The Blood of an Englishman (23 page)

Realizing that any form of direct approach was now out of the question, he took advantage of the fact the fair-haired man’s back was still turned to beat a quick retreat behind the Chevrolet, there to reconsider his strategy.

The hitch-hiker came over. “You gonna eat too? Or are you ready to blow?” He spoke with an odd American accent. “I mean I could use a ride, man.”

“You must be tired,” said Kramer, trying desperately to think of a way to get rid of him fast without attracting the fair-haired man’s attention—short of slugging the stupid bastard. “You look tired,” he added, lamely.

“I’m dead,” said the hitch-hiker.

You could be at any moment, thought Kramer, and noted the very masculine, aggressive stance the youth had, which suggested that tough tactics wouldn’t work too well on him. He also had a self-pitying sulkiness that didn’t guarantee a polite rebuff any success, not without a long wheedling argument.

“Don’t much care which way you’re headin”, man,” the hitchhiker said. “If it’s back downtown, then I guess I’ll find me a pad at the Y.”

Kramer decided it’d have to be done the other way round: the hitch-hiker would have to reject
him
—yet an outburst of rank anti-Semitism could backfire nastily.

“If you’re so tired,” said Kramer, smiling like a toothpaste ad, “perhaps you’d like a bed for the night at my place? I don’t live far away.”

“You don’t? That’s great! And I’ll get a chance to study your culture up close the way—”

“Shhhh! Not so loud, hey? Of course, you can study my culture! And this bed, it’s a really big one, you know? Satin. All the sheets are satin. Not pink-for-girls satin, mind! Blue satin. Do you like blue things, my friend?”

“Sure, I like blue things. I sleep on anything.”

“So you’ll sleep on mine?”

“Sounds really snappy.”

“Share and share alike, hey?”

The hitch-hiker’s bloodshot eyes suddenly narrowed, and there was a horrifying moment when a small smile played about his thick lips—then those lips twisted down at the corners. “Oh shit,” he said softly, “and so butch with it. I thought this was gonna turn out my lucky night.”

“And so it could, my friend! Don’t go!”

He went. Lock, stock and haversack, and never glanced back, which tended to prove two basic suppositions: firstly, that it was possible to lose the look of a police officer, and secondly, that every prejudice had its virtues, provided it was used correctly. Then Kramer forgot all about him and turned to face the café once more, having tried to keep half an eye on the fair-haired man throughout this bad moment.

The man was moving. He had stood up with the newspaper folded in his right hand, and he was going out towards the telephone boxes. The traffic noise made it impossible to tell at that range whether one of the telephones was ringing, but Kramer judged from his stride that he was in no particular hurry. The man went into the far box with his newspaper still clutched tight and closed the door. Vandals had kicked in its panes of glass, and someone had stuck a sheet of semi-transparent blue plastic in their place, which showed whether anyone occupied it but gave away no details of feature.

This made the far box an ideal place for a killer to hide himself—but only up to a point. His intended victim might well not be able to see in, but how was the man going to see out? There would be no need for him to see out, Kramer reasoned, if instead of gunning Wilson down on his approach to the telephones, he shot him in the actual boxes themselves. The dividing wall was only a sheet of thick plywood, and a .32 could go right through that and still blow a hole in a war-surplus squadron leader. There was a snag, though. How would the man be able to know for certain that it was Wilson in the next box, and not some innocent member of the public? The traffic sounds were enough to blot out even the sound of Wilson’s self-opinionated voice. But this wouldn’t apply, of course, if the killer heard that voice over the telephone! And there might be a few words of hate he’d like to spew out before he pulled the trigger.

“Ach, it’s perfect.…” murmured Kramer, admiring a mind which could think like that. “Only I’ve got him like a dead duck!”

Kramer moved swiftly round in a wide circle, coming up on the pair of telephone boxes from behind. There were no sounds of speech coming through the rear wall of the far box, although he pressed an ear gently against it to check this. The bastard was just standing there, waiting for Wilson to step into the empty box and dial his number, and then he would plug him. The timing of the whole thing was pretty good too, considering how long Wilson would have taken to reach the garage, had there been nobody around to save his bacon.

