Chapter 7

By the time he had driven into Weezen after lunch and found it was early closing day, the Kommandant had begun to think that he was never going to find the Heathcote-Kilkoons’s house. His earlier impression that time stood still in the little town was entirely reinforced by the absence of anyone in the streets in the afternoon. He wandered round looking for the Post Office only to find it shut, tried the store he had been to in the morning with equal lack of success and finally sat down in the shadow of Queen Victoria and contemplated the dusty cannas in the ornamental garden. A thin yellow dog sitting on the verandah of the store scratched itself lethargically and recalled the Kommandant to his new role. “Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the mid-day sun,” he thought to cheer himself up and wondered what a genuine Englishman who found himself in a strange town at this time of the day would have done. “Gone fishing,” he imagined and with the uneasy feeling that he was being observed rather critically which resulted subliminally from the great Queen above him, he got up and drove back to the hotel.

There too the sense of inanition with which the old building was so imbued was even more marked now. The two flies were still trapped in the revolving door but they no longer buzzed. Kommandant van Heerden went down the corridor to his room and collected his rod. Then after some confusion in the revolving door, which refused to take both his rod and his basket at the same time, he was out and threading his way down the weedy paths to the river. At the foot of the enormous drainpipe he hesitated, looked to see which way the river flowed, and went upstream on the grounds that he didn’t want to catch fish that had grown fat on its discharge. He had some difficulty in finding a spot which wasn’t encumbered with branches and presently settled down to casting his most promising-looking fly, a large red-winged affair, onto the water. Nothing stirred beneath the surface of the river but the Kommandant was well content. He was doing what an English gentleman would do on a hot summer afternoon, and knowing how ineffectual Englishmen were in other matters he doubted if they caught anything when fishing. As time slowly passed the Kommandant’s mind, somnolent in the heat, pondered gently. With something remotely akin to insight he saw himself, a plump middle-aged man standing in unfamiliar clothes on the bank of an unknown river fishing for nothing in particular. It seemed a strange thing to do yet restful and in some curious way fulfilling. Piemburg and the police station seemed very far away and insignificant. He no longer cared what happened there. He was away from it, away in the mountains, being, if not himself, at least something equivalent and he was just considering what this admiration for things English meant when a voice interrupted him.

“Oh, never fly conceals a hook!” said the voice and the Kommandant turned to find the salesman with flatulence standing watching him.

“It does as a matter of fact,” said the Kommandant who thought the remark was rather foolish.

“A quote, a quote,” said the man. “I’m afraid I’m rather given to them. It’s not a particularly sociable habit but one that arises from my profession.”

“Really,” said the Kommandant non-committally, not being sure what a quote was. He wound in his line and was disconcerted to find that his fly had disappeared.

“I see I was right after all,” said the man. “Squamous, omnipotent and kind.”

“I beg your pardon,” said the Kommandant.

“Just another quote,” said the man. “Perhaps I ought to introduce myself. Mulpurgo. I lecture in English at the University of Zululand.”

“Van Heerden, Kommandant South African Police, Piemburg,” said the Kommandant and was startled by the effect his announcement had on Mr Mulpurgo. He had gone quite pale and was looking decidedly alarmed.

“Is anything wrong?” asked the Kommandant.

“No,” said Mr Mulpurgo shakily. “Nothing at all. It’s just that … well I had no idea you were … well … Kommandant van Heerden.”

“You’ve heard about me then?” the Kommandant asked.

Mr Mulpurgo nodded. It was perfectly clear that he had. The Kommandant dismantled his rod.

“I don’t suppose I’ll catch anything now,” he said. “Too late.”

“Evening is the best time,” said Mr Mulpurgo looking at him curiously.

“Is it? That’s interesting,” the Kommandant said as they strolled back along the river bank. “This is my first try at fishing. Are you a keen fisherman? You seem to know a lot about it.”

