The Blood of an Englishman (12 page)

“The master not home,” a giggly housemaid informed him, peering round the edge of the door. “Madam fast-fast asleep.”

“CID, hey? I spoke to the cook girl on the phone.”

She nodded vigorously.

“Has Mr. Digby-Smith rung up to say he’ll be back?”

“No, the master not ringing.”

“Okay, then show me where I can wait for him.”

The house had a heavy scent of wax polish, lavender and boiled vegetables—plus a pronounced hint of long-haired dog—that summed up several of Kramer’s ethnic prejudices in one.

“Here all right?” said the housemaid, then fled.

Kramer found himself in what had to be Digby-Smith’s study. A real study this time, with rows and rows of books, an
orderly desk, plenty of leather, plenty of soft light, and a great big oil painting of an English sea captain in knee-breeches, scratching himself under his smart blue tunic. Pride of place in the room, however, went to an enormous collection of bottles lying on their sides with little ships somehow shoved into them. The only thing these ships had in common was that they were all battling through stormy seas; in every other way, they were as different from one another as they could be, and the mystery of how the masts fitted through the necks of the bottles temporarily defeated him.

Then through the big side window, he glimpsed something going on under an apple tree that mystified him even more. But, unless he was very much mistaken, the Digby-Smiths’ garden boy was digging two graves.

M
AMA
B
HENGU’S FIVE
customers had taken their pleasure and gone by the time Zondi emerged with the Indian from the last cubicle along. They had been replaced by an even more ill-favored crew, including a leprous albino, who were all so drunk that seeing two men come out together only made them snigger. The Indian smiled back in a dazed sort of way, and meekly rejoined the end of the queue.

Mama Bhengu raised her eyebrows in surprise at this. “How is it that you have not lost me that miserable rand’s worth?” she asked. “Truly, I never thought he would stay long enough for me to see his ugly face again!”

“It was nothing,” grunted Zondi, sitting down and reaching for the bottle and his glass.

“
Nothing?
But how? You must tell me!”

“Am I a man to ruin your business? I just made it clear to Mr. Govender that tomorrow I might change my mind about going easy on him, and if he didn’t have one now, then it could be the last chance he’ll ever get.”

Missy Madam, who had come to sit at the table too, shared in Mama Bhengu’s delighted laughter. Then she leaned over and took the end of Zondi’s tie to play with.

“Your little talk was good?” she asked.

“It was—no, you could not say good.”

“You talked very softly,” she said.

“This one?” chortled Mama Bhengu, nudging Zondi with an elbow the size of a knee. “You know how he talks so softly? He talks with his hands!”

“Mmmmm,” murmured Missy Madam, opening the front of her blouse to him and shaking her small breasts free. “Will you say something to me?”

“Uh huh—I also talk with my feet,” rasped Zondi.

Then he closed his eyes on the whore’s uncertain mirth, tipped his hat forward, and concentrated on getting half a glass of neat gin inside him. As it burned down his gullet, set fire to his empty stomach, and seemed to pass straight to his brain, he went over what he had managed to extract from one Jiji Govender. It amounted to very little: someone, somewhere in the town, had put out the word on Monday that a good price would be paid for a .32 Smith & Wesson revolver. Govender was such small fry, a mere scavenger snatching crumbs from bar counters, street corners, flop houses, that the task of tracing this information back to its original source through him was impossible. And would it be worth it? Govender insisted there had been not a whisper of such a thing before Monday—
this
Monday nine days ago—which came too late for the attack on Bradshaw, and made nonsense of the time factor. Perhaps a few enquiries could be made elsewhere, but on the face of it everything pointed to Govender having simply picked up a garbled story based on the efforts the Lieutenant and he had been making to track down the weapon since Saturday. No, it had been Monday before they’d really got down to that. How sweetly the gin was beginning to ease his acute disappointment.

He felt the clink of Mama Bhengu refilling his glass, and nodded his thanks to her. And yet, just like the Lieutenant, he had this feeling deep inside him, a feeling that criminal involvement could not be ruled out of the case, even if Hookham made it seem incompatible. Or was it that he knew too little of this kind of white man? Was he also being swept away by
his imagination? Perhaps the best plan was to sleep on it, and to keep to what he said he’d set out to do.

