The Song Dog (8 page)

“What we need is a good map of the district, hey?” interrupted Kramer. “You’ve got one?”

“Er, large-scale, you mean?”

“Bigger the better.”

“We’ve got a map that shows farmhouses—is that big enough?”

Kramer shrugged. “It’s a start,” he said. “We’ll get the others together, and then I want you to draw a big circle on it showing twenty minutes’ car drive from anywhere within that curved line to Fynn’s Creek.”

Terblanche raised an eyebrow. “Excuse, but what has ‘twenty minutes’ to do with anything?”

“A proper, sit-down meal’s been found in Kritzinger’s belly, which means we can work on the basis that Kritz must have eaten no longer than half an hour before he got the chop, okay? So take off the ten minutes it must’ve taken him to get from his car to the house, even if he bloody ran, and twenty minutes is the maximum traveling time you’ve got left. That’s why we’re going to consider
any point
within that circle as his possible starting point—or in other words, where he ate his last curry.”

“Bet it was a meat curry.”

“Why say that?”

“Maaties would never touch it if it was chicken or fish, but meat curry, yes—especially mutton! It was his most favorite food.”

“Oh, ja?”

“You know, he would always ask for it, without even looking at the menu. Hettie wouldn’t have curry powder in the house, see? She said it was coolie swill. Next, you’ll be telling me he’d had tinned peaches as well.”

“Another big favorite of his?”

“Very definitely—pineapple also.”

“Well, I’m buggered,” said Kramer. “You’ve just narrowed things down again, hey?”

“But how does that narrow down anything?”

“For the obvious reason that whoever provided him with that meal must have known Kritz pretty well to make sure he had his favorite scoff—it can’t have been some stranger, someone unknown to him.”

Terblanche, throttling down on the last straight before Jafini, nodded slowly. “Ja, that makes sense—it makes
good
sense,” he said. “Now, why didn’t I think of that?”

Because CID isn’t your bloody department, thought Kramer.

Back at Jafini, Bokkie Maritz claimed to have been through Maatie Kritzinger’s desk three times with a fine-comb tooth, as he insisted on calling it, without coming across anything of interest, and so he had turned instead to listing the dead detective sergeant’s most recent cases.

“You’re sure you could find nothing of interest?” said Kramer, pulling open the desk’s top drawer.

“Apart from this,” said Maritz, pointing to a row of irregularly shaped pieces of colored plastic arranged along the typewriter’s roller. “It makes a Scottie dog you can hang on your key chain—provided you can work out how to fit them back together, hey? I’m going to try again in a minute.”

“You do that,” Kramer murmured, glancing through a small stack of box camera prints.

They were all of the same four freckle-faced little kids, and in three, true to the tradition of amateur snapshots, the
photographer’s shadow was visible. In each instance, however, this shadow was that of a woman—which possibly explained why Ma Kritzinger appeared in none of them. This did not explain, however, why a supposedly devoted father had never seemed to be around much.

Nothing else of a personal nature came to light as Kramer went on to search the two other drawers in the desk. This struck him as only slightly odd, given Kritzinger’s reputation as work-obsessed. There was certainly plenty of proof of that: time and again, Kramer came across sheets of carbon paper, some used so often they were full of tiny holes that made them look like the black lace that panties were made of.

“Anyway,” said Kramer, pushing the last drawer shut, “how’s that list of cases going? Can I see it?”

“Actually, I’d like a little more time first to, er, perfect it,” said Maritz, hastily putting aside two pieces of the key-ring puzzle. “But what I can tell you already is, old Maaties was one hell of a worker, even if it was almost all the usual Bantu rubbish: faction fights, stabbings, assault, arson, robberies, murder, theft, one rape—”

“ ‘Almost,’ you say,” interrupted Kramer. “With what exceptions?”

Maritz floundered, sending a pile of dockets cascading off the desk to the floor as he sought the one he was after. “Here’s one, Lieutenant!” he said, handing over a slim folder upside down. “But as you’ll note, there’s nothing special about it either.”

