Riotous Assembly Page 12

  *

  If Kommandant van Heerden and Miss Hazelstone were astonished at the extraordinary turn events had taken, Konstabel Els was even more surprised. He had just finished putting the final touches to what he hoped was going to be Miss Hazelstone’s execution when he was vaguely aware that something unforeseen was in the air. Like some dark premonition he glimpsed a black blur as the Dobermann leapt through the mist of powdered plaster that filled the corridor. The dog’s mouth was already open and its eye was fastened prematurely on Els’ jugular vein. Els dug his chin firmly into his chest and butted the beast’s muzzle with the top of his head. The dog’s teeth, missing the vein, fastened on Els’ shoulder and a moment later the two animals were locked in their interrupted struggle for supremacy.

  As they rolled across the landing, knocking chairs and tables over left, right and centre, as Miss Hazelstone opened up with the scatter gun and the barricades began to disintegrate above them, the Browning machine-guns, thrown off target and now pointing up at the ceiling, began to pour tracer bullets at the rate of five thousand rounds a minute out through the roof of Jacaranda House. A lame vulture which had only a few minutes before managed to take off after a long and painful run and was flying gamely above the house which had already provided supper, breakfast and very nearly lunch, evaporated in the hail of bullets with an explosion of feathers and odds and ends. It was the only casualty of the gun-battle that raged in Jacaranda House.

  The only other person who nearly received a burst of gunfire in his vital parts was Kommandant van Heerden. The sudden eruption of violence on the landing which had allowed him the opportunity to eject himself with double bed attached, out of the window of the bedroom, had found Sergeant de Kock waiting in the garden in the hope of getting a chance to take a pot shot at Miss Hazelstone from below. The Sergeant had been regretting his decision to allow Konstabel Els to use the machine-guns and was fully expecting the plan to end in disaster. As the roar of gunfire erupted in the house, the Sergeant threw himself to the ground, and was lying there when there was a clatter of breaking glass followed by an awful thud just above his head. He got to his feet and stared up at the thing that hung dangling from the window above him.

  The Sergeant was by no means a squeamish man and not in the least averse to shooting women. Plenty of Zulu widowers could attest to that. And had he been able to imagine for one moment that the corpulent creature in the pink nightdress who squirmed and struggled against the wall of the house some twenty feet up was Miss Hazelstone, he would have shot her without a moment’s thought. But it was all too apparent that what was dangling there was not the old lady. She wasn’t fat like that, she wasn’t hairy like that, and above all, he felt sure she didn’t have reproductive organs like that. It was difficult enough for the Sergeant to believe that anything could look like that. Sergeant de Kock stood and wrestled with the problem of the thing’s identity. He peered up at its face and saw that it was wearing a mask.

  Of all the queer comings and goings Sergeant de Kock had seen since he arrived at the house, this was undoubtedly the queerest. And queer was the word that sprang most naturally to mind. Whatever was hanging hooded and partially dressed up there was exposing itself to him in a manner that was shameful and indecent beyond belief. The Sergeant didn’t like pansies at the best of times and he certainly didn’t relish being solicited by one in this disgusting fashion. He was just making up his mind to put an end to the obscene display by a burst from his Sten gun when he was stunned by something that dropped out of the sky on to him. Enveloped in a cloud of feathers and draped with what appeared to be the half-digested contents of a stomach that had recently indulged in an enormous meal of raw meat, Sergeant de Kock staggered about the garden in a state of shock.

  As he tried desperately to disentangle himself from the mess of entrails and feathers, he was temporarily put off his idea of ridding the world of the raving transvestite jerking spasmodically below the bedroom window. The discovery in the detritus that covered him of several brass buttons and a South African Police cap badge was making him wonder what the hell had hit him. He was still debating the point when a new burst of gunfire above his head told him that the gun-battle was by no means over. He glanced up and saw the mattress above the hooded figure erupt into an enormous cloud of feathers, and as they floated down and adhered to the blood and guts covering him, Sergeant de Kock turned and ran. Behind him a muffled voice yelled, ‘Chicken.’