Zondi opened his eyes and smiled at Mama Bhengu. “I have something to show you,” he said. “Not the hacksaw blade again, but something new. I have just found it.”

“Hau!”

“But first, Mama, a serious question. Is it true that nobody has been in that cubicle since Willie Jackson was stabbed there?”

“As true as I sit here, Michael Zondi.”

“Then maybe my time has not been wasted.”

“Why?”

“While I was talking in there, my eye saw this rolled into a corner, and I cannot say I looked everywhere last Thursday night; there was that niece of yours under the body to remove, together with many other distractions.”

“Indeed it was terrible! I thought she was dead as well, not only fainted!”

“But can we see what this thing is?” begged Missy Madam.

Zondi opened his fist and an aluminum object, rather bigger and rounder than a thimble, closer in shape to an acorn cup, tinkled on the table top, rolled round in a half-circle and came to a stop. It made both women gasp very loudly.

Rupert Digby-Smith was a man with a smooth, almost glassy exterior, storm-gray eyes, and a sharp chin that jutted out, dividing the way before him. He was dressed in a silk cravat, white shirt, fawn slacks, desert boots and a double-breasted blazer with brass buttons and a bowls club badge. His voice came from far back in his mouth, rounding its vowels into plum puddings of over-rich sound, and his handshake was like testing the weight of a seal’s flipper: cold, damp, quite impersonal.

“I saw you at the window, officer,” he said, opening a small liquor cabinet. “Wretched business, but it had to be done.
My wife is quite beside herself at the thought of her brother being the object of their attentions this morning, and insisted I had them put down without delay. The vet was very good about it.”

“You’d had the two dogs long, sir?”

“Since pups. Fine animals both of them, and I dare say I’d have forgiven and forgotten soon enough, but.…” And he sighed with restraint. “I can offer you brandy, whisky, gin, rum—or would you care for a beer?”

“A brandy and orange juice.”

“What you people call a ‘dop en dam,’ I believe?”

Kramer tried not to allow his hackles to rise. “And what you people call a ‘ghastly concoction,’ I believe?” he replied.

Digby-Smith stared at him. “Ah! Very good!” he said, noting humor rather than appreciating it.

Down under the apple tree, the garden boy was refilling the dogs’ graves, working slowly and apparently enjoying himself. Probably, to judge by Digby-Smith’s slow, stiff gait, it had been the servant’s job to take the big Irish Setters for their walk every evening.

“Your glass, officer.”

“Cheers, sir,” said Kramer, turning round. “Now I wonder if we can—”

“Ice?”

Kramer accepted two lumps of ice, and watched the muscles in the angle of Digby-Smith’s narrow jaw bunch up and set hard. They stayed that way for several seconds, went down again, there was a moment’s delay, then the action was repeated.

“Now, sir, as I was about to say, there are a lot of questions I must—”

“What I dread,” said Digby-Smith, taking a sip of his brandy and water, “is telling the servants. They were fond of my brother-in-law, he spoiled them, treated them quite wrongly; he’d been away too long, y’know. God, what a scene.”

“How long exactly had he been away, sir?”

“Oh, years and years,” Digby-Smith replied, taking the high-backed chair behind the desk. “Do sit down, officer, there’s a good chap.”

Kramer pulled a chair up to face him on the other side of the desk, and took out his notebook. “He was in the RAF during the war? Why was that?”

“Wanted to do his bit, I suppose—fiery little devil Edward, of course. Couldn’t wait until we had got things sorted out here, so off he went. Joined the RAF in Rhodesia, got his wings and that was the last my wife’s family saw of him; rather selfish, I thought. Still, even some of your people got the same bee in their bonnet, didn’t they?”

“Sir?”

“You must have heard of Sailor Malan, surely? Afrikaner like yourself; finished up the top-scoring RAF fighter pilot in the war, friend of Bader’s, came back here and blotted his copybook by starting the Torch Commando.”

“That would be before my—”

“War veterans, y’know. It’d all gone a bit to their heads, this business of having blacks out there in the desert with them, doing the cooking and the ambulance driving and that. They tried to nip the Nats’ plan to implement apartheid in the bud, but not too surprisingly came unstuck.”

