The Caterpillar Cop

4

Kramer stuck them up. He waited a moment and then turned around, lowering one hand to lay a finger on his lips.

“Don’t shoot,” he begged in a whisper.

Bang.

“I said-”

“You’re dead,” the small boy informed him. “And when you’re dead, you can’t talk.”

“Quite right.”

“I know. I’m not stupid like Susan.”

“Who’s that?”

“My baby sister. She’s three.”

“And you are?”

“Fi-no, six. It was my birthday yesterday. Guess what I got?”

“A cap gun?”

“ And a microscope.”

So this was how a mad scientist appeared during his formative years.

“I say, Mungo?” The sleep-slurred voice came from behind a door on the bedroom side of the house. “What in heaven’s name are you doing? Not trying to frighten poor Jafini, are you?”

“No, Daddy, it’s a man.”

“What man?”

Mungo appraised Kramer, sizing him up thoroughly the way children do when they can see how tidy a fellow keeps his nostrils. Then he paused to wrinkle his brow and select a category.

“It’s an uncleish sort of man with very short hair and big front teeth like a rodent.”

Kramer snorted.

“Aren’t you an uncle?” inquired Mungo politely.

“No, I’m a policeman.”

“Oh, good! Then show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”

“Hey?”

“ Your gun, of course!”

He damn nearly did.

“Get your father!”

“Will you?”

“Scoot!”

Mungo retired with dignity and there were whisperings. Kramer stepped back onto the doorstep. Things had got out of hand. Nor did they add up. Still, there was undoubtedly blood on that jacket and some family men had been known to live extremely private lives.

From the bedroom emerged a shock-haired, bearded weirdo in a tartan dressing gown and Wellington boots. He was about thirty-five, slightly built except for the hands, and like a tick bird in his movements-jerky yet enormously precise.

“Yes?” he said, bringing to his face a half-smile which never left it again. Kramer was immediately reminded of the anxious expression worn by travelers being addressed in a foreign tongue.

“CID. I’m Lieutenant Kramer.”

“Yes?”

“Phillip Sven Nielsen?”

“Correct.”

“You are the owner of a long-wheelbase Land-Rover registered as NTK 1708?”

Nielsen nodded.

“And you were driving this vehicle in the vicinity of the Trekkersburg Country Club at 12:30 a.m. this morning?”

“But-”

“Were you?”

“Oh, yes. I was out collecting.”

“What exactly?”

“Excreta.”

“Pardon?”

Nielsen looked to one side as if sneaking a peep at a phrasebook.

“Shrew shit,” he said.

Now there was something to conjure with.

Danny Govender did the job because his father, mother, three sisters, two brothers, widowed uncle, half-cousin, and half-witted grandfather needed the money. It was as simple as that, they told him, and would hear none of his protests.

Such was the price of success, limited though that might be for a twelve-year-old Indian.

In the beginning, Danny had been fired with ambition. Something all too obvious to the dispatch foreman at the Trekkersburg Gazette who gave him his first newspaper round. A bleak, slothful man himself, he had hoped to break the persistent little bastard’s spirit by awarding him the Marriott Drive area. This toy-block scattering of multistory apartment houses, with very few auxiliary lifts marked for non-whites, was generally too much for a full-grown coolie, let alone a bandy-legged runt.

But somehow the foreman’s plan had gone wrong-or right, depending on which way you looked at it. All of a sudden there were no more calls from irate subscribers down Marriott Drive way. Danny was getting up and down those stairs like a rock rabbit.

And more. He was rolling his papers neatly, being careful not to upset milk bottles, whistling silently, and winning the affection of every housewife up early enough to return one of his betel-nut smiles through her kitchen window. Someone even wrote a Letter to the Editor, saying what a joy it was to encounter a child who so loved his work.

That inadvertently chucked a handful in the fan, all right; the foreman was summoned to the dispatch manager’s office and there upbraided for squandering such an asset on mere flat dwellers. After all, he was forcefully reminded, it was the manager who dealt with the irate Greenside subscribers who invariably began their calls with: “I would have you know that the managing director of your paper is a personal friend of mine…”

Danny shot to the top overnight-the Boxing Day hand-outs in Greenside were enough to keep you in Cokes for the year. But, curiously, the boy he deposed seemed only mildly aggrieved. Perhaps there was a snag.

There was.