“My associations are purely literary,” Mr Mulpurgo confessed, “I’m doing my thesis on ‘Heaven’.”

Kommandant van Heerden was astonished.

“Isn’t that a very difficult subject?” he asked.

Mr Mulpurgo smiled. “It’s a poem about fish by Rupert Brooke,” he explained.

“Oh is that what it is?” said the Kommandant who, while he’d never heard of Rupert Brooke, was always interested in hearing about English literature. “This man Brooke is an English poet?”

Mr Mulpurgo said he was.

“He died in the First World War,” he explained and the Kommandant said he was sorry to hear it, “The thing is” continued the English lecturer, “that I believe that while it’s possible to interpret the poem quite simply as an allegory of the human condition, la condition humaine, if you understand me, it has also a deeper relevance in terms of the psycho-alchemical process of transformation as discovered by Jung.”

The Kommandant nodded. He didn’t understand a word that Mr Mulpurgo was saying but he felt privileged to hear it all the same. Encouraged by this acquiescence the lecturer warmed to his task.

“For instance the lines ‘One may not doubt that, somehow, good, Shall come of water and of mud’ clearly indicate that the poet’s intention is to introduce the concept of the philosopher’s stone and its origin in the prima materia without in any way diverting the reader’s attention from the poem’s superficially humorous tone.”

They came to the enormous drain and Mr Mulpurgo helped the Kommandant with his basket. The evident alarm with which he had greeted the Kommandant’s introduction had given way to nervous garrulity in the face of his friendly if uncomprehending interest.

“It’s the individuation motif without a doubt,” he went on as they walked up the path to the hotel. “‘Paradisal grubs’, ‘Unfading moths’, ‘And the worm that never dies’ all clearly point to that.”

“I suppose they must do,” said the Kommandant as they parted in the foyer. He went down the corridor to Colonic Irrigation No 6 feeling vaguely elated. He had spent the afternoon in an authentic English fashion, fishing and engaged in intellectual conversation. It was an auspicious start to his holiday and went some way to compensate for the disappointment he had felt on his arrival at the hotel. To celebrate the occasion he decided on a bath before dinner and spent some time searching for a bathroom before returning to his room and washing himself all over in the basin that looked most suited to that purpose and least likely to have been used for any other. As the old man had warned, the cold water was hot. The Kommandant tried the hot tap but that was just as hot and in the end he sprayed himself with warm water from a tube that was clearly too large to have been used as an enema but which left him smelling distinctly odd all the same. Then he sat on the bed and read a chapter of Berry & Co. before going to dinner. He found it difficult to concentrate because whichever way he sat he was still faced by his stained reflection in the wardrobe mirror which made him feel that there was someone with him in the room all the time. To avoid the compulsive introspection this induced he lay back on the bed and tried to imagine what Mr Mulpurgo had been talking about. It had meant nothing at the time and even less now but the phrase “And the worm that never dies” stuck in his mind relentlessly. It seemed unlikely somehow but remembering that worms could break in half and still go on living separate existences, he supposed it was possible that when one end was mortally ill, the other end could dissociate itself from its partner’s death and go on living. Perhaps that was what was meant by terminal. It was a word he’d never understood. He’d have to ask Mr Mulpurgo, who was evidently a highly educated man.

But when he went to the Pump Room for dinner, Mr Mulpurgo wasn’t there. The two ladies at the far end of the room were his only companions and since their whispered conversation was made inaudible by the gurgling of the marble fountain the Kommandant ate his dinner in what amounted to silence and watched the sky darken behind the Aardvarkberg. Tomorrow he would find the address of the Heathcote-Kilkoons and let them know he had arrived.

