He saw Zondi blink.
“What-er-what do I say if someone here asks?” Ferreira asked anxiously, his avarice having died of frostbite. “Asks where Tommy is, I mean.”
“Just say that he ought to be back soon. Any problems on your side, Sergeant?”
“None, sir!” replied Jonkers, coming to attention.
“Then let me give you one. This guest was making long-distance telephone calls recently; I want you to contact the Brandspruit exchange and tell them I need those numbers chop chop.”
“Immediately, sir. Anything else?”
“Ja, your friend here can see if he’s got a nice metal strongbox for me to stash this stuff in. Go.”
Both men hurried from the room, closing the door very gently behind them. Zondi’s low, puzzled laugh followed as the thud of their footfalls died away.
“Boss? There are times when you do things I do not fully understand.”
Kramer grinned. “If you knew how I’d been misleading them this afternoon, maybe you’d appreciate how much explaining I’ve just saved myself. Besides, it’s nice to see a bit of action.”
“So you do not suspect-”
“Ach, of course not! Which isn’t to say this case has got any less peculiar. What’s your view?”
“Hau, hau, hau,” sighed Zondi, kneeling on the mat. “This money was not my expectation.”
They began to gather up the rolls.
“Could be that we fell into the old trap of presuming too much,” Kramer said, sitting back on his heels, “because, from one angle, it still being here does make sense.”
“How is that?”
“Well, everything they’ve told me makes Monday night sound as if it came as a nasty shock to him. He had his bum in the butter and could easily have stayed another three months, I reckon. Out he goes, expecting to be so short a time he doesn’t bother to make his usual lying excuses to Ferreira, and they nail the bastard. He won’t tell them where the moola is, takes the drop, and they’re left scratching their arses. Now all you’ve got to do is explain why, if they knew where to contact him, they didn’t come here and turn the place over.”
Zondi pursed his lips.
“What’s the problem?”
“I am a kick-start kaffir, boss, as you well know.”
“Oh, ja?”
“I would first like to hear about these telephone numbers.”
“Can’t help you there, man,” Kramer said, smiling as he recognized the same pattern of thought that had him in a tangle. “But I do know one thing: whoever was on the receiving end would know from the operator where the call originated, even if he didn’t tell them himself. ‘We’ve got Witklip on the line,’ and all that. He’d know this, too, and the chances are that only persons he really trusted would-”
“A big mistake?” Zondi broke across. “He chose unwisely?”
“Either that or one of his contacts was got at. The timing of all this does suggest nobody knew where he was until he began the calls.”
“Hmmm.”
“Tollie would recognize the risks himself?”
“Yebo, and this does not tell us why the telephone became necessary to him.”
“Boredom? He’d begun to hit the bottle a lot harder. Might have been checking to see if we were still so interested. Then we start the other permutations: Why should he be worrying about anyone except us? Wasn’t it natural for him to keep in touch? Et cetera.”
“We could go mad.”
“True. Is that the last one?”
Zondi flipped the roll over. “There is no necessity for us to consider this matter, boss. What you said just now is the important thing: If we can find one person who was aware of the whereabouts of this man, then we have a lead.”
“Let’s hope so. Those numbers could all be for public phone boxes.”
“In Zambia,” added Zondi, and enjoyed his joke hugely until Jonkers came tiptoeing in.
“Hell, I haven’t got such good news for you, Lieutenant,” he said nervously. “The exchange says finding your information isn’t going to be all that simple, although the night shift may be able to get it for you by the morning.”
Kramer had, however, been expecting a cloddish reversal of this kind, and refused to allow it to spoil his mood of mild jubilation. With a maturity he very much admired, he waved aside the apology.
“We’ve got to get the tom back, anyway,” he said, taking the strongbox Jonkers was carrying. “Ring them again and say they’ll find me working under Murder and Robbery in Trekkersburg.”
And so it was, not a quarter of an hour later, that they bowled out of Witklip, feeling justly pleased with their day but somehow unable to reconcile themselves to the idea it had ended.
“We might look in on the exchange on our way through,” Kramer suggested.
“Can do, boss.”
“So tell me when we hit Brandspruit.”
“Okay.”
Zondi seemed about to add something. Kramer waited in case he did, then settled down comfortably, with his knees against the dashboard, to ruminate and even to doze a little. Very soon he was forcing his eyelids open for just long enough to see-and instantly forget-any onrushing obstacle. This was no more than a reflex response to a slight change in his center of gravity, caused by Zondi’s easing up momentarily on the throttle; the donkey carts, ox sledges, and wobbling cyclists were in themselves very dull. A farm truck appeared, heeling over against the sunset, dark and menacing, and gave them a long, angry blast on its horn, before scraping by with a broadside of loose stones.
“Jesus!” said Kramer, sitting bolt upright.
This amused Zondi.
But Kramer’s smile never made it. About nine kilometers from Witklip, on a road leading nowhere else he knew of, he’d just seen an enormous man with a beard at the wheel of a farm truck. And-in what had been like a remembered glimpse of a dream, so vivid it had made his loins leap-he had seen, on the far side of this man, a beautiful girl with honey hair and blue eyes and a mouth like a whore. She had laughed at him.
“Fluke!” muttered Strydom, putting down his favorite work, The Essentials of Forensic Medicine by Cyril John Poison, who was a barrister as well as a pathologist, and could be depended upon for a very dry wit.
“You’re not still moaning about what Trompie said,” grumbled his wife, Anneline, as she came in from watching the neighbors’ television set. “It was lovely, Chris; you really missed out. And do you remember The World at War you saw last week? Well, tonight Maria’s husband told us that those Nazi concentration camps were all faked by the Jews afterwards.”
“Rubbish,” said Strydom, who was still wrapped up in his own problems of conscience.
“I told him you’d say that, and he lent me this clipping from the Jo’burg Star. It’s a letter from a Mr. G. Rico, who states that the figures were grossly exaggerated. ‘Furthermore, any such casualties as did exist were not victims of any premeditated act.’ So what do you say now, before I have to give this back?”
“The chances of the drop being a fluke are a million to one,” began Strydom, then realized that these odds were greatly exaggerated.
“Ach, you’re impossible, Chris! You mustn’t let Trompie prey on your mind like this-and if it isn’t him, it’s that damned boy of his with the leg.”
“I’ve got to make certain, Anneline. I could be wasting everybody’s time.”
“Like mine, for instance?”
“Sorry, my poppie,” he soothed, getting up to hug her plump warmth. “I’ll leave this till tomorrow, when I can get at some old P.M. reports and study the incidence.”
“Tomorrow night the TV’s in Afrikaans,” she said, keeping hold of his hand, and they went automatically through to the kitchen for their coffee. “They’ve invited us again, so can you come over?”
“What’s on?”
“An Australian baritone singing translations from real Italian opera. I’m going.”
That, thought Strydom, was exactly what the old Minister of Posts and Telegraphs had warned about when describing television as the Devil’s instrument. Not once that week had they sat down together as man and wife and talked over his more interesting cases.