  12

  The failure of her rapid fire down the corridor to silence for an instant the roar of the machine-guns and the screams and snarls that were part and parcel of all Konstabel Els’ encounters with the Dobermann forced Miss Hazelstone to the realization that her plans were not running true to form. As repeated volleys of shot smashed through her Louis Quinze barricades and riddled with new authenticity several pieces of mock-Jacobean furniture and an irreplaceable eighteenth-century escritoire previously inlaid with ivory, the din of battle on the landing increased. Above her head a fountain of tiles hurtled up into the air under the impact of the machine-gun bullets and crashed back on the roof like enormous hailstones. Miss Hazelstone gave up her attempt to peer through the fog of plaster and went back into the bedroom.

  It was immediately apparent to her that here too something had gone astray. The room was pitch dark and some large object was completely obscuring the view of the Park she had previously enjoyed from the window. She switched on the light and stood gazing at the under-side of the bed on which but a few minutes before she had sat encouraging Kommandant van Heerden to be a man. Looking at the enormous bed she realized for the first time what a tremendously powerful man the Kommandant was. It had taken ten men to manhandle that bed up the stairs and along the corridor, and now one man had lifted it by himself and had carried it to the window where he was evidently standing on the sill holding it at arm’s length, a feat of strength she would never have believed possible. As she looked and wondered, a muffled yell came through the mattress.

  ‘Let me down,’ the Kommandant was shouting. ‘Let me down. Let me down. That bloody woman will be the death of me.’ Miss Hazelstone smiled to herself. ‘Just as you say,’ she murmured and aimed the scatter gun at the bedsprings. As she pulled the trigger she noted how appropriate it was that the Kommandant should meet his Maker strapped in a rubber nightdress to a mattress labelled Everrest and as the bedsprings twanged and the feathers flew, Miss Hazelstone turned and went out into the corridor with a sob.

  It was in all likelihood the sound of that sob that led to the death of her beloved Toby. The Dobermann which had until then felt secure in the hold it had fastened on Konstabel Els’ face relaxed for one fatal second. It raised its head and pricked its ears for the last faithful time and in that second, Els, half asphyxiated by the dog’s persistent hold on his nose, seized his opportunity and clamped his jaws on the dog’s throat. With one hand he clasped the dog to him and with the other grabbed the dog’s scrotum and squeezed. Squeezed was hardly adequate to describe the immense pressure he exerted.

  Unable, thanks to Els’ grip on its windpipe, to protest this infringement of the Queensberry rules, the dog hurled itself sideways and scrabbled furiously with all four feet in an attempt to free itself. Dragging the limpet-like Els with it, it accelerated from a standing start, hurtled towards the top of the stairs and a second later the two maddened animals were airborne several feet above the great staircase. As they avalanched into the hall, the portraits of Sir Theophilus and Judge Hazelstone gazed grimly down on the sordid spectacle. Only the wild boar, itself strapped to an unrelenting iron frame, can have appreciated what its modern counterpart was suffering.

  Three minutes later Konstabel Els, lying on the marble floor of the hall, knew that he had won. The Dobermann lay still in death and Els relaxed his grip on its throat and rose unsteadily to his feet. Around him the heads of stuffed wart-hogs and buffaloes were his only audience in the moment of triumph. Dragging the dog by the tail Konstabel Els went out into the
Park to look for the vulture. It had looked at him ravenously enough, and he thought it might like a change of diet. He had some difficulty in finding it, and when he did, even Konstabel Els could see that it had not died of hunger.

  *

  The shots that had indirectly led to the death of Toby had come very near to causing the death of Kommandant van Heerden. Near but rather too high, for the Kommandant had had the good fortune to be hanging by his wrists from what was now the bottom of the bed. He had chewed through the hood and was staring down at Sergeant de Kock who had from the look of him just emerged from a nasty accident in a turkey abattoir. It didn’t seem a likely explanation of the Sergeant’s condition but after his recent experience of perversion the Kommandant wouldn’t have been at all surprised to learn that the Sergeant had been acting out some depraved obsession connected with his name.

  He was just speculating on the matter when his thoughts were drowned by the roar of a gun just above his head and a cloud of feathers suddenly obscured his view of the garden. ‘Chicken,’ he yelled as the Sergeant disappeared round the corner of the house, and he was still screaming abuse some minutes later when the Sergeant followed by several konstabels reappeared. It seemed that his voice, issuing through the hole he had managed to chew in the rubber hood, carried less than its normal quota of authority. The little group of policemen gathered below him seemed more amused by his orders than likely to obey them.

