Riotous Assembly

Chapter 9

Few other people in Piemburg dropped off to sleep so easily that night. Too many disturbing things were happening around them for their sleep to be anything but fitful. In Upper Piemburg the searchlights swung slowly to and fro around the perimeter of Jacaranda Park, illuminating with quite astonishing brilliance the great hoardings that announced the arrival of death by two of its most awful means. Designed originally for the Army before being turned over to the police force, the searchlights did a great deal more than that. As they traversed the Park, the neighbouring suburbs and the city itself, they turned night into brilliant day with some remarkable results, particularly in the case of a number of chicken farms whose battery hens were driven to the verge of nervous breakdown by finding their already short nights suddenly diminished to something like four minutes.

Families which had taken the precaution of locking their dogs in the backyard and of sprinkling their sheets with DDT and whose bedrooms lay in the path of the searchlights found dawn break upon them with a rapidity and brilliance they had never before experienced, to be succeeded by a duskless night, and the process repeated endlessly while they tossed and turned in their itching beds. Outside along the roads rumbled the armoured cars and trucks of the police and bursts of firing interrupted the silence of the night, as the crews followed the Kommandant's instructions to shoot any small bush resembling Luitenant Verkramp.

The switchboard at the Piemburg Hospital was deluged with calls from agitated callers who wanted to know the symptoms of bubonic plague and rabies and how to treat the diseases. In the end the frantic telephonist refused to take any more calls, a dereliction of duty that had fatal results in two cases of heart attack.

Only Konstabel Els slept soundly in the isolation hospital. Occasionally he twitched in his sleep but only because he was dreaming of battle and sudden death. On the Vlockfontein road families whose cars had broken down in the long queue trudged towards Piemburg. It was a hot night and as they walked they sweated.

Kommandant van Heerden sweated too but for a rather different reason. He had been too exhausted when he climbed into bed to take much notice of his surroundings. He had noticed that the sheets felt peculiar but he had put their smoothness down to the fact that Miss Hazelstone's bed linen would naturally be of the finest quality and unlike his own ordinary sheets.

Kommandant van Heerden slept like a babe for an hour. When he awoke it was to find the bed dripping with moisture. He climbed out of bed horribly enbarrassed.

'It isn't as though I've been on the booze,' he muttered as he grabbed a handtowel from the washbasin and began to mop the bed out, and wondered how he was going to explain the mishap to Miss Hazelstone in the morning. He could imagine the sort of caustic comments she would make.

'Thank heaven the sheets seem to be waterproof,' he said and climbed back into bed to dry them out. 'It's a terribly hot night,' he thought tossing and turning. He just couldn't make himself comfortable. As he drifted off and woke again and drifted off he gained the definite impression that the bed was getting no dryer. If anything it was getting wetter. He could feel the sweat running down his back as he slithered from side to side in the infernally slimy sheets.

He began to wonder if he had fallen sick with a fever brought on by the strain of the day. He certainly felt feverish and his thoughts bore all the marks of delirium. Uncertain whether he was dreaming or recalling what had actually happened, pursued by elephant guns, Miss Hazelstone with a scimitar, Mings and a demented Konstabel Els, Kommandant van Heerden thrashed on through the night in a froth of agitation.

At two in the morning he took the blankets off the bed. At three he mopped the bed out again. At four, convinced that he was dying in a raging fever and with a temperature of one hundred and ten he stumbled to the bathroom in search of a thermometer. He had begun to think that he had shown remarkable foresight in ordering the plague notices to be put up round the Park. Whatever disease he had caught he had no doubt it must be both infectious and fatal. But when he took his temperature he found it to be subnormal.

'Odd,' he thought. 'Very odd,' and after drinking several pints of water out of a tooth-mug went back to his room and climbed back into bed. At five o'clock he gave up all idea of sleeping and went along to the bathroom and had a cold bath. He was still debating what was wrong with him as he began to dress. He noticed that the room had a funny sort of smell about it, and for a moment he looked suspiciously at his socks. 'It isn't that sort of smell,' he said to himself and crossing to the windows pulled back the curtains.

Outside the sun was up and the jacaranda trees bright with flowers in the morning light. But Kommandant van Heerden wasn't interested in the view from his window. He was much more concerned with the curtains. They felt just like the sheets. He felt them again. 'The bloody things stretch,' he thought, and found that the sheets were elastic too. He smelt them closely and recognized the smell now. The sheets and the curtains were made of latex. Everything in the room was made of thin blue rubber.

