The Blood of an Englishman (22 page)

Former Squadron Leader Ernest John Wilson was not the easiest of men to convince that his life could be in mortal danger. He sat in open-toed sandals in a deckchair, sipping rather than smoking his briar pipe, and now and again he wiggled his gray mustache from side to side like a mildly astonished rabbit.

There was quite a lot of rabbit in Wilson, Kramer had decided, if the old bugger’s main rondavel was anything to go by. He had filled it with so many books, articles of unused furniture, magazines, bags of fertilizer, cardboard boxes, fencing poles and egg trays that, in order to be able to move about,
he’d had to burrow out a warren of narrow paths through which, by stepping sideways, a man could just fit. His deck-chair was placed to the rear of all this, in a small semicircle of uncluttered floor space. The wall above him was decorated with photographs, the one in the middle was a group portrait taken beneath the wing of a Lancaster bomber, while around it were a dozen or so snapshots of smiling women, some with modern hairstyles and others typical of the forties. This display served to encapsulate the paradoxical quality of the rabbit which also seemed to lurk within him: although his broad face was gentle, his manner charmingly vague, and his gaze so innocently steady, he could no doubt pack a nasty kick in those hind legs of his, and as for lady rabbits, well, they had a surprising lot of fun. But it was not an analogy to be taken to extremes, because as Kramer could see for himself, looking like a frightened rabbit just wasn’t Ernie Wilson’s style at all—and never would be.

“Jolly decent of you, old boy,” the veteran airman said to him, “popping out all this way to give me the gen. Like to offer you a spot of something—or must you dash?”

“Nothing right now, thanks,” said Kramer. “I was wondering, sir, if we could move this cupboard across the window?”

“Interesting,” murmured Wilson, relighting his pipe.

“What is, sir?”

“All this. What sparked it off?”

“You mean the idea? The basis I’m working on? I thought I’d explained that already.”

“Formed a notion of my own, y’know. Listening to you; turning things over in the old noggin. Weak link somewhere.”

Kramer moved the cupboard, then started picking up the avalanche of things that had fallen off it. “I notice you don’t seem to keep a watchdog, Mr. Wilson.”

“He left me, old boy. Not much to watch, I suppose—went off with a family of gadabouts he met up with at the garage.”

“Where do you keep your gun?”

“Good God, haven’t the foggiest. Somewhere under all that clobber, but I doubt anyone would ever find it. Can’t see old Bonzo upsetting a soul, y’know. Weak link that.”

“Bradshaw reinforces it though!” retorted Kramer.

“Poor old Bradders.… You do rather base everything on the sort of anti-feelings the chap produces in strangers. Touch of prejudice there.”

“Not just my prejudice,” said Kramer, giving up his hunt for the gun and leaning against a wash-stand out of line of the door. “In fact the only thing most people like about that man is his nun joke.”

Wilson wiggled his mustache. “There you go, you see! No attempt to get under the skin. Great friend of mine was in the same show—terrible business. Shot the lot of ’em bar Trigger Stevens and old Archie, who has the luck of the devil, y’know. Take what happened to him last week: if that’d been a few other chaps I know, wallop! a bullet straight through the head. Not easy to live with, that kind of luck, y’know. Keeps a fella wondering what the price will be.”

“Ja, it must be hell,” murmured Kramer, listening hard to the night outside. “But if it was such a terrible business, why make jokes about it?”

“Come, come,” chided Wilson. “Don’t you ever do that sort of thing? Don’t mind admitting I do! Always best if you can see the funny side of appalling things that have happened to one. I’ve laughed on the spot, old boy. Nervous reaction.”

Kramer had laughed at the first dead body he had ever seen, that of a janitor who had impaled himself on a broom handle left carelessly propped against some banister-less stairs. “Uh huh,” he conceded. “I suppose it’s not a bad joke as they go.”

“But old Bradders never tells the rest, y’know. Doesn’t explain that the poor wretch in the nun’s outfit had dysentery. Oh God, yes—the gallopers, poured out of him, blood and all
the bits. Startled the life out of this French priest who’d taken ‘her’ under his wing, and he nipped off to have the Huns find a doctor on the train and—well, the quack took one look and that was it. The whole lot of them were carried off, treated unspeakably, and then they were shot one by one, firing squad, y’know. Eight ack-emma each morning. Bradshaw might be a bit of a rough diamond, a bloody bolshy sort of cove, but that’s what kept him alive. Those swines tried everything on him, kept him till last, but Trigger Stevens cracked under torture, spilled the beans about their escape route, then succumbed, all in the nick of time. The chaps say Bradders came back to the camp in a frightful state, and was chucked straight into the cooler for a month’s solitary, while he licked his wounds. Came out very shaky but—”

“Shhhh!”

