“Ach, no, there’s no hearing that can’t be adjourned, not in these circumstances! What really happened was, the lady first had to have her hysterics—you know, cry and scream and scare the shit out of the servants, saying she just couldn’t take any more. Then, when she finally woke up to the fact that she’d better go—or what would her friends say?—the old man, who’d been using her as his excuse, had to come, too.”
“God preserve me,” murmured Mansfield, after quite a pause, “no bloody wonder I prefer animals …”
And Terblanche, nodding, silently concurred.
“Fine,” said Kramer, lighting a Lucky. “First, I want to know whether if at any time it has crossed your mind that Lance Gillets could have been behind what happened early yesterday morning at Fynn’s Creek.”
“What an extraordinary idea!”
“Is it? How would you describe them as a couple?”
“Well, um, rather ill matched, I suppose, and things were bound to get a bit sticky eventually—but that’s it. I’ve never dwelt on the matter, if you know what I mean.”
“Why not, sir?”
“No idea. Better things to do, I suppose.”
“You’re sure you are not being evasive because suddenly you feel partly responsible for what’s happened?”
Mansfield did a double blink. “Good Lord, no!” he said. “What on earth do you mean by that?”
“We understand that you’d put Gillets under a lot of pressure recently, telling him that Fynn’s Creek was his last chance to get his private life sorted out and make good.”
Mansfield’s face darkened. “Who the Devil’s been—”
“Is it true?”
“To some extent.”
“Meaning?”
“I would have been recommending we got shot of him anyway, once I had someone to take his place.”
“Oh, ja? You’d better expand on that.”
“Difficult. I suppose it could have been partly a certain, er, unpleasant streak in him that regrettably surfaced.”
“See?” said Terblanche to Kramer, looking vindicated.
“What sort of streak exactly?” asked Kramer.
“Put it this way,” said Mansfield. “It’s always been a deuce of a business, getting any of my game guards to work under him.”
“Meaning boys, Bantus,” explained Terblanche, in case Kramer had missed the distinction between game guard and game ranger. “Can you quote any specific examples of—”
“Ach, never mind about that,” cut across Kramer. “Let me ask you the opposite question now, Mr. Mansfield: Why did you hire this man in the first place?”
“I didn’t, as a matter of fact,” he said. “That sort of thing is done by our headquarters staff. And he came to us most highly recommended, the right sort of background and all that. Awarded his gymnasium’s Sword of Honour during—”
“Ah, so he’s another former army man, like yourself?”
“Not army, no—he was at the Navy Gymn in Simonstown, as I recall.”
“Bugger!” said Kramer.
Mansfield raised a bushy eyebrow. “Have I inadvertently said the wrong thing?” he asked. “I was simply—”
“Too right, you have!” replied Kramer. “Because, so far as I know, sodding sailors don’t usually receive training in preparing explosive charges—do they?”
Both bushy eyebrows now rose. “I say, you really are rather drawing a bead on Gillets, aren’t you? Is that wise?”
“Meaning what, sir?”
“I mean I had him under my eye the whole of Monday, from the moment I had him flown in until well after midnight, when we finally called it a day and took to our beds. Put him up myself, a shakedown in my living room, and shared a nightcap with him, explained I’d been glad of a chance to see how well he could work in a team, in view of odd complaints I’d had. Now that, Lieutenant, was the only moment in all that time he looked a trifle on edge: for the rest of that day, he’d been perfectly cheerful and agreeable—almost a changed character, in fact!”
“I see,” said Kramer. “Like a man might act who’d fixed to secure himself a happy release that very night from a bad situation?”
“Good God, no!” replied Mansfield, taking out a large khaki handkerchief to mop his brow with. “Like anyone glad to be away from his better half and all that damned bickering for a while, I’d imagine.”
“So what time was he picked up from Fynn’s Creek?” asked Kramer, rising, having become increasingly frustrated by this line of inquiry. “Morning or afternoon?”
“Morning, definitely. Can’t have been much later than half past ten, because the plane only—”
“Fine,” Kramer said, turning to prize Terblanche out of his seat.