 Seventy miles away in Piemburg the evening which had begun so uneventfully took on a new animation towards midnight. The twelve violent explosions that rocked the city within minutes of one another at eleven-thirty were so strategically placed that they confirmed entirely Luitenant Verkramp’s contention that a well-organized conspiracy of sabotage and subversion existed. As the last bomb brightened the horizon, Piemburg retreated still further into that obscurity for which it was so famous. Bereft of electricity, telephones, radio mast, and with road and rail links to the outside world severed by the explosive zeal of his secret agents, the tiny metropolis’ tenuous hold on the twentieth century petered out.

From the roof of the police station where he was taking the air, Verkramp found the transformation quite spectacular. One moment Piemburg had been a delicate web of street lights and neon signs, the next it had merged indistinguishably with the rolling hills of Zululand. As the distant rumble from Empire View announced that the radio tower had ceased to be such a large blot on the landscape, Verkramp left the roof and hurried down the stairs to the cells where the only people in the city who would have actively canvassed for electricity cuts were still receiving their jolts from the hand-cranked generators in the darkness. The consolation for the volunteers was the disappearance of the naked black women as the projectors went out.

In the confusion Luitenant Verkramp remained disconcertingly calm.

“It’s all right,” he shouted. “There is nothing to be alarmed about, just continue the experiment using ordinary photographs.” He went from cell to cell distributing torches which he had kept handy for just such an eventuality as this. Sergeant Breitenbach was as usual less unperturbed.

“Don’t you think it’s more important to investigate the cause of the power failure?” he asked. “It sounded to me like there were a whole lot of explosions.”

“Twelve,” said Verkramp emphatically, “I counted them.”

“Twelve bloody great explosions in the middle of the night and you aren’t worried?” said the Sergeant with astonishment. Luitenant Verkramp refused to be flustered.

“I’ve been expecting this for some time,” he said truthfully.

“Expecting what?”

“The sabotage movement has begun again,” he said going downstairs to his office. Behind him Sergeant Breitenbach, still literally and metaphorically in the dark, tried to follow him. By the time he reached the Kommandant’s office, he found Verkramp checking a list of names by the light of an emergency lamp. It crossed the Sergeant’s mind that Verkramp was remarkably well prepared for the crisis that seemed to have caught the rest of the city unawares.

“I want the following people detained at once,” Verkramp told him.

“Aren’t you going to check on what’s been going on first?” Sergeant Breitenbach asked. “I mean you don’t even know for sure that those explosions were made by bombs.”

Luitenant Verkramp looked up sternly.

“I’ve had enough experience of sabotage to know a bomb when I hear one,” he said. Sergeant Breitenbach decided not to argue. Instead he studied the list of names Verkramp had handed him and was horrified by what he saw. If Verkramp were right and the city had been disrupted by a series of bomb attacks, the consequences to public life in Piemburg would be mild by comparison with the chaos that would ensue if the men on the list were arrested. Clergymen, councillors, bank managers, lawyers, even the Mayor himself appeared to be the object of Verkramp’s suspicions. Sergeant Breitenbach put the list down hurriedly. He didn’t want anything to do with it.

“Don’t you think you’re being a bit hasty?” he asked nervously.

Luitenant Verkramp clearly didn’t. “If I am right, and I am, the city has been subjected to a premeditated campaign of sabotage. These men are all well-known-”

“You can say that again,” muttered the Sergeant.

“-opponents of the Government,” continued the Acting Kommandant. “Many of them were Horticulturalists.”

“Horticulturalists?” asked the Sergeant who couldn’t see anything wrong with being a horticulturalist. He was one himself in a small way.

“The Horticulturalists,” Verkramp explained, “were a secret organization of wealthy farmers and businessmen who were planning to take Zululand out of the Union at the time of the Republic referendum. They were prepared to use force. Some were officers in the Piemburg Mounted Rifles and they were going to use weapons from the military arsenal.”

“But that was ten years ago,” Sergeant Brietenbach pointed out.

“Men like that don’t change their opinions,” said Verkramp sententiously. “Will you ever forgive the British for what they did to our women and children in the concentration camps?”