The night was deeply silent.

“Sorry, go on, sir. You were saying?”

“About prejudice. Got to be damned careful, y’know. Make sure you know the whole story. Isn’t ‘Kramer’ German?”

“Pardon?”

“Of course it’s ruddy German!” chuckled Wilson, pointing accusingly with his pipe stem. “A name notorious in certain quarters! And there you are, you see—the weak link!”

Kramer forgot about the door for a moment. “I’m not with you, Mr. Wilson,” he said. “You mean a weakness in my theory?”

“Look, old boy, your whole fanciful proposition depends upon the effect that a couple of harmless chaps could have on an eavesdropper by blethering on about blasting Jerry to bits. A thing I’ve done
dozens
of times! May I go on?”

“Oh ja,” sighed Kramer. “But will you please try to keep your voice down a bit?”

Wilson laughed. “There isn’t anybody out there! Good God, that’s what I’m about to prove to you.”

“Even so, if you don’t mind, hey?”

There was a dull, metallic clunk some distance off.

“Didn’t have a motive for the cowardly attack on poor old Bradshaw, did you? No idea what brought about Bonzo’s wretched end? So what did you do? You decided to put yourself in the shoes of this murdering swine.”

“Ja, ja, obviously.”

“Young man, of distant Germanic extraction, tries to imagine motivation. Young man asks himself: Now what possible motive could I have for killing these men? What would make me feel justified in doing so? And with all that Hun blood in your veins, up popped the answer! Revenge, old boy; pure and simple.”

“Ach, who’s showing prejudice now! Let me tell you that—”

“Prejudice! The very word! You’re very obviously anti-Bradshaw even now, despite the fact he’s been on the receiving end! Doesn’t this tie in with that ‘feeling’ you insist gives you the right to invade a chap’s privacy? When did that feeling first assail you? Was it when you were first confronted by an ex-RAF—?”

“It was when I went to interview Bradshaw at his—”

“What did I tell you?” chortled Wilson, delighted with himself. “As a former member of the RAF, it must now be very plain to you why
I’m
not so easily persuaded by this tommy-rot of yours!”

Kramer almost walked out then and went home. But his hunch had never felt stronger, and he dismissed Ernie Wilson’s deck-chair psychology with the thought that, were carrots a less accommodating shape, then he’d have told the old bastard to stuff one up his cotton-tail.

Z
ONDI GRADUALLY ALLOWED
his taut muscles to relax again, fairly confident that there was nobody close at hand who might have heard the clunk of his gun barrel against an unexpected water pipe. Then he continued to crawl closer to the chicken house along a shallow, weed-choked ditch, pausing only when he had the door to the main rondavel in sight.

How heavy the Walther PPK always seemed at moments like these, and how slippery in his grip.

There was a shower of pebbles down the side of the ditch behind him.

A toad, most probably.

“Saved by the bell!” said Ernie Wilson, reaching his hand into a chipped water jug. “Don’t look so startled, old chap!”

Bleep-bleep-bleep
.

Kramer reholstered his Ruger magnum. “Robert du Plooi?” he said, recognizing the device.

“So you’ve met? You wouldn’t have so much as a pencil about you? Whacko! I’ll get this number down.…”

The control-room girl’s voice sounded eerily disembodied, and Kramer stole a quick glance out of the window. Still nothing.

“Ah, where were we?” asked Wilson, tearing the corner off the ancient copy of
Wings
that he had used for a note pad.
“That’s right, talking about this thingummy. Being in cahoots with young Du Plooi, he lets me have one on the cheap—absolute ruddy Godsend, as you can imagine. You don’t happen to have a spare coin on you, do you? Here’s the pen.”

“Hey, hold on a tick, Mr. Wilson! You’re not thinking of leaving this—”

“Only to pop up the road, old chap.”

Kramer blocked the gap leading to the door. “I’m sorry, but under these circumstances, I can’t allow you to leave the rondavel, sir.”

“Good God, don’t think you can come barging in here and start telling a fellow what he can and can’t do! If I wish to leave, there’s nothing you can do to stop me!”

“There’s a lot I can do,” warned Kramer, “and don’t worry, I bloody will if you don’t listen! Whose number is that anyway? What makes it so urgent?”

