The Song Dog (34 page)

“Ach, no! What’s this? Fairy-tale time?”

Zondi chuckled. “No, boss, that was a bad joke, but one thing does worry me a bit, and that is—”

“Hey,” said Kramer, interrupting, “you haven’t told me yet what
you
found out at the Suzmans’—what was it?”

“Oh, that a small traveling clock had gone missing over the weekend, which the maid took the blame for, and that Boss Suzman had come back in very dirty clothes last night, which he obviously tried to clean up a bit himself before throwing them in the wash basket.”

“After you’d sent him arse over tip in the mud at Fynn’s
Creek with your bloody awful marksmanship? Ja, that figures! Christ, while I was setting up my little trap yesterday, it was bloody Suzman who kept poking his nose in, wanting to know what was afoot, asking questions and everything! Man, I don’t know how I missed that.”

“But, boss, to go back to what I was saying, there is still one thing about all this that truly worries me: would Boss Suzman have been clever enough to make a time bomb? And where would he have got dynamite from, without—”

“Hmmm,” said Kramer, “now
that
, Mickey, is a bloody good question …”

“You see, Lieutenant, even if—”

“Got it!” whooped Kramer, flinging his car door open. “You want to stand amazed and truly mind-boggled? Then just follow me, hey?”

Trust Hans Terblanche to choose that exact moment to halt Kramer and Zondi in their tracks as they hurried into the police station, by blocking the corridor outside his office with his benign, bumbling presence.

“Tromp!” he said, with a huge beam. “Really good news, hey? Our friend Stoffel from Mabata will be allowed to leave hospital first thing tomorrow morning! Aren’t the miracles of modern medicine wonderful?”

“Hans,” said Kramer, “isn’t there a bloody
Readers Digest
you can bugger off and read somewhere?”

Terblanche, glancing at Zondi, allowed his hackles to rise visibly. “Ach, Tromp,” he said, “that’s not how I like to be—”

“No offense intended, Hans, hey? It’s just I haven’t time to waste. Have you got your key to the exhibits cupboard?”

“Er, ja, here it is, only—”

Kramer grabbed the key from him and hastened to the end of the corridor, where he had the padlock off before Zondi and Terblanche could reach his side. Then he threw open the
cupboard doors and reached in, his right hand confident it knew exactly where to go. It disappeared under a bundle of recovered clothing, felt around, rummaged for only a second or two, then came out again, clutching the brown-paper parcel labeled
Umfolosi Quarry Co
.

“But, Lieutenant,” ventured Zondi, with a wary sideways glance at Terblanche, “that label says a dozen sticks, and one look tells me that there
are
a dozen sticks in—”

“Just
listen
, though …” said Kramer. “Bet you they don’t all make the same sound!”

“Heavens, you’re not going to put a match to—” began Terblanche, stepping back sharply.

“Relax, Hans, the fireworks are later,” said Kramer.

Then, one at a time, he tapped each of the twelve paper-wrapped cylinders against one of the cupboard shelves; six produced a dull thud; the rest gave the sharp rap of wood on wood.

“Look, cut-up broomsticks, Mickey!” said Kramer, stripping the wrapping off a sample of the latter. “Note also, this isn’t proper dynamite paper, man. It’s ordinary brown parcel paper, smeared with something like butter to give it the right greasy, translucent look.” He sniffed at the wrapping and added: “Christ, it
is
bloody butter—and no watermark!”

“Six sticks substituted, Lieutenant …” murmured Zondi. “One less than Boss Dorf said were used to blow up the house at Fynn’s Creek.”

“Ach, nobody’s perfect!” said Kramer.

Terblanche grunted and said: “What exactly is going on here, hey? How much longer am I going to be kept in the dark?”

“Listen, Hans,” said Kramer, turning to him, “there’s a lot I’ve got to fill you in on, but first, have you any idea where Sarel Suzman is?”

“Up at Mabata, of course—I thought I’d told you that.”

“But he is still there, hey?”

“Of course!”

“The point is, man, I need a quick word with old Sarel—in person, that is—only I’d appreciate it if he didn’t know I was on my way up there, okay?”

“Why?” challenged Terblanche unexpectedly.

