The Sunday Hangman (22 page)

“The bar’s beginning to fill up now—it’s after six. Would you like to take a look at some of them?”

“What’s that, Piet?”

“They’ve heard about you being here.”

“And?”

“I said you were baby-sitting for Willie. Old Gysbert nearly bust a gut—he’s one you can knock off your list right away.”

“Why? Has he got one arm?”

“Ach, what I meant was you’ve never known a wild man like Gys! Here, you sit where the floor isn’t so wet. A huge
bloody thing, he is—big black beard; you’ll know him. Farms about eight kilos out and drives a truck like a madman. Every time he goes into Brandspruit the traffic cop gives him another ticket.”

Kramer’s gut twinged. “Has he—is he married?”

“Widower,” replied Ferreira, motioning the barman to put the tray of drinks down on the table. “Took up with Annie Louw after Tiens was killed, then she got TB and he was left with just the one daughter. Nice kiddie, blond the same as her mum. Goes to the government boarding school in ’Spruit during the week, comes home weekends and holidays. Hell, he’s strict with her, though, and she’s only—what? Maybe fourteen, fifteen? Like another?”

“Uh huh.”

“Just lately he’s stopped her coming to the barbecue because the Jackson boy took her into the old barn one night. It was nothing, only kids’ stuff, bit of a fumble, but Gysbert nearly took off! Karl de Bruin—a nice old bugger—he had to talk reason to him before we had bloodshed. The Jackson boy was yelling—Gysbert had his hair, you see?—and saying he’d tell his father, and Karl was saying that kids would be kids and the boy had just been boasting. What a schlamozzle! Gysbert will knock any man down who crosses him, as Frikkie knows only too well, and that would include hard cases even like Tommy, who was there as well. About two years ago, he very nearly went on a charge over what he did to a guest who got fresh. But I mustn’t give you the impression his heart is in the wrong place.”

Ferreira, well-oiled himself, continued to talk about the man while making a production of pouring two more Scotches without a tot glass. Gysbert Swanepoel hadn’t always been such a wild man, it appeared, but had undergone a personality change after the death of his wife. For some months he had remained his old, quiet self, then one night he’d arrived
half-tanked already and had never looked back. But Kramer wasn’t taking much of this in. It all added up: Wednesday had been the end of the school term in Natal, the description of the man and his driving matched, and the incident had taken place within nine kilometers of Witklip. Only by an outrageous coincidence could it have been anyone but the Swanepoels. And to think that, in his half-awake state, he’d superimposed his dream hussy over a fleeting glimpse of a giggling schoolgirl. Far worse, to think that he’d been on the brink of challenging Ferreira’s claim there were no beddable females around—God, that would have sounded like an allegation of a statutory offense! He felt as though he’d just passed an ice cube.

“And so, you see,” Ferreira was saying earnestly, “I think that should qualify him automatic.”

“Who?”

“The Reverend Kotse.”

Then Ferreira grinned to show he knew that Kramer hadn’t been attending. He was not altogether correct, however.

“De Bruin acted as peacemaker?”

“Karl always does. He hates to see any trouble.”

“What age is he?”

“Around fifty, the same as Gysbert, although you’d never guess it. A bloody good farmer—in fact, maybe our best. Him and his son have made pots of it, but they’re not the kind of people to let it show. Hell, I see what you’re driving at.…”

Kramer looked at the white stone through the facets of his whisky glass, making it bulk and shrink as he turned the thing slowly in his hand. His stomach was expanding and contracting in much the same way: a sure sign of breakthrough fever in the intuitive male. He switched his gaze suddenly to Ferreira.

“I can’t imagine it, Lieutenant. A more law-abiding—”

“Interesting, Piet, very interesting. Tell me, did he take on Gysbert Swanepoel all by himself, or was his son also present?”

Ferreira shrugged. “They’ve always been on good terms, despite the differences now between them, so it wasn’t really—”

“He’s a churchgoer?” Kramer asked.

“Er—ja. Nearly all the Afrikaner ones are. You know how—”

“Prisons? Connections with warders?”

“Not that I know of,” replied Ferreira, frowning a little.

Kramer began to tread, toe to heel, along the edge of the verandah between the two pillars. One false move would have him in mud up to the ankles—one false move and he’d be in something similar, although a lot nastier, up to his nose, for Karl de Bruin was obviously a highly respected member of the community.

