Riotous Assembly

by Tom Sharpe

  ‘What the fuck do you think we’ve been doing? And it’s not anyone behind a bush. I’ll take my oath on that. We’ve pumped hundreds of rounds into that fucking bush and it still goes on firing back. I tell you it’s bloody well bewitched, that bush.’

  Luitenant Verkramp looked up the road uncertainly. He certainly wasn’t going to fall for any crap about bewitched bushes but on the other hand he could see that something pretty extraordinary had reduced the men to their pitiful condition. It was on the tip of his tongue to say, ‘You’re out of your minds,’ but since they were out of just about everything else he thought it better not to. The question of morale was important and it had been at the back of his mind ever since they had left the station. One false move now and there would be a panic in the convoy. He decided to set the men an example.

  ‘I want two volunteers,’ he told Sergeant de Kock and while the Sergeant went off to dragoon two mentally retarded konstabels into volunteering, Luitenant Verkramp turned back to the plain-clothes men.

  ‘Where is this bush?’ he asked.

  ‘Just inside the gateway. You can’t miss it,’ they told him, adding, ‘And it won’t miss you either.’

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ muttered the Luitenant and clambering off the Saracen he began to prepare for the reconnaissance. Luitenant Verkramp had attended an anti-guerrilla course at Pretoria and was well versed in the art of camouflage. By the time he had finished the three men who began crawling up the ditch towards Konstabel Els’ privet bush resembled nothing so much as three small bushes themselves. They were not so well trimmed, it was true, and certainly not so bullet-proof, but whatever else their camouflage served to conceal it was quite impossible to tell even at close range that here were three uniformed men of the South African Police.

  6

  Kommandant van Heerden had just paused for breath under an oak tree in the middle of Jacaranda Park and was trying to pluck up courage to return to the house when Konstabel Els fired the elephant gun. In the wake of the detonation that followed the Kommandant had his mind made up for him. For one thing a vulture which had been waiting with evident prescience in the branches above him was startled into flight by the roar of the gun and flapped horribly up into the sky. For another the Kommandant reached the immediate conclusion that the company of Jonathan Hazelstone was infinitely less murderous than the holocaust Konstabel Els was generating at the main gate. He left the cover of the tree and raced ponderously towards the house, looking for all the world like the maddened pachyderm the elephant gun had been designed to incapacitate.

  Behind him the silence of recent death hung sombrely over Jacaranda Park. Ahead he could just make out the tall elegant figure of Miss Hazelstone standing on the stoep. She was looking tentatively up into the cloudless evening sky. As the Commandant plunged past her into the drawing-room he heard her say, ‘I thought I heard a clap of thunder just now. I do believe it’s going to rain.’ It was good to be back in a world of sanity, the Kommandant thought, as he dropped limp and exhausted into an easy chair.

  Presently Miss Hazelstone turned from her study of the sunset and entered the room. She carried with her an atmosphere of tranquillity and an acceptance of life as it came to her, unique, or so it appeared to Kommandant van Heerden, among the people who were living through the events of the afternoon at Jacaranda Park. The same could hardly be said of Konstabel Els. Whatever life was coming his way he certainly wasn’t accepting with anything faintly approaching tranquillity. The only consolation Kommandant van Heerden could find was the thought that by the sound of it Els had blown himself and half the neighbouring suburb up.

  Miss Hazelstone moved pensively and with an air of gentle melancholy to her wing-backed armchair and seating herself in it turned her face with a look of the profoundest reverence towards a painting that hung above the fireplace.

  ‘He was a good man,’ she said at last in a low voice.

  Kommandant van Heerden followed her gaze and studied the painting. It portrayed a man in long robes and carrying a lantern in his hand at the door of a house, and the Kommandant supposed it to be yet another portrait of Sir Theophilus, painted this time, to judge by the robe he was wearing, while the great man had been serving in India. It was entitled ‘The Light of the World’, which even the Kommandant, for all his admiration of the Viceroy, thought was going a bit far. Still he felt called upon to say something.

  ‘I’m sure he was,’ he said sympathetically, ‘and a very great man too.’

  Miss Hazelstone looked at the Kommandant gratefully and with new respect.

  ‘I had no idea,’ she murmured.