Danny discovered it the hard way: the bigger the property, the longer the drive leading up to the house, and the meaner the dogs-creatures so incredibly stupid they could not distinguish between an aquiline profile and a flat one. If it was two-legged, dark-skinned, and not employed on the premises, they attempted a disembowelment.

The big house coming up now on his right retained one of the most serious threats to his survival; an enormous, long-fanged, tatty-eared hellion called Regina by the family.

He called her “nice doggy” and ran like hell.

That was on the first day, and he got all of fifteen paces before going down screaming. Luckily the head garden boy was out early, dampening the lawns before the sun got going, and he had called the bitch off with a casual, almost regretful, word of command.

On the second day and thereafter, Danny never arrived at the high wooden gate without a bone cadged from the butcher’s near the market that opened at five. Regina still pursued him, all right, but, being so incredibly stupid, kept the offering clenched in her jaws and this took care of her bite.

Danny leaned his bicycle against the gatepost. He unwrapped the bone and tossed it over.

There was an indignant yell. Then the head garden boy came charging out, rubbing his shoulder.

“What you do that for, you damn fool?” he demanded.

“Me?” said Danny, quick as a flash.

So the Zulu hurled the bone at him and missed. It hit the bicycle lamp instead and broke the glass. Now came Danny’s turn for indignant histrionics.

“You damn fool!” he shouted. “That bike he belonging newspaper Europeans. Big trouble for you now.”

A lie, but all the lovelier for it-vendors were required to provide their own transport.

“ Hau, sorry, I buy new one-you not say,” the Zulu urged, very shocked.

“Maybe, we see. But you better having it tomorrow, my boss he is a terrible man. Worse than the dog by this place.”

“The dog is dead.”

That took a few seconds to register.

“A car hitting it?”

“No.”

“God’s truth?”

The Zulu nodded.

“Why are you waiting by the gate, big chief? Did they send you to bite me?”

This bared the big bully’s teeth but he knew what was good for him.

“Me for paper,” he muttered. “Want quick today.”

Danny handed it over with a flourish.

Then, as he pedaled on up the hill to make his last delivery, he looked back and noted that the curtains in the big house were still drawn across every window. When the servant had said the paper was wanted in a hurry, he thought it must be later than he imagined, but here was evidence to the contrary. Which posed the interesting question: Who had asked for the Trekkersburg Gazette so early and why?

He was freewheeling downhill past the big house again when a second question occurred to him: why had the dog, in such robust health two days before on the Saturday, died so suddenly?

Danny decided to have a word with the lad from the Central News Agency who delivered the Sunday papers.

Mungo had to take most of the credit for saving the situation, Kramer acknowledged generously-he himself had only made certain that a respectable citizen would not be protesting an infringement of rights.

“Because that’s bloody nearly what happened,” he told Zondi as they drove back into the center of Trekkersburg. “I was committed, you see. I was in the bloke’s house and he wanted to know the reason. You can’t go fooling with people like that even if they are polite face to face. The Colonel does not like that kind of trouble. He can tell them to get lost but he doesn’t like it.”

“Who could say you were in his house without asking first, boss?”

“This kid Mungo. He told them.”

“But you could have said you were just talking to him.”

“The trouble was I was stroppy with Nielsen when he came out. I came on hard-Phillip Sven Nielsen? You know.”

“Why, boss?”

“Because I’d already found blood on his jacket sleeves.”

That took ten miles an hour off the speedometer.

“Boss Nielsen’s?”

“Uhuh. That’s where Mungo stopped me making the all-time boo-boo. Thing was I said to Nielsen I wanted to ask him some questions and we’d better go somewhere and sit. He said he’d have to tell his wife what was happening because she’d got a fright, and put me in his study. In the meantime Mungo comes in and wants to look at my gun. I let him and ask if he knows what his father’s job is. Of course, he says-not like a normal kid at all, this Mungo; bloody microscopes, hell! His dad’s an ecologist and he catches things. Kills them, too. Rabbits, mainly, he tells me, just as his old man walks in.”

“And then?”

“He hears what the kid is saying and he adds, I need the blood, you know. Really, I say. He explains he uses it to catch meerkats, carries it around in one of those plastic bowls with a lid-like you put in the fridge. Splashes it all round his traps with a rag.”

“His jacket, too.”