As Kramer edged around the side of the near box, he saw to his annoyance that the hitch-hiker had returned, and was crouched about seventy yards away, taking something out of his haversack. The hitch-hiker had not noticed him, however, by all appearances, and so could probably be safely ignored.

The big problem was whipping open that far door fast enough to disarm the killer before he had time to react. Some
sort of distraction would be the answer, but it wasn’t easy to think of one which mightn’t alert him. Then Kramer was seized by a sudden temptation to hear exactly what it was that he said to his victims before pulling the trigger, and just how this strange mixture of an accent sounded.

He paused, took out the scrap of paper with the number on it, memorized the digits, put it away and decided to kill two birds with one stone, as it were. Neither would this be anything as difficult as it might seem. The nearside telephone box had three things going for it: it was vacant, of course; the vandals had removed its door completely, so the killer would not be listening for any opening and closing; and best of all, it wasn’t a large telephone box, which meant that Kramer could remain on the concrete outside—out of the firing line—while he put through the call.

Before stepping up to the front of the empty box, he glanced round to make sure there were no kids, petrol-pump attendants or other encumbrances who might either get hurt or precipitate the action by becoming nosy at the last moment. There was none. The hitch-hiker had settled down on a patch of lawn, and was connecting together what looked like one of those small, take-apart tent poles.

Kramer made his move. He reached into the telephone box, lifted the receiver, dialed the number with the muzzle of his magnum, and was not at all surprised to hear the ringing tone without there being a reciprocal ringing sound from the other box beside him. The killer would have anticipated what an immediate give-away this could be, and had no doubt disconnected the bell leads in his instrument. He had no need to be alerted by the bell, not when a hand, pressed against the plywood division, would easily pick up the distinctive vibration of the dial being turned and allowed to return to zero. After feeling the vibrations cease, he would probably wait about twenty seconds before lifting the receiver on his side. What
followed after that would be the fascinating part. Kramer stood poised outside the box, ready to plunge his five-cent piece into the slot at the very moment the call was answered.

The delay was only eleven seconds.

This bastard, thought Kramer, as he jammed the coin home, is a man in a hurry.

The coin mechanism whirred and gulped.

Kramer whipped his arm out of the box, then almost lost his balance by stepping backwards on to a Coke can he hadn’t noticed earlier. He teetered, caught a glimpse of the hitch-hiker advancing, and nearly let the receiver slip from his grasp.

“Who’s that?” someone demanded distantly.

Recovering, Kramer brought the receiver to his ear and said, “You tell me who you are first, hey? Fair’s fair!” There was a thoughtful pause, then he started violently.

“You bastard!” exploded Colonel Muller. “De Klerk worked out that was where you must have disappeared to, but I didn’t want to believe him!”

“Sir? But why—”

“Because there’s been another shooting, Lieutenant!”

“Hey? Not Bradshaw again!”

Colonel Muller laughed nastily. “No, not Bradshaw again—nobody even remotely like Bradshaw! Do you want to know the name of the intended victim this time? She was a schoolgirl called Classina Marie Baksteen.”

And the fair-haired man came out of his telephone box muttering, “Jesus Christ, it was only a trunk call—can’t anyone get anything right these days?”

