A very cheerful Hendriks, because he had once again succeeded in winning a transfer to a job he considered more congenial-and this time he was confident of having found his true billet. Nobody else had transfers granted as readily as he did. He wondered again if, in point of fact, he did have a winning personality. A sergeant had once murmured something to that effect.
There was not a great deal of traffic, yet he kept his speed down. The whole secret of ferrying prisoners to and fro was in the timing; if you did the journey too quickly, the jail would find paper work for you; too slowly and the court cell sergeant would bawl you out in front of the wogs.
He looked into his mirror, noting with satisfaction that the sole occupant of the lock-up section in the rear was sitting nice and quiet. Now here was an interesting case, this snot-nosed Indian kid who claimed he had gone into a posh area to dig up a dog. What a story! And yet everyone felt there was an even better one somewhere if only they could coax it out.
Hendriks’ thoughts homed in on himself. Actually, when he dispassionately reviewed his career in the force to date, he could detect only one minor shortcoming: a tendency to forgetfulness.
Which was one of the reasons he had for being so pleased about his present job. There was nothing to remember-no messages, no beats, no faces on the wanted list. All he did was count the prisoners as they hopped in, snap the lock, drive, twist the key, count them as they got out, and hand over the papers.
He hiccuped, tasting again the very strong coffee he had been given out at the place of safety by the housekeeper. A nice woman who always made him very comfortable, and it was good to put up his feet for five minutes.
Jesus! Some cheeky sod behind him was hooting to pass; he would bloody well-
A fire engine shot by, its siren coming on with a long wail of derision. Hendriks could have sworn that the baboon next to the driver had shaken a fist at him.
He would bloody well show them!
The van leaped in pursuit, its police markings giving it the same immunity from the normal rules of the road, and all other traffic shrank towards the curbside.
To his delight, Hendriks started gaining and could spare a moment to check his prisoner in the mirror again. The little devil was loving it. There would be no complaints, and if there were…
Just look at that, the fire engine was chickening out at the turnoff to Binswood Avenue. It might be a blind corner but there was no need to drop down into bloody first gear for it. Wait till he got there. The fire engine disappeared out of sight.
Hendriks braced himself against the door and gunned the van into a fancy four-wheel drift.
He came out of the corner into Binswood Avenue at thirty mph, which, while being a lot slower than it felt, gave him a thinking distance of thirty feet and a braking distance of forty-five feet. For the first ten yards he thought about the petrol tanker lying on its side, completely blocking the road, and its load gushing out of the fractured seams. For the rest of the way he braked.
As it happened, he traveled all of eighty feet from the corner-missing the fire engine by a coat of red paint- before denting his radiator grille slightly on the stricken vehicle. It was amazing how his all-weather tires kept their grip through the great spread of fuel.
A fireman wrenched his door open.
“Jump, you stupid bastard! This lot could go up any second!”
Hendriks wobbled out on trembling legs and was hustled to safety.
“Has he got anyone in there?” asked the fire chief, being answered with a nod. “Then give us the bloody key, mate, and be quick!”
Hendriks felt in his pocket. Then in his other pocket. All three other pockets.
“ Ach, no! I forgot it when I had coffee,” he mumbled. “You see, you don’t need it to snap on-”
“Bolt cutters!” bellowed the fire chief, somewhat needlessly, as two of his men were already rushing towards the van with them.
The exhaust manifold on the police van ignited the vapor-or so it seemed, for the first explosion came from under its bonnet. There were nine others, and flames as high as the walls of hell.
Luckily for the pair with the bolt cutters, the initial blast knocked them flying before they got their boots wet. But although suffering severe injuries, they did not lose consciousness and were able to hear, as much as they tried not to, the sounds that Danny Govender made as he was roasted alive.
A horrible death for a boy-but pure accident.
11
If there was one thing that bored the pants off Kramer, it was a fire story. He picked up the evening newspaper, noticed BLAZE in the main headline, and dropped the whole shebang into the wastepaper basket.
Then he continued to pace the office, varying his stride only when he turned or had to step over Zondi’s outstretched legs.
On his desk lay the three pieces of tracing paper with their enigmatic inscriptions uppermost. All around them were crumpled leaves from the memo pad, each covered in various permutations of the letters. Three hours’ work had proved nothing more than the fact Pembrook was correct in his assumption that a code, rather than a cipher, had been used. A cipher required that each character of the alphabet be given a substitute symbol-even another letter would do; but Kramer had been able to find only twelve different letters anyway and you could not make up words from such a limited number.
“What I am wondering about,” said Zondi eventually, “is why Boetie was thinking in English when he wrote this thing.”
He pointed to a c in the bottom line of one sheet he had copied down. There was no such letter in Afrikaans.
“Yes, I noticed that, too, man. But I suppose it’s all part of making up a secret message-if you can do it in another language as well, so much the better.”
“And another matter, boss-who was he writing these messages to?”
“Himself, I’d say. Case notes. Information he had picked up but didn’t want known until he was certain. Kids like writing things down-I remember a bloke at school who used to make huge lists of birds he had seen, even though he remembered every last one.”
Zondi went over to the desk and examined the original.
“Did Boss Pembrook find anything hard in his room to write on?”
“Bugger all.”
“Boetie could have used this toffee tin lid.”
“I’ve tried that-it isn’t as smooth as it looks. Pencil picks up tiny bumps.”
Sighing, Kramer wandered over to the window. Suddenly he stiffened.
“Bring me a spare bit of tracing paper and a pencil,” he said.
They were in his hands in seconds. He pressed the paper against the pane and wrote. The effect was identical.
“As smooth as glass.” Kramer smiled. “He did it on his window because the light coming through made it even easier to trace.”
“But this paper is quite thin, boss.”
“Perhaps whatever he was tracing wasn’t too distinct, then. Come on, man, what could they have been? What is about that size and shape?”
No good-they had been through everything they could think of.
“What would this code thing have on it?” Zondi asked. “Just words?”
“I expect so.”
“Then wouldn’t it be just as hard to understand as these things-and mean, by itself, nothing at all?”
“Like a dictionary?”
“Yes, boss, you cannot find secrets in those books. They are quite safe.”
“So?”