“Is that all, dear boy?” said Mansfield. “Because I—”
“Just a sec,” said Terblanche, “there’s something I want to ask. This business of the plane going to fetch Gillets from Fynn’s Creek—was that all a bit sudden, as we have been led to understand? Or had he some prior warning you might be needing him for a few days?”
“Oh, no, I’d have had him drive up, had I known properly in advance he’d be needed,” said Mansfield. “Thing was, Jonty Armstrong had a sudden malaria attack that morning, leaving us a bit light on the ground, and Lance, being one of the chaps on three days’ standby for special duties, was—”
“Ah, so Gillets could have at least planned for the time he might be away?”
Mansfield gave a little frown. “Why, of course,” he said, nonplussed. “That’s the whole point of the standby thing, surely? He was married staff, with his good lady and her own life to consider, the necessary arrangements to make.”
“Precisely,” said Terblanche, looking hard at Kramer.
The journey back to Jafini seemed to take forever, made all the more tedious by the station commander’s repeated claim to have found the chink in Gillets’ armor.
“Christ Almighty, Hans, how many more times must I say it?” growled Kramer, growing very impatient as they left Nkosala behind them. “Nothing up at that bloody game reserve gave me cause to feel confident we’d picked the right chief suspect; in fact, the reverse happened. Gillets wasn’t right somehow as the killer, and almost everything Mansfield told us was totally inconsistent with—”
“Ja, almost everything, Tromp! Except for—”
“You’re clutching at straws, man!”
“You wait and see, Tromp. Gillets could easily have positioned that time bomb on the off chance of his being called to do standby duty, and then just switched it on when the plane came for him.”
“Oh, ja? Before eleven in the morning? What about the maximum delay of twelve hours between—”
“The clock must’ve had something wrong with it; maybe it stopped or slowed down for a while.”
“Huh! That I can believe!”
“Or maybe he didn’t use an alarm clock for a timer, but something with a longer delay on it.”
“Such as?”
“I’ve no idea, Tromp! But who knows what Dorf has discovered while we’ve been away, hey?”
“He could have discovered there never was a time bomb,” said Kramer, slowing down. “But that somebody had just taken that dynamite and bloody lit it!”
Terblanche chuckled. “Wait and see!” he said again, at the risk of having his neck wrung.
“Tell me, Hans,” said Kramer, determined to distract him and selecting a surefire means of doing so. “Reference little Annika …”
“Oh, ja?” said Terblanche, turning around. “What about her?”
“We’ve seen one lot of parents today, but where have the others got to? Has Doc also got them under sedation? In fact, I can’t remember anyone mentioning them since I—”
“They’re dead, a big tragedy last year,” explained Terblanche. “Man, it happened only two weeks before the wedding. They were on their way home one night when Andries somehow lost control coming round this sharp left-hand bend—his car shot off the road and wen
t smack into two cane trucks, killing both her parents instantly.”
“Where was this?”
“On Grantham’s land along a track back that way, which Andries used as a shortcut down from the mill to home—they’d been to the boss’s for a barbecue. There was a theory Andries had swerved to avoid a kaffir or some animal in the road.”
“Wasn’t he just full of jungle juice?”
“The medical report did say he’d drunk quite a bit, ja, but naturally the magistrate, who was also at the party, was keen to find some other reason. Maaties was asked to look into the kaffir angle, but I don’t think he went to much trouble—road traffic accidents he never saw as CID work. Mind you, they often can involve just as much forensic as any—”
“Ja, ja,” said Kramer, anxious not to be drawn into that old argument, “and you say the wedding went ahead just the same?”
Terblanche sighed. “More’s the pity,” he said. “But at the time, even I could understand it. Poor little Annika felt suddenly so alone in the world, it was somebody to cling to. Plus, she also knew how keen her parents had felt about the marriage, and called it granting them their ‘last wish’—which was true, I suppose.”
“What about his parents, were they as keen?”