“Yes, that’s about it. By now I’m getting the picture. I tell him we believe he was up in the plantation catching things for ecology, and he says you could put it that way. He is doing a study of one small section and learning all he can about how the food goes from one animal to another. Like what the shrews eat and what eats the shrews. That’s why he was working so late; shrews die if they are kept in a trap for too long and he has to empty them every eight hours.”

“For how long, boss?”

“He says he’s been doing it three years.”

“You believe him?”

“There’s a place in England, so he tells me, where the scientists have spent twenty-seven years in a forest nonstop.”

“White men!” Zondi chuckled.

“I feel the same, kaffir. Anyway, he asks me what my questions are. I say, as if I know already, Mr. Nielsen, you visit this plantation at eight o’clock in the morning, four o’clock in the afternoon and at midnight? Ja, he says. All right, then, I say, did you notice anyone in the trees at all yesterday? — and I tell him why. He thinks for a long time and then says there was nobody. But, I must remember, he just goes to a small part down near the dual highway. Thanks very much, I tell him, and take my gun back from Mungo.”

“So?”

“Then he says, Just a minute, is that all you want to know? He looks at me all suspicious. I don’t say anything. Because if it is all, then he wants to ask a question. Go ahead, I say.

“He’s no fool, this one. He says, It seems strange to me, Lieutenant, that you feel at liberty to walk into my house, unannounced, to ask a single question which, according to your theories on sex killers, could easily have waited an hour or so. You could have telephoned-or knocked on my door-at seven, when I generally get up.

“Man, I had to think fast. I said, It is urgent, man, because I wanted you to take a look at the murder scene for me before it rains or whatever. Why him? he wants to know. Well, because our forensic experts, ha ha, haven’t been able to find anything there of any use to us. He knows the plantation better than anyone; there was just a chance he would spot what we wouldn’t.

“But why hadn’t I said so in the first place? he wants to know. Look, it’s a favor I’m asking, I say. When you ask a favor, you try not to cause any inconvenience. I’m in a hurry, right? Surely it’s better I come round and see if he is already awake? And, if not, wait a while in the car outside? I arrive, I see the kid in the passage, I hear he’s awake, I ask to see him. Then, because it’s a favor, I dither about before asking him because it could be a big waste of time.”

Zondi gave the sort of grunt that implied he could not agree more. He picked up speed again.

“The main thing is to let Mr. Nielsen feel important and then send him away happy,” Kramer said, really trying to convince himself, rather than Zondi, it was worth all this to avoid a fuss.

“Maybe he will find something, boss.”

“True but unlikely. I’d thought of that; either way we can’t lose.”

They arrived at CID headquarters.

“I want the car for an hour, Zondi. See you here at eight and we’ll be up at the country club by the time he’s finished with his traps.”

“Where do you go then?”

“One more bit of unfinished business before I really get stuck into this case. Cheers.”

As Kramer drove off, he cursed himself loudly and viciously for having been so impulsive. From here on in, caution was the watchword. What a start to a sodding lousy morning-with the prospect of many more to come. This was definitely not his kind of case. Sod it.

The Widow Fourie presented her cheek to be kissed much as a bishop might his episcopal ring-there was no promise whatever of more intimate communion.

As Kramer never kissed women on the cheek, he ignored it. He pinched her instead.

“Trompie!”

Now that, too, was unlike her.

“What is it?” he asked. “Time of the month?”

“Yes,” she said.

“The curse?”

“That’s right.”

But which curse? A good question. Right from the moment he entered the flat, with just enough time for bed and breakfast, he sensed a definite change in her. It was as though she dreaded something dark she could not quite see over his shoulder.

“Where are the kids?”

“Out.”

“So early?”

“I asked Mr. Tomlinson down the passage to take them in the car-he passes the school on his way to varsity.”

“It isn’t raining, you know.”

“I know.”

“And so?”

“Nothing.”

A whimsy caught Kramer unexpectedly. In the good old days, this would have been his cue to bash her one with a club and drag her off by the hair. Hit her hard enough and temporary amnesia would take care of her troubles. But this was the twentieth century, Western civilization, and she was wearing a wig.

“I’m waiting,” she said.

“What for?”

“Did you get him? Or are my kids still-”

“ Ach! Don’t worry, we will.”

Strained silence.

“How did you get your hands so dirty?”

“I’ll wash.”

