Riotous Assembly

'Rubber,' said Miss Hazelstone briefly.

Kommandant van Heerden leant back in his chair angrily. He had had about as much of Miss Hazelstone's leg-pulling as he could take. If the old girl seriously supposed that he was going to believe some cock-and-bull story about a rubber idol, she had another think coming.

'Now listen to me, Miss Hazelstone,' he said seriously. 'I can appreciate what you are trying to do and I must say I admire you for it. Family loyalty is a fine thing and trying to save your brother is a fine thing too, but I have my duty to do and nothing you can say is going to prevent me doing it. Now if you will be good enough to get to the point and admit that you had nothing whatever to do with the murder of your cook and were never approximately in love with him, I will allow you to go. If not I shall be forced to take some drastic action against you. You are obstructing the course of justice and you leave me no alternative. Now then, be sensible and admit that all this talk about fetishes is nonsense.'

Miss Hazelstone looked at him icily.

'Are you easily stimulated?' she asked. 'Sexually, I mean.'

'That has got nothing whatever to do with you.'

'It has got a lot to do with this case,' said Miss Hazelstone, and hesitated. Kommandant van Heerden shifted uneasily in his chair. He had come to recognize that Miss Hazelstone's hesitations tended to augur some new and revolting disclosure.

'I have to admit that I am not easily aroused,' she said at last. The Kommandant was delighted to hear it. 'I need the presence of rubber to stimulate my sexual appetite.'

The Kommandant was just about to say that in his case the presence of rubber had quite the opposite effect, but he thought better of it.

'You see I am a rubber fetishist,' Miss Hazelstone continued.

Kommandant van Heerden tried to grasp the implications of the remark.

'You are?' he said.

'I have a passion for rubber.'

'You have?'

'I can only make love when I am dressed in rubber.'

'You can?'

'It was rubber that drew Fivepence and me together.'

'It was?'

'Fivepence had the same propensity.'

'He did?'

'When I first met him he was working in a garage retreading tyres.'

'He was?'

'I had taken my tyres in for a retread and Fivepence was there. I recognized him at once as the man I had been looking for all my life.'

'You did?'

'I might almost say that our love affair was cemented over a Michelin X.'

'You might?'

Miss Hazelstone stopped. The Kommandant's inability to say more than two words at a time and those two in the form of a question she had already answered was beginning to irritate her.

'Do you have any idea what I am talking about?' she asked.

'No,' said the Kommandant.

'I don't know what more I can do to make my meaning plain,' Miss Hazelstone said. 'I have tried to explain as simply as I can what I found attractive about Fivepence.'

Kommandant van Heerden closed his mouth which had been hanging open and tried to focus his mind on something comprehensible. What Miss Hazelstone had just told him so simply had not, he had to admit, been in the least abstract, but if just before he had hovered over a void of unfathomable abstractions, the simple facts she had placed before him now were so far beyond anything his experience had prepared him to expect that he began to think that on the whole he preferred the conceptual abyss. In an effort to regain his sense of reality, he resorted to healthy vulgarity.

'Are you trying to tell me,' he said, picking the bathing-cap off the desk and dangling it from his finger a few inches in front of Miss Hazelstone's face, 'that this rubber cap gives you an overwhelming desire to lay me?'

In front of him Miss Hazelstone nodded.

'And if I were to wear it you wouldn't be able to control your sexual impulses?' he went on.

'Yes,' said Miss Hazelstone frantically. 'Yes, I would. I mean, no I wouldn't.' Torn between a raging torrent of desire and an overwhelming aversion for the person of the Kommandant, she hardly knew what was happening to her.

'And I suppose you're going to tell me that your Zulu cook had the same taste for rubber?'

Miss Hazelstone nodded again.

'And I suppose all those rubber clothes I found in the bedroom upstairs belong to you too?' Miss Hazelstone agreed that they did. 'And Fivepence would put on a rubber suit and you would wear a rubber nightdress? Is that right?'

Kommandant van Heerden could see from the expression on Miss Hazelstone's face that at long last he had regained the initiative. She was sitting mute and staring at him hypnotized.

'Is that what used to happen?' he continued remorselessly.

Miss Hazelstone shook her head. 'No,' she said, 'it was the other way round.'

'Oh really? What was the other way round?'

'The clothes were.'

'The clothes were the other way round?'

'Yes.'

'Inside out I suppose, or was it back to front?'

'You could put it like that.'

Kommandant van Heerden's experience of rubber clothing during the night hadn't induced in him any desire to put it like anything.

'Like what?' he said.

'I wore the men's suits and Fivepence wore the dresses,' Miss Hazelstone said. 'As you've probably noticed I have some marked masculine characteristics and Fivepence, poor dear, was a transvestite.'

The Kommandant staring at her with increasing disgust could see what she meant. Masculine characteristics indeed! A taste for tall and revolting stories for one thing. And if for one moment he really believed that a fat Zulu cook had been dressing up in his missus' clothes then he was a very lucky Zulu to have gone the way he had. The Kommandant knew what he'd do to any houseboy of his he found prancing around in ladies' clothes, rubber or not, and it included pulling more than his vest tight too.

He dragged his attention back from the prospect and tried to think about the case. He had known there was something sinister about the bedroom with the rubber sheets, and now Miss Hazelstone had explained its purpose.

'It's no good your going on trying to cover up for your brother,' he said. 'We've enough evidence to hang him with already. What you tell me about the rubber clothes merely confirms what we already know. When your brother was arrested last night, he was wearing this cap.' He held it up in front of her again.

'Of course he was,' said Miss Hazelstone. 'He has to when he goes swimming. He has trouble with his ears.'

Kommandant van Heerden smiled. 'Sometimes listening to you, Miss Hazelstone, I fancy there's something wrong with my ears too, but I don't go around with a rubber bathing-cap on all the time.'

'Nor does Jonathan.'

'No? Well then perhaps you'll explain how it came about that when he was brought before me this morning, he was still wearing it. Your brother evidently likes wearing rubber things.'

'He probably forgot to take it off,' Miss Hazelstone said, 'He's very absent-minded you know. He's always forgetting where he's left things.'

'So I've noticed,' said the Kommandant. He paused and leant back in the chair expansively. 'The pattern of the case seems to go like this. Your brother comes home from Rhodesia, probably because things got too hot for him up there.'

'Nonsense,' interrupted Miss Hazelstone. 'Barotseland does get very hot, I know, but Jonathan's used to the heat.'

'You can say that again,' said the Kommandant. 'Well, whatever the reason, he comes home. He brings with him all the rubber clothes he's so fond of and he starts trying to seduce your Zulu cook.'

'What utter rubbish,' said Miss Hazelstone. 'Jonathan wouldn't dream of any such thing. You're forgetting that he is a bishop.'

The Kommandant wasn't forgetting anything of the sort since he had never known it.

'That's maybe what he has told you,' he said. 'Our information is that he is a convicted criminal. There is a file on him down at the station. Luitenant Verkramp has the details.'

'But this is insane. Jonathan is the Bishop of Barotseland.'