“Is a fire to be blamed for what cooks in a pot?” she answered, nudging him back in matronly glee.
There was a pause. Toes wriggled, and river clay was poked from between them with stalks of grass; the rat also wriggled, annoyed by the elbow that had bumped against the leg. Zondi slipped a hand into his inside jacket pocket and felt for the picture of the white tramp.
“And now to a serious matter,” he said, pleased with the progress he was making.
Kramer was standing at the window of the station commander’s office, gripping the bars very tightly and trying to get an equally strong grip on his temper. After all, he’d not asked for much, simply a list of fanners, which any half-wit should have been able to provide in a twinkling, but Boshoff was still stuck on the seventh name thirty minutes later.
“This is too bloody much, man!” Kramer snapped, spinning round and thumping his fist down on the desk. “How long have you been here at Witklip? Since police college?”
“Twenty-six months and three weeks, sir,” replied the abject acting station commander.
“And you can’t do better than this? Christ, Witklip’s a place for getting away with murder, all right!”
Then Kramer realized how precise that count had been and, despite himself, he had to smile; obviously, Willie Boshoff wished that the duration of his stay had been a great deal shorter.
Encouraged by the smile, the youth said, “I just never get many jobs outside the reserve, Lieutenant. If a farmer has a complaint, then he sees Sarge at Spa-kling, or if he phones, then I’ve got to fetch Sarge to speak to him. They don’t really know me, you see-and someone has to look after the Bantu.”
“They don’t have Bantu on their farms? What else have they got to complain about?”
“Ach, what I mean is that I’ve never got on a personal level, if you understand, sir. Naturally, I raid the compounds from time to time, but nobody wants me to go banging on their front doors to tell them about it! They’re all friends of Sarge’s and so-”
“Hold it, Willie.”
“Well, he likes to do favors, sir.”
“Shut up.”
Kramer was searching for an alternative, and in no mood to have his shoulder wept upon.
“Favors? What about Ferreira? Don’t they all use his bar and come to the barbecue!”
“That’s brilliant, sir! He must know them at least as well as Sarge does. Shall I go and ask him to come?”
“No, Willie,” Kramer said patiently. “Unless you want to be in Witklip all your life, you will go and tell him to come.”
He began to root in the filing cabinet, just on the off chance of finding something interesting. What he did find was an accident report on Mr. and Mrs. P. W. J. Ferreira and their daughter-in-law, Mrs. P. E. Ferreira, who had all been fatally injured in a level-crossing collision near Brandspruit some six years back. The report gave their home address as Rest Haven, formerly Happy Valley Hotel, Witklip, and said that their son, Pieter Eugene Ferreira, had been at the wheel. No charge was going to be preferred, Jonkers had added in his own handwriting.
“Tea or coffee, sir?” asked Luthuli, hovering in the doorway.
“Coffee, I think-for three.”
“Tree? You want girl make rocky bun for visitor?”
Somebody, it seemed, had taught the man to regard himself as a bloody butler. “No, thanks. Plain coffee-that’s all.”
“Hau!”
“Three spoons of Nescafe, three cups-you’ve got the picture? Have yourself a quiet day.”
“Hau!” Luthuli exclaimed again, and disappeared mumbling.
Then Ferreira arrived with Willie, looking far less sloppy than he’d done the time before, and without those idiotic sunglasses. His smile lingered like the damp feel of his handshake.
“I’m told you want a list of everyone,” he said, taking the chair pointed out to him. “Is this some development regarding Tommy? Willie didn’t seem to know.”
Kramer saw no reason to start explaining anything at this stage either, and settled for what was immediately important. “I can tell you both this much, hey? I’m engaged in trying to trace where a certain woman and her young son stayed for a long weekend on a farm in this district about twenty-five years ago. That isn’t as impossible as it sounds, and when I get the answer, I’ll be a long way towards solving a serious case.”
“Of …? Please, sir,” said Willie.
“Call it suspected murder,” Kramer replied, being careful to keep within the framework he’d laid down for himself. “How many farmers do you reckon there are?”
Ferreira needed a second longer to function again. “Around two dozen. Taking those nearest, we’ve got Peter Crowe, George van der Heever, Gysbert Swanepoel, Karl de Brain, Mr. Jackson-”
“Write neatly,” ordered Kramer, sliding the sheet of foolscap across. “Full names, farm names, home language, approximate ages, any comments.”
The list was returned to him twenty minutes later.
“I wasn’t too sure what you meant about comments,” Ferreira admitted, having failed to make any. “Newcomers I’ve left out.”
“Thirty-two!” said Willie. “Phew!”
Kramer looked down the names with equanimity. Compared with some elimination jobs he’d done-like when one of 1,400 black workers had stitched up a bullying foreman in a boot factory-this was a walkover. Of those thirty-two names, none was foreign, but he had been expecting that. Twenty-seven of them had Afrikaans as their home language, and the rest English; he’d been expecting that, too. The five English-speakers would be his prime target.
“Not that I see how you’ll pinpoint this bloke,” Ferreira murmured deferentially, having had time to think. “Not if he’s mixed up in any way-which I can’t imagine for a start. I mean, he’s not likely to say, ‘Oh, ja; I was the bloke who had them to stay.’ ”
“There was a party,” explained Kramer.
Willie waited, then said, “And, sir?”
“Ach, I’m relying on people who were at this party to remember those two. When they do that, then we’ll know who the host was-and take it from there. From these figures I would conclude that if one of the English-speakers gave a party, he’d have to have Afrikaners among his guests, too, to make up the numbers.”
“Jackson’s the only stuck-up redneck in the district,” said Ferreira. “The rest of us-man, you wouldn’t know the difference. Was this party specifically for these people?”
“I don’t reckon so. But-”
“Then you’ll excuse me saying, Lieutenant, that having folk for the weekend is quite common out in the country, and twenty-five years is a long time to forget one little party.”
“I was thinking the same,” said Willie.
“Not if she was tempted to do her party trick,” Kramer told them, a smile quirking his lips. “The lady concerned was an Italian mamma mia who could speak some Afrikaans. That should jog a few memories-or do you get them here pretty often?”
Ferreira grinned his defeat and sat back. “Okay, you win. The only wops we’ve ever had here could only speaka da English.”
“ ‘We’ve’?”
“You know, at the hotel when I was a kid.”
Perversely, Kramer’s mind skipped sideways to investigate why he had always presumed that the Ferreira family were late on the scene and hardly an established part of it. Then he recalled the farmhouse-like architecture of the hotel-which wasn’t an uncommon feature in itself, of course-and tried to reconcile this with the fact that the building wasn’t very old. You surely didn’t design something one way to convert it almost in the next breath.
“Spa-kling Waters,” Willie said helpfully, in response to the uncomprehending silence.
“No, not then,” Ferreira contradicted him. “It was still Tobruk Guest Farm; my dad called it that when he made a mess of trying to be a farmer after the war. He’d dreamed too much in the desert.”
An unlucky family, mused Kramer, seeking distraction in the three changes of name for the grotty place he’d come across. A family of losers struggling to find the right words for the sign writer; the right spell, if you liked, to fend off their fate. None had worked so far, and yet here was the surviving son still mixing self-deception and bad magic, still trying to prove a point nobody else cared about.