“Uh huh. If we could—”

Digby-Smith narrowed his eyes distrustfully. “You may have been too young then, as you say, but surely you must have read about Malan when he died? Parkinson’s disease? There were headlines in all the papers when the Government refused him a military funeral on the grounds that he’d fought for—what was by then—a foreign power.”

“It wasn’t headlines in the Afrikaans press, I don’t think,” said Kramer, curbing his impatience but only just. “I’m really more interested in Mr. Hookham himself, sir, and in what you
can tell me about him. I notice you don’t call him ‘Bonzo’ the same as your wife does.”

“Don’t I? Well, perhaps that’s because I regard that sort of thing as fractionally childish. Got saddled with that after his squadron’s fox terrier was run over by a drunken wing commander, y’know; they were due to fly on a raid again that night, hadn’t time to find a replacement, and so they decided—on account of his size, I believe, and his snappy, terrier-like temperament—to adopt him as their lucky mascot. Rather rash of them, in the event: he only survived three more raids before they were faced again by the same problem. Settled for a greyhound that was a damned sight faster than the wing commander’s Austin.”

Kramer underscored the one phrase in all that he’d copied down. “Do I understand you to mean, when you say he ‘only survived three more raids,’ that he was shot down or something?”

“Over France,” confirmed Digby-Smith, smiling slightly. “Which was, on reflection, a lucky-ish thing. Yes, our young hero found himself up to his neck in a midden in Normandy, surrounded by grinning peasantry, and was duly marched off to a POW camp. Had that midden been in Saxony, I dare say the peasantry there would have continued to heap ordure upon him until he suffocated or whatever—if he hadn’t had a pitchfork through him before then. You know what the Germans called them? ‘Terrorflieger’—hated, loathed and feared them like nothing on earth; would butcher them on sight.”

“Oh ja?”

“Oh yes,” said Digby-Smith. “And if you’ve ever read an account of what happened to places like Dresden, who could really blame them?” His slight smile twitched at the corners. “Ironic that—no, nevermind. He was a prisoner of war for only six months, escaped with two others and, helped by the French underground, made his way back to England. In fact, the girl
he married came from one of the French families who’d hidden him in their attic for a time.”

Kramer looked up from his notebook. “She was French? I’m sure I was told English by someone today.”

“It’s a common assumption people make,” replied Digby-Smith, shrugging. “They hear he married and settled down in England after the war, and—well, need I go on? You can’t have got that from anyone we know intimately.”

“And so that’s why your brother-in-law stayed on in England?” said Kramer, sidestepping the question implicit in that last remark. “He didn’t want to take his wife too far away from her family?”

“Not quite, old chap,” murmured Digby-Smith, patronizingly. “Alice—he always called her that, although her real Christian name was Alloise—had become an orphan by the time he got back to France. Some bother with the Gestapo.”

“Oh ja? Then what was the reason for him staying on, sir?”

“The village pub, if he’s to be believed. Cricket on the green,
The Times
, his circle of friends, something nebulous he calls ‘civilisation,’ while damning trade unions as ‘the new barbarism.’ However, the truth probably lies closer to the fact his ex-navigator, Hampshire born-and-bred and totally unwillingly to move, had this brilliant idea for some form of electronic gadget, and asked him to make up a partnership. With his approach to life, Edward did rather well on the business side.”

“His approach?” repeated Kramer, detecting a faint echo of Bradshaw in this. “Are you saying that Mr. Hookham was a hard-headed bas—um, businessman?”

Digby-Smith considered his reply carefully, swilling a mouthful of his drink round and round before finally swallowing it. “If required,” he said, “to provide a thumbnail sketch of my brother-in-law’s chief characteristics, then I’d possibly describe him as resolute, impetuous, unforgiving and
an aggressive little bore at times. But I’d rather you didn’t put that on record for my good lady’s sake.”

God, thought Kramer, why this bugger keeps ice for his drinks, I’ll never know; he’s so cold that all he needs to do is stir the stuff with his finger.

“Well, officer, have we finished with the biographical background? I’ve had an afterthought, actually: possibly the fact his wife was known as Alice led to the confusion in the mind of that person who thought she was English.”

“Uh huh,” said Kramer, almost certain the man was fishing. “She died of cancer, I’m told.”

“Like his mother.”

“Sir?”