of ’em is pinched to be made into
muti
. Wouldn’t have yer job for a big clock, I’m tellin’ yer! Fancy a bit of gum, chief?”

Kramer declined the proffered stick of Wrigley’s with a shake of his head, glanced into the back of the nearest ambulance, then turned and went over to the Land Rover, followed by Zondi.

“Can’t see what help we’d be, hanging around here,” he said, starting the engine. “You heard all that?”

Zondi nodded and sighed. “The crow, boss,” he said.

“Come again? What was that?”

“I’ve never liked helicopters, Lieutenant,” said Zondi.

“F
IRST OF ALL
, Mickey,” said Kramer, as they started cautiously down the zigzagging, hazardous track leading from Mabata to the coastal plain, “I’m going to have you formally seconded to this investigation, okay?”

“Boss?”

“Well, any damn fool can see your undercover role has been blown to buggery by now, so we’ll just have to catch Cousin Nun-Shagger later on, when we have the time, hey? For expediency’s sake, however, to avoid a lot of nonsense from Bronkhorst, the Colonel, and the rest of the bloody red-tape brigade, I’m going to bullshit them that the mission murders and the Fynn’s Creek ones are possibly connected. That way, I can have you start work for me officially almost the minute we get back to Jafini. The ‘officially’ aspect is important, of course, because of technicalities such as the continuity of evidence et cetera, once we finally drag this bastard, kicking and screaming, to bloody court.”

“
Hau
, this is very good news, Lieutenant!”

“And as for what we do next, it seems we have a simple choice. Either we go looking for whoever took potshots at us last night,
or
we start poking into what the Song Dog’s sicked up on the carpet. Myself, I favor the latter plan, because at least we know where to bloody begin, hey?”

“Boss?”

“Didn’t the witch-doctor female tell you that Kritz had been fretting over what he’d written about the cane-truck fatal at his desk?”

“That’s true, Lieutenant. Only I—”

“And she did say ‘desk,’ didn’t she? Not ‘table’ or something similar?”

“No, ‘desk’ for definite, boss, because I was surprised that someone so raw would know the term. Then I realized she was repeating part of Boss Kritzinger’s speech word for word, showing off to me how good her memory was. But I thought you said—”

“Then obviously if we can find those case notes of his, a hell of a lot of time could be saved! Sounded to me as though Kritz had already done most of the groundwork.”

“But, I thought, boss,” Zondi finally got in, “I thought the Lieutenant had already made a thorough search of Boss Kritzinger’s desk and found nothing?”

“Ach, maybe I didn’t look as hard as I might have. After all, I didn’t know at that stage he’d been committing his big secret to paper, creating a document he’d not want anyone else to see. I just hope to God he didn’t destroy it!”

“Or maybe the desk that the
songoma
spoke of was a different one he had back at his own house, boss.”

“Good thinking, hey? I’ll do a check on that. Anything else she said I should know about?”

Zondi smiled. “Well, there was what Mama Pelapela told me, Lieutenant, when I tried to trick her into telling me more, by asking if she had any advice to give us.”

“Oh, ja, what was that?”

“Mama Pelapela replied, boss: ‘I say to you both, revenge is your gift to the unjustly dead; go forth and be generous! For even when you are wrong you will be right, and when—’ ”

“Cheeky old bitch!” said Kramer. “When have I ever been wrong, hey? But that first part I
like
—oh, ja, very definitely!”

“Me, too, Lieutenant,” said Zondi.

They came down out of those mountains like two-up in a fiery chariot, billowing a great plume of red dust behind them, and fell upon the Bombay Emporium like wolves upon a fold—or at least, that was how an astonished shop assistant seemed to view it when they bought up every Texan and Lucky Strike pack in sight, aware that they could have a long, hard haul ahead of them and no time to bugger about shopping for essentials in the middle of it.

They were on their way out of the trading store when Zondi nudged Kramer and said: “Look, boss …”

Hans Terblanche had just double-parked his Land Rover beside their own, and was lumbering with a frown toward the store’s verandah.

“Wait here while I find out what he wants, Mickey,” said Kramer.

“Tromp!” said Terblanche. “Where in heaven’s name have you been, hey? And look at the state you’re in! You’ve had me and the Widow Fourie worried sick about you, imagining all sorts of things!”

“Oh, ja?” said Kramer, reaching the top step. “None of them too filthy, I hope.”

“Pardon?”

“Ach, I’ve just been following up a few leads, doing this and that, bumming a helicopter ride off Aap van Vuuren from Mabata.”

“Mabata?” repeated Terblanche, taking a pace backward, his color draining. “You surely don’t mean you …!”

“Relax, Hans, this isn’t a ghost you see! I got off the stop before, hey, so no harm done.”

“Isn’t it terrible what happened to those blokes? I’ve never known such a week!”

“Terrible,” said Kramer. “And you? What have you been doing?”

“Me? I’ve been waiting for that fingerprint expert of yours to arrive from Trekkersburg—in between five hundred other things! You know Malan’s off sick today? An infected thumb that he got from some hammer yesterday, and now Sard’s got to go and relieve Stoffel Wessels up at Mabata. He’s packing himself a suitcase at his ma’s house right now, and the Colonel says I’m to drive him up there chop-chop—I’m on my way round now—on account of Stoffel’s having a nervous breakdown or something, and then I’ve got to bring Stoffel back for a proper checkup at the hospital, leaving only a raw Bantu in charge here, referring all important calls to Nkosala, while I—”

“Would it help if I kept an eye on him?”

“You actually mean that?”

“Of course.”

“Wonderful, man! You don’t know what a weight that is off my shoulders!”

“Fine, then I’ll see you later, hey?”

“Many, many thanks,” said Terblanche, hurrying back to his Land Rover. “I owe you a favor, hey?”

No, we’re quits, thought Kramer, very heartened by having been told how much the Widow Fourie had missed him.

And then, as the station commander’s Land Rover went backfiring off up the street, its tailgate flapping, Zondi emerged from the Bombay Emporium and murmured: “Why the sly little smile, Lieutenant?”

“Ach, didn’t you hear, hey? I’ve just been put in charge of Jafini, which means
we can bloody tear the place apart
in our search for Kritz’s stuff, if we need to …”

After just fifteen minutes back at the police station, that was no longer the idle threat it might have sounded. The dead detective sergeant’s desktop, awash in dockets, old carbon papers, and everything else once stored in its drawers and pigeonholes, had yielded nothing that seemed worth a second glance.

Zondi dropped to his knees and started looking under the desktop itself.

“I’ve already done all that!” said Kramer. “Can’t you come up with something more original, man?”

“In a minute, boss,” said Zondi, pulling the drawers right out and turning them over.

“And I’ve already explored those as well—you won’t find a damn thing stuck to them, I bet you!”

“Hmmmmm,” said Zondi.

“Listen,” said Kramer, “time to test your idea of the desk being one he had at home. I’ll go and find Kritz’s number in the boss’s office, ring the house, and pick up the inquest papers on the Cloete road traffic fatal while I’m there.”

An unfamiliar female voice answered the Kritzingers’ telephone and explained, rather sharply, that she was Hettie’s sister, newly arrived from Durban to gather the bereaved family together and take them back with her.