The Widow Fourie shuddered and went into the kitchen, pausing just inside the doorway until she heard the taps running. Her shadow was a dead giveaway.

It was shorter than she was, squat and broad and a little bowed; come to think of it, rather like the shade of some primitive ancestor apprehensive at the mouth of her cave.

Now a hunter sought admission but, having come from where the sounds of the night were made, his scent would lead the unthinkable right to her litter within.

Suddenly he saw it all.

“I’ve fried you a couple of eggs. There’s no bacon left.”

The plate stared balefully up at him with its two yellow eyes, waiting to be blinded by the knife.

“We know who the kid was. He-”

“I don’t want to hear.”

“But usually-”

“It’s repugnant to me.”

“Repugnant? Where did you get that one from? The crossword?”

“That’s what Mr. Tomlinson called it and he’s right. Repugnant.”

“Ah, yes, our English-speaking university intellectual.”

“He’s a very nice man.”

“Not repugnant.”

“No, but-”

“Go on. Were you going to say…?”

She responded eagerly to the kettle’s whistled summons.

And returned with his coffee to find the room empty. Kramer had got the message.

The fresh-water crabs must have thought themselves especially favored when enough food to last them through two generations landed in their irrigation ditch. It came sealed in a big brown wrapper. After a week of high excitement, they had just started to get this off when it vanished.

And wound up on the next slab along from Boetie Swanepoel in the Trekkersburg police mortuary.

“I’ll start on the Bantu male,” Strydom told the attendant, Sergeant Van Rensburg. “No sense in trying to concentrate with a stink like that hanging around.”

Van Rensburg had already made the preliminary incision from throat to crotch. All Strydom had to do was reel off enough routine observations to fill up the form. The plain fact of the matter was that a rural Bantu had died because he ate too little.

“Natural causes,” Strydom concluded, moving on to the other table.

Boetie lay awkwardly on the channeled porcelain; the headrest was chiefly to blame for this-like the headrest on a barber’s chair, it was not designed for the young. But his spare frame left plenty of working space all around him, which made a nice change.

Van Rensburg wheeled the light over and the examination began.

“Yes, someone definitely put their fingers in this lot,” Strydom murmured, indicating a smear running up the belly from the lacerated loins. “Yirra, and look at this mark in the leg, man!”

Strydom had spread the legs apart and exposed a bloody mark on the inner thigh.

“That’s the shape of the weapon we’re after-remind you of anything?”

“No, Doctor.”

“Well, it does me. Funny how the end is chopped off nearly at right angles like that.”

“Could be the point snapped.”

“Hmmm. Anyhow, I think I’ll just save this for closer examination before you wash down.”

Strydom flayed the area with his scalpel and laid the skin in a small dish. On a flat surface, the dominant characteristic of the weapon’s imprint was even more pronounced. They both peered at it closely.

“That thing had a real curve on it,” Van Rensburg said. “It wasn’t a sheath knife for sure. What about one of those Arab daggers?”

“Not very likely. The width of those blades gets smaller all the way down to the tip. This one stays the same. Also it seems the blade was very flat or it wouldn’t have made a clear mark like that. Finished?”

The blood was gone. The wounds were short, deep slashes that gaped like the mouths of smiling babes, each with a rim of subcutaneous fat to give an illusion of toothless gum within.

Strydom found them beguiling; he was sure they could tell him something. And would, given time.

Van Rensburg watched for a while and then helped his Bantu assistant remove the other corpse. A splintery coffin, made by a timber firm that also churned out fruit trays for farmers, was waiting for it in the refrigerator room.

As he measured and probed, Strydom could hear the widow being cursed for having come alone with her small son. So she had brought the coffin along on her head, Van Rensburg bawled, but how the hell did she think she would take it away again full? Still, that was her problem. No, he would not telephone for a taxi. The box scraped over the concrete floor, one bent nailhead screeching, and then the hot draft through the outer door ceased to blow. The fly screen beyond clattered.

“Damn fool,” Van Rensburg grunted, taking up his clipboard for notes.

“And a lot of damn noise,” Strydom rebuked him.

“Sorry, Doctor.”

His tone was so surly that Strydom looked up in surprise. Van Rensburg had always been unbearably sycophantic-this was indeed a welcome indication of personality inversion. The big bruise of a face, purpled by drink and normally sensitive to the slightest touch of criticism, was without expression.

“Something the matter, Sergeant?”