  ‘Oh, I practically worship the man,’ the Kommandant continued, adding as an afterthought, ‘He knew how to handle the Zulus all right,’ and was surprised when Miss Hazelstone began to sob into her handkerchief. Taking her tears to be a further indication of her devotion to her grandfather, van Heerden ploughed on.

  ‘I only wish there were more of his sort about today,’ he said, and was gratified to notice Miss Hazelstone once more gazing at him gratefully over her handkerchief. ‘There wouldn’t be half the trouble there is in the world today if he were back.’ He was about to say, ‘He’d hang them by the dozen,’ but he realized that hanging wasn’t a tactful subject to bring up considering the likely fate of Miss Hazelstone’s own brother, so he contented himself by adding, ‘He’d soon teach them a thing or two.’

  Miss Hazelstone agreed. ‘He would, oh, he would. I’m so glad, Kommandant, that you of all people see things his way.’

  Kommandant van Heerden couldn’t quite see the need for her emphasis. It seemed only natural that a police officer would want to follow Sir Theophilus’ methods of dealing with criminals. After all, Judge Hazelstone hadn’t sucked his known preference for hanging and flogging out of his thumb. Everyone knew that old Sir Theophilus had made it his duty to see that young William early developed a taste for corporal punishment by inflicting it on the boy from the day he was born. The thought of duty recalled the Kommandant to his own distasteful task, and he realized that this was as good a moment as any to break it to her that he knew that Fivepence had been murdered not by her, but by her brother Jonathan. He rose from his chair and relapsed into the formal jargon of his office.

  ‘I have reason to believe …’ he began, but Miss Hazelstone wouldn’t let him continue. She rose from her chair and gazed up at him enraptured, a reaction van Heerden had hardly expected and certainly couldn’t admire. After all, the fellow was her own brother, and only an hour before she had been willing to confess to the murder herself just to shield him.

  He began again, ‘I have reason to believe—’

  ‘Oh, so have I. So have I. Haven’t we all?’ and this time Miss Hazelstone gathered the Kommandant’s large hands into her own tiny ones and gazed into his eyes. ‘I knew it Kommandant, I knew it all the time.’

  Kommandant van Heerden needed no telling. Of course she had known about it all the time, otherwise she wouldn’t have been covering up for the brute. To hell, he thought, with formalities. ‘I suppose he’s still upstairs in the bedroom,’ he said.

  The expression on Miss Hazelstone’s face suggested a certain wonder which the Kommandant assumed must be due to her sudden recognition of his talents as a detective.

  ‘Upstairs?’ she gasped.

  ‘Yes. In the bedroom with the pink floral bedspread.’

  Miss Hazelstone’s astonishment was obvious. ‘In the pink bedroom?’ she stammered, backing away from him.

  ‘He’s not a very pleasant sight, I’m afraid,’ the Kommandant went on. ‘He’s as drunk as a lord.’

  Miss Hazelstone was verging on hysteria. ‘As the Lord?’ she managed to gasp at last.

  ‘Soused,’ continued the Kommandant. ‘Blind drunk and covered with blood. Guilt’s written all over him.’

  Miss Hazelstone could stand no more. She made for the door but Kommandant van Heerden was there before her.

  ‘Oh no you don’t. You’re no
t going upstairs to warn him,’ he said. ‘He’s got to take what’s coming to him.’ Kommandant van Heerden had private doubts if the fellow was still upstairs. Even a blind drunk must have been jerked awake by that explosion. Still the man was a maniac and one never knew with lunatics. Their actions were likely to be unpredictable. There were symptoms too, he now noticed, of irrationality and unpredictability in Miss Hazelstone’s behaviour, and signs that she could behave in a manner neither sweet nor gentle.

  ‘Come, come, my dear Miss Hazelstone. There are some things we must learn to accept,’ he said reassuringly, and as he said it, Miss Hazelstone knew only one thing for certain, that nothing on God’s earth would persuade her to come anywhere within striking distance of this fat perspiring policeman who thought that Jesus Christ was lying dead drunk and covered with blood upstairs in the pink floral bedroom. There might be, she conceded generously, certain irrational tendencies in her own psyche, but they were as nothing to the inescapable symptoms of insanity that the Kommandant was displaying. She sprang back from him white and gibbering and, seizing an ornamental scimitar that hung on the wall, held it above her old grey head in her two hands.

