“The lazy bugger needs a walk,” said Kramer, making for the car.
Zondi could have chosen which path to follow without any assistance from the Doringboom bumpkin: it was so obviously a children’s path. The veld was never as flat and featureless as it looked from the road, and a path made by adults’ feet, trudging through the same dry grassland day after day, would have taken the line of least resistance. A four-gallon tin of river water, balanced on the head, was far easier to bear up a slope if the incline was climbed crookedly, and an outcrop of rocks was tedious when your feet were heavy. Arid so, whereas a path worn away by grownups would have skirted and meandered and turned, the path he was following ran straight. Dead straight, and as uncompromising as the hunger that sent small bare feet, numbed fleet by the frost, scampering down it each morning. He cursed the children for the straightness of their path. There was, of course, nothing to prevent him from finding a less strenuous route, except his pride. Over the past three months, Zondi had learned many things about pride, and in particular, how much strength it took.
But he could be weak and shameless, too. This was when he permitted himself to imagine all sorts of nonsense, just as he was doing right then. The thief Erasmus, his brain said, had fired a rat, not a bullet, through that car door and into his leg. By mistake, this rat had been sewn inside him at the hospital, trapping it there in the flesh and the dark, and making it very afraid. If left undisturbed, then the rat endured quietly, and all he felt was the sting of the urine it passed. All he had to do, however, was to take a single step, and the jolt would startle the rat, forcing it to twist and bite and then gnaw on the bone, until he stopped. Oh, yes, it was a clever rat, this frantic, burrowing pain in his thigh.
Zondi limped on.
Then stopped suddenly, aware of how foolish he was being. Why, this was what pride could do to a man! It could lead him to act without thinking, and not for a moment had he given the Lieutenant’s actual order any thought. He’d been far too busy proving to the doctor what a tough little kaffir he was.
If I were a child, he thought, then I would have been greatly excited by what I saw today. It was a dead white man, and now I know that a white man can die, the same as my father. I have seen this frighten other white men, and I want to see why the police come here to do so much writing. There is no food at home until tonight, when perhaps my father brings a little, and I don’t have to go to school like the ones whose parents have the money-why should I go home? Let this big fool chase me, if he likes, for he will surely not come all the way. I will steal back, like I did the day I first saw the big snake, and perhaps I’ll even share in that pig meat. I will steal back, with the cunning of my uncle’s dog, lying low in the grass. It will be-but see, another man is coming this way. Come, let us follow! What strange things are happening.
And sure enough, now Zondi had taken his eyes from the path, and had allowed them to pass casually over the long grass surrounding him, he was able to see three places where the seed tufts leaned against the press of the wind. His ears then snatched at a muffled giggle, and he knew himself for the bumbling idiot he must have looked. These had to be the children he sought-they could hardly be anyone else-and the rest was simple.
No, it wasn’t; by slipping himself back into their skins again, he knew that, at the first sigh of the hiding places being spotted, they’d be up and off and running like spring hares, leaving him far behind. His next move would, in fact, have to be judged most carefully.
With a strangled cry, Zondi pitched forward in his second-best suit and lay very still.
The speedometer needle gave no hint of the loss of momentum that Kramer was experiencing. Doringboom lay within sight, and the copper steeple on the Dutch Reformed church grew taller by the second. But his own interest in reaching the town seemed to be diminishing proportionately, for he was not an unreasonable man, and the evidence, presented to hint at the picnic spot, had worked on his gut reaction like a dollop of milk of magnesia.
“Speaking objectively,” he said, lighting another Lucky, “and forgetting about the drop for a moment, is there
“Only that such a high point of suspension was employed-but that’s part of the drop bit, anyway.”
Then Strydom went on to explain that a surprisingly low point of suspension was very often the popular choice, as when a table leg or doorknob was used, involving less than a meter.
“Talking of which, Tromp,” the DS added, going off on one of his tangents, “it bloody amazes me how stupid some coons can be! When I borrowed that tape just now, the one Van Heerden was complaining about being in inches, I found it had meters marked on the underneath side. You would have thought his boys would have looked!”
“Perhaps they had, Doc,” Kramer answered with a slight smile; he’d suspected as much from the start.
“Hey? I don’t get that. Anyway, where was I?”
“Getting the Nobel Prize for bullshit.”
“Ach, no; that isn’t a nice attitude when a bloke’s doing his best. You can’t have seen as many as I have, and it’s quite true what I’m saying.”
People who
Nor did it take a genius, Kramer conceded a little angrily to himself, to work out that only Tollie Erasmus would have had a compelling interest in going, as it were, according to the book. Anyone else could have achieved the same result with a minimum of fuss, effort, and imagination-and have been back in their car before the next lot of lights caught their reflectors.
WELKOM! — WELCOME! said the Doringboom boundary board.
“Get stuffed,” said Kramer, hoping that Mickey wasn’t going to a lot of trouble for nothing.
4
Constable Van Heerden must have radioed ahead some dire warning or other, because when Kramer and Doc Strydom drove round the back and into the Doringboom vehicle yard, at least half of the station’s white complement just happened to be there. Five of them were crawling on, under, and through a green Ford, while the remaining three sixteenths, in the rhinocerine person of Sergeant Cecil Arnot, stood directing operations.
“Hello, gentlemen,” he said, begrudging the obligatory smile that went with it. “As you will see, I have not been letting the grass grow under my feet.”
“I don’t think the car’s where you’ll find the money,” Kramer replied, puzzled by that strange emphasis, “but it’s certainly worthwhile having a look. Hell; Johannesburg number plates? Nobody bothered to bloody mention that to me. Have you-”
“I’m checking with Johannesburg, sir, and they’ll be reporting back shortly. The plates themselves seem genuine.”
“Uh huh.”
“Is Dr. Myburgh here yet?” Strydom asked in English, as a courtesy.
“Ready and waiting, Doc! I passed on your telephone message at lunchtime, and he said there was no need to ring back; he’d be honored.”
Funny, thought Kramer, watching the DS toddle off to where the mortuary, a Victorian relic, stood quietly on its own in the far corner. If Myburgh had known all along that he was having a visitor, then.… But there wasn’t time to take this any further.
“Sir,” Arnot was saying, his heavy head lowered, “although I cannot explain how I sense this, I’ve reason to believe that someone has been
He made it sound as horrible as anything an incontinent dog did, and then waited for his answer, little eyes aglint.