Kramer turned the papers the right way up and saw that one Hendrik Willem Schmidt, white adult male aged forty-six, had been charged with the culpable homicide of an Asiatic male who had trespassed on his land. Schmidt, according to his sworn statement, had shot the man with a single round from a .303 rifle in the belief “the coolie after my chickens.” According to the statement made by the wife of the deceased,
her husband had been approaching the farmyard with a sack in his hand because he had hoped to beg any old clothing the family might have for his children, and that she had witnessed this from where she was standing with the aforesaid offspring. A third statement, sworn by a Bantu farm worker, said that it was true, nobody in his right mind ever came to beg at that house because of its reputation, and so his employer had acted in a reasonable manner entirely in accordance with the known facts at the time, unaware the Asiatic male was new to the area.

“Uh-huh, nothing special,” said Kramer, “apart from the date—Christ, man, this thing is
months
old! What’s all this I’ve been hearing about the famous Kritzinger efficiency?”

“Which case is that?” asked Terblanche, who had just entered the CID office to peer over his shoulder. “Ach, the Schmidt one. My guess is he probably thought it’d get watered down to justifiable homicide in court and so he just couldn’t be bothered to pursue matters. That Schmidt is always a big pain to deal with, let me tell you.”

“Fine,” said Kramer. “All set for the briefing yet?”

Terblanche nodded. “I’ve got the map stuck up on the wall of my office, duly marked as you requested, and both the blokes have just got back from Fynn’s Creek, so we’re ready and waiting for your instructions.”

“Keep up the good work, Bok!” said Kramer, palming two pieces of the Scottie dog puzzle to keep his interest up.

Ash-smeared Sarel Suzman and Jaapie Malan looked ready for a shower, half a dozen Castle lagers each, and ten hours’ sleep, which made getting them to concentrate more than Terblanche could apparently handle.

“No,
listen
,” he said. “The map shows a total of thirty-three possible addresses within the twenty-minute area at which curry
might
have been served, so we’ll now divide it equally and
each
of us will do a group, not go round them all together, hey?”

“I still don’t get it,” whined Malan, rugby stockings at halfmast and one knee grazed.

“Ach, what don’t you get, Jaapie?”

“How we’re going to divide this list up.”

“Surely, that’s obvious. We—”

“But four doesn’t go into thirty-three, sir!”

“Oh, yes, it bloody does,” intervened Kramer. “I take the first eight addresses, Suzman takes the next eight, Lieutenant Terblanche the next eight, and you, Malan, the last lot. After which we—”

“But that means I get nine to do and—”

“Look, have you forgotten my warning earlier on, hey?”

“What
I
don’t get,” cut in Suzman, fingering a trouser crease morosely and finding it no longer had its knife edge, “is why Maaties should have eaten out at all last night, when his own home is less than twenty minutes from Fynn’s Creek. Are you sure Hettie hasn’t changed her mind about this curry business?”

“Absolutely sure,” said Terblanche. “I sent Blackspot down to have a word with her kitchen boy just a quarter of an hour ago, and he confirms not only that but also that his boss didn’t come home again at all after he left at breakfast time.”

“Nice thinking, Hans,” said Kramer. “But can we get back to—”

“I still don’t see the point of all this,” grumbled Malan. “If Maaties was at one of these places beforehand, and the people there told him the explosion was going to happen, then they’re not going to tell us that, are they? I mean, if they
were
going to, they’d have done so already—not so?”

“No, not necessarily so,” said Suzman unexpectedly. “Maybe they’re frightened to get involved now, with a proven killer on the loose. It could be a different story once we actually catch him.”

“Correct—except for one thing,” said Kramer. “We’re cops, hey? It’s our job to get people to talk when we want them to
talk, not just when it suits them, so get out there and start twisting a few arms. You follow, Malan? Show them what a real man is like when he does business!”

Suzman and Terblanche exchanged amused glances as Malan, tugging those stockings up, went over to the map and started earnestly jotting down addresses as though now hell-bent on terrorizing half of Northern Zululand.

B
ARELY TWO MINUTES
later, Kramer was alone in his Chevrolet, heading out of Jafini back down the Nkosala road to the first address on his share of the list. He’d been warned that half a mile short of Fynn’s Creek turnoff, he should start watching out for a sign which came and went rather suddenly, pointing the way to Moon Acre Farm, the property of a Mr. Bruce Grantham.