“No, Doctor.”

Strydom was sure then that in some way he had offended the great oaf. Exactly how was tantalizing, but best left unexplored if he was to make the most of the situation. Obviously Van Rensburg was desperately seeking a confrontation that would leave him the injured yet forgiving party. The hell with that. A diversion was indicated.

“Look at these wounds,” Strydom said, “and tell me if the pattern means anything to you.”

Van Rensburg shrugged.

The pattern had not meant a thing to Strydom either-until he started talking.

“Let’s start by assuming that the object was mutilation-and mutilation of the genitals. But it is immediately apparent that most of the blows fell on either side and just above. What does that suggest to you?”

“He kept missing?”

“Right. But why did he? You use that ballpoint of yours and try a stab-see? You got it spot on.”

“He could have been all excited.”

“Then why stop once the severing had taken place? Why not go on-mutilate some more? Now use my ruler and hit the plug hole here by the foot. Quick!”

Van Rensburg missed by a good inch-enough to make the difference between a wound in a child’s groin and one on the thigh. He tried again and hit his target.

“Now that’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Strydom said. “You had to have some practice because the longer the instrument you use, the greater your error can be. It’s exaggerated, you see. You have to hold a pen near the nib, don’t you?”

“And so? It was a long knife.”

“Ah, but you, Sergeant, pointed out that it curved so much it was like part of a not-so-big circle. What sort of knife is that?”

“Which was he-left- or right-handed, Doctor?”

Two could play at diversions.

“From the wounds-they slope towards the right-I’d say left. But the wire is wound to indicate a right-hander.”

“There were two of them?”

“Not necessarily.”

“But it’s difficult to hold a knife wrong.”

“Back to the weapon again. Let’s have your board and we’ll try and draw what it looks like.”

Strydom, whose mother had always said he was artistic, made an accurate scale representation of the weapon’s imprint. Then he extended the natural lines of the curve until they ran over the edge of the paper.

“We need a bigger sheet,” he said, and went through into the office, where he started again on Van Rensburg’s blotter.

“Hell,” said Van Rensburg softly.

After Strydom had made the blade about two inches longer, bringing it up to the conventional five inches, he tried to draw a hilt on it. The angle was very difficult, the arc being too tight. It finished up more like the end of a boat hook than anything else.

“It could have been on a long handle,” Van Rensburg suggested.

“The force would have been increased proportionately, yet those wounds aren’t very deep.”

Strydom then discovered that by placing his drawing hand in the center of the paper and using his other hand to rotate the blotter, he could bring the edge of the blade around to almost meet. This left him with two concentric circles-or a ring of flat metal.

“But it can’t do that,” Van Rensburg objected, “or there would be no sharp end.”

“I know. I’m just fiddling with the idea,” Strydom replied.

“The nearest it can get is halfway, Doctor. Otherwise it’s coming back to stab you yourself.”

“Then let’s mark it there if it pleases you,” Strydom replied testily. “A blade that’s half a circle is bloody ridiculous, man! I was only-”

That was when he saw it. By drawing a line at right angles across the extended blade, and then thickening it with a flourish of irritability, he had put the hilt-or handle-almost precisely where it belonged.

“A sickle! ”

“A bloody sickle,” sighed Van Rensburg, as if he knew already none of the glory would ever be shared with him.

“You know something, Sergeant? I’ve had a sickle at the back of my mind all along.”

Van Rensburg, who looked as though he could cheerfully have put one there for him, lifted the telephone receiver.

“Shall I tell the lieutenant?” he asked.

“I will-don’t want to bother you any more than I need to.”

That did it, whatever it was.

When Kramer’s car radio informed him that the district surgeon wanted him urgently, he stopped at the first call box and rang in. He then said nothing to Zondi about the conversation until they were at the country club car park waiting for Nielsen to appear.

“The bastard used a sickle,” Kramer said, handing over a ready-lit cigarette.

Zondi looked understandably surprised.

“Where for, boss?”

“Seems it left a picture of itself on the inside leg. Doc Strydom also points out that sickles are easy to hold squiff and that’s why the stab wounds came from the wrong side. He’s quite sure about it.”

“But that is a strange thing!”

“You’ve said it. Only time I remember a case was when two farmboys got in a fight. A sickle’s hard to carry without someone noticing.”

“Unless it is for your work.”

