James Mcclure - The Sunday Hangman

She obliged, frowning slightly as if dissatisfied with his reply, but not actually querying it.

“Then you’ve got something else on your mind, Trompie, or you’d have tried out the new frigate Janie’s made. He says it’s to shoot General Amin with, for what he does to people, but I told him Uganda hasn’t got any sea and besides-”

Kramer had submerged briefly, making quite a splash. He stepped out and took up his towel.

“Ja, ja, so maybe I have.”

“Oh, that!” The Widow laughed, putting down her teacup. “That’s the whole trouble with having servants.”

“No, I-”

“Come on, why don’t we, though?” she said with sudden mischief. “Jo’s back in the kitchen and the kids aren’t up.”

She rose and slipped home the bolt slowly and suggestively, making a funny, erotic thing of it, watching his eyes. Then she began loosening the gown which covered her voluptuous maturity, her wealth of warmth and tenderness so enveloping. How detached the girl had been, how detached, he remembered; how free she had left him.

The Widow Fourie let go of the bow she had been undoing in her belt. “Is it Zondi again?” she asked solemnly. “There is definitely something; I can sense it.”

Kramer began drying his hair.

“Now listen to me, Trompie. I’ve had an idea recently. If the worst comes to the worst, and his leg doesn’t get any better, then why not start using some of the land round the back?

Mickey could find-well-things to plant in it for us, turn it into a market garden. I know he grew up on a farm, so he’s bound to be able to-you know.”

“All he knows of farming is what it did to his dad.”

“He could learn, though. You’re the one who’s always said how intelligent he is.”

“Mickey’s leg is mending nicely; you’ll see.”

“He should have gone on giving it rest after-”

“For him to decide.”

“Oh, no,” said the Widow Fourie, very firmly. “Chris Strydom says that you’re the one who lets his hopes rise. Without you, he’d be treated like any other boy in the same situation, and it isn’t right-”

“Behind my back, hey?”

“I just happened to see Chris in the street.”

“Uh huh.”

“Tromp, you’ve got to realize this is for your sake as well! I wouldn’t, normally. You know how I-”

“Then look at my back,” he said, stalking out, “and try to remember it.”

That made a lousy start to the morning. Admittedly, there was nothing rational in the tacit agreement over the leg, but Kramer knew where it mattered most to him-in his gut-that Zondi needed his backing all the way, whatever purpose he chose to put it to. And while the work still got done, sod them and their red tape; he just didn’t want to know.

His punch knocked wide the door to Fingerprints, and he followed it through with a cheerful greeting.

“You can go out and start again,” Lieutenant Dirk Gardiner advised him, rising stockily in his blue safari suit. “This isn’t the place for what you’re hoping.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing,” affirmed Gardiner, handing over the Bible.

“You put the rays on it?”

“The lot. It’s full of miracles, but none of them worked for you, my friend.”

Gardiner was one of the few people Kramer knew who could crack jokes while their breath still smelted of breakfast. For once, however, this did nothing for him, and he had to force an appreciative groan before leaving.

So much for Fingerprints.

Ballistics didn’t even try to soften the blow, but dispassionately delivered both barrels. The Colt.38 was not the same gun that had been used during the raid at Peacevale, nor was either of the recovered weapons described on the list of reported thefts. Kramer asked for more work to be done on the metal where the numbers had been filed off.

“It won’t necessarily get us anywhere,” murmured the ballistics man. “And we’ve got a lot on.”

“Try it. Could be the owners were too scared to tell you their firearms had been taken, or maybe they don’t even know yet.”

“Hmmm.”

“We’d have two addresses. I know it’s a faint chance, but Erasmus could have stolen them himself.”

The ballistics man made a sound like a silencer and went back into his lab.

So much for bloody science.

With the Bible in his right hand, and swearing quietly under his breath, Kramer took himself out onto the pavement. As chance would have it, an Anglican minister walked by on his way to the cathedral, pretending he didn’t hear the row coming from Security on the first floor.

“Excuse me, Reverend,” Kramer said on impulse, blocking his path, “but if you wanted to know about Bibles, where would you go?”

The minister responded warily, easing the dog collar around his plump throat, and clearing some phlegm there.

“Is this to do with television?” he asked, glancing about.

“No, sir; I’m from CID here, working on an investigation. This is the Bible we’ve got an interest in, you see, and we were hoping it’d give us a lead.”

“Ah. Has it a bookshop label in it?”

“Been removed.”

“Mmmm. Then one wouldn’t really know where one should start. Not an authority on them myself, of course. Tell you what, though, there’s always the Christian bookshop up the road a bit. You must know it?”

Having received his directions, Kramer set off at a brisk pace that gradually slowed down, adapting itself to a more sensible approach to a venture that held little promise. Quite soon he was half enjoying his walk, and the minor distractions it afforded him. The morning was muggy and warm, and the sky still the misty white of a bathroom mirror, which had brought out the housewives in their brightest of frocks. They darted from car to store like tropical fish-some were just as ugly-and flicked away from the gray-skinned beggar crabbing his legless way down the gray paving stones. If you did catch their eye, they never blinked. More interesting were the gawpers, blacks for the most part, whose fixed stares made them blink a good deal, as they stood outside shopwindows watching the miracle of the SATV test card. Every other bloody shop seemed to be selling sets, Kramer noted, and this included a hairdressing salon and, so far, two respectable jewelers’. The gawpers were interesting because you had to work out which were honest idiots, and which were pickpockets and bag-snatchers responding intelligently to the advent of television. Then came Toll Street and the dividing line between bustling commercialism and the sort of shop assistants who kept a good book under the till. He crossed over against the lights, to hold himself in trim, and started along a wide sidewalk that had little eddies of confetti in its gutter. Just about every denomination known to Trekkersburg had its main church between that set of traffic lights and the next: Baptist, Dutch Reformed, Presbyterian, Methodist, Congregationalist, Mormon-and, at the far end, Lutheran, playing David and Goliath with the Bleeding Heart towering above it across the way. There was a funeral on there, and the undertakers were out having a smoke; Kramer gave old George Henry Abbot a wave, called out that he’d drop by soon, and took the next turning.

He immediately recognized the long, low facade of the yellow-brick bookshop, but excused himself his oversight on the grounds that, with its total lack of people appeal in the sign-writing of Larkin and Sons, Ltd., and its air of complacent prosperity, he had always thought the place sold veterinary supplies to stock breeders. That just showed how much you could miss from a car.

You could also miss quite a lot from the pavement. When Kramer went up the steps and into the showroom, he was astonished by what he saw there. Hell, never mind being Christian; Larkin’s looked the biggest bloody bookshop in town. There were thousands of glossy volumes on the wall shelves and on the display units that covered the vast, carpeted floor, together with an unimaginable number of knickknacks-like the molded relief map of the Holy Land, or the Sunday school blackboard-and some pretty weird stuff near the cash desk. He browsed through this while the salesman wrapped up something in brown paper for a nun.