“I’m going to start with the search,” Kramer said, returning to the table to finish his drink. “That way I stay winning whether we find anything or not. The subtle stuff can come later.”

“Start searching right now?” Ferreira gasped.

“I’d prefer it to be in daylight while he’s away from home,” admitted Kramer. “Does de Bruin play bowls or do anything like that at the weekends?”

“Um—no. Tell you what, though: the barbecue committee will all be here tomorrow afternoon, fixing up the kids’ holiday special. He’s the chairman.”

Such a long delay had little appeal for Kramer, then he remembered Zondi’s condition and decided he might need the time for other things. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll be in touch again in the morning. Meantime, don’t say a word about any of this, but keep your ears open.”

“Don’t worry, Lieutenant! I don’t want to go on anybody’s black list!”

“Ach, when did you ever kill someone and get away Scot-free?” Kramer reassured him jokingly and, with a mock salute, took his leave by jumping down into the garden.

A look on Ferreira’s face, glimpsed just as he turned from the verandah, made him regret very much having said that.

That was the start of a dark mood which became darker and darker until, deciding he was achieving nothing by sitting up alone in the station commander’s office, Kramer took the pathway to Jonkers’s bungalow, passing close to the hut where Zondi was quartered. Although there was no light showing, he paused and listened for a while, hearing not a sound.

Kramer moved on, lethargic with a sense of absurdity. Exactly what he found absurd, he wasn’t sure; perhaps it was the idea of having an early night. Or it could have been the fault of the Widow Fourie, who’d just accused him on the telephone of having had another woman; a more absurd conversation, based on a wild assumption made over a range of three hundred kilometers, was difficult to imagine.

The bungalow stank of floor polish, stale beer, and mail-order perfume. He pushed the door shut behind him, left the lights off, and followed the passage down to the end; on the right, the maid had said, was the guest room and his bed. A weak moon, shining in through the burglar-proofed window, dimly outlined a lot else: an ironing board, a sewing machine, a dressmaker’s dummy on a stand, rows of melon preserve, cardboard boxes. He picked his way across, stripped to his underpants, and lay back on the coverlet. It was, in fact, a long time since he’d slept in a strange bed, let alone one with a stranger in it. Silly bitch.

He closed his eyes and his thoughts drifted, swirled, and became caught up in an eddy of too much drink and no food. He saw tiers of prisoners in brightly colored uniforms behind silver bars upsetting their water dishes.

He opened his eyes and took a fix on the far wall. The giddiness left him; he began to feel floppy, warm, and drunk. It was a good feeling, and eased away his anxiety over what might happen to poor bloody Zondi. It couldn’t be ending.…

That was a pretty little dress on the dummy. Short sleeves but a high-buttoned front; a teaser if ever there was one. He rolled onto his feet and bent to look at it. There was a scrap of paper, scribbled over with measurements that didn’t make sense, pinned to the collar;
Suzanne
was the name across the top of it. Little Suzanne Swanepoel, who hadn’t a mother to make her a pretty party dress, so kind Mrs. Jonkers helped out. Between tumbles with Tollie and frolicking with Frikkie, the woman had a heart of gold. Trouble was, with a dress like that, you could never be sure of what lay underneath. Not unless you undid the round buttons, starting at the neck, one by one. All the way down to the waist and then drew back the two sides and had a look. Like that. Too dark, much too dark to see a thing. Feel, then. Run the fingertips up over the patent adjustable form and fill your palm with such a pleasing small shape. Linger. Think about the search tomorrow. Yawn, button up, and go to bed. Trying to be filled with self-disgust, but failing.

M
R
. R
AT DIED
that night. By Saturday morning, he no longer gnawed on the bone, nor did he squirm, twist, and scrabble. Instead, giving off heat and bloating rapidly, Mr. Rat decayed. Zondi could just feel the swelling.

But uppermost in his mind, as he drove through the early morning mist toward the farm where Dorothy Jele worked, was the story of Mama Buza’s baby. It had seemed a perfectly good story when told by a virtuous man like Absalom Mkuzi, and yet, within minutes of Zondi’s leaving the headman’s kraal, his instincts had taken him on that long trek to talk to Mama Buza’s former neighbors. They had said nothing to alter the crucial fact that all of Witklip believed in Izimu’s guilt as a child-stealer; they had, however, enlarged on one or two details that troubled an outsider unused to God’s taking part in police work. Details such as the baby’s miraculous condition—which could, as one old hag had observed, have been attributed to Izimu’s foul designs, along the lines of the fatter the better. Then again, Zondi had seen his own infants restored to bouncy well-being overnight at the end of a lean week on staple rations. Notwithstanding any of this, it still seemed to him rather peculiar, and he was eager to hear what Dorothy Jele might be able to tell him.