  Kommandant van Heerden was taken totally by surprise. One moment he had been confronted by a dear old lady who held both his hands in hers and gazed tenderly up into his face, and the next she had turned herself into a dancing dervish evidently intent on slicing him in half with a terrible knife.

  ‘Now, now,’ he said, unable to adjust his pattern of speech to his new and terrifying predicament. A moment later it was clear that Miss Hazelstone had taken his ‘Now, now’ as an indication that he wanted his death to be immediate. She was moving crablike towards him.

  Miss Hazelstone was, in fact, trying to reach the door into the hall. ‘Stand aside,’ she ordered, and the Kommandant, anxious to avoid causing her the slightest pretext for bifurcating him with the scimitar, leapt to one side, colliding as he went with a large Chinese pot which toppled from its stand and crashed to the floor. For a second time the expression on Miss Hazelstone’s face demonstrated that capacity for rapid change the Kommandant had already noticed. Now she was clearly mad with rage.

  ‘The Ming! The Ming!’ she yelled and brought the scimitar crashing down from above her head. But Kommandant van Heerden was no longer there. He was charging across the room leaving in his wake the shattered art treasures of several millennia of Chinese history.

  As he plunged across the verandah he could still hear Miss Hazelstone screaming to her brother.

  ‘The Ming! The Ming!’ she yelled and judging the Ming to be some indescribably powerful weapon hanging ready to hand on the wall of the gallery, the Kommandant raced across Jacaranda Park yet again, but this time in the direction of the sound of renewed gunfire at the gate, a sound he now welcomed as indications of normal healthy violence. And as he ran, he thanked his lucky stars that dusk was already turning into night, to obscure the path of his flight.

  The first indication that Konstabel Els, still smirking at the effects of his marksmanship, had that several new factors had entered the little patch of Western civilization he was defending so manfully, came as dusk began to fall over the Park’s contorted gates. He was just having a swig of Old Rhino Skin brandy to keep out the night chill, when he heard a strange scratching noise outside. He thought at first that a porcupine was scratching itself against the armoured door of the blockhouse, but when he opened it there was nothing outside, while the sounds were getting closer. They seemed to emanate from a hedge down the road, and he had just begun to think that they could only be explained by supposing that a rhinoceros suffering from impetigo was seeking relief from its irritation by rolling in a thorn tree when he saw three remarkably agile agglomerations of vegetable matter scuttle across the road. Evidently the next attack was about to begin.

  Konstabel Els sat back and considered the position. He had repelled one attack with his revolver. He had decimated a second with the elephant gun. It was time, he felt, to go over to the offensive. In the deepening dusk Konstabel Els left the shelter of the blockhouse, and clutching his revolver crawled silently towards his attackers, whose polyphonic progress drowned any slight noises he might make.

  By the time Luitenant Verkramp and his two volunteers had crawled three-quarters of a mile to the top of the hill, Verkramp had begun to wish that he had come up in the armoured car after all, and to doubt the value of the whole exercise. It was already so dark that while he might not be able to miss the bush that was giving so much trouble, he probably wouldn’t be able to see it. His hands were scratched and torn, and he had come within spitting distance of two puff-adders and a cobra, which had been an undoubted tribute to his skill in camouflage, but one that he could well have done without. He had never realized before what a profusion of wild life there was in the hedgerows of Piemburg.

  The spider that had bitten him on the nose as he tried to disentangle himself from its web had been of a size and malevolence he would never have believed possible if he hadn’t seen it with his own one eye, the other being obscured by the spider’s three feet which it had fastened there to give it a good foothold while it injected 50 cc of toxic venom into his left nostril. He had almost turned back at that point because the poison spread so fast and with such evident effect that even after the giant spider had been good enough to let go of his cornea he still couldn’t see out of it. That side of his face was pulsating alarmingly and his sinus appeared to be filled with some caustic liquid. Realizing that the expedition must proceed with some urgency before his breathing apparatus seized up for good, Luitenant Verkramp and his two men crashed on through the infested under-growth towards their quarry.