C
LASSINA
M
ARIE
B
AKSTEEN
was a very sweet sixteen and had short-cropped blonde hair, big blue eyes, unblemished, honey-colored skin, and long, comely limbs. She lived at 33 Hiemstra Road, Six Valleys, with her mother, father, and two younger sisters. She was working for her Junior Certificate of Education, and went to the J. G. Strijdom High School for Girls, where the medium of instruction was Afrikaans. Classina was a model young Afrikaner, born of Afrikaner parents, reared in an Afrikaner atmosphere, and her worst subject was English. How anyone could invent a language where words like
plough, cough, through
and
though
each had totally different vowel sounds was beyond her. She was very pleased and proud that when Afrikaans had been invented in 1926, nobody had allowed himself to be so silly. Her mother tended to endorse her views, but her father gave her no encouragement—in fact, quite the reverse. Although Klaas Baksteen had a secret loathing for all things even marginally Anglo-Saxon, and had taken the Germans’ side in every war film he’d ever seen, he was none the less aware that if Classina failed to improve her knowledge of the republic’s second official language, then her hopes of becoming a psychiatric nurse could be dashed. And so, ever a conscientious parent, he had told Classina to sit at the desk by the window in the back room that night until she had finished her English homework.
One hot sunnie day
, Classina
had begun, before running out of inspiration. The window had been wide open, and through it had come all sorts of tiny, distracting sounds from the wattle plantation behind her back garden. Chitterings and squeaks and the raark of frogs mainly, and then sudden ghostly hushes. From further away had wafted the bugle noises made by the English-speaking boy on the corner, who had recently joined his school’s military cadet band,
a new and very sad case came to the hospital
, Classina had gone on,
and he was put with the other patience in the ward for people who’s personalities were split up
. After that she had managed an entire page before the blank expanse of a new leaf in her exercise book made her mind wander. Standing on the inner sill of the open window had been a very big glass vase in the shape of a swan with its neck tucked down as a sort of a handle. Classina’s mother had arranged five bullrushes in it that afternoon, and had been surprisingly boastful of the effect. The arrangement was, she had told Classina, based on an idea she had picked up from that snobby Mrs. Drake down the road, only she had greatly improved on it.
The new case
, wrote Classina,
was a big worrie because he liked to fill his water jug with all sorts of funnie things ‘There must be sum hidden reeson behind this,’ said the Ward Sister, who was very wise for her age and had lovely blue eyes
. From then on, the essay had just flowed from Classina’s fountain pen of its own accord until she reached the middle of a sentence which began,
The new case cried big tears when they said he was cured for ever and he tried to kiss the Ward Sister’s hands and

“And then,” said Classina, retelling her tale for the third time, “I just screamed! It was amazing! The vase just blew up in bits all over my exercise book!”

Kramer felt quite numb as he looked around the room, seeing in the fragments of glass far more than merely a shattered vase. He caught the triumphant gleam in Colonel
Muller’s eyes and turned back to the young girl. “Uh huh? What happened next?”

“Pa heard me scream, and he came running in like a flash! He started looking for the stone the boy must have thrown, because he’s always doing things like that, you know—the boy on the corner with the bugle.”

“Uh huh.”

“But instead he found this bullet lying on the couch.”

“Uh huh.”

“He knew it was a bullet because my pa’s in the Active Citizen Force,” Classina disclosed proudly. “He said it was a thirty-two and he phoned the police.”

“Ah, that’s an interesting point,” remarked Colonel Muller. “You say your pa is a soldier, but has he ever been in the air force?”

“Never ever. My pa says being a pilot is soft. He likes to push his bayonet right into the terrorists and give it a twist.”

“Well, Lieutenant?” said Colonel Muller, turning to Kramer. “Have you any further questions for this little girl before she goes to bed? Any comment to make?”

“Only that you and her pa would seem to have a lot in common, sir,” said Kramer, whose numbness was giving way to a sense of extreme irritation.

Colonel Muller responded with an angry look of his own. “Okay, Classina, off you go then! Just thank God tonight in your prayers that you weren’t hurt and—”

“Ach, I think it’s exciting!” said Classina, and her big blue eyes sparkled. “Think how jealous all my friends will be! I only wish there’d been some water in the vase, so I wouldn’t have to hand in my composition tomorrow. Pa says I’ve got to get up at six to finish the last page.”

“I’ll see what I can do to change his mind,” promised Colonel Muller, with an avuncular wink. “Come, Lieutenant, if you’ve seen all you want to here, I think we might as well go through to the sitting room and see what Frans has organized.”

Kramer strode after him, his fists clenched, and found the sitting room filled with detectives and uniformed men. Bateman was interviewing the parents.

“But why would anyone want to murder my little girl?” Mrs. Baksteen was demanding to know. “Why, for heaven’s sake? That bullet couldn’t have missed her head by more than an inch!”

“Half an inch, in my opinion,” said Mr. Baksteen, a stern pedantic-looking man with translucent ears like a fruit bat. “Half an inch higher and it wouldn’t have been deflected by the vase—you saw where I found it lying spent on the couch, didn’t you?”