The white constable on duty behind the charge office counter, who said his name was Boshoff and had a face like Elvis Presley’s, tried a stall when asked where the station commander could be found. Then he contrived to elbow some stolen property to the floor-to wit, a trussed chicken-and its owner added her own squawks to the lament. For just a few seconds there, it was all very noisy. While Zondi brought the prisoner back from the verandah, Kramer followed Boshoff to a door, had it knocked for him, and then went into the small office alone.
Tubby Frikkie Jonkers rose at once from his chair behind the desk, where he had been apparently checking the station inventory, and responded to Kramer’s introduction with jerky alertness. His smile, beneath a hairline mustache, was most welcoming, and the bright, wide-awake glint of his slightly poppy eyes impressive. What betrayed him was the impression of his tunic cuff button, as plain as a dimple, in his right cheek.
“Is this a social,” he asked, as they sat down, “or are you here in some way we can help you?”
“I’m trying the whole area for information about a bloke we found hanging from a tree. We can’t get hold of the next of kin because he didn’t leave any papers, and the car number plates are causing some problems. You know how it is these days with computers.”
Jonkers laughed, holding up his fingers. “That’s the only kind of computers we have got in Witklip, Lieutenant! For the really heavy stuff, we take off our socks as well.”
“Have a look at this description anyway, and see if it means anything to you.”
Kramer had heard somewhere that intelligence was curiosity mixed with an urge to join things together in patterns. If that was so, then Jonkers had just proved the other side of the argument, by grasping only what concerned him personally. It was fascinating to watch, but probably uneventful to live with.
“Almighty God,” said Jonkers. “This is Tommy!”
“You know him?”
“Certainly! He’s been staying at a pal of mine’s place right nearby here. I tell you, this is a real shock to me. Only this morning I phoned Henk for a check because I was worried about him-which reminds me, he hasn’t called back yet.”
“We’ll, here’s your answer,” said Kramer. “Will you be able to furnish the necessary particulars?”
“Not really; his name, his home address from the register, which I haven’t bothered to find out yet. He was a mercenary, you know.”
“Uh huh?”
“Oh, ja; he could tell you all about it. Some of the things those coons do, you could hardly believe! He had memories that were terrible. I know because once there was a bloke in the room next to his, heard him whimper in his sleep at night-sort of like a dog that thinks someone is trying to catch it to beat it? Like that. My wife had the right word for him: she said he was haunted. But not according to Tommy; he laughed in that way of his, and asked if we’d never heard of malaria. He was always okay again after a few drinks.”
“Boozed a lot?”
“Hell! I’ve never met a bloke who was better company in that department.”
Then Tollie Erasmus must have been, Kramer reasoned to himself, either very rash or very relaxed, and the more Jonkers had to say, the more it would appear to have been the latter.
“And you all liked him?”
“Man, you can’t exactly say he was popular,” Jonkers admitted, with the proper hesitation that goes with speaking ill of the dead, “but you can say that every man respected him. It takes quite a nerve to go and fight Commies in the bush, ’specially when you’re working for bloody wogs who can’t be trusted-and although there’s good money in it, you can still see how all of us gain in the end.”
“So he’d done all right?” Kramer said enviously, offering Jonkers one of his Luckies.
“Unlike some he could tell you about. But he still had to make his pile, he used to say, and he was hoping to get something quite soon.”
“Angola hadn’t put him off? The firing squad?”
Jonkers snorted and replied, “Tommy? That’ll be the day! He was even trying to get me to go with him.”
“Uh huh?”
“That’s true,” Jonkers confirmed with unconcealed pride, while studying the back of his bear’s paw. “Said I would qualify for a top rank, maybe even colonel, at my age and with all my experience behind me. You know, the military training we get at college, and the attitudes I have formed. Could see I knew how to handle myself. Oh, ja, he really pestered me, Tommy did. You never know, it’s possible if.…”
How astute Erasmus had been in making the silly fat sod see himself as a gun-slinging glamor boy, and not as the plodding police sergeant he was paid to be. And of course, Jonkers had known all along that when it came to the crunch, he was going to say the wife wouldn’t wear it.
“Do you think his experiences could have led to his death?” Kramer suggested, preparing to begin on another tack. “There was no farewell note.”
“That’s Tommy’s style, all right. A hard man. You would have liked him.”
“But I was really querying the reason for-”
“Ach, I see, sir; sorry. You know, I’ve been wondering about that myself. It comes so sudden. Difficult, too, when a bloke has only talked in a bar, where others can listen. What I mean is, Tommy was never actually personal, if you follow. The wife says there was probably a divorce somewhere in the background.”
How right the good woman was; bigamy had also been one of Tollie’s little failings.
“There’s something that doesn’t add up here,” Kramer observed with polite curiosity. “How come he was thinking of joining up again, but had allowed himself to get so fat?”
“His leg,” Jonkers said, as if this were self-evident.
“Hey?”
“He’d taken a hell of a fracturing of the thighbone-not quite a compound, he explained, but the muscles got all ripped up. That was the reason he came to Spa-kling Waters-for the treatment. He’d been advised by a specialist in Jo’burg, apparently, and wasn’t to put too much weight on it till the insides had mended. There was nothing you could see on the outside, of course, even when he was in his swimming cozzy, and he didn’t always limp.”
The irony stunned Kramer. Then he rationalized, and saw that a fractured thigh would have been, after the story in the papers, the first injury to come to Erasmus’s mind. A thinking mind that might also have gauged that a coincidence is the first thing most people dismiss.
Something in his expression must have cued Jonkers for a divergent response of his own: “Hey, that’s it, isn’t it, sir? The leg made him do it! I’d noticed he wasn’t talking about it anymore-but it wasn’t getting better, it was getting worse!”
Kramer could only grunt to that.
“You mean the big irony involved, Lieutenant?”
“Which one?” said Kramer, surprised by an abstract.
“The irony that in the end those bloody black Commies got Tommy,” sighed Jonkers. “Oh, ja, it certainly makes a man think.”
Which was as fine a red herring as ever there was, and in Kramer’s opinion, his complete vindication.
The hotel was positioned on a wooden shelf in a steep-sided valley, all of one kilometer down a rutted track that expanded into a nothing designated FREE CAR PARK. Some black children squatted there, hoping to pit their strength against any incoming suitcases. A four-wheel-drive vehicle could continue on around the corner, go through an assault course, and end up near the kitchen entrance, trailing oddments of vegetation behind it. The hotelier’s own Land-Rover had a good-sized branch wilting on its roof rack, and a flat front tire.
Kramer followed Frikkie Jonkers along a crazy-paving path and out onto the scrubby lawn, further designated THE TERRACE. He was fast learning that if you found it difficult to believe your eyes at Spa-kling Waters, then a reassuring notice was bound to pop up. A deep verandah ran the full width of the farmhouse-it could never have been anything else-with access to both private and public rooms being provided by narrow French windows. The concrete pillars that held up the verandah’s molting thatch had been painted various fairground colors, and the rafters had been strung with colored electric light bulbs-which weren’t working, because at least one in the series had fallen out. On the verandah itself was an assortment of cane furniture, repainted so often the weave had almost been obscured, and in this cane furniture sat an assortment of guests.