Grantham, so Terblanche had explained, was about as close as anyone had ever become to being a friend of Maaties Kritzinger, chiefly on account of the particularly savage bunch of coons living in his farm compound. Kritzinger had spent many hours—even whole days—at Moon Acre, dealing with everything from murder to serious assault, petty theft, and arson. Afterward, he and Grantham would often booze half the night away, talking it all over and coming, more often than not, to a mutually satisfactory arrangement. “Mind you,” Terblanche had added, “those boys of his do some really crazy things, even for kaffirs, and I often wonder what goes on up at that big house of his. He sometimes goes so far out of his way to look after their interests you’d think he was a kaffir-lover.”

Kramer narrowed his eyes. An oddly familiar figure had come in sight, back turned, walking along the verge of the road ahead of him. Then, an instant later, the inside-out jacket and the pair of tennis shoes registered. Short Arse was
on the move, as jaunty as ever, chewing on a length of sugarcane. He took absolutely no notice as the Chevrolet went by, enveloping him in a cloud of red dust that hung in the air for several seconds before disappearing.

By then, Short Arse appeared to have disappeared himself, but the Chev was into the next corner before Kramer knew it, making it too late to verify this fleeting impression without reversing.

“Ach, no, the bastard can’t have vanished,” Kramer told himself, not dropping speed, “but one thing’s for certain: I
have
seen that same walk before somewhere—and it
wasn’t
some other coon doing it …”

MOON ACRE FARM
—
KEEP OUT
warned the snazzy sign, and forced a quick turn to the left. The cattle grid between the gateposts clattered loudly under the Chev and then came the hiss of a wide drive, laid with gravel.

Listen, Kramer told himself, you’ve already got too much on your mind to start worrying about this Short Arse nonsense, so just forget all about it until later, when there’s time.

But he went on searching obscure corners of his memory for a matching mug shot until the farmhouse came in view, framed by the last rows of sugarcane. Beyond them stretched a lawn so green and neat a carpet would certainly have been cheaper, provided you cut holes in it for the trunks of the English trees scattered everywhere like in a park. Keeping the grass so green were more water sprinklers than Kramer had ever seen off a racetrack, and squatting kaffirs moved in lines, plucking out imperfections with watchmaker’s precision and placing them in burlap bags tied to their waists. The huge farmhouse itself was every bit as neat as the lawn, what with freshly painted columns holding up the verandah roof and bright, striped canvas making the deck chairs and other outdoor seating as cheerful as toffee wrappings.

Kramer drove right the way up to the front steps, and
switched off his engine after a quick, loud rev to announce his arrival. Two wolves—or rather, two creatures that looked very like wolves—immediately sprang over the verandah railing and hurled themselves at him, snarling with astonishing ferocity. He felled the first with his car door as he stepped out and got the other in the throat with his toe cap, snapping its head back.

“Well, that’s buggered the bastards as watchdogs,” said a cool voice in English. “I’ll have them destroyed.”

Kramer looked around. Coming down the front steps was a man in his early sixties, lean as a whip and with a beak-nosed head that seemed a sunburned version of the busts printed on the Roman-Dutch lawbooks at Police College. He wore an elephant-tail bracelet on his right wrist, a fiddly watch filled with little extra dials on his left, and carried a fly whisk. The rest of his appearance was standard English-speaking farmer: short-sleeved, open-necked white shirt; khaki shorts to midthigh; long khaki stockings and tan desert boots.

“Mr. Bruce Grantham?”

“The very same. You’re obviously a police officer—poor old Kritzinger’s replacement? I’d been hoping it wasn’t true, the guff I heard this morning on the bush telegraph.”

“Depends on what it was you heard,” said Kramer.

“That Maaties had become involved in some God-awful explosion or other at Fynn’s Creek, and that young Mrs. Gillets had died with him. He’d been trying to save her, I believe?”

“It certainly looks that way,” agreed Kramer. “You’d say that would have been in character?”

“Oh, utterly—brave as a lion! Maaties has saved my bacon more than once, I don’t mind admitting, when my laborer wallahs have got a trifle out of hand. But what happened to him exactly? I think I was enough of a chum to be entitled to a few details.”

“There really isn’t much to add,” said Kramer, “which
is why I’ve come to see you, hoping you can come up with some ideas.”