He opened the wardrobe and felt the suits and dresses that hung there. They too were made of rubber. Kommandant van Heerden sat down on the bed astonished. He had never run across anything like this in his life. Certainly his annual acquaintance with latex had hardly prepared him for this encounter, and as he sat there he began to think that there was something definitely sinister about the room. Finally he examined the contents of the chest of drawers and found the same thing there. Shirts, pants, and socks were all made of rubber. In one small drawer he found several latex hoods and two pairs of handcuffs. Very definitely the room had a sinister purpose, he thought and went downstairs to have breakfast.

'How's the prisoner?' the Kommandant asked Sergeant de Kock when he had finished his toast and coffee.

'Looks insane to me. Keeps talking about animals all the time. Seems to think God is a guard dog or a vulture or something,' said the Sergeant.

'Won't do him much good. How many men did we lose yesterday?'

'Twenty-one.'

'Twenty-one and a Zulu cook. Say twenty-one and a quarter. No man who shoots twenty-one policemen can plead insanity.'

Sergeant de Kock wasn't convinced. 'Any man who shoots twenty-one policemen and leaves his wallet behind at the scene of the crime sounds insane to me.'

'We all make mistakes,' said the Kommandant, and went upstairs to begin his cross-examination.

Down in the cellar the Bishop of Barotseland had spent the night chained to a pipe. He had slept even less than the Kommandant and had been guarded by four konstabels and two dogs. During the sleepless hours he had wrestled with the intellectual and moral problem implied by his predicament and had finally come to the conclusion that he was being punished for not getting out of the swimming-bath fast enough. For a while he had even considered the possibility that what was apparently happening to him was a symptom of delirium tremens brought on by drinking a bottle of bad brandy neat. When finally he was dragged to his feet and taken upstairs and down the corridor to his father's study he was certain that he was having hallucinations.

Kommandant van Heerden had not chosen Judge Hazelstone's study for interrogating the prisoner by accident. His unerring sense of psychology had told him that the study, redolent with judicial severity and the associations of childhood, would prepare Jonathan Hazelstone for the grilling the Kommandant intended to give him. Seating himself at the desk in a large leather-covered chair, the Kommandant assumed a posture and mien he felt sure would remind the prisoner of his father. To this end he toyed with a miniature brass gallows complete with trap and dangling victim which he found on the desk serving as a paperweight. It was a gift, he noted, from 'The Executioner in gratitude for Judge Hazelstone's many favours'. Confident that he looked very much as the great lawmaker must have done when he interrogated his son about some childish misdemeanour, the Kommandant ordered the prisoner to be brought in.

Whatever resemblance there might have been between the Kommandant and Judge Hazelstone of the Supreme Court, and it was practically non-existent, there was absolutely none between the manacled and naked creature that hobbled into the study still wearing the absurd bathing-cap, and any High Church dignitary. Staring wild-eyed at the Kommandant, the Bishop looked the picture of depravity.

'Name?' said the Kommandant putting down the paperweight and reaching for a pen.

'I'm hard of hearing,' said the Bishop.

'So am I,' said the Kommandant. 'Comes of firing that bloody elephant gun.'

'I said I can't hear what you're saying.'

Kommandant van Heerden looked up from the desk. 'What the hell are you wearing that cap for?' he asked, and signalled to a konstabel to take it off. The konstabel laid the bathing-cap on the desk and Kommandant van Heerden looked at it suspiciously. 'Do you make a habit of wearing rubber clothes?' he inquired.

The Bishop chose to ignore the question. It had too much of the nightmare about it and he wanted to get back to the everyday world.

'I must protest against the assaults made on my person,' he began, and was surprised at the reaction this simple statement provoked.

'You want to do what?' yelled the Kommandant.

'I have been assaulted by several of your men,' went on the Bishop. 'They have treated me absolutely abominably.'

Kommandant van Heerden couldn't believe his ears. 'And what do you think you were doing to them yesterday afternoon, playing kiss-in-the-fucking-ring? You butcher half my bloody men, ruin a perfectly good Saracen and murder your sister's Zulu bleeding cook and you've got the nerve to come in here and protest at the assaults on…' Kommandant van Heerden was at a loss for words. When he recovered his temper he went on more quietly. 'Anything else you would like to ask me?' he said.

'Yes,' said the Bishop. 'I demand to see my lawyer.'

The Kommandant shook his head. 'Confession first,' he said.

'I'm entitled to see my lawyer.'

Kommandant van Heerden had to smile. 'You're not.'

'I am entitled by law to consult my lawyer.'

'You'll be bleating about Habeas Corpus next.'

'I most certainly will unless you bring me before a magistrate in forty-eight hours.'

