James McClure - The Caterpillar Cop

That inadvertently chucked a handful in the fan, all right; the foreman was summoned to the dispatch manager’s office and there upbraided for squandering such an asset on mere flat dwellers. After all, he was forcefully reminded, it was the manager who dealt with the irate Greenside subscribers who invariably began their calls with: “I would have you know that the managing director of your paper is a personal friend of mine…”

Danny shot to the top overnight-the Boxing Day hand-outs in Greenside were enough to keep you in Cokes for the year. But, curiously, the boy he deposed seemed only mildly aggrieved. Perhaps there was a snag.

There was.

Danny discovered it the hard way: the bigger the property, the longer the drive leading up to the house, and the meaner the dogs-creatures so incredibly stupid they could not distinguish between an aquiline profile and a flat one. If it was two-legged, dark-skinned, and not employed on the premises, they attempted a disembowelment.

The big house coming up now on his right retained one of the most serious threats to his survival; an enormous, long-fanged, tatty-eared hellion called Regina by the family.

He called her “nice doggy” and ran like hell.

That was on the first day, and he got all of fifteen paces before going down screaming. Luckily the head garden boy was out early, dampening the lawns before the sun got going, and he had called the bitch off with a casual, almost regretful, word of command.

On the second day and thereafter, Danny never arrived at the high wooden gate without a bone cadged from the butcher’s near the market that opened at five. Regina still pursued him, all right, but, being so incredibly stupid, kept the offering clenched in her jaws and this took care of her bite.

Danny leaned his bicycle against the gatepost. He unwrapped the bone and tossed it over.

There was an indignant yell. Then the head garden boy came charging out, rubbing his shoulder.

“What you do that for, you damn fool?” he demanded.

“Me?” said Danny, quick as a flash.

So the Zulu hurled the bone at him and missed. It hit the bicycle lamp instead and broke the glass. Now came Danny’s turn for indignant histrionics.

“You damn fool!” he shouted. “That bike he belonging newspaper Europeans. Big trouble for you now.”

A lie, but all the lovelier for it-vendors were required to provide their own transport.

“ Hau, sorry, I buy new one-you not say,” the Zulu urged, very shocked.

“Maybe, we see. But you better having it tomorrow, my boss he is a terrible man. Worse than the dog by this place.”

“The dog is dead.”

That took a few seconds to register.

“A car hitting it?”

“No.”

“God’s truth?”

The Zulu nodded.

“Why are you waiting by the gate, big chief? Did they send you to bite me?”

This bared the big bully’s teeth but he knew what was good for him.

“Me for paper,” he muttered. “Want quick today.”

Danny handed it over with a flourish.

Then, as he pedaled on up the hill to make his last delivery, he looked back and noted that the curtains in the big house were still drawn across every window. When the servant had said the paper was wanted in a hurry, he thought it must be later than he imagined, but here was evidence to the contrary. Which posed the interesting question: Who had asked for the Trekkersburg Gazette so early and why?

He was freewheeling downhill past the big house again when a second question occurred to him: why had the dog, in such robust health two days before on the Saturday, died so suddenly?

Danny decided to have a word with the lad from the Central News Agency who delivered the Sunday papers.

Mungo had to take most of the credit for saving the situation, Kramer acknowledged generously-he himself had only made certain that a respectable citizen would not be protesting an infringement of rights.

“Because that’s bloody nearly what happened,” he told Zondi as they drove back into the center of Trekkersburg. “I was committed, you see. I was in the bloke’s house and he wanted to know the reason. You can’t go fooling with people like that even if they are polite face to face. The Colonel does not like that kind of trouble. He can tell them to get lost but he doesn’t like it.”

“Who could say you were in his house without asking first, boss?”

“This kid Mungo. He told them.”

“But you could have said you were just talking to him.”

“The trouble was I was stroppy with Nielsen when he came out. I came on hard-Phillip Sven Nielsen? You know.”

“Why, boss?”

“Because I’d already found blood on his jacket sleeves.”

That took ten miles an hour off the speedometer.

“Boss Nielsen’s?”

“Uhuh. That’s where Mungo stopped me making the all-time boo-boo. Thing was I said to Nielsen I wanted to ask him some questions and we’d better go somewhere and sit. He said he’d have to tell his wife what was happening because she’d got a fright, and put me in his study. In the meantime Mungo comes in and wants to look at my gun. I let him and ask if he knows what his father’s job is. Of course, he says-not like a normal kid at all, this Mungo; bloody microscopes, hell! His dad’s an ecologist and he catches things. Kills them, too. Rabbits, mainly, he tells me, just as his old man walks in.”

“And then?”

“He hears what the kid is saying and he adds, I need the blood, you know. Really, I say. He explains he uses it to catch meerkats, carries it around in one of those plastic bowls with a lid-like you put in the fridge. Splashes it all round his traps with a rag.”

“His jacket, too.”

“Yes, that’s about it. By now I’m getting the picture. I tell him we believe he was up in the plantation catching things for ecology, and he says you could put it that way. He is doing a study of one small section and learning all he can about how the food goes from one animal to another. Like what the shrews eat and what eats the shrews. That’s why he was working so late; shrews die if they are kept in a trap for too long and he has to empty them every eight hours.”

“For how long, boss?”

“He says he’s been doing it three years.”

“You believe him?”

“There’s a place in England, so he tells me, where the scientists have spent twenty-seven years in a forest nonstop.”

“White men!” Zondi chuckled.

“I feel the same, kaffir. Anyway, he asks me what my questions are. I say, as if I know already, Mr. Nielsen, you visit this plantation at eight o’clock in the morning, four o’clock in the afternoon and at midnight? Ja, he says. All right, then, I say, did you notice anyone in the trees at all yesterday? — and I tell him why. He thinks for a long time and then says there was nobody. But, I must remember, he just goes to a small part down near the dual highway. Thanks very much, I tell him, and take my gun back from Mungo.”

“So?”

“Then he says, Just a minute, is that all you want to know? He looks at me all suspicious. I don’t say anything. Because if it is all, then he wants to ask a question. Go ahead, I say.

“He’s no fool, this one. He says, It seems strange to me, Lieutenant, that you feel at liberty to walk into my house, unannounced, to ask a single question which, according to your theories on sex killers, could easily have waited an hour or so. You could have telephoned-or knocked on my door-at seven, when I generally get up.

“Man, I had to think fast. I said, It is urgent, man, because I wanted you to take a look at the murder scene for me before it rains or whatever. Why him? he wants to know. Well, because our forensic experts, ha ha, haven’t been able to find anything there of any use to us. He knows the plantation better than anyone; there was just a chance he would spot what we wouldn’t.