“No,” said the Sergeant, who hadn’t had any women or children in concentration camps in the Boer war but who knew the right answer.

“Exactly,” said Verkramp. “Well, these swine are no different and they’ll never forgive us for taking Zululand out of the British Empire. They hate us. Don’t you understand how the British hate us?”

“Yes,” said the Sergeant hastily. He could see that Verkramp was working himself up into a state again and he preferred to be out of the way when it came. “You’re probably right.”

“Right?” shouted Verkramp. “I’m always right.”

“Yes,” said the Sergeant even more hastily.

“So what do they do, these Horticulturalists? Go underground for a time, then gang up with Communists and Liberalists to overthrow our glorious Afrikaner republic. These bomb attacks are the first sign that their campaign has started. Well, I’m not going to sit back and let them get away with it. I’ll have those bastards in prison and squeeze the truth out of them before they can do any real harm.”

Sergeant Breitenbach waited until the seizure had run its course before demurring once again.

“Don’t you think it would be safer to tell Kommandant van Heerden first? Then he can carry the can if there is a balls-up.”

Luitenant Verkramp wouldn’t hear of it. “Half the trouble in this town is due to the way the old fool treats the English,” he snapped. “He’s too bloody soft with them. Sometimes I think he prefers them to his own people.”

Sergeant Breitenbach said he didn’t know about that. All he knew was that the Kommandant’s grandfather had been shot by the British after the Battle of Paardeberg which was more than could be said for Verkramp’s. His grandfather had sold horses to the British army and had been practically a khaki Boer but the Sergeant was too discreet to mention the fact now. Instead he picked up the list again.

“Where are we going to put them all?” he asked. “The cells on the top floor are being used for your kaffirboetje cure and the ones in the basement are all full.”

“Take them down to the prison,” Verkramp told him, “and see that they’re kept in isolation. I don’t want them cooking up any stories.”

Half an hour later the homes of thirty-six of Piemburg’s most influential citizens had been raided by armed police, and angry frightened men had been hustled in their pyjamas into pick-up vans. One or two put up a desperate resistance in the mistaken belief that the Zulus had risen and had come to massacre them in their beds, a misunderstanding that arose from the total black-out into which Verkramp’s agents had plunged the city. Four policemen were wounded in these battles and a local coal merchant shot his wife to save her from being raped by the black hordes before the situation was clarified.

By dawn the arrests had all been made though one or two mistakes remained to be rectified. The man torn from the arms of the lady Mayoress turned out to be not the civic dignitary himself but a neighbour he had asked to help with his election. When the Mayor was finally apprehended he was under the impression that he was being arrested for corruption in high places. “This is disgraceful,” he shouted as he was bundled into the pick-up van. “You have no right to pry into my private wife. I am your ewected representative,” a protest that did nothing to effect his release but went some way to explain the presence of the neighbour in his wife’s bed.

In the morning after a few hours sleep Luitenant Verkramp and Sergeant Breitenbach toured the installations which had been destroyed by the saboteurs. Once again the Acting Kommandant’s grasp of the situation astonished Sergeant Breitenbach. Verkramp seemed to know exactly where to go without being told. As they surveyed the remains of the transformer on the Durban Road, the Sergeant asked him what he was going to do now.

“Nothing,” said Verkramp to his amazement. “In a few days’ time we’ll be in a position to arrest the whole Communist organization in Zululand.”

“But what about all the people we arrested last night?”

“They will be interrogated and the evidence they give will help to reveal their co-conspirators,” Verkramp explained.

Sergeant Breitenbach shook his head in bewilderment.

“I hope to hell you know what you’re doing,” was all he said. They drove back via the prison where Verkramp gave instructions to the teams of Security Policemen who were to conduct the interrogation round the clock.

“The usual routine,” he told them. “Keep them standing up. No sleep. Rough them up a bit to start with. Explain they’ll be tried under the Terrorist Act and have to prove their innocence. No right to a lawyer. Can be detained indefinitely and incommunicado. Any questions?”

