Riotous Assembly Read online

  Kommandant van Heerden acted swiftly. He stepped out on to the stoep and shut the door behind him.

  ‘Konstabel Els,’ he commanded. ‘These are your orders.’ The Konstabel dropped the pillowcase and came to attention eagerly. Tree-climbing and body-snatching he could do without, but he loved being given orders. They usually meant that he was being given permission to hurt somebody.

  ‘You will dispose of that … that thing,’ the Kommandant ordered.

  ‘Yes sir,’ said Els thankfully. He was getting tired of Fivepence.

  ‘Proceed to the main gate and remain there on guard until you are relieved. See that nobody enters or leaves the grounds. Anybody at all. That means Europeans as well. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘If anyone enters you are to see that they don’t get out again.’

  ‘Can l use firearms to stop them, sir?’ asked Els.

  Kommandant van Heerden hesitated. He didn’t want a bloodbath up at the main gateway to Jacaranda Park. On the other hand the situation was clearly such a desperate one – and one word to the Press would bring hordes of newspapermen up – that he was prepared to take drastic measures.

  ‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘You can shoot.’ And then remembering the fuss there had been when a wounded reporter had been taken to Piemburg Hospital, he added, ‘And shoot to kill, Els, shoot to kill.’ Complaints from the morgue were easier to refute.

  Kommandant van Heerden went back into the house and Konstabel Els started off to guard the main gate. He hadn’t gone very far when the thought crossed his mind that the elephant gun would certainly ensure that nothing larger than a cockroach got out of Jacaranda Park alive. He turned back and collected the gun from the stoep and then, after adding several packets of revolver ammunition from the police car, set off up the drive with a light heart.

  Back in the house Kommandant van Heerden was glad to see that Miss Hazelstone was still in her stupor in the armchair. At least one problem had been solved. No word of the injections would reach Konstabel Els. The thought of what would follow should Els get wind of that diversion had been haunting the Kommandant’s mind. There had been enough complaints lately from local residents about the screams that came from the cells in Piemburg Police Station without Konstabel Els practising penile injections on the prisoners. Not that Els would have been content to use novocaine. He would have graduated to nitric acid before you could say Apartheid.

  With Els out of the way, the Kommandant decided on his next step. Leaving Miss Hazelstone in her chair, he made his way to the telephone which lurked in the potted jungle in the hall. He made two calls. The first was to Luitenant Verkramp at the Police Station.

  In later life Luitenant Verkramp was to recall that telephone conversation with the shudder that comes from recalling the first omens of disaster. At the time he had merely wondered what the hell was wrong with his Kommandant. Van Heerden sounded as though he were on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

  ‘Verkramp, is that you?’ His voice came in a strangled whisper over the phone.

  ‘Of course it’s me. Who the hell did you think it was?’ Verkramp couldn’t hear the answer but it sounded as if the Kommandant was trying to swallow something very unpleasant. ‘What’s going on up there? Is something wrong with you?’ Verkramp inquired hopefully.

  ‘Stop asking stupid questions and listen,’ the Kommandant whispered authoritatively. ‘I want you to assemble every single officer in Piemburg at the police barracks.’

  Luitenant Verkramp was appalled. ‘I can’t do that,’ he said, ‘the rugby match is on. There’ll be a riot if—’

  ‘There’ll be a fucking riot if you don’t,’ the Kommandant snarled. ‘That’s number one. Second, all leave including sick leave is cancelled. Got that?’

  Luitenant Verkramp wasn’t sure what he had got. It sounded like a frantic Kommandant.

  ‘Assemble them all at the barracks,’ continued the Kommandant. ‘I want every man jack of them fully armed up here as soon as possible. Bring the Saracens too, and the guard dogs, oh and bring the searchlights too. All the barbed wire we’ve got, and bring those rabies signs we used in the epidemic last year.’

  ‘The rabies signs?’ Luitenant Verkramp shouted. ‘You want the guard dogs and the rabies signs?’

  ‘And don’t forget the bubonic plague signs. Bring them too.’

  Luitenant Verkramp tried to visualize the desperate outbreak of disease that had broken out at Jacaranda Park that necessitated warning the population about both rabies and bubonic plague.

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ he asked. It sounded as if the Kommandant was delirious.

  ‘Of course I am all right,’ snapped the Kommandant. ‘Why the hell shouldn’t I be all right?’

  ‘Well, I just thought—’

  ‘I don’t care a stuff what you thought. You’re not paid to think. You’re paid to obey my orders. And I’m ordering you to bring every bloody sign we’re got and every bloody policeman and every bloody guard dog …’ Kommandant van Heerden’s catalogue continued while Verkramp desperately searched his mind for the reasons for this emergency. The Kommandant’s final order trumped the lot. ‘Come up here by a roundabout route. I don’t want to attract any public attention.’ And before the Luitenant could inquire how he thought it possible to avoid public attention with a convoy of six armoured cars, twenty-five lorries and ten searchlights, not to mention seventy guard dogs, and several dozen enormous billboards announcing the outbreak of bubonic plague and rabies, the Kommandant had put down the phone.