“Weren’t at the wedding, Tromp—which is how today was the first time I’ve ever set eyes on them. I think that gives you some idea of how violently they were against it, against their son marrying into a family so far beneath them.”
“Hmmm,” said Kramer, momentarily entertaining a very bizarre suspicion regarding the elder Gillets pair.
Everyone at Jafini police station seemed to be trying to talk to him at once.
“Oh, there you are, Lieutenant!” said Bokkie Maritz, waving a piece of paper. “The Colonel’s just been on the phone—he’s worried you could have been upsetting some big-shot lawyer who rang him from the game reserve. He wants you to—”
“How’s the throat, Bok?”
“Hell, a thousand times better, sir! He really is a good doctor, isn’t he—that Doc Mackenzie? Man, I’d hardly swallowed one spoonful of the mixture he gave me when I—”
“Your turn, Malan,” said Kramer, looking at the detective constable waiting behind Maritz, red-faced from a day at the beach. “How are things going at Fynn’s Creek?”
“Fine, sir! Dorf awaits your presence, he says. He has fresh information for you, but hasn’t let on exactly what.”
“We’re on our way! Hans, did you hear that? Dorf’s—”
“But the Colonel wants you to ring him immediately, sir!” bleated Maritz, shaking the piece of paper. “I promised him you would!”
“Then you mustn’t make promises you can’t keep, Bok,” admonished Kramer. “And what is it that you want, Cassius? Aren’t you meant to be off duty now?”
The big Zulu nodded and smiled shyly. “Yebo, my boss, that is true,” he said. “But Boss Terblanche he tell Cassius he must first give message to Moses cook boy to come here to Jafini station to make written statement, boss.”
“Oh, ja, I remember. Has Moses remembered something else—come up with something new?”
Cassius shook his head. “No, but very strange-strange thing is happening, boss. Moses say, boss, he must be wearing his Sunday bests to do such a important thing as make statement, so Cassius he tells him, ‘Make it snappy, kaffir!’ Much-much noise, my boss, because Moses cook boy cannot find Sunday bests in his hut, no trouser, no T-shirt, no belt, no shiny shoe. Hau, bad-bad thief has come by his hut and—”
“Ach, really!” said Maritz. “Sir, you could be on the phone instead of wasting time on kaffir petty theft and—”
“Finish what you were saying, Cassius, hey?” said Kramer.
“My boss,” he said, trying to ignore Martiz’s glare. “Moses cook boy absent from his place of work only one time—same night he go for big-big beer drink with his uncle.”
“You’re saying his things were stolen the night of the blast?”
“Hau, correct too much, my boss!”
“Then, presumably, the thief must have been some sly bastard who saw Moses getting pissed out of his brains in Jafini and whipped down to the hut while his back was turned,” said Kramer. “Good, let’s catch him and quick, hey? You never know what else the bugger might have noticed that night, right? This could be our big breakthrough!”
14
IT WAS LATE afternoon, with sunset about to blood the sea, when Kramer and Terblanche returned to Fynn’s Creek, bringing Bantu Constable Cassius Mabeni with them, riding in the cage on the back of the Land Rover.
“Jiminy, just look at that!” exclaimed Terblanche, as they topped the last incline. “What on earth has Dorf been up to? Playing chess or something?”
It was indeed an unexpected sight: that neat grid of thatching string, stretched taut between freshly fashioned wooden pegs, and covering the entire blast area. Even more extraordinary in its way was the fact the place was now as tidy as a chessboard, too, with every piece of debris, every article of clothing, every item of kitchenware, for example, neatly stacked around the periphery in carefully categorized piles.
“Just what it needed, a woman’s touch,” murmured Kramer. “And a worse old woman I’ve never bloody come across …”
“Ja, but I bet he’s found a twenty-four-hour timer somewhere in there,” said Terblanche. “Come and see!”
“Huh!” said Kramer. They climbed from the cab and found Cassius Mabeni already disembarked, standing stiffly to attention and awaiting further orders.
