“Christ, sir, that’s good!”
“Logical, nothing else. So what is there in it for him? If he tells the police what they already know, they will laugh. If he tells them what they will doubtlessly find out, they’ll want to know where he got his information. He realizes that it would be best to keep quiet.”
“That sort of cool thinking would take a hard-headed kid.”
“Boetie in a nutshell, Johnny. Okay, so he sneaks out and goes home, but he’s only twelve and he’s seen a man die. This keeps him awake. Makes him oversleep. Perhaps by morning it is all unreal and almost a dream. He forgets to do his homework. On Monday he wants to make sure he saw what he saw-and he’s also very curious to check on how the case has been treated. Crime in Greenside is big stuff.
“He buys a paper. What’s in it? An inquest stating Andy Cutler died accidentally. He must have flipped. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t make the same mistake we made over that line. ‘A typical drowning.’ ”
“But, sir…”
“Go on.”
“Surely that was his cue to tell the police? Now he was in the strongest possible position.”
“Oh, no, he could go one better. Here, the letter reads: ‘I think I have found a way of proving to him a big mistake has been made.’
“You mustn’t overlook Boetie’s feud with the station commander. That had made him really sore. He didn’t want to reveal the crime so much as actually use it to prove how useful he and his mates could be.”
Pembrook pushed back his cuff from his watch and frowned.
“You see,” said Kramer, leaning forward, “what Boetie had in mind was presenting the police not with just his eyewitness report, but the whole bloody thing tied up in a string. Real evidence like a real detective.”
“Sorry, sir, that’s too much to believe.”
“All right, let’s try another approach. Up to the moment Boetie saw the newspaper article he had no reason to doubt his assessment of the activity by the pool. Now he is confronted by what seems an incredible oversight. Or is it? Only an investigation can give him the answer and he prefers to carry it out himself.”
“Then nobody can call him a fool,” Zondi murmured.
“Well, Johnny?”
Pembrook had been turning the rubber roller of the typewriter in an irritating way. He jerked his head up.
“I think all he wanted was something to back up his word. One or two outside facts, maybe. If he had just gone to the station commander with his story, it could have been dismissed as a nasty piece of malicious hearsay-particularly as everyone was being so soft about the thing. I’m with you there, but now I can’t understand why he put it in his letter to the Detective Club. Or why he wrote to it at all.”
“A good point. My theory is simply that he felt he had to tell someone. You can see the kids take this club pretty personally.”
“Hmmm. Where do we go from here then, sir?”
“Just a minute-the wire netting. There is a chance that it boosted any doubt that started to grow in his mind. At that range he might not necessarily have been able to give a good description of the other party. He’d have to see them again first, so he decided to get mixed up with the family. He notices Sally is twelve and somehow finds out she goes to dancing. Let’s not trouble with that point too much. In the first place, it’s a reasonable deduction considering the type of girl she is-and in the second place, we know he was training down at the town baths with English boys. They could have told him.
“Hester is a snag. She expects him to go around with her, and won’t be easily fobbed off with excuses. She’ll get in the way. Then the conscience thing again, which I think is very real. And on top of this, the breaking-off committed him to his plan of action.
“Boetie gets all togged up and goes to dancing on Friday night. Naturally Sally is pleased when a boy takes so much notice of her for a change. She’s probably so hard-up that it doesn’t make any difference he’s Afrikaans-or maybe she goes for being a rebel daughter. With an old man like that, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. From here on, Boetie worms his way into the household, trying to find out what he can.”
“Yet he still isn’t any the wiser after how many visits?”
“Who said? He must have finally got somewhere because he implied as much when he asked Hennie to look after the toffee box.”
Pembrook opened it.
“I bet these codes could explain a few things. Pity there was nothing in his room-I was there two hours, you know.”
“That’s what I’m going to work on as soon as you leave. Christ, the time! You’d better go.”
Zondi handed Pembrook his raincoat and small suitcase, adding a little bow which did not go down very well.
“All right, sir, I’ll ring in the morning. I think I know what you want out of Miss Jarvis.”
“What’s that?”
“Mainly if Boetie told her dirty jokes, too. That’s the one bit that doesn’t fit into all of this.”
“You’re my boy.” Kramer grinned.
The padlocked Ford van carrying Danny Govender from the place of safety to the magistrate’s court for another remand that Thursday afternoon was being driven by Constable Hendriks.
A very cheerful Hendriks, because he had once again succeeded in winning a transfer to a job he considered more congenial-and this time he was confident of having found his true billet. Nobody else had transfers granted as readily as he did. He wondered again if, in point of fact, he did have a winning personality. A sergeant had once murmured something to that effect.
There was not a great deal of traffic, yet he kept his speed down. The whole secret of ferrying prisoners to and fro was in the timing; if you did the journey too quickly, the jail would find paper work for you; too slowly and the court cell sergeant would bawl you out in front of the wogs.
He looked into his mirror, noting with satisfaction that the sole occupant of the lock-up section in the rear was sitting nice and quiet. Now here was an interesting case, this snot-nosed Indian kid who claimed he had gone into a posh area to dig up a dog. What a story! And yet everyone felt there was an even better one somewhere if only they could coax it out.
Hendriks’ thoughts homed in on himself. Actually, when he dispassionately reviewed his career in the force to date, he could detect only one minor shortcoming: a tendency to forgetfulness.
Which was one of the reasons he had for being so pleased about his present job. There was nothing to remember-no messages, no beats, no faces on the wanted list. All he did was count the prisoners as they hopped in, snap the lock, drive, twist the key, count them as they got out, and hand over the papers.
He hiccuped, tasting again the very strong coffee he had been given out at the place of safety by the housekeeper. A nice woman who always made him very comfortable, and it was good to put up his feet for five minutes.
Jesus! Some cheeky sod behind him was hooting to pass; he would bloody well-
A fire engine shot by, its siren coming on with a long wail of derision. Hendriks could have sworn that the baboon next to the driver had shaken a fist at him.
He would bloody well show them!
The van leaped in pursuit, its police markings giving it the same immunity from the normal rules of the road, and all other traffic shrank towards the curbside.
To his delight, Hendriks started gaining and could spare a moment to check his prisoner in the mirror again. The little devil was loving it. There would be no complaints, and if there were…
Just look at that, the fire engine was chickening out at the turnoff to Binswood Avenue. It might be a blind corner but there was no need to drop down into bloody first gear for it. Wait till he got there. The fire engine disappeared out of sight.
Hendriks braced himself against the door and gunned the van into a fancy four-wheel drift.
He came out of the corner into Binswood Avenue at thirty mph, which, while being a lot slower than it felt, gave him a thinking distance of thirty feet and a braking distance of forty-five feet. For the first ten yards he thought about the petrol tanker lying on its side, completely blocking the road, and its load gushing out of the fractured seams. For the rest of the way he braked.