“I haven’t the foggiest, to be honest. Now, if you’ll be so good as to get out of my way, I’ll—”

Kramer snatched the scrap of paper from him. “You don’t even know whose number this is?”

“That’s what makes it so damnably intriguing,” replied Wilson, trying unsuccessfully to grab it back. “It might well be that tragic young woman I met only last week.”

“Does she live in this area? Because the first digit shows it must be a phone on the west side of Trekkersburg.”

Wilson looked a little less cocksure of himself. “Six Valleys and all that, do you mean?”

“Or very much closer than that.”

“Look, it wouldn’t take me more than a minute or two to find out,” said Wilson, digging into his hip pocket.

Like one of those special color slides, flashed for only a split-second on the screen at the police college, Kramer saw a fleeting tableau in his mind’s eye: A Free State farmer and his family; an Israeli hitch-hiker; a hefty, fair-haired man with his
back turned, who kept looking from his coffee to his newspaper to the clock to the telephones standing out on the forecourt.

“Wait here, Mr. Wilson!” he said, edging towards the door. “And don’t you move an inch outside this rondavel, because that’s exactly what he wants you to do!”

“Oh, what utter tripe,” snapped Wilson, whipping out a five-cent coin. “I’m simply not going to be dictated to by a—”

Kramer heaved over a pile of egg boxes, blocking the exit, and then grabbed for the door handle.

Zondi felt the heavy footfalls through the ground before he heard them. He raised his head, looked quickly behind him, saw nothing, and turned in surprise to face the rondavels. A giant was heading straight for him, looming enormous against the scud of clouds across the moon. He aimed his pistol and curled the first squeeze on its trigger. He had to suck spit from his cheeks before his voice would work.

“Hold it right there! Police!”

“Don’t be a bloody fool,” hissed the Lieutenant. “The killer’s that fair-haired bastard back at the café! But stay here and see this old fool doesn’t try to come after me—use your cuffs, use anything!”

“But, boss, you can’t go by yourself to—”

“Orders, kaffir!”

It would be a pity, thought Zondi, as he watched the Lieutenant sprint towards the service station, if those turned out to be his last words. Then he was distracted by a very agitated white man who skidded to a halt and wet himself.

Adrenaline gave Kramer his high and his cool detachment; while everything at the service station now seemed pricked out much clearer, sharper, brighter than before, it also appeared so unreal to him that he moved with the confidence of a dreamer in a dream world where nothing had the power to hurt him.
He covered the last fifty yards without feeling his feet touch the uneven ground, then cut back his pace, slowed right down and came to a halt behind the His and Hers lavatory block, which stood at the abrupt edge of the spotlit set, an actor’s stride away from the darkness.

Deception was the crucial factor in a one-man operation like this. First he removed his shoulder holster, being well aware that only police officers went about covered up in jackets on sweltering hot nights, and hid it behind a rubbish bin. Next he tucked his shirt in very tightly all the way round, which would give the impression that he had only just risen from a prolonged sitting in the gents’. He switched his watch from his left wrist to his right, a little trick that had more than once gained him a split-second’s advantage when his opponent had mistaken him for a southpaw. He combed his hair, just as he might have done at the basin after washing his hands, and then, lastly, he slipped the Ruger magnum into a sleeve of his jacket, and arranged the folds so that he could carry it casually without any telltale lumps or bumps showing.

Action. Kramer slipped out from behind the lavatory block, sidestepped into the straight line leading from His to the café entrance, and fell into an easy stroll, fighting an inclination to up heels and run. Heavy traffic roared and flashed by across the back projection, divorced from what lay before him.

The Israeli hitch-hiker had moved on to the concrete apron in front of the pumps, his haversack at his feet and his thumb in the air. It was good to see him there: one less innocent bystander to be mourned if anything went wrong. Better still, as Kramer neared the café, the Free State family came solemnly from the side entrance, applauding the quality of drinking-water in Natal, and dispersed to their numerous vehicles. Circling them with a friendly smile, Kramer went to pretend a check on whether his car was securely locked—Zondi had forgotten to see to this, as it turned out—and to take in the
revised tableau inside the glass-fronted café. The two black waiters were disappearing into the kitchen with trays of dirty plates, followed by the raven-haired manageress gesturing in their wake, and the fair-haired man was still at his table. But what made Kramer shudder was the scamper of young children that had since appeared, racing around all over the place, and plainly far beyond the control of their travel-weary parents, who sat studying the menu together right in the middle.