“I’ll also explain that later, once I—”

“Sorry, that’s not good enough, Lieutenant!” said Terblanche, his voice hardening further, in a way it had never done before. “I also think it’s high time your boy went into Bantu CID, don’t you?—maybe find himself something useful to do there …”

“You heard, kaffir,” said Kramer.

T
ERBLANCHE LED THE
way through into his office and motioned for Kramer to be seated. “You know what you’re doing, Tromp?” he said, in a gruff, aggrieved voice, as he sank into the chair behind his desk. “You’re doing to me exactly what Maaties used to do. The more I get to know you, the more I realize how alike you are—but it’s really not nice that.”

“
Me?
Like Kritz? Jesus, you can’t be serious, man! I’m not a bloody—”

“Listen, you’ve been treating me as thicker than that blasted farm boy you’ve got seconded to assist you! But there
are
limits to my stupidity, of that I can assure you! You want a ‘for instance’?”

“Hell, if you think—”

“Point number one,” said Terblanche, pointing with his paper knife, “you asked me for a key to the exhibits cupboard. Such keys are only available to white noncommissioned officers and above, correct? A total of three personnel at Jafini: two sergeants and me. Only we go minus one, because one of those sergeants is now dead, killed by a dynamite bomb. And then we go minus one again, because
I
know I have had nothing to with taking explosives that never belonged to me. Heavens, man, give me credit for something! Even Hans Terblanche can take two from three and see that the one who’s left, the one who’s got some difficult questions to find the answers to, must be
Sarel Suzman! Why not just come straight out with what’s on your mind? Why not treat me the same way you—”

“Fine, then take a look at these pictures Suzman kept hidden away in his bedroom, Hans,” said Kramer, who really didn’t have time for point number two. “I was about to show them to you anyway …” And he dealt the defaced prints one at a time onto Terblanche’s blotter—all except for the Fourie picture, which he palmed.

There began a long, crackly silence.

Terblanche’s hands shook as he lifted each print, looked at it, and then laid it gently aside again, as though trying to make up somehow, in his clumsy way, for the violence they’d been subjected to.

“No,” he said in a whisper.

“Ja, Hans,” said Kramer. “It’s hard to accept, man, I know, but it’s true. Do you know who everyone is? I’m stuck regarding the identity of those two couples in the pictures on the left.”

“These—” began Terblanche, but had to swallow first. “These were good friends of mine from the tennis club at Nkosala. That’s Barry Gardiner and his young wife, Sue; that’s Louise and Pat Simpson, his farm manager.”

“Oh, ja? Were, you say?”

“B-Barry had this big sugar farm just above Nkosala, and his own little plane, a four-seater. They—they all died in it, last Christmas, some fault after takeoff. He used to fly in, you see, bringing Pat dressed as Santa Claus, for the kiddies, and say he’d fetched him down from the North Pole. The kiddies all saw the crash, it was terrible! Even the piccanins, watching the party from the fence and asking for cake, they also cried, wept their hearts out. Oh,
man
!” And now Terblanche was weeping too.

“Listen,” said Kramer, certain he had heard somewhere it was better for a bloke to be allowed to express his deep feelings than to suppress them, “get up off your fat arse, hey, and help me go get this bloody animal!”

Stumbling to his feet, the station commander dragged a forearm across his eyes to wipe his tears away, then jerked open his top desk drawer, fumbled a fifty-round pack of .38 ammunition into his right trouser pocket, followed it with a pair of handcuffs, and shoved two tear-gas grenades into his tunic’s side pockets, before grabbing up a whip, a big torch, and a long truncheon. Then, without looking at Kramer, for his tears had not stopped streaming down, he barged past him, blinking, snatching up the keys to his Land Rover on his way out.

“Be with you in two seconds, hey?” said Kramer. “First, I’ve got to tell my boy where we’re—”

“Listen!” said Terblanche, turning abruptly, speaking through clenched teeth. “This has got to be just us. Understood?”

“You mean—”

“Just us. You and me only, Tromp!”

“Fine,” said Kramer, “we ride alone, that’s agreed. You get the Land Rover started …”

Then he went down the corridor and walked into the Bantu CID office, expecting Zondi to be waiting there impatiently, bursting to hear what had happened after he’d been ordered to remove himself from the corridor.

