Kramer pointed to the inquest cutting and she nodded.
“And another thing, Lisbet: Hennie told me Boetie said nothing more about Greenside for a whole month. That’s also about Monday-or the weekend before.”
“The drowning-is that what he saw?”
The music stopped.
“Let’s get going, Lisbet, before the mob reaches us. We’ll say thanks another time.”
They hastened away together.
But when she saw what the time was, Lisbet had to very reluctantly ask to be dropped off. She had forty compositions still to mark. Equally reluctantly, Kramer escorted her to the lift, promised to ring, shook hands, and departed in search of Dr. Strydom.
He found him in the surgery at Central Charge Office examining some pompous idiot who had been arrested while in charge of a motor vehicle he was trying to park in the mayor’s civic goldfish pond.
“But I am a fish!” the driver insisted. “Pissed as a newt and fed to the gills! Ha ha. But I don’t supply-suppose you could understand that in your bloody Dutch patois, hey?”
His jibes at sixty percent of the white population went ignored. Everyone was too intent upon what the district surgeon was up to next.
Kramer looked over their heads.
Dr. Strydom had his piece of chalk and was drawing a long, wobbly line with it across the floor.
“Right now, sir,” he said with a showman’s grin. “I’ve drawn a straight line from here to the wall. All I want you to do is walk along it without stepping off.”
The drunk studied the challenge before him.
“God, I am sloshed!” he said and collapsed.
“Help him up,” Strydom ordered the young constables who were staggering about themselves, hooting and slapping their thighs. “I’ve got to take a urine sample.”
“What’s that?” asked the drunk.
“Urine.”
“Ah, number ones, you mean. Who- whom do I have the pleasure of doing it on?”
“Yourself, if you’re not careful!” giggled the ubiquitous Constable Hendriks, who had grown a new patch of pustules.
“Cut this bloody rubbish out!”
Even the drunk was sobered somewhat by Kramer’s harsh voice. Strydom most of all.
“Lieutenant! I didn’t know you were here.”
“What’s all this in aid of, Doctor?”
“Well, you know, all work and no play makes-”
“Rubbish, man. This sort of conduct is dangerous and you know it.”
“Spoken like a gentleman, sir!”
Kramer grabbed the drunk by the lapels.
“Call me that again and it’ll be blood samples! Understand?”
Hendriks flinched.
“May I have the recep-tickle?” the drunk asked meekly.
Strydom obliged.
“Now get him out of here,” Kramer ordered when the messy deed was done.
In seconds he and Strydom were left alone in the room. Then neither spoke for a full minute.
“I’m sorry, Doctor.”
“Oh, you were quite right.”
“It’s just I wasn’t in the mood-I need your help urgently.”
“Indeed?” Mollification set in.
“Come up to the officers’ mess and I’ll buy you a brandy.”
The dreary room was empty. Kramer went behind the bar and poured two stiff ones. Then, having put his name in the book, he joined Strydom in a corner.
“It’s about the Cutler drowning case,” he said after a sip.
“Now there’s a coincidence!”
“How’s that? Something new?”
“Oh, no, not the boy, I meant the family-Captain Jarvis. We had him treading the white line not so long ago. A fortnight, maybe. Banned for a whole year and I wasn’t surprised. What got me started on that?”
“I mentioned the Cutler affair.”
“Sad, sad business. That’s right, Jarvis said in mitigation it had led to him taking too much. I suppose the Yankee insurance companies want something from you?”
“No.”
“What then?”
“Boetie Swanepoel.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Listen, and I’ll explain.”
Strydom listened. First with one ear, then with the other, twisting and wriggling in the soft armchair, becoming progressively more uncomfortable. His lobes turned very red.
“Damn it, man, you’re implying I made a mistake!” he finally exploded.
“Only might have made one, Doctor. Let me finish first, please. Yes, suppose Boetie was nosing around Greenside, heard a suspicious sound from inside 10 Rosebank Road, and investigated. He goes in quietly and comes across something he later describes as being of great interest to the police. Was it young Andy drowning?”
“Why keep quiet about that?”
“Exactly.”
“I see. You think it may have been a bit more dramatic in reality. A fight maybe?”
“Something along those lines.”
“Impossible.”
“Why?”
“Because he died of cardiac inhibition.”
“That isn’t what you said in court. Ordinary drowning, you told the magistrate.”
“Never!”
Kramer opened the scrapbook and pushed it across the coffee table. Strydom found his spectacles, read the line pointed out to him, and grunted.
“Bloody young fool,” he said. “I even gave my evidence in English and the reporter still gets it wrong.”
“Then your words weren’t: ‘a typical drowning’?”
“ Atypical. One word. It means almost exactly the opposite.”
“Come again?”
“I was asked to be brief.”
“But Geldenhuys read your report!”
“What does he know about it? I’d said drowning and that was enough. Everyone wanted the thing over as quickly as possible.”
“So it seems.”
“Be careful, Lieutenant. I’d like to tell you something now. Before Cutler was cremated in New York, he had to be examined again by a pathologist over there-his conclusions were exactly the same as my own: cardiac inhibition due to the stimulation of the vagus nerve.”
“I need another brandy,” Kramer said.
“Medicinal? Allow me.”
An officer from the Security Branch, the one who never removed his high-crowned felt hat, was now behind the bar reading someone else’s letter over a beer. He served Strydom without missing a word-you could tell that because his lips never stopped moving.
“There you are, my dear Kramer, get that down you.”
The whip hand held out a well-charged glass.