“Changed your mind? Think a black bugger did it?”

“Never, boss.”

Funny how you could tell some things when others were impossible to see. But statistics would bear him out on this one: There was virtually no likelihood of a white child being sexually murdered by a black. In fact, Kramer doubted there was a single example on record. Funny that, too.

Zondi was making stabbing motions, bringing the point of an imaginary sickle down on his knee.

“Look, boss,” he said. “My hand is here and the sharp part is here. That is a big space between them.”

“About nine inches.”

“And where does the blood go? Because the blade is turning in it shoots that away.”

“Not bad, man! You’ve got a good chance of not being splashed. That’s probably why he chose it. By the way, the only fingerprints on the bike were Boetie’s own ones.”

A Land-Rover roared up beside them, stopped, lurched, chipped a bollard, stopped. The engine died fighting.

Without even a sideways glance, Kramer said, “Mr. Nielsen has arrived. Right on time, too-he’s keen.”

“Makes you feel bad, boss?”

Kramer cuffed Zondi and they got out.

“Lovely morning,” Nielsen said affably, shouldering a haversack. “Could turn into another scorcher, though. Shall we go?”

There was nothing for it-they went. Down the terrace, across the third green of the pitch-and-putt course, and into the trees.

The glade seemed exceptionally dull in daylight.

Twenty minutes later Kramer had waited long enough. He left Zondi beside the small stream, where they had been passing the time taunting tadpoles, and strolled back to Nielsen. The ecologist was crouched, staring intently at the ground just to the right of the forked tree.

“Man, I’m sorry but we’d better be getting along,” Kramer said.

Nielsen pointed. A party of ants was dragging something through the litter of fallen twigs.

“Ants?” Kramer said.

“I’ve just finished timing them.”

“Really?”

“And now let’s have a proper look at their trophy.”

The tweezers brought the back half of a hairy caterpillar to within six inches of Kramer’s face.

“Very nice,” he said, squinting politely.

“Anything else?”

“Interesting.”

“Isn’t it? A bird’s beak couldn’t have made such a neat job of slicing it in two like that.”

“You don’t say. Now I’ll just call my-”

“It must have come from there somewhere,” Nielsen said, looking up.

“ Ach, yes, I know the kind you mean. They lie in a line along the top of a branch-something to do with the way eggs are laid. Like trains.”

“So, you’re quite a naturalist on the quiet!”

“Me? Any kid who’s ever climbed a tree can tell you the same. They’re proper bastards when you come from underneath and squeeze your hand over them.”

“Not that they stay stationary for more than a couple of days, though, but we may be lucky.”

The use of the plural pronoun put Kramer to flight. As he retreated he added, “Thanks a lot for coming, Mr. Nielsen. We appreciated it.”

He stepped backwards onto Zondi’s foot.

But the protest was never made. At that instant Nielsen uttered a strange whoop.

“Just look at what I’ve found!”

“Oh, yes?”

Reluctant, yet curious, Kramer joined Nielsen on a stump beside the wattle nearest to the tree with a fork in it. Across a branch in front of them, which was just low enough for a man to touch with his fingertips from the ground, ran a long, deep cut that went quite a way into the bark on either side.

“What on earth would leave a mark like that one, though?” Nielsen asked, bemused.

“A sickle?”

“That fits the bill exactly! Why did…?”

“The killer used one. Any blood? Hair?”

“No, not a suggestion; just a greenish smear where it bisected our small friend.”

The gash was right in the middle of the gap in a straggling line of newly hatched caterpillars.

“I know what,” said Kramer. “He just hung it up here while he had his hands full with other matters.”

“Simplicity itself, Lieutenant. I do the same with tools when I’m gardening; keeps them out of the children’s reach.”

You could see, a second later, Nielsen wished he had not said quite that.

“Every little helps,” Kramer said, jumping to the ground. “Now we really must be off, man.”

Nielsen chuckled.

“You surprise me, Lieutenant.”

“Why’s that?”

“Are you usually happy with just half a body?”

“Hey?”

Zondi stepped forward and bent down to examine the area under the branch.

“You won’t find it there, boy,” Nielsen said. “I had a good quiz over the whole area when I found the first piece. That’s why I was checking on the time the ants took to move such a weight.”

“You think they were coming back for more this time?”

“It’s a possibility. Shall we explore a little?”