“Mickey, are you deaf?”

Zondi, totally engrossed in a slim docket, looked up and took a second or two before responding. “
Hau
, sorry, boss!” he said, leaping up out of his chair and thrusting the docket eagerly toward Kramer. “Look, Lieutenant, see what is written here! I saw that notice over there on the notice board and then I found—”

“What’s this? Has the bastard also been killing off—”

“No, no, boss—not Boss Suzman. The Bantu male suspect described here sounds like my cousin Matthew Mslope!”

“Ach, Christ, we haven’t got no time for that now, man. We’re hitting Mabata before Ma Suzman can raise the alarm
or anything else happens. But I’ve got to ride with Terblanche so, here, grab these!”

Zondi caught the Chevrolet’s keys and weighed them in his hand, an eyebrow raised. “Lieutenant?” he said.

“Ach, you’ll think of something useful to do with them, kaffir, if you try hard enough, hey?”

Then Kramer turned at the sound of a Land Rover over-revving, and tried a little stunt he’d just picked up: he did a half-vault over the wide windowsill, landed heels together, and covered the rest of the distance at a run.

Very torn, Zondi watched the churned dust quickly settle out in the yard, and then looked back at the docket, which he had still clutched in his hand. If the investigating officer in this particular case of petty theft had his facts right, it looked as though there was now every chance of Matthew Mslope finally being made to pay the ultimate penalty.

On the other hand, although the Lieutenant’s parting words had been strangely ambiguous, Zondi could not help feeling that he had, perhaps, an equal duty to travel up to Mabata, there to assist if necessary in the arrest of that psychopathic pervert, Sarel Suzman.

Still in a dilemma, back Zondi went to the bulletin board in the Bantu CID office, where an efficient-looking, ballpoint
Wanted
notice demanded of Detective Sergeant Mtetwa’s fellow workers:

The Lieutenant, of course, would have been quick to point out that it was only through a
lack
of efficiency on Mtetwa’s part that the thing was still up there, and bound to catch Zondi’s eye as he entered the office, because the docket itself had
Complaint Withdrawn
scrawled across it. An attached note from the station commander, written two days earlier, had informed Mtetwa that the vicar of St. Peter’s had rung up to say his wife had found the missing objects in their small daughter’s dollhouse.

The Lieutenant would have enjoyed that. Just as he would have smiled, too, at the Black Mass theory advanced separately by the church warden, who admitted to have been reading the Sunday papers his lodger took.

But what would the Lieutenant have made of Mtetwa’s own statement, based on a large number of informal interviews he had conducted? These had built up a picture of a strange, haunted figure that people kept seeing in their churches, but could never describe too clearly, having dismissed it as simply dark-skinned, before it could excite their curiosity.

Obviously, however, from the frequency of these sightings, this phantom of the pews had to be living somewhere fairly near both Nkosala and Jafini, and accordingly should not take too long to track down, especially if a close eye were kept on all places of worship.

But before lifting a finger, the Lieutenant was bound to say: “You’re sure all this ‘approx’ bullshit gives us a close enough description to confirm that this is the bloody nun-shagger, kaffir?” At least Zondi had his reply ready: “Oh, without a doubt, boss. Most especially the little blue flowers, for Sister Theresa
said she had been named thus, the Little Flower, and when we were piccanins, we would pick them on the way to school for her on many, many days, me and my cousin Matthew Mslope.”

This sudden memory caused Zondi’s throat to hurt so much—it was as though a hangman’s noose had begun to crush his windpipe—he found his mind made up the very next instant.

When the roller-coaster section of the road up to Mabata succeeded in checking Terblanche’s headlong rush, Kramer decided the time had come to do a little talking, to fill the man in, before reaching the mountain police station.

He began by describing Maaties Kritzinger’s first uneasy suspicions about the Cloete affair, and then went on to the meeting with the old Bantu cane-worker, Bhengu. He skimped on only a little of the detail, but of the Pik Fourie case he said nothing.

“So let me get this straight, Tromp,” said Terblanche, dropping the Land Rover into its lowest gear to cross a dry watercourse. “Maaties was sure the Cloetes had been murdered, but he couldn’t see any motivation?”