The Chevrolet rattled over the cattle grid and followed the drive around to the front steps of the huge white house, which
had very small, narrow windows. Two lion dogs rushed out, barking savagely, to be followed by Mr. Jackson, the farmer.

He was a big man with a red wobble under his sharp chin like a turkey. His bluey-gray eyes were the color of a dead sheep’s and his nose was pointed, making him resemble the sort of white man a child would crayon at school, yet his voice was low, deep, and almost friendly.

“Yes, boy?” he said, noting the official look of the car. “What is it you want here?”

Zondi replied in respectfully murmured Zulu: “I wish to speak a little with your servant Dorothy Jele, master.”

“Dorothy is helping the madam with her hair,” Mr. Jackson told him, switching to Zulu himself. “You’d better go round and wait in the yard for a while—but first I will have to know what this is all about.”

It was a pity he was bilingual; often a fluent burst of gibberish and a few clicks of the tongue would deflect an awkward question such as this without further ado.

“There is a new ordinance, sir,” Zondi lied earnestly, building on a truth, “similar to the one which makes all Xhosa people into citizens of the new nation of the Transkei, irrespective of their place of birth. It requires registration of those—”

“Whoa! You’re not trying to take her away from us, are you?” interrupted Mr. Jackson, returning sternly to English. “We’ve had Dorothy for thirty years, you know—she’s one of the family. Never been parted from us for more than a week.”

“On the contrary,” Zondi replied, using English himself now out of politeness. “The ordinance is concerned with the maid’s domicile at the termination of her employment only.”

“But we’ve promised her she can build a hut here and we’ll see she never starves or anything. Can’t she do that?”

“It is not for me to say, sir. But has the boss considered nominal employment?”

“So that’s how it’s done?” Mr. Jackson chuckled, then went back into Zulu. “A man never knows what they will think of next! All right, off you go. She will be about ten minutes.”

Zondi waited until the dogs had followed the farmer into the house, then he hobbled down the drive leading to the garages and the servants’ quarters. The five domestics in the walled yard, seated on wine boxes and upturned buckets, spooning up mealie meal porridge, greeted him with reserve. He declined their offer of a seat and a share of their breakfast, and leaned against the trunk of an avocado tree, thinking over what he had just learned. So Dorothy Jele had chosen to work for the Jackson family for a full generation without, it appeared, having ever requested more than a week at a time in which to turn her back on them. This deepened his interest in the case of Mama Buza’s baby—although that wasn’t, of course, what he was there for. At a guess, the Lieutenant would want to know if any had cross-examined her about the identity of the man in the forest.

Kramer overslept, to be awakened by the maid bearing a breakfast tray of fried bread and tomato. Intensely annoyed with himself, he leaped up, ate the bread while he shaved, and then dressed hurriedly, muttering recriminations. He left the bungalow shortly after eight and jog-trotted along the path, noting to his satisfaction that the door of Zondi’s hut was closed and that all was as quiet as it had been the night before. But as he drew nearer to the police station, he saw that his car had gone, and this made him run the rest of the way.

“Where the hell’s Sergeant Zondi?” he demanded on reaching the charge office.

Goodluck Luthuli stamped to attention. “He go by Jackson farm, suh!”

“Is that so? What’s that you’ve got there?”

Goodluck handed over an envelope marked
PRIVATE
&
CONFIDENTIAL
, which Kramer tore open where he stood.

Dear Lt. Kramer
, the note inside said.
Hardly anybody pitched up last night because of the roads and the trouble when the vet crashed. See you later. In haste, Piet F. (I’ve gone to get a new tire from Brandspruit, don’t know how long I’ll be.)

The note—and the fact it was a note—somehow bothered him. But not half so much as the discovery that Zondi had helped himself to the Chev and buggered off. No doubt the cheeky sod was checking to see if anyone had tried to make Dorothy Jele swear to having spotted Izimu among the trees—only those hadn’t been his orders, and things in that department were coming to a head.