Kommandant van Heerden sat back in his chair and grinned cheerfully. 'You think you know your law, don't you? Being the son of a judge, you'd know all about it, wouldn't you?'

The Bishop wasn't going to be drawn. 'I know my basic rights,' he said.

'Well, let me tell you something now. I'm holding you under the Terrorism Act and that means you can see no lawyer and there's no Habeas Corpus, nothing.' He paused to let this sink in. 'I can detain you till the day you die, and you never so much as get a whiff of a lawyer, and as for charging you before a magistrate, that can wait for forty-eight years or four hundred and eighty, for that matter.'

The Bishop tried to say something, but the Kommandant continued, 'I'll tell you something else. Under the Terrorism Act you have to prove yourself innocent. I don't have to go to the bother of proving you guilty. Really rather convenient from my point of view,' and the Kommandant picked up the paper-weight with what he hoped was a meaningful gesture.

The Bishop groped for something to say. 'But the Terrorism Act doesn't apply to me. I'm not a terrorist.'

'And what would you call a person who went round murdering twenty-one policemen if not a bloody terrorist?'

'I've no idea what you're talking about.'

'I'll tell you what I am talking about,' shouted the Kommandant, 'I'll spell it out for you. Early yesterday afternoon you attempted to destroy the evidence of a bestial crime committed upon the person of your sister's Zulu cook by shooting him with a monstrous elephant gun. You then forced your sister to confess to the crime to save your skin, while you went up to the main gate and shot down twenty-one of my men as they tried to enter the Park.'

The Bishop looked wildly round the room and tried to pull himself together.

'You've got it all wrong,' he said at last, 'I didn't kill Fivepence-'

Kommandant van Heerden interrupted him quickly. 'Thank you,' he said, and started to write, 'Confesses to killing twenty-one police officers.'

'I didn't say that,' screamed the Bishop. 'I said I didn't kill Fivepence.'

'Denies killing Zulu cook,' continued the Kommandant painstakingly writing it down.

'I deny killing twenty-one policemen too,' shouted the Bishop.

'Retracts previous confession,' said the Kommandant.

'There was no previous confession. I never said anything about killing the policemen.'

Kommandant van Heerden looked at the two konstabels. 'You men heard him confess to killing twenty-one police officers, didn't you?' he said. The two konstabels weren't sure what they heard but they knew better than to disagree with the Kommandant. They nodded.

'There you are,' the Kommandant continued. 'They heard you.'

'But I didn't say it,' the Bishop yelled. 'What would I want to kill twenty-one policemen for?'

The Kommandant considered the question. 'To hide the crime you'd committed on the Zulu cook,' he said at last.

'How would killing twenty-one policemen help to hide Fivepence's murder?' wailed the Bishop.

'You should have thought of that before you did it,' said the Kommandant smugly.

'But I didn't do it, I tell you. I never went anywhere near the main gate yesterday afternoon. I was too drunk to go anywhere.'

The Kommandant started to write again. 'Claims he acted under the influence of alcohol,' he said.

'No I don't. I said I was too drunk to go anywhere. I couldn't have got up to the gate if I had wanted to.'

Kommandant van Heerden put down his pen and looked at the prisoner. 'Then perhaps you'll be good enough to tell me,' he said, 'how it was that sixty-nine tracker dogs when put on your trail followed your scent up to the main gate and then back to the swimming-pool where you were disposing of the murder weapons?'

'I don't know.'

'Expert witnesses, tracker dogs,' said the Kommandant. 'And perhaps you'll explain how your wallet and handkerchief came to be inside a blockhouse from which my men had been shot down.'

'I've got no idea.'

'Right, then if you'll just sign here,' said the Kommandant holding out the statement to him.

The Bishop bent forward and read the statement. It was a confession that he had murdered Fivepence and twenty-one police officers.

'Of course I won't sign it,' he said straightening up at last. 'None of the crimes you mention there have anything to do with me.'

'No? Well then just you tell me who committed them.'

'My sister shot Fivepence…' the Bishop began, and realized he was making a mistake. In front of him the Kommandant's face had turned purple.

'You sordid bastard,' he yelled. 'Call yourself an English gentleman, do you, and try and shift the blame for a murder on your poor dear sister. What sort of a man are you? Doesn't the family name mean a bleeding thing to you?'

At a signal from the Kommandant the two konstabels grabbed the Bishop and hurled him to the floor. In a flurry of boots and truncheons, the Bishop rolled about the floor of the study. Just as he thought he was about to die, he was hauled to his feet in front of the desk.