  Konstabel Els, crawling with less haste and more anonymity, had, in the meantime, discovered Sir Theophilus’ terrible haha and had observed with considerable satisfaction its effects on its latest victims. Els lay back in the grass and debated some further means of satisfying the clearly insatiable appetite of this offspring of Sir Theophilus’ anxiety. The sounds reaching him from the hedgerow seemed to indicate that his enemies were already suffering some trepidation. To the sounds of breaking twigs that had accompanied their progress were now added the occasional whimper and what appeared to be chronic catarrh. Konstabel Els waited no longer. Crawling soundlessly he avoided the murderous haha and stationed himself in the grass beside the road.

  To Luitenant Verkramp crawling doggedly in the hedge nothing seemed ominous or unusual. His nose was giving him trouble, it was true, and the spider’s venom had spread alarmingly so that now his eyes were playing him up and now his ears, but if his interior world was full of flashing lights and strange drumming noises, outside all seemed peaceful and quiet. The night was dark, but overhead the stars shone and the lights of Piemburg in the valley below gave to the sky an orange glow. The lights of Jacaranda House twinkled invitingly across the Park. Crickets sang and the distant murmur of traffic wafted gently to him from the Vlockfontein road. Nothing in the world prepared Luitenant Verkramp for the horror that was to strike him so suddenly.

  Not that anything struck him physically. It was worse than that. There was an almost spiritual quality about the scream that exploded in his damaged ear, and about the appallingly crooked and malignant shape that suddenly loomed above him. He couldn’t see what it was. He knew only its disgusting breath and with it a banshee yell, malignant beyond belief, and coming, he had no doubt at all, from the very depths of hell. Any doubts Luitenant Verkramp had entertained about the story of the bewitched bush disappeared in a trice, and in another trice Verkramp, hurling himself sideways, dropped into the very pit of hell he suspected the scream came from. Lying impaled on the iron spikes at the bottom of the haha, his screams echoing across the Park, Luitenant Verkramp, half dead with fear and pain, stared upwards and knew himself eternally damned. In his delirium he saw a face peer down into his grave, a face diabolically satisfied: the face was the face of Els. Luitenant Verkramp passed out.

  His two comp
anions had by that time reached the foot of the hill. They had fled, leaving behind them not only the Luitenant but a trail of leaves, branches, helmets, and all the impedimenta of their profession. They need not have hurried. The news of the encounter had preceded them. Konstabel Els’ yell, terrible even diminuendo, had wafted like some fearful confirmation of doom to the cars that still jammed the Vlockfontein road.

  The policemen lounging by the lorries and armoured cars grew rigid at its import. Men who had been erecting some of the rabies and bubonic plague billboards stopped work and stared into the darkness trying to make out what new horror had sprung from the deadly bush. Even the guard dogs cringed at the sound. And in the middle of Jacaranda Park, Kommandant van Heerden, in terror of his life from the Ming, halted involuntarily at the sound. No one who heard that scream was ever likely to forget it.

  If Konstabel Els had been astounded at the effect of the elephant gun, he was even more astounded at the results of his experiment in psychological warfare. His imitation of the awakened dead had borne fruit among his vegetable enemies to an extent he wouldn’t have believed possible, but as he stood listening to the ebbing screams from the ditch, a momentary shadow of doubt crossed his mind. There was something about those screams, something about their tone that was vaguely familiar. He went over to the haha and peered down, and was just able to make out, through the foliage that covered it, a face, and again there was something familiar about the face. If it hadn’t been for the bulbous nose and the puffed-up cheeks, he might have thought it was Luitenant Verkramp down there. He grinned to himself at the thought of the Luitenant lying on those spikes. Serve the bastard right if he had been down there for keeping him hanging around all night when he should have been relieved hours ago, he thought, as he entered the blockhouse.

  He took another swig of brandy and was just putting the bottle back in his hip pocket when he heard a sound that sent him hurrying to the gun port. Something was coming up the road. Some vehicle, and a touch of familiarity caught his ear. It sounded for all the world like a Saracen armoured car. ‘About bloody time too,’ Els thought, as the headlights swung round the corner and lit up for a second the bodies lying on the hillside opposite. A moment later a fresh light was thrown on the scene. A searchlight probed through the night and turned the privet hedge into one brilliant spot in an otherwise dark world.