  ‘Let me down,’ yelled the Kommandant. ‘Let me down.’ Against this background of ignored instructions, Sergeant de Kock was explaining the nastier facts of life to the young konstabels.

  ‘What you see before you,’ he said portentously, ‘is a transvestite.’

  ‘What’s that mean, Sergeant?’ inquired a konstabel.

  ‘It means a man who likes dressing up in women’s clothes. This transvestite is also a pervert.’

  ‘Let me down, you sod,’ yelled the Kommandant.

  ‘It’s a pervert,’ continued the Sergeant, ‘because it is a homosexual and it’s a pervert twice over because it’s a rubber fetishist.’

  ‘I’ll have you stripped of your stripes if you don’t get me down.’

  ‘What’s a rubber fetishist, Sergeant?’

  ‘It’s someone who dresses up in rubber nighties and hangs out of other people’s bedroom windows soliciting people below,’ continued the Sergeant plucking feathers and lights off his uniform. ‘It’s also a product of the permissive society and as you all know South Africa is not a permissive society. What this swine is doing is against the law here, and what I suggest is that we shove a bullet or two up his arse and give him the thrill to end all thrills.’

  The suggestion was greeted with nods of approval from the konstabels and a crescendo of screams from the hooded dangling figure. Only one naïve konstabel objected.

  ‘But wouldn’t that be murder, Sergeant?’ he inquired.

  Sergeant de Kock looked at him sternly. ‘Are you telling me,’ he asked, ‘that you think that blokes should be allowed to run around the country dressed in women’s nighties?’

  ‘No, Sergeant. It’s against the law.’

  ‘That’s what I just said, so we’d be doing our duty if we put a bullet in him.’

  ‘Couldn’t we just arrest him?’ the konstabel asked.

  ‘This is your commanding officer, and I order you to let me down.’

  ‘It’s guilty of another crime now, Sergeant,’ said another konstabel. ‘It’s impersonating a police officer.’

  ‘You young konstabels know the procedure or you bloody well ought to,’ continued the Sergeant. ‘In the case of a criminal apprehended in the commission of a crime, what do you do?’

  ‘Arrest him,’ chorused the konstabels.

  ‘And if you can’t arrest him? If he tries to escape?’

  ‘You give him a warning.’

  ‘And what if he doesn’t stop trying to escape?’

  ‘You shoot him, Sergeant.’

  ‘Right,’ said the Sergeant. ‘Now are you trying to tell me that that bastard isn’t a criminal caught in the commission of a crime, and that he isn’t trying to escape?’

  The konstabels had to agree that the Sergeant was right, and they had just reached this point in their deliberations when Konstabel Els came limping triumphantly round the corner dragging the Dobermann after him.

  ‘Look what I’ve got,’ he said proudly.

  Sergeant de Kock’s little group were not impressed. ‘Look what we’ve got,’ they said, and Konstabel Els had to admit that what was hanging squirming from the window made his own trophy look pretty tame.

  ‘Just doing a queer in,’ said Sergeant de Kock. ‘Want to join in, Els, should be just up your street?’

  ‘Not my street,’ said Els peering up at the figure. ‘That’s Kommandant van Heerden’s street, that’s what that is. I’d know it anywhere.’

  As the firing party broke up in confusion at the news that it was the Kommandant who was hanging there, the woman largely responsible for his predicament was debating what to do next. She thought that she must have at last got it into the thick head of the Kommandant that she was capable of killing Fivepence and while she realized that Kommandant van Heerden’s opinion no longer mattered, she hoped that his successor would have enough sense to arrest her promptly.

  She went downstairs to look for a policeman to escort her to her cell in Piemburg Police Station, but the house appeared to be deserted.

  ‘I must have scared them off,’ she said to herself and went to fetch her car. Halfway to the garage she realized that Fivepence had the keys with him and instead she climbed into one of the police Land-Rovers and started the engine.