“Any, sir?” asked one of the men.

“You heard me,” snapped Verkramp, “I said, ‘Any questions?’” The men looked at him dumbly and Verkramp dismissed them and they filed off to begin their arduous duties. Luitenant Verkramp went to see Governor Schnapps to apologize for the temporary inconvenience he was causing in the prison. When he returned to the wing in which the detainees were being interrogated Luitenant Verkramp found that his orders were being obeyed to the letter.

“Who won Test Series in 1948?” shouted Sergeant Scheepers at the manager of Barclays Bank.

“I don’t know,” squealed the manager who had been twice kicked in the scrotum for his failure to follow cricket.

Verkramp asked the Sergeant to come out into the corridor.

“What do you want to know that for?” he asked.

“Seems a fairly easy question,” said the Sergeant.

“I suppose it does,” said Verkramp. He went to the next cell where the Dean of Piemburg had avoided a similar fate by knowing the road distance between Johannesburg and Capetown, the age of the Prime Minister, and what the initials USA stood for.

“You said ‘Any questions’,” the Security man explained when Verkramp demanded the reason for the quiz game.

“You dumb bastard,” Verkramp yelled, “I said ‘Any questions?’ not ‘Any questions.’ What do I have to do? Spell it out for you?”

“Yes sir,” said the man. Verkramp called the teams together and briefed them more explicitly.

“What we need is proof that these men have been conspiring to overthrow the government by force,” he explained, and got the Security men to write it down. “Secondly that they have been actively inciting the blacks to rebel.” The men wrote that down too. “Thirdly that they have been receiving money from overseas. Fourthly that they are all Communists or communist sympathizers. Is that quite clear?”

Sergeant Scheepers asked if he could tell the Mayor that one of the aldermen had said he was a cuckold.

“Of course,” Verkramp said. “Tell him that the Alderman is prepared to give evidence to that effect. Get them started giving evidence against one another and we’ll soon get to the root of this affair.”

The men went back to the cells with their list of questions and the interrogations began again. Having satisfied himself that his men were keeping to the point, Luitenant Verkramp returned to the police station to see if there were any messages from his secret agents. He was rather disappointed to find that none had arrived but he supposed it was too early to expect any concrete results.

Instead he decided to test the effectiveness of the aversion therapy on the volunteers on the top floor who were still screaming rhythmically. He sent for Sergeant Breitenbach and ordered him to bring a coon girl from the cells.

The Sergeant went away and returned with what he evidently thought was a suitable subject. She was fifty-eight if she was a day and hadn’t been a beauty at half her age. Luitenant Verkramp was horrified.

“I said ‘Girl’ not ‘Old bag’,” he shouted. “Take her away and get a proper girl.”

Sergeant Breitenbach went back downstairs with the old woman wondering why it was that you called a black man of seventy or eighty a boy but you couldn’t call a woman of the same age a girl. It didn’t seem to make sense. In the end he found a very large black girl and told her to come up with him to the top floor. Ten minutes and eight konstabels later, one of whom had a broken nose and another complained he couldn’t find his testicles, they managed to get the girl up to the top floor only to find that Verkramp was still not satisfied.

“Do you really think that any sane man would find that attractive?” he asked pointing to the unconscious and battered body that the konstabels were trying to keep on its feet and off theirs. “What I want is a nice kaffir girl that any man would find attractive.”

“Well, you go and get one then,” Sergeant Breitenbach told him. “You just go down to the cells and tell a nice attractive black girl that the policemen on the top floor want her and see what happens.”

“The trouble with you, Sergeant,” Verkramp said as they went down for the third time, “is that you don’t understand psychology. If you want people to do things for you, you mustn’t frighten them. That’s particularly true with blacks. You must use persuasion.” He stopped outside a cell door. The Sergeant unlocked it and the large black girl was pitched inside. Verkramp stepped over her body and looked at the women cringing against the wall.

