But Zondi was not going the full distance anyway, it seemed. He braked into the next curve, changed down and was in second by the time the turn-off broke clean in the straight. The car plunged down the dirt road and churned a high wake of red dust towards the old experimental farm which lay a mile or so beyond the last mud houses.
Kramer remembered the place well. A year back there had been a culpable homicide there; one labourer had stabbed another in the neck with a penknife in a fight over an apple. But there was no one there now, the hybrids had failed and the Government had decided to cut its losses. The few buildings had been bulldozed in case homeless families took them over.
The Chev’s sump clanged on a rock as it topped the last rise and slithered down into the overgrown yard. Kramer was about to suggest a quick check for oil leaks when he noticed a car had flattened a path through the weeds. He kept silent as Zondi took it.
The trail ended a scant fifty yards further on at the start of another dirt road. Zondi continued along it without hesitation. On either side were vast untidy plots which retained their look of scientific symmetry only because each was given up exclusively to one variety of cereal-and weed-killer was still doing its work.
Some forgotten fertilizer was not doing badly either, from the look of an immense field of kaffir corn coming up on the right. It was extraordinarily high and had a most curious reddish hue.
Car tracks extended into it for about ten yards.
Zondi stopped and switched off. It was deathly quiet. So quiet that when Zondi reached out and pulled a corn stalk, Kramer heard the squeal as it left its tight sheath of leaves.
The hybrid was distinctive. No wonder the peasant farmer’s son had so readily recognised a sample caught in the Dodge’s substructure.
Zondi pressed the glove compartment catch and it clattered open. Kramer saw the thin film of pink powder which lay over the road maps. Peacehaven dust could penetrate anything, even spectacle cases. This was not remarkable in itself.
“I see, so the Dodge had been cleaned inside except for in there-that’s why you looked-”
There was no point in talking to himself. Zondi was already making off across the field. He did not go far.
As Kramer approached there was a sudden buzz like a bullet, so immediate and menacing that his fists clenched. Then a spangled pall rose above the kaffir corn, dithered a brighter blue against the sky, and disintegrated into zipping threads of belligerent flies.
Five paces on sat Shoe Shoe, exactly where he had been left. Only now he appeared to be twice his normal size. Since dawn the sun had been urging life and growth in all living things. Shoe Shoe was dead; but millions of bacteria were multiplying and feeding in their host, breaking wind millions of tiny times and filling his body with gases which distended him horribly.
Even so, the stink was not that bad and both Kramer and Zondi had seen it all before. This enabled them to ignore nature’s remorseless processes and search for any sign that man had played his sinister part. There was none. It was a natural death.
That was if you ignored the fact that someone had taken a man, paralysed from the neck down, and dumped him out of sight and earshot in a deserted area surrounded by Keep Out signs. The sun and the ants and the beetles-even the bluebottles-had simply done as ordained.
And while they toiled, Shoe Shoe must have broken his silence.
Kramer replaced the handset of the dashboard radio and accepted Zondi’s offer of chocolate.
“Bloody hungry,” he said, “what’s the time?”
“Three.”
“The meat wagon’s coming, Dr Strydom has one call to make on the way-police widow, or something. We should get back to town by four.”
“Why didn’t you put out an alert for Mkize, boss?”
“Gershwin? Because I want you to have him, my friend.”
Zondi gave a grunt of deep satisfaction.
“That’s the way we are playing this one, man, by ourselves. I told the Colonel and he’s dead scared about the tip-off he gave the killer.”
“Better not make any slip-ups though.”
“ Ach, I’ll just blame my kaffir.”
They laughed. The sound reached a crow about to settle in the kaffir corn and it flapped resignedly away again. Overhead larger birds with hooked beaks kept to their stacking column.
“Shoe Shoe’s still got his eyes,” Kramer remarked.
“Them flying up there? They are worried, they wait for Shoe Shoe to lie down. He does not look dead enough for them.”
“What about the crow then?”
“Oh, he just another damn fool black bastard.”
“Watch it. How long have they waited, do you think?”
“Since Shoe Shoe come here-one, maybe two days. You can see he was in the sun a long time.”
“And Gershwin said that he had gone to the mountains on Saturday. Funny that, he only became important to us three days after Dr Strydom found the spoke wound. You could say this is a fluke.”
“Boss?”
“Yes, has nothing to do with the Le Roux case. This is just a little private affair of Gershwin’s. No one was ever meant to know about the girl-why look for trouble by chopping a witness in advance who would never be called anyway?”
Zondi spread out the chocolate wrapping and licked it clean. Then he made a small silver ball of it which he flicked at a passing butterfly. It missed.
“Not a witness, boss,” he said, “informer.”
“Hey? Shoe Shoe was your mate but he never told you a damn thing.”
“Perhaps if he heard what they were going to do to the little missus.”
“Warn us, you mean? Why should he?”
“Oh no, boss-wait until afterwards. Then he would come by and offer information if we kept him in a safe place. He would just stay there until they were hanged. I think he would like that very much, boss.”
Kramer lit a Lucky Strike in slow motion.
“But it wouldn’t be the same mob, would it? This spoke man was from Jo’burg.”
“That’s what Dr Strydom says, maybe Shoe Shoe know different.”
“And even if he didn’t, it would be a spoke man and that’s what really mattered to him?”
“Yes, boss.”
“And he would get Gershwin, too?”
“It seems like it, boss.”
Zondi borrowed the Lucky Strike to light his Texan off it. His expression was slightly sulky.
“ Ach, it’s good thinking, Zondi man-but why didn’t Shoe Shoe pull this one when they first got him four years ago? Why wait all this time?”
“Because they did not kill him, boss,” Zondi reminded Kramer, as tactfully as possible. “The most for assault would be fifteen years inside and then they would come back for him. Or maybe their friends would do it meantime.”
Kramer sat up. “Friends? Then this time he had to put everyone in the bag to make it safe!”
“That’s right, boss. Your white fellow, too.”
Jesus, with stakes that high it was a wonder they had been so confident that the exposure treatment would work. Zondi read his gaze out of the window.
“They probably left a man here to watch that Shoe Shoe died without any trouble,” he said.
“Okay, so you win. And if it hadn’t been for kaffir corn under the Dodge, we’d really have been buggered. Never even begun.”
The meat wagon arrived as if making deliveries in a district ravaged by rabid dogs. Every week Sergeant Van Rensberg handled on average a dozen bodies mangled in road accidents and his frenzied motoring was some sort of inverted reaction. As Kramer had once remarked, you could only feel safe with Van Rensberg if you were already on one of the two trays under the curious pitched roof which covered the back of the Ford pick-up.
The mortuary sergeant came coughing and hawking out of his dust cloud, trying to find a handkerchief. He was a colossal man. The combination of banana fingers and thighs that stretched trousers taut made the search quite something.