“Nothing, boss. Just that Argyle didn’t have his spear in the living room.”
“Christ, kaffir! I tell you we’re not getting sidetracked onto this case. There’s a lot you’ve got to hear from me and a lot we must do. That’s why I came by your place tonight-I want you to start at Greenside first thing. It could be we’re at last making some progress.”
The mortuary van passed by to collect together Sister Gertrude, a good nurse notwithstanding.
9
While waiting for Zondi to report back, Kramer had Pembrook fetch the toffee tin from the safe so that they could study its contents afresh in the light of a drizzly morning. Little wonder people caught colds in such an unpredictable climate.
“Pull over Zondi’s stool but don’t sit too close to me,” he said.
Pembrook complied with a sniff.
“I went round to the Swanepoels’ at breakfast time, sir,” he said. “That reference the father made to Boetie oversleeping one Sunday and missing church for the first time-it was on November the sixteenth.”
“Fine! Now we have narrowed it right down to the morning after, so to speak.”
“And that reminded Bonita that Boetie had been in high spirits the morning before. He’d exchanged his bike for a better one with a dynamo lamp-said he’d be out late testing it.”
“Even better. But it still beats me why his parents never asked him what he was up to.”
“They keep saying the same thing: they trusted him and-”
“Who, man?”
“God.”
Kramer wrote the name on his blotter. Then he opened the tin, giving two of the squares of tissue to Pembrook and opening the other one out himself.
“I have a feeling,” he said, “that these things might tell us a lot about what our young friend knew. The trouble is finding out how they work.”
“Well, isn’t the first thing deciding whether it’s a code or a cipher, sir?”
“Hey? Come again? And stick to Afrikaans this time.”
The probationer squirmed.
“I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t know the word for ‘cipher.’ ”
“What does it mean, then?”
“That you give each letter of the alphabet a number or something, perhaps switch the letters around, and write like that.”
“Bugger it, Pembrook, that is a code!”
“No, sir-at least not according to what I read once. A code is where one letter stands for a whole word-or where a drawing, say a circle, stands for ‘battleship.’ The trouble is you can’t write just anything and you must have a codebook to do it.”
Kramer made a show of peering into the tin.
“Nothing there,” he said.
“That’s also the trouble, sir,” Pembrook went on, rather apprehensively. “You can’t get anywhere without one.”
“Uhuh.”
A prisoner from the cells shuffled in to sweep the floor and was waved out again.
“Seeing you know so much about it, my boy, which one is this in?”
Pembrook caught a sneeze in a tissue and spent some time folding it away.
“Couldn’t we ask them through in Security, sir? They’re supposed to know all there is to know-more than me.”
“What? And make a bloody fool of myself if it’s a lot of twaddle? We’re dealing with a kid of twelve, remember.”
“Sir.”
“Well?”
“I think it’s in code, sir. You’ll notice how each line of letters stays straight and keeps inside a sort of square. There’s a pattern to it you wouldn’t need if you were just switching letters around. It must match up with something.”
“Of course! That explains the tracing paper!”
Pembrook flushed with embarrassed pride.
“Shall I have another go at his room, sir?”
Kramer did not hear him. He was closely examining all four slips, putting one on top of another and holding them to the light.
“No good,” he said finally, “can’t see anything that way. But I can help you in your search a little. You’ll notice that although he used tissue paper and a sharp pencil, there are no tears in it-no dents along his lines either. He must have done these on a very hard, smooth surface.”
“A book cover?”
“Much harder than that. Probably some sort of plastic or tin.”
“And the bedroom’s a likely place?”
“Why not? A job like this would have taken time and he’d need to be private.”
Pembrook reached for his raincoat but Kramer stopped him.
“Wait to hear what Zondi has to say first,” he said. “I’m sick of repeating everything.”
Grandfather Govender was being very tiresome. Short of telling him he was a senile old fool, the rest of the family could find no obvious way of explaining why he could not understand what had happened to Danny. There he stood, clutching his staff like some latter-day Gandhi in the corridor of the magistrate’s court, toothlessly sucking on an orange and shaking his head.
“All rubbish!” he muttered once again.
“Listen to me, Grandfather,” said his son Sammy. “Last night Danny was arrested by the police and today he must go to a place of safety until they find out what it was he has done.”
“They remanded him,” said the half-cousin.
“They say he was carrying a housebreaker’s tools, Grandfather,” went on Sammy. “Do not make another noise here or it will go badly for all of us-Danny, too.”
“What tools?”
Sammy winced.
“A spade,” said the half-cousin.
“Rubbish!” shouted Grandfather, expelling a seed with the word.
“They can get you for just having a nail file sometimes,” said an uncle with unhappy experience in these matters.
“What’s the matter with you all?” Grandfather spluttered. “Do you think I’m senile?”
All Zondi wanted to talk about were the dogs. To avoid any complications, he had left the Chev some distance from 10 Rosebank Road and gone on foot the rest of the way, dressed as ordered in his worst. Within a matter of yards he felt like the star attraction at a jackal hunt. One haughty old bitch in a floppy hat, cutting a rosebush down to size with secateurs, had actually encouraged a toy poodle to join in the chase.
“Shame!” laughed Kramer. “Did you show them your warrant card?”
Zondi patted his Walther PPK in the shoulder holster.
“Next time, boss,” he growled.
“Don’t let the Colonel hear you, kaffir. He’s always saying he doesn’t ever want a Sharpeville in his area.”
Pembrook seemed ill at ease in their company. He would have to grow used to the idea that CID work made such partnerships necessary and therefore fairly common. Kramer felt himself curiously irritated.
“Why the look?” he asked sharply. “Are you a liberal or something?”
