In a pink blaze of light Zondi saw-or thought he saw-the lieutenant enter the room.
“Shoot!” he gurgled.
But what made him uncertain was the fact that the ghostly blond figure failed to fire the gun in its hand. Instead it disappeared into the bedroom.
“Die, die, die!” the witch doctor bellowed, oblivious to any further intrusion.
This, too, led Zondi to believe he was going faster than he supposed. The pain was excruciating. He was no longer able to squeeze back. A wave of nausea swept up him and, finding the way blocked, spilled into his lungs. They tried to burst. His brain burst instead and everything went black.
For a very long moment, in the middle of which he heard the most terrible scream and wondered how he had managed it, he counted his children.
Then he sat up and was sick. He was alive and the witch doctor was dying.
That was all he needed to know until he ceased retching. And then he took a proper look.
The beast’s massive body lay on its side in a heap, heaving in spasm, with its tail sticking out straight. Not a tail at all, but the shaft of Argyle’s spear. And holding the end of it, Argyle himself, out cold.
Kramer preferred to sit outside in the Chev, so Miriam brought his tea out using her washboard for a tray, disguising it with a dishcloth.
“Pity I missed the fun,” he said to Zondi, raising his cup in salute. “Might have evened up our score a little. I still owe you for that time at the brickworks-that bugger with a knife in his bike pump.”
“So the score isn’t even, boss?” Zondi asked with a slight smile.
“No, man, and I’m glad it wasn’t this time. If I’d got mixed up in that business it would have been statements and inquests and all that rubbish right in the middle of this other job.”
“Argyle Mslope is a brave man to go on fighting with such wounds.”
“You’ve said it. A brave man to go in there in the first place.”
“I spoke with the doctor, boss.”
“Oh, yes?”
“He said he did not know how Argyle could do such a thing.”
“I don’t think that’s a problem. The bastard had his bum stuck in the air-must’ve done. Easy enough target even if you are half out.”
“Because, boss, Argyle’s right hand was nearly cut off already.”
“ Ach, no! I didn’t notice. So much blood about. Did the doctor say what his chances are?”
“Not very good.”
“Of course this will make sure his widow gets a proper pension-in the line of duty as they say.”
Zondi sipped his tea slowly.
“What are you thinking?” Kramer asked.
“Nothing, boss. Just that Argyle didn’t have his spear in the living room.”
“Christ, kaffir! I tell you we’re not getting sidetracked onto this case. There’s a lot you’ve got to hear from me and a lot we must do. That’s why I came by your place tonight-I want you to start at Greenside first thing. It could be we’re at last making some progress.”
The mortuary van passed by to collect together Sister Gertrude, a good nurse notwithstanding.
9
While waiting for Zondi to report back, Kramer had Pembrook fetch the toffee tin from the safe so that they could study its contents afresh in the light of a drizzly morning. Little wonder people caught colds in such an unpredictable climate.
“Pull over Zondi’s stool but don’t sit too close to me,” he said.
Pembrook complied with a sniff.
“I went round to the Swanepoels’ at breakfast time, sir,” he said. “That reference the father made to Boetie oversleeping one Sunday and missing church for the first time-it was on November the sixteenth.”
“Fine! Now we have narrowed it right down to the morning after, so to speak.”
“And that reminded Bonita that Boetie had been in high spirits the morning before. He’d exchanged his bike for a better one with a dynamo lamp-said he’d be out late testing it.”
“Even better. But it still beats me why his parents never asked him what he was up to.”
“They keep saying the same thing: they trusted him and-”
“Who, man?”
“God.”
Kramer wrote the name on his blotter. Then he opened the tin, giving two of the squares of tissue to Pembrook and opening the other one out himself.
“I have a feeling,” he said, “that these things might tell us a lot about what our young friend knew. The trouble is finding out how they work.”
“Well, isn’t the first thing deciding whether it’s a code or a cipher, sir?”
“Hey? Come again? And stick to Afrikaans this time.”
The probationer squirmed.
“I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t know the word for ‘cipher.’ ”
“What does it mean, then?”
“That you give each letter of the alphabet a number or something, perhaps switch the letters around, and write like that.”
“Bugger it, Pembrook, that is a code!”
“No, sir-at least not according to what I read once. A code is where one letter stands for a whole word-or where a drawing, say a circle, stands for ‘battleship.’ The trouble is you can’t write just anything and you must have a codebook to do it.”
Kramer made a show of peering into the tin.
“Nothing there,” he said.
“That’s also the trouble, sir,” Pembrook went on, rather apprehensively. “You can’t get anywhere without one.”
“Uhuh.”
A prisoner from the cells shuffled in to sweep the floor and was waved out again.
“Seeing you know so much about it, my boy, which one is this in?”
Pembrook caught a sneeze in a tissue and spent some time folding it away.
“Couldn’t we ask them through in Security, sir? They’re supposed to know all there is to know-more than me.”
“What? And make a bloody fool of myself if it’s a lot of twaddle? We’re dealing with a kid of twelve, remember.”
“Sir.”
“Well?”
“I think it’s in code, sir. You’ll notice how each line of letters stays straight and keeps inside a sort of square. There’s a pattern to it you wouldn’t need if you were just switching letters around. It must match up with something.”
“Of course! That explains the tracing paper!”
Pembrook flushed with embarrassed pride.
“Shall I have another go at his room, sir?”
Kramer did not hear him. He was closely examining all four slips, putting one on top of another and holding them to the light.
“No good,” he said finally, “can’t see anything that way. But I can help you in your search a little. You’ll notice that although he used tissue paper and a sharp pencil, there are no tears in it-no dents along his lines either. He must have done these on a very hard, smooth surface.”
“A book cover?”
“Much harder than that. Probably some sort of plastic or tin.”
“And the bedroom’s a likely place?”
“Why not? A job like this would have taken time and he’d need to be private.”
Pembrook reached for his raincoat but Kramer stopped him.
“Wait to hear what Zondi has to say first,” he said. “I’m sick of repeating everything.”
Grandfather Govender was being very tiresome. Short of telling him he was a senile old fool, the rest of the family could find no obvious way of explaining why he could not understand what had happened to Danny. There he stood, clutching his staff like some latter-day Gandhi in the corridor of the magistrate’s court, toothlessly sucking on an orange and shaking his head.
“All rubbish!” he muttered once again.
“Listen to me, Grandfather,” said his son Sammy. “Last night Danny was arrested by the police and today he must go to a place of safety until they find out what it was he has done.”
“They remanded him,” said the half-cousin.
“They say he was carrying a housebreaker’s tools, Grandfather,” went on Sammy. “Do not make another noise here or it will go badly for all of us-Danny, too.”
“What tools?”
Sammy winced.