“Now then, there’s no need to be frightened,” he told them. “Which one of you girls would like to come upstairs and see some pictures? They are pretty pictures.” There was no great rush of volunteers. Verkramp tried again.

“No one is going to hurt you. You needn’t be afraid.”

There was still no response apart from a moan from the girl on the floor. Verkramp’s sickly smile faded.

“Grab the bitch,” he yelled at the konstabels and the next moment a thin black girl was being hustled upstairs.

“You see what I mean about psychology,” Luitenant Verkramp said to the Sergeant as they followed her up. Sergeant Breitenbach still had his doubts.

“I notice you didn’t pick a big one,” he said.

On the top floor the girl had her clothes stripped off her by several willing konstabels whom Verkramp put down on his list for treatment and was then paraded before the volunteers in the nude. Luitenant Verkramp was delighted by their lack of positive reaction.

“Not an erection from one of them,” he said. “That’s scientific proof that the treatment works.”

Sergeant Breitenbach was, as usual, more sceptical.

“They haven’t had any sleep for two days,” he said. “If you brought Marilyn Monroe in here in the raw, I don’t suppose you’d get much response.”

Verkramp looked at him disapprovingly. “Peeping Thomas,” he said.

“I don’t see what that has to do with it,” said the Sergeant. “All I’m saying is that if you want to be really scientific you should bring a white girl up and try her on them.” Luitenant Verkramp was furious.

“What a disgusting suggestion,” he said. “I wouldn’t dream of subjecting a white girl to such a revolting ordeal.”

He gave orders for the treatment to be continued for at least another two days.

“Two more days of this and I’ll be dead,” moaned one of the volunteers.

“Better dead than a black in your bed,” said Verkramp and went back to his office to draw up the plans for the mass treatment of the other five hundred and ninety men under his temporary command.

 At Florian’s café Verkramp’s secret agents were making remarkable headway in their search for members of the sabotage movement. After years of frustration in which they had mingled in liberal circles but had been unable to find anyone remotely connected with the Communist party or prepared to admit that they approved of violence, they had suddenly met quite a number. 745396 had discovered 628461 who seemed to know something about the explosion at the telephone exchange and 628461 had gained the very definite impression that 745396 wasn’t unconnected with the destruction of the transformer on the Durban Road. Likewise 885974 had bumped into 378550 at the University Canteen and was sounding him out about his part in the disappearance of the radio mast, while hinting that he could tell 378550 something about the bomb that had destroyed the railway bridge. All over Piemburg Verkramp’s agents had something to report in the way of progress and busied themselves encoding messages and moving digs as instructed. By the following day the conviction that each agent held that he was onto something big grew when 745396 and 628461, who had arranged to meet at the University Canteen, found a sympathetic audience in 885974 and 378550, who had been so successful there the previous day they had decided to return. As the coalescence of conspirators continued Verkramp was kept busy trying to decode the messages. This complex process was made even more difficult because he had no idea on which day the message had been sent. 378550’s message had been deposited at the foot of a tree in the park which was the correct drop for Sunday but after working at it for two hours using the code for that day Verkramp had managed to turn “hdfpkymwrqazx-tivbnkon” which was designed to be difficult to understand into “car dog wormsel sag infrequent banal out plunge crate”, which wasn’t. He tried Saturday’s code and got “dahlia chrysanthemum fertilizer decorative foxglove dwarf autumn bloom shady”. Cursing himself for the limited vocabulary provided by page 33 of the Piemburg Bulb Catalogue which he had chosen as the codebook for Saturday on account of its easy availability, Verkramp turned wearily to Friday’s codebook and finally came up with the deciphered message that Agent 378550 had carried out instructions and was proceeding to new lodgings. After six hours hard labour Verkramp felt his efforts merited something more interesting than that. He tried 885974’s message and was glad to find it came out correctly first time and contained the reassuring information that the agent had made contact with several suspected saboteurs but was having difficulty in reaching the drop as he was being followed.