'We'll continue this conversation when you feel up to it,' the Kommandant said more calmly, and the Bishop thanked the dear Lord for sparing him another encounter with Kommandant van Heerden. He knew he would never feel up to it. 'In the meantime I am sending for Luitenant Verkramp. This is clearly a political case, and in future he will interrogate you,' and with this dire threat the Kommandant ordered the two konstabels to take the prisoner back to the cellar.

As Kommandant van Heerden waited for Miss Hazelstone to be brought to him, he fingered the bathing-cap thoughtfully and wondered what had happened to Luitenant Verkramp. He had no great hope that the Luitenant was dead. 'The crafty swine is probably holed up somewhere,' he thought and idly poked his finger into the bathing-cap. He was beginning to wish the Luitenant was around to consult about the case. Kommandant van Heerden was no great one for theories and the cross-examination had not turned into a confession quite as easily as he had expected. He had to admit, if only to himself, that there were certain aspects of Jonathan's story that had the ring of truth about them. He had been dead drunk on the bed in Jacaranda House. The Kommandant had seen him there with his own eyes and yet the shooting at the gate had started only minutes later. The Kommandant could not see how a man who was dead drunk one minute half a mile from the blockhouse, could the next be firing with remarkable accuracy at the plain-clothes men. And where the hell had Els disappeared to? The whole thing was a bloody mystery.

'Oh well, never look a gift horse in the mouth,' he thought. 'After all my whole career is at stake and it doesn't do to be choosy.'

The Kommandant hadn't been far wrong in his assessment of Luitenant Verkramp's position. He was indeed holed up. Of all the people who slept in Piemburg that night, Luitenant Verkramp was perhaps the least restless and certainly the least refreshed when dawn broke. His sleep had been disturbed, very disturbed, but in spite of his discomfort he had not dared to move. Below him and in some cases actually inside him, the dreadful spikes made the slightest movement an exceedingly unrewarding experience.

Above him the moving finger of an enormous light swung eerily back and forth through a great pall of greasy smoke. A nauseating smell of burning flesh filled the air, and Luitenant Verkramp in his delirium began to believe in the hell his grandfather's sermons had promised for sinners. At intervals during the long night he woke and considered what he had done to deserve this dreadful fate, and his mind was filled with visions of the prisoners he had tortured by tying plastic bags over their heads, or by administering electric shocks to their genitals. If only he were given another chance in life, he promised he would never torture another suspect and realized as he did so that it was a promise he would never be able to keep.

There was only one portion of his anatomy he could move without too much pain. His left arm was free and as he lay staring up into the smoke and flames of hell, he used his hand to feel about him. He felt the iron spikes and underneath him he discovered the body of another damned soul stiff and cold. Luitenant Verkramp envied that man. He had evidently passed on to some other more pleasant place like oblivion, and he envied him all the more a moment later when an extremely unpleasant sound farther down the ditch drew his attention to new and more horrible possibilities.

He thought at first that someone was being undressed in a great hurry, and by a person with little respect for his clothes. Whoever was busy down there certainly wasn't bothering to undo buttons very carefully. It sounded as if some poor devil was having the clothes ripped off him unceremoniously indeed. Luitenant Verkramp was sure they would never be fit to wear again. 'Probably preparing some poor devil for roasting,' he thought and hoped that his camouflage would help to prevent them finding him for some time.

Raising his head inch by inch he peered down the moat. At first it was too dark to see anything. The sound of undressing had ceased and was followed by noises more awful than anything he had ever heard. Whatever was going on down there didn't bear thinking about, but still horribly fascinated he continued to peer into the darkness. Above him the great probing light swung slowly back towards the moat, and as it passed overhead Luitenant Verkramp knew that his encounter with the wildlife of the hedgerow in the shape of the giant spider had been as nothing to the appalling agonies death held in store for him. Down the ditch a great vulture was up to its neck in plain-clothes policemen. Luitenant Verkramp passed out yet again.

When dawn broke over the varied remains of Konstabel Els' defence of Jacaranda Park, the policemen guarding the gate discovered the haha and its inhabitants living and dead and clambered gingerly down to collect what had not already flapped gorged out of the moat. They had some difficulty at first in recognizing Luitenant Verkramp under his vegetation and when they had decided that he was at least partially human, they had even more difficulty deciding whether he was alive or dead. Certainly the creature they hauled onto the grass seemed more dead than alive, and was clearly suffering from a pronounced persecution complex.

'Don't roast me, please don't roast me. I promise I won't do it again,' Luitenant Verkramp yelled and he was still screaming when he was lifted into the ambulance and driven down to the hospital.