  Kommandant van Heerden’s second call was to the Commissioner of Police for Zululand. Standing among the flora and fauna of the hall, the Kommandant hesitated some time before making his second call. He could see a number of difficulties looming up ahead of him when he made his request for Emergency Powers to deal with this situation, not the least of which was the sheer disbelief that was certain to greet his considered opinion as a police officer that the daughter of the late Judge Hazelstone had not only murdered her Zulu cook but that prior to this act had been fornicating with him regularly for eight years after rendering his reproductive organs totally numb and insensitive by intramuscular injections of massive doses of novocaine. Kommandant van Heerden knew what he would do to any subordinate officer who rang him up in the middle of a hot summer afternoon to tell him that sort of cock-and-bull story. He decided to avoid going into the details of the case. He would stress the likely consequences of a murder case involving the daughter of an extremely eminent judge who had, in his time, been the country’s leading exponent of capital punishment, and he would use Luitenant Verkramp’s report to Pretoria on Miss Hazelstone’s subversive activities to justify his need for Emergency Powers. Plucking up courage, Kommandant van Heerden picked up the telephone and made his call. He was surprised to find the Commissioner raised no objections to his request.

  ‘Emergency Powers, van Heerden? Of course, help yourself. You know what you’re doing. I leave the matter entirely in your hands. Do what you think best.’

  Kommandant van Heerden put down the phone with a puzzled frown. He had never liked the Commissioner and he suspected that the feeling was reciprocated.

  The Commissioner in fact nourished the ardent hope that one day Kommandant van Heerden would perpetrate an error so unforgivable that he could be summarily reduced to the ranks and it seemed to him now from the Kommandant’s hysterical manner on the phone that his day of vengeance was at hand. He immediately cancelled all appointments for the next month and took his annual holiday on the south coast, leaving orders that he was not to be disturbed. He spent the next week lying in the sun in the certain knowledge that he had given van Heerden enough rope with which to hang himself.

  Armed now with Emergency Powers that made him the arbiter of life and death over 70,000 Piemburgers and gave him authority to suppress newspaper stories and to arrest, detain and torture at leisure all those he disapproved of, the Kommandant was still not a ha
ppy man. The events of the day had taken their toll of him.

  He turned for relief from his problems to a full-length portrait of Sir Theophilus Hazelstone in the full panoply of his regalia as Knight of the Royal Victorian Order and Viceroy of Matabeleland that hung at the foot of the great staircase. Sir Theophilus stood, robed in ermine, his scarlet uniform encrusted with jewelled stars and the medals of disastrous campaigns, each medal representing the deaths through their General’s incompetence of at least ten thousand enlisted men. The Viceroy’s left hand rested arthritically upon the hilt of a sword he was far too pusillanimous ever to have withdrawn from its scabbard, while his right hand held the thonged leash of a wild boar which had been specially imported from Bohemia to share the honour of representing the Hazelstone family in this great work of art. Kommandant van Heerden was particularly struck by the wild boar. It reminded him of Konstabel Els and he was not to know that the poor beast had had to be strapped to an iron frame before the Viceroy would enter the same room as the animate family emblem, and that only after being cajoled by the artist and the administration of half a bottle of brandy. All this escaped the Kommandant and left him free to hold firmly to his faith in the great qualities of the Imperial statesman whose granddaughter he had made it his mission to save from the consequences of her own folly. Spiritually resuscitated by his perusal of this portrait and a similar one of the late Judge Hazelstone looking as remorseless as the Kommandant could remember him to have looked in court on the day he had sentenced eleven Pondo tribesmen to death for stealing a goat, the Kommandant slowly ascended the staircase to look for somewhere to rest until Luitenant Verkramp arrived with reinforcements.

  Once the Park had been isolated from the outside world, he would set about the business of convincing Miss Hazelstone that she had never murdered her cook and that she had invented the whole business of the injection needle and the love affair. He felt sure that he could bring the old lady to see reason and if that failed the Emergency Powers entitled him to hold her indefinitely and without recourse to a lawyer. If need be he would invoke the Terrorist Act and keep her incommunicado for the rest of her life, which life could be shortened by suitable treatment and a regimen of necessary harshness. It was hardly the method he would like to have applied to a lady of her descent but for the moment he could think of nothing better.

  He paused at the top of the staircase to regain his breath and then made his way along the gallery that ran the length of Jacaranda House. If the hall downstairs had been filled with stuffed heads and portraits, the gallery walls were likewise lined with trophies of past battles. On either side of him the Kommandant was startled to find weapons of all shapes and sizes, weapons of all ages and types, united by only one common feature as far as the Commandant could make out, that they were all in perfect working order and lethal to a degree he found positively hair-raising. He stopped and examined a machine pistol. Well-oiled and complete, it hung beside an ancient blunderbuss. Kommandant van Heerden was amazed. The gallery was a positive arsenal. Had Miss Hazelstone not telephoned to acknowledge her contretemps with Fivepence and had she decided to defend Jacaranda House, with these weapons at her disposal, she could have held the entire Piemburg police force at bay for weeks. Thanking his lucky stars for her cooperation, Kommandant van Heerden opened one of the doors that led off the gallery and looked inside.

  As he had expected, it was a bedroom and was furnished with a sense of taste and delicacy appropriate to the home of South Africa’s leading expert in soft furnishings. Chintz curtains and a matching bedspread gave to the whole room a gay and floral air. What lay on the bed had the opposite effect. There was nothing tasteful or delicate about it at all and nobody could call it furnished. For there, its incongruity emphasized by the daintiness of the other appointments, lay the body of a large, hairy and completely naked man. Worse still, for the Kommandant’s disturbed state of mind, the body bore all the signs of having only recently bled to death. It was practically coated with blood.

  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 realised 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 t
racks 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.