“Right,” said Kramer. “You’re to go to Moses, get him to go over the facts of the theft again, and—most important—you’re to get a bloody good description of his Sunday best, understand? We’re going to have to be able to recognize his missing clothes the moment we find them or see them on anyone. Okay?”
“Hau, Cassius will try, my boss!”
Then Kramer and Terblanche carried on down to where the Parks Board Land Rover still stood. Beside it was a pile of recreational items—fishing rods, a pair of frog flippers, two tennis rackets, a smashed-up phonograph, and so on—while the next pile was given over to bathroom items, including two bars of Lux soap, two sponges, two nailbrushes, two pumice stones, two loofahs, and a rubber duck. Kramer picked up the duck and squeezed it, expelling a stream of small, sweetly scented soapy bubbles from the squeaker hole in its beak.
“Little Annika!” gasped Terblanche, caught off guard. “Dear God above, you can smell her …”
“Lieutenant Kramer?” said Dorf, right behind them.
“Ja, Sybrand?” he said, handing Terblanche the duck as he turned. “We were just admiring your work, hey? We understand that you’ve found some fresh evidence.”
“Very little, but all the more significant for that,” replied Dorf, motioning Kramer and Terblanche to follow him. “It’s assembled over here, on my field table, folding.”
And it was very little, by the look of it. Four tiny scraps of brown paper, in a cellophane envelope, labeled; three cigarette lighters, labeled; a can of lighter fuel, labeled; an envelope with two twists of wire in it, both covered by red plastic insulation, both labeled; a heavy, square battery, labeled; a small, coiled spring, brass cogs, steel spindles, and other clock parts, labeled and carefully stowed in a small cardboard box.
Everyone crowded round while Dorf, standing on the far side of the display like a market stallholder going through a particularly lean time, and with much the same eager glint in his eye, pointed first to the scraps of paper. “These,” he said, “are fragments from the waxed wrapping used around sticks of D14, the most common blasting explosive. The paper’s fine diagonal watermark pattern is very distinctive.”
“What sort of blasting would that be?” asked Kramer.
“Quarrying, road construction, dam building—call it civil engineering, if you like. It’s also the type, because of the circumstances in which it is often stored, most commonly stolen. I’m sure you’ve had instances of that around here
.”
“True,” said Terblanche. “But not for some time, hey?”
“When last?” asked Kramer.
“Three, four years ago, Tromp. Mind you, I’ve heard these thefts are not always reported, because of the trouble the owners can get into for not following regulations about their safekeeping.”
“That used to be the way,” agreed Dorf. “But people are a bit jittery now that such a theft could have political implications—I’m sure you’d have heard if this little lot had been stolen locally.”
“Then we’d best request Pretoria for reports of stolen dynamite nationally,” said Kramer. “Next?”
Dorf pointed to the three cigarette lighters. “Two of those have lighter fluid in them,” he said. “The remaining one, which your Bantu CID sergeant found near that line of bushes directly behind the detonation point, contains plain petrol. The conclusion I draw is that these two were filled from this can of lighter fuel, recovered from Square F23 on my grid, and thus the property of the householders, while the third lighter could have been dropped by the killer—anyone recognize it?”
There was a general shaking of heads.
“Ach, come on, tell us about the time bomb,” demanded Terblanche. “First of all, was it one?”
Dorf nodded, pointing to the small cardboard box. “Ja, I think we can call that more than a reasonable assumption, Lieutenant. Detonated by this little alarm clock here—the traveling variety, to go by the reduced size of its components. We have yet to find the case, but I’m sure it can’t be very far away. Those wires and the battery were obviously part of the same crude setup. Maximum setting, a twelve-hour period.”
Terblanche frowned. “But what proof have you,” he asked, “that the spring and the rest of the stuff weren’t from a traveling clock owned by the deceased and her husband? I—”
“These items were embedded in the mud below the blast,” explained Dorf. “Not only that, the various parts show not the slightest sign of corrosion, which indicates they can’t have been exposed to the sea air for long. Contrast them with these parts from a clock that must have once stood in their—”
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