Zondi, who was standing behind Nielsen, grinned heartlessly. He was thoroughly enjoying such an uncharacteristic display of restraint on Kramer’s part. He knew it hurt.

“Why not?” Kramer replied, shrugging. He would deal with Zondi later.

“What we’re after is their nest,” Nielsen explained confidentially. “It shouldn’t be too difficult to find as they try to travel in a straight line when they’re lugging a load. Now this is the way they were heading…”

Kramer followed him into the brambles a short distance.

“And here’s a nest of them! Boy, bring me my bag, will you?”

Zondi slouched up with the haversack. Nielsen took from it a small trowel and began to dig. Furious ants poured out of the ground and pumped formic acid into anything soft. It was all very uncomfortable-yet obviously unscientific, let alone unmanly, to shift your position.

Finally, Nielsen held up a lump of earth resembling a gritty bath sponge.

“Their food store,” he said, breaking it open gently. Out of the holes dropped a weblike cocoon. Nielsen peeled off the white covering.

“And here we have the rest of the caterpillar-the two halves match up precisely.”

“What’s the stuff around it?”

“The ants’ way of preserving it for later.”

“I see.”

Nielsen shook his head solemnly.

“I’m not sure you do. Wrapping up their bits and pieces takes quite some time. Also, these ants never forage after dark. Therefore, according to my calculations, they must have got hold of it yesterday morning.”

“Morning?”

“No later than lunchtime, I’m afraid.”

The implication sank into Kramer like a depth charge. At first nothing happened as it moved down through the warm superficialities of a sunny day and fairly companionable intercourse. Then it entered the colder layers of his mind where, finding its critical level, it exploded-buckling the plates of a watertight assumption and bringing confusion to the surface.

“But-but that means the killer was here long before… It was…”

“Premeditated.”

“Right!” Zondi stepped in a pace. There was not a sound in the forest. No wind. Silence.

“I thought you said this species of murderer acted spontaneously,” Nielsen queried.

“I did.”

“And that, particularly with child victims, it was a case of their meeting up with a stranger quite by chance?”

“Yes.”

“Yet the boy must have arranged to be here last night, in this one glade out of hundreds like it all around. How else could the murderer have known where to leave the sickle handy?”

Kramer was ordering his own thoughts.

“Maybe I’m wrong,” he said at last, sitting down on a boulder. Nielsen lit the cigarette for him.

“Never mind, you’re not the only one to have a pet theory upset by the facts, Lieutenant. They’ve cost me my doctorate once already.”

“Hey? I meant wrong in applying the bloody thing in the first place.”

“But the mutilations! No ordinary murderer goes in for that sort of thing, surely.”

The cigarette was handed over for Zondi to take a light. Kramer retrieved it before replying.

“Unless, of course, he’s a very smart cookie. How’s that for a theory? The facts fit it all right.”

“Good God!”

Nielsen sat down, too, on the other rock.

“Are you actually suggesting that whoever’s involved is not necessarily a pervert?”

“I’m sure of it.”

This intuitive leap was too much for strictly disciplined thought processes: it plainly annoyed Nielsen.

“Oh, come on. Wouldn’t you expect to have found at least some sign of squeamishness? I might be driven to kill, but I doubt if I could go in for-you know, that sort of disgusting behavior.”

“What sort? All he did was strangle the kid and stab him. Stabbing is stabbing, whatever part you do it in. He just got the effect he was after by going for the crotch-and there are a lot more disgusting things he could have done than that, man.”

“You’re forgetting the legs, aren’t you? I thought it looked like a frenzied attack.”

“That was before, while we were seeing what we thought we saw. Now I’d say the lack of any proper pattern in the wounds shows he could have tried to do it with his head turned away.”

“Because he was squeamish? Well, maybe.”

“There’s the time factor as well, remember. The body was carefully positioned and he made quite sure nothing incriminating was left behind. You can’t tell me he was in such a hurry that he had to skip a part of his plans-there is no evidence of any sexual interference, besides the wounds.”

“Then the whole thing’s a fake!”

“Except for the fact, Mr. Nielsen, that the victim is genuinely dead.”

Nielsen stared at Kramer and Kramer stared at Zondi and Zondi looked from one to the other.

Sex had been such an acceptable motive for child murder-yet any alternative was bound to prove twice as engaging.

“You’re right,” said Kramer, “it is a lovely morning.”