885974’s experience was not confined to him alone. In their attempts to find where the other saboteurs lived Verkramp’s secret agents were trailing one another all over Piemburg or being tailed. As a result they were covering an enormous mileage every day and were too tired when they finally got home to sit down and encode the messages he expected. Then again they had to move lodgings every day on his orders and this required finding new ones so that all in all the sense of disorientation already induced by the multiple identities their work demanded became more pronounced as the days went by. By Monday 628461 wasn’t sure who he was or where he lived or even what day of the week it was. He was even more uncertain where 745396 lived. Having tailed him successfully for fifteen miles up and down the sidestreets of Piemburg he wasn’t altogether surprised when 745396 gave up the attempt to shake him off and returned to a lodging house on Bishoff Avenue only to find that he had left there two days before. In the end he slept on a bench in the park and 628461, who had several large blisters from all this walking, turned to go back to his digs when he became aware that someone was following him. He stepped up his limp and the footsteps behind him did the same. 628461 gave up the struggle. He no longer cared if he was followed home. “I’ll move in the morning anyway,” he decided and climbed the stairs to his room in the Lansdowne Boarding House. Behind him 378550 went back to his digs and spent the night encoding a message for Luitenant Verkramp giving the address of a suspected saboteur. Since he started it at ten-thirty on Monday and finished it at two a.m. on Tuesday Verkramp had even more difficulty than usual making out what it meant. According to Monday’s codebook it read “Suggest raid on infestation wood but pollute in the”, while Tuesday’s ran “Chariot Pharoah withal Lansdowne Boarding House for Frederick Smith.” By the time Luitenant Verkramp had decided that there was no sense in “Chariot Pharoah withal infestation wood but pollute in the” there was no point in raiding the Lansdowne Boarding House, Frederick Smith had registered at the YMCA as Piet Retief.

 If Luitenant Verkramp was having difficulties in the communications field much the same could be said of both Mrs Heathcoat-Kilkoon and Kommandant van Heerden.

“Are you sure he’s not there?” Mrs Heathcoat-Kilkoon asked the Major, whom she had sent on his daily outing into Weezen to tell the Kommandant that they were expecting him to lunch.

“Absolutely certain,” said Major Bloxham. “I sat in the bar for nearly an hour and there was no sign of the fellow. Asked the barman if he’d seen him. Hadn’t.”

“I think it’s most peculiar,” said Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon. “His card definitely said he would stay at the hotel.”

“Damned peculiar card, if you ask me,” said the Colonel. “Dearest Daphne, Kommandant van Heerden has pleasure-”

“I thought it was a very amusing card,” Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon interrupted him. “It shows what a sense of humour the Kommandant has.”

“Didn’t strike me as having a sense of humour,” said the Major who had not got over his encounter with the Kommandant.

“Personally I think we should be thankful for small mercies,” said the Colonel. “It doesn’t look as if the swine is coming after all.” He went out to the yard at the back of the house where Harbinger was grooming a large black horse. “Everything ready for tomorrow, Harbinger? Fox fit?”

“Took him for a run this morning,” said Harbinger, a thin man with eyes close together and short hair. “He went quite quick.”

“Fine, fine,” said the Colonel. “Well we’ll get off early.” In the house Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon was still puzzled.

“Are you sure you went to the right hotel?” she asked the Major.

“I went to the store and asked for the hotel,” the Major insisted. “The fellow tried to sell me a bed. Seemed to think that’s what I wanted.”

“It sounds most peculiar,” said Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon.

“I said I didn’t want a bed,” said the Major. “He sent me across the road to the hotel in the end.”

“And they hadn’t heard of him?”

“Didn’t know anything about any Kommandant van Heerden.”

“Perhaps he’ll turn up tomorrow,” said Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon wistfully.