“Switchboard? Call an ambulance, there’s a critical heart case in the-just a moment.”
He covered the mouthpiece with his hand.
“I want you all out of this top floor before Jackson gets here. Where can you go?”
“You can’t move Fergy in this condition!” protested Da Silva, who was much tougher than he felt to the knuckles. “Besides, he’s too heavy.”
“I’ve seen you in action on film, Fat Boy-you’ve got the strength. Now, where to?”
Trenshaw stood up shakily.
“Say the gents at the rear of the stage. There’s a service lift.”
“Hello, switch? The heart case is in the men’s lavatories behind the stage. That’s right. Police. So-what’s that? Urgent? Are you sure? Please, and put it through on this number.”
Da Silva and Ford already had Ferguson supported between them.
“Better take his feet,” Ford said to Trenshaw.
“I’ll open the door first.”
“Not that one, Trenshaw. The side door into the passage. I’ll see to the ladies. Just you stay with him until the ambo comes.”
“What then?”
“Hurry, man!”
His call came through.
The general run of conversations conducted on the twenty-eight lines connecting the Trekkersburg City Hall with the telephone exchange were not worth putting down Women’s Own to listen to. They were polysyllabic marathons about main drainage which could have been curtailed considerably by the appropriate use of four-letter words.
This one, however, warranted plugging in an extra set of headphones for Mavis, the caretaker’s wife, who always saw the late shift had a nice hot cup of tea.
“Kramer here.”
“Lieutenant?”
“Make it snappy, Van Niekerk.”
“Hell, how did you know it was me straight off, sir? Having a nice party?”
“I said snappy!”
“Just a minute, sir-the Colonel wants to say something. Oh, it’s just he hopes you’re not giving the ladies too much-”
“Shut up and get on with it-they said it was urgent.”
“Did they, sir? It wasn’t as urgent as all that. I hope I haven’t taken you away from something important?”
“Sergeant, I’ll give you ten seconds to give me the message or I’ll come round and kick your bloody balls off. Now speak!”
“Yes, sir. Well, it’s that coolie making trouble, again.”
“What coolie?”
“Zondi’s mate-Moosa.”
“So?”
“He rang up three times jabbering all kinds of rubbish about some shirts that were stolen and this bloke Lenny.”
“Where from?”
“The call, sir, or the shirts?”
“Two seconds-”
“I thought you’d like to know, sir. Anyway, I’ve sent Zondi down to investigate. I got sick of it.”
There was a long pause.
“Sergeant, did I hear right? You get a tip-off regards Lenny and you send Zondi down? By himself?”
“ Ach, it was real churra talk-maybe it was a tip-off. I don’t think so.”
“Did Zondi speak to him?”
“I was detailed to handle the calls, Lieutenant.”
There was a long pause.
Kramer’s next seven words whipped off two pairs of headphones and spilt the tea. But the eavesdroppers made miraculous recoveries.
“Yes, Sergeant Van Niekerk, that’s exactly what I mean. I’ll do it personally.”
“What for?”
“Because you’ve not only probably buggered up this entire investigation, you’ve also sent-”
“Yes?”
A receiver was replaced.
“Sir?”
What a pity, a moment’s pretended prudery had made them miss what had obviously been the best bit.
Kramer walked slowly around the table to the double doors leading back into the Assembly Room. He listened for the sound of women’s voices from the other side and heard nothing. But then the doors were specially made to prevent civic secrets leaking out, and like everything else, it worked both ways.
He turned suddenly right and headed for the side door into the passage: the hell with Jackson. He turned about: the hell with Zondi.
As Kramer slipped out of the council chamber into the Assembly Room, immediately closing the door behind him, he realised that councillors’ wives had a rough deal. And that they grew very used to being left high and dry without explanation and only their delinquent servants to talk about.
The hen party broke up with a great clucking of mild recrimination.
“Whatever have you boys been doing in there?” Mrs Trenshaw chided. “Did you sneak dear Phyllis van Reenen in there without our knowing?”
So they were not altogether as stupid as they seemed to their husbands.
“Sorry, not tonight, ladies.”
It helped to get them laughing. Paved the way, so to speak.
“I’m afraid something very important has cropped up,” Kramer said. “None of your hubbies had the courage to ask you so they sent me: do you think you could all make your own way home? They said take the cars.”
“I should hope so!” snorted a peroxided shrew with long nails who was strangling her silver fox. And her companions echoed the lack of sentiment.
Kramer smiled charmingly as they walked to the exit-he had one minute to go.
Then Mrs Trenshaw swung round.
“Oh, you might tell my husband,” she said, “that there was a man looking for him a little while ago. We told him where you were but he just took a peep through that big keyhole and said it looked a long business and he couldn’t wait.”
“What man?”
Kramer stepped forward.
“Pardon? Oh, he didn’t give his name. Said it wasn’t important.”
“I still say bow ties suit some men,” the shrew added firmly, as if having the final word in an argument.
Then she and the other women gasped, for they had never seen a man move so fast.
Van Niekerk was right, the Salvation Army Men’s Hostel had seemed a most unlikely place to find Lenny. It was almost enough to convince you that Moosa had run amok. But as Kramer pressed his foot to the floorboards, it all suddenly made very good sense. The sort of sense that Jackson had displayed on other occasions.
Going back to what the waiter at the pie-cart had said, Lenny had been picked up by several men in a Trekkersburg car. Point Two: he had not been back to his flat since then. Conclusion: Lenny was staying in Trekkersburg. If he had moved into any non-white area, however, the presence of a stranger would have been noted, and particularly so by police informers. The alternative was a white area, and that would also have attracted attention anywhere but in the hostel. Ensign Roberts was always pointedly indifferent as to where a man came from or why. Nor would his suspicions be aroused by a man claiming the rights of a white while looking very much on the borderline: an accident of pigmentation was a common reason for men taking to the road rather than spend lives producing written evidence of their statutory status.
The hostel was, in fact, the ideal place for Lenny to lie low within Jackson’s call.
And this meant that Zondi could now be in far greater peril than it appeared when the call from headquarters came through beside the mayoral seat. That area of the chamber had been right opposite the keyhole. If the mysterious Jackson had known a policeman when he saw one, or conceivably recognised Kramer, then he would have immediately set about destroying whatever evidence there was. This just might include Lenny Francis-and Zondi would doubtless try to prevent that happening.
Unlike Jackson, he would be all alone in the world at the time.
The hostel was around the next corner to the right, coming up fast.
Moosa had the shakes. And a suspicion that he had wet himself, ever so slightly. But Moosa was not afraid.
He had never felt such curious excitement; it tickled its way right down him, even into his loins. His eyes felt fat with their looking. It was simply that to maintain his watch on the hostel he had been forced to stand on his toes for well over an hour, enough to give any mature man of sedentary habits quivering muscles. Singh had been adamant about putting up his steel window guards after nightfall as he always did to protect his property. He offered Moosa a box but it had proved too high and exposed too much of the watcher. So Moosa had no choice but to put a cruel strain on his legs and back.