Tom Sharpe - Riotous Assembly

Shaken by the appalling discovery of yet another corpse, the Kommandant staggered into the gallery and leant against the wall. One body in an afternoon he could just about cope with, particularly if it was black, but two, and one of them white, filled him with despair. Jacaranda House was taking on the qualities of an abattoir. Worse still, this second corpse destroyed any chances of hushing the case up. It was one thing to persuade Miss Hazelstone that she hadn't murdered her black cook. The disappearance of Zulu cooks was a routine matter. The murder of a white man would simply have to be made public. There would have to be an inquest. Questions would be asked and one thing would lead to another until the full story of Miss Hazelstone and her Zulu cook came out into the open.

After a moment's agonizing thought, Kommandant van Heerden recovered his nerve sufficiently to peer round the door into the murder room again. The corpse was still there, he noted miserably. On the other hand it had certain attributes which Kommandant van Heerden found unique in his experience of corpses. One quality in particular struck his attention. The corpse had an erection. The Kommandant peered round the door again to confirm his suspicion, and as he did so the corpse stirred and began to snore.

For a moment Kommandant van Heerden was so relieved by this evidence of life, that he felt inclined to laugh. The next moment he realized the full importance of his discovery and the smile died on his face. He had no doubt at all that the man whose body lay before him on the bed was the true murderer of Fivepence. The Kommandant peered down at the figure on the bed and as he did so he became aware of the smell of brandy in the air. A moment later his foot banged against a bottle lying on the floor. He reached down and picked it up. Old Rhino Skin brandy, he noted with disgust. It was a brandy that Konstabel Els was partial to and if anything was needed to confirm his suspicion that the fellow on the bed was a dangerous criminal it was the knowledge that if he shared one of Konstabel Els' depraved tastes, he was almost certain to share others even more vicious.

With the bottle still in his hand Kommandant van Heerden tiptoed from the room. Outside in the passage he tried to consider how this discovery affected his plans. That the man was a murderer, he had no doubt. That he was now drunk to the world, no doubt either. What remained a mystery was why Miss Hazelstone had confessed to a crime she had never committed. More of a mystery still, why she had embroidered her confession with the gratuitous filth that she had been sleeping with her Zulu cook and injecting him with novocaine. Kommandant van Heerden's head reeled with possibilities and, not wishing to remain in the vicinity of a dangerous killer, he made his way along the passage to the landing at the top of the stairs. He wished now that he hadn't sent Els off to guard the main gateway and at the same time he began to wonder when Luitenant Verkramp would arrive with the main force. He leant over the balustrade and stared down on the tropical mausoleum in the hall. Hard by him the head of a stuffed rhinoceros peered myopically into eternity. Kommandant van Heerden peered back and wondered which of his acquaintances it reminded him of, and as he did so he had the sudden insight into the true meaning of Miss Hazelstone's confession which was to alter his life so radically.

He had suddenly realized that the face of the murderer on the bed reminded him of someone. The realization sent him stumbling down the stairs to stare up at the great portrait of Sir Theophilus. A moment later he was back in the bedroom. Tiptoeing to the edge of the bed Kommandant van Heerden peered cautiously down at the face on the pillow. He saw there what he had expected to find. In spite of the gaping mouth and the bag-bottomed eyes, in spite of years of dissipation and sexual over-indulgence and gallons of Old Rhino Skin brandy, the features of the man on the bed bore an unmistakable resemblance to those of Sir Theophilus and to the late Judge Hazelstone. He knew now who the man was. He was Jonathan Hazelstone, Miss Hazelstone's younger brother.

With new understanding dawning on him, Kommandant van Heerden turned to leave the room. As he did so the murderer stirred again. The Kommandant froze in his tracks and watched with a mixture of fear and disgust as a bloodstained hand groped up the man's hairy thigh and grasped the great erection. Kommandant van Heerden waited no longer. With a gasp he dashed from the room and hurried along the corridor. A man who could put away a bottle of Old Rhino Skin and still survive in no matter how comatose a state was undoubtedly a maniac, and if on top of all that he could lie there with an erection while his body fought off the appalling injuries being inflicted on it by the brandy, he was undoubtedly a sex fiend whose sexual appetite must be of such an intensity as to leave nothing safe. Kommandant van Heerden remembered Fivepence's posture at the foot of the pedestal and he began to think he knew how the Zulu cook had died and in his calculations there was no place for the elephant gun.

Without a moment's hesitation he hurried down the stairs and left the house. He must fetch Konstabel Els before he tried to arrest the man. As he strode up the drive, he understood why Miss Hazelstone had made her outrageous confession and with this understanding there grew in the Kommandant's breast a new and deeper respect for the old family ties of the British.

'Chivalry. It's pure chivalry,' he said to himself. 'She is sacrificing herself to protect the family name.' He couldn't quite see how confessing to murdering your black cook was saving the family name, but he supposed it was better than having your brother confess to having buggered the said cook into an early grave. He wondered what the sentence for that sort of crime was.

'Deserves to be hanged,' he said hopefully, and then remembered that no white man had ever been hanged for murdering a black. 'Buggery's different,' he thought. Anyway they could always get him for 'actions calculated to excite racial friction', which crime carried with it ten strokes of the heavy cane, and if buggering a Zulu cook wasn't calculated to excite racial friction, then he for one didn't know what was. He would have to ask Konstabel Els about it. The Konstabel was more experienced in that sort of thing than he was.

At the main gateway to Jacaranda Park, Konstabel Els was not finding the afternoon as enjoyable as he had expected. Nobody had tried to enter or leave the Park and Els had had very little to shoot at. He had taken a pot shot at a native delivery boy on a bicycle, but the boy had recognized Els in time and had thrown himself into the ditch before Els had time to take proper aim. Missing the native hadn't improved Els' temper.

'Miss one and you miss the fucking lot' he said to himself, and it was certainly true that once word got round that Kaffir-Killer Els was in the district, white housewives could scream blue murder at their servants and threaten them with every punishment in the book, and still no sane black man would venture out of the house to water the lawn or fetch the groceries.

So, for want of anything better to do, Els had explored the area round the gateway and had closed and bolted the great wrought-iron gates. In the course of his explorations he made the exciting discovery that what he had at first sight taken to be a well-clipped square privet hedge concealed in fact a concrete blockhouse. It was clearly very old and just as clearly very impregnable. It dated in fact from the days of Sir Theophilus who had ordered its construction after the Battle of Bulundi. The Governor's victory on that occasion had done nothing to diminish his natural cowardice and the accusations of treachery levelled against him by the Zulus and by the next of kin of the officers killed by their own shells had turned what had been previously natural anxiety into an obsessive phobia that thousands of vengeful Zulus trained in the use of ten-inch naval guns by the surviving members of his old regiment, the Royal Marines Heavy Artillery Brigade, would storm Jacaranda Park one awful night. Faced with this imaginary threat, Sir Theophilus had begun the collection of weapons that had so startled Kommandant van Heerden in the gallery of Jacaranda House, and also the construction of a series of formidable blockhouses around the perimeter of the Park, all of which had been designed to withstand a direct hit from a ten-inch naval shell fired at point-blank range.