Kramer handed over two rand notes. His change was returned without so much as a formal smile. The bag was dumped before him. The Widow Fourie moved away to serve a bare-breasted Zulu matron in a mud headdress.
This was hardly the way to treat a gentleman.
“Just a minute!” Kramer called out.
The Widow Fourie somehow caught the bag of vests he tossed over to her. She was bewildered.
“On second thoughts, they’d better be for you, popsy, seeing you’re going to be all alone these cold nights.”
Miss Hawkins indulgently let him pass unimpeded.
The Swanepoel family lived behind the station at one end of town. This did not, however, place them on the wrong side of the tracks. Far from it, they were part of a most influential community. Proof of this was to be found in records of Trekkersburg’s recent history: before the vast railway township was abruptly (some said illogically) transferred there from the loyalist hinterland, the city had always managed to return an opposition member of Parliament-it had never succeeded since.
Of course the swiftness of the operation left its mark on the place. The Swanepoels’ home was basically similar to the thousands surrounding it because this simplified construction, although an element of variety had been introduced by building the bungalows in pairs and making one the mirror image of the other. Each stood square on its quarter-acre plot, well fenced in by stout wire mesh, with its silver corrugated-iron roof covering a lounge, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, stoop, and three bedrooms. A separate structure, also in yellow brick, served to accommodate a car, a servant, and gardening equipment. The land in front of the dwellings was leveled for threadbare lawn and that at the back left rough for maize or pumpkins. When you really came down to it, the properties were as unremarkable as rows of passenger coaches in a marshaling yard.
A single tree would have made all the difference, Kramer mused, noticing another pack of sulky dogs patter by.
“Something wrong?” Zondi asked quietly, turning the Chev into Schoeman Road.
Hell, it showed so that even kaffirs could tell. No reply.
“Sorry, boss,” Zondi mumbled in apology.
But he was smart. He knew. He had guessed when Kramer erupted from Woolworth’s and ordered him to get his finger out and the show on the road, and then sat beside him gazing with glum intensity at Railway Village as if he had never seen it before. Being a family man in his own right, Zondi understood the importance of a warm woman and a flat full of friendly children. He deserved better than a silent rebuke.
“Just a pain in my arse, man-it’ll go away.”
Zondi laughed hopefully.
The Swanepoel house had a white police constable lounging outside it in a van and the curtains still drawn behind the burglar-proofing.
“Good morning, Lieutenant, sir.”
“What’s up? Why’re you here?”
“Colonel Muller’s orders, to keep the neighbors and press away.”
“Any trouble?”
“No, sir. Only one old dear being nosy so far. Dominee Pretorius is inside-the doctor’s just been.”
“Oh, yes?”
“The parents are both under sedation.”
“Jesus! What is this, a radio play? I’ve got questions to ask.”
“Bonita’s all right, though.”
“Come again?”
“Bonita Swanepoel-the boy’s big sister.”
“Okay, I’ll start with her. Sergeant Zondi’s going to take a look at the kaffir on the premises. Don’t let anyone in till I’m finished.”
“Sir.”
Kramer ignored the path, the doormat, and the brass knocker shaped like the Voortrekker Monument near Pretoria. He rapped softly with his knuckles.
The door immediately opened a crack.
“Dominee? It’s Lieutenant Kramer.”
The minister silently bade him enter.
“I want to see Bonita.”
“Shhh! Not so loud. Bonita? Well, I’m not too sure that she’s-”
“Don’t waste time, please. This case is probably more serious than we thought last night.”
While he was gone, Kramer opened the curtains and the windows. In no time at all the faint smell of ether from the injection rubs vanished. The room became a size larger with the sun in it and the vases of plastic flowers-mostly arum lilies-lost their funeral parlor gloom.
There was a large number of framed photographs scattered among the African wood carvings and miniature sport trophies. The small Instamatic ones on the radio-phonograph gave tilted glimpses of a holiday by the sea-Boetie must have taken them because he featured in none. On the bookcase, empty except for a pile of women’s magazines, three copies of the Holy Bible, and a ready reckoner, was a selection of infant dimples and senile smirks that suggested a gallery of relatives. The wall opposite the window gave pride of place to pictures which marked major events in the Swanepoels’ past-ranging from a large wedding group to a stillborn baby, hand-colored. Kramer paused to study the latter, not expecting to discover anything significant but remembering the day when just such a print in another home had given him the vital clue in an infanticide case. Then he passed on to the collection on the mantel shelf and had time to memorize the faces of the immediate family before Bonita presented herself.
She was truly a genetic amalgam of her parents, the poor girl. Her mother’s sharp, almost pretty, features were ill suited to her father’s broad, flat skull. The curly brown hair came from her mother, too, but she had her father’s bull neck save for the Adam’s apple. The maternal inheritance very properly dominated as far as her thighs, sadly giving way to knees, calves, and ankles identical to those of the engine driver snapped on the footplate. The mixture that produced the handsome Boetie must certainly have been more vigorously stirred.
“Hello, Bonita. I’m Lieutenant Kramer.”
“Pleased to meet you, sir,” she said, dry-eyed and somehow self-important.
Which struck Kramer as odd until they had completed an exchange of inanities appropriate to the occasion. Then it occurred to him that she was behaving as if Boetie had become a pop star, rather than a corpse, overnight. The impossible had been achieved. This wholly unremarkable young woman had become someone: no less than the blood sister of a posthumous celebrity soon to have his pictures in every paper. They would certainly want hers, too, no doubt artfully improved by holding a lacy hanky in the right place. She could tell her story of their happy childhood together and tug heartstrings loose from Table Mountain to the Limpopo. She could- Ach, maybe he was being too hard on her. Grief did funny things to people.
“You must understand I loved my brother very much,” Bonita declared clairvoyantly. “We were very close.”
“So you knew a lot about him-his friends and all that?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Can you tell me who his main ones were?”
“There’s Hennie Vermaak. He lives around the corner at 21 Retief Road. He’s twelve, too.”
“And how old are you, Bonita?”
“Sixteen.”
“Who else, then?”
“His schoolmates.”
“Uhuh?”
“I–I don’t know all their names.”
“Just some of them?”
She bit her lip.
“His teacher, Miss Louw, could tell you.”
“Fine. Now did he have any other friends?”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“Any older people? Menfolk, for instance.”
“Men?”
“Never mind. It’s just some lads get friendly with an old chap and listen to his stories and that.”
“He knew Uncle Japie but he’s dead now.”
This understandably broke the flow.
“Did Boetie make friends easily? Get on well with people?”
“Oh, he was very popular-everyone said so.”
“Did he have any hobbies? Collect birds’ eggs?”
“Just reading, I suppose. And puzzles-he really went for puzzles.”
“I see. How had your brother seemed lately? Did you notice anything different in the way he acted?”
“A bit jumpy.”
“Really?”