  As the konstabels on the other side of Jacaranda House assisted the Kommandant down the ladder, they gave no thought to the Land-Rover that sailed unsteadily up the drive. At the gate the sentry signalled it out and the car disappeared round the corner and down the road into Piemburg.

  Most of the events of the day had passed clean over the head of the Bishop of Barotseland. Manacled and naked, he lay in the cellar and tried to concentrate on spiritual questions as being less painful than the affairs of the flesh. He wasn’t particularly successful in this effort; hunger and pain competed with fear to occupy his attention, and over them all there hung the awful dread that he was going mad. It was less in fact fear at the thought that he was going than that he had already gone. In twenty-four hours he had seen the accepted tenets of his world abused in a way which had, he had to admit, all the hallmarks of insanity.

  ‘I am a bishop and my sister is a murderess,’ he said to himself reassuringly. ‘If my sister is not a murderess, it is possible that I am not a bishop.’ This line of logic didn’t seem very helpful and he gave it up as likely to disturb what little balance of mind he had left. ‘Someone is mad,’ he concluded, and began to wonder if the voices he had heard in the depths of the swimming-bath were not after all symptoms of the insanity he seemed to be suffering from.

  On the other hand his firm belief in the intervention of the Lord in the affairs of the world led him to wonder how he had transgressed so gravely as to warrant the punishment that had fallen on him. He came to the conclusion that he had been guilty of hubris. ‘Pride comes before a fall,’ he said, but he couldn’t imagine what height of pride could justify the depths to which he had fallen. Certainly the little bit of self-congratulation he had allowed himself on his appointment to Barotseland hardly called for the appalling punishment he was now undergoing. He preferred to believe that his present sufferings were a preparation for better things to come, and a test of his faith. He consoled himself with the thought that there must be some people in the world in even worse plights, though he couldn’t think who they were or what they were suffering.

  ‘I shall bear my tribulations gladly and my soul will be renewed,’ he said smugly and gave himself up to meditation.

  Kommandant van Heerden had come to quite different conclusions. He had borne enough tribulations in the
past twenty-four hours to last him a lifetime. He knew now that there were three things he never wanted to see again. Rubber nightdresses, Sergeant de Kock and Jacaranda House. All three had lost whatever charm they had once held for him, and in the case of the first two that was nil.

  As for Jacaranda House, he had to admit he had once liked the place, but he could see now that his feelings were not reciprocated. The house evidently reserved its favours for those of impeccable social standing and British descent. For lesser mortals it held terrors. In decreasing order of social standing he placed himself, Els, the Dobermann, Fivepence and the vulture. He himself had been trussed, terrified and threatened with death. Els had been savaged on two separate occasions. The Dobermann had been bitten to death. Fivepence had been deposited all over the garden and the vulture all over Sergeant de Kock. All in all, these indignities had been too closely related to the class of the recipients for there to be any doubt that the reputation for snobbery the Hazelstones enjoyed was not without foundation in fact. On the whole he thought Els had come off pretty lightly, considering his origins and social standing.

  On the other hand he had cause to suspect that Els’ share of misfortune was yet to come. True, he had been instrumental in saving the Kommandant’s life on two occasions. Kommandant van Heerden had to admit that the Konstabel’s intervention on the landing had given him time to jump out of the window, and once there it had been Els who had stopped Sergeant de Kock exceeding his duty. But then again, there was the little matter of the fracas up at the gateway. It had too many of the trademarks of Els to be ignored entirely. Els had some explaining to do.

  As he dressed in the study Kommandant van Heerden eyed Els warily. The Konstabel was dabbing antiseptic on his nose and playing with the paperweight. By the time he had put on his trousers, the Kommandant had come to some definite conclusions. Miss Hazelstone had made her point, and the Kommandant was convinced that in all probability she had killed Fivepence. Unfortunately, she could not, he knew, have butchered the policemen at the gate. Someone else was responsible for that, and while the evidence pointed to Jonathan Hazelstone, the Kommandant had seen him asleep on the bed just before the firing began. It followed that if Jonathan was innocent, the guilty person was Els. It was but a step from this conclusion to the question of responsibility. Who, it would be asked, had allowed a homicidal maniac like Els to have possession of a multi-barrelled elephant gun, and had given him permission to use it?