The Song Dog by James McClure Page A

green, and that was the end of the bastard. Maaties had a damned good laugh over that, and so did I. He said he must take a look at the reserve sometime, now his curiosity had been aroused in it—Good God, something’s just struck me …!”
    “Fire away,” invited Kramer. “What is it?”
    “There was a point, toward the end of the evening,” said Grantham, glancing at that cockpit of a watch of his, “when dear old Maaties, frightfully pissed by then, started to tell me something he didn’t finish. He was obviously upset by it, but started getting bolshy when I couldn’t follow his drift and said never mind, I was too damned drunk to understand and we’d best change the subject. I said, ‘The hell with you, Kritzinger!’—and said I’d show him which of us was too damned drunk by thrashing him at snooker. I think we’d reached the third frame when he put up his hands, was sick into a spittoon, and toddled off home.” Grantham paused, shook his head, and gave a three-gins sigh. “Last time I ever saw the poor sod.”
    Kramer frowned, slightly confused. “So you’d left here and driven to some hotel somewhere?” he said. “At approximately what time did this—”
    “Hotel? What hotel? Don’t quite follow …”
    “You know, where they had the snooker table, hey?”
    Grantham laughed. “What a sheltered life you’ve led in the Orange Free State, Lieutenant,” he said. “I’ve a full-size table of my own in the billiards room immediately behind you, should you ever feel up to a frame!”
    Now that, thought Kramer, is what you really call posh, and it called to mind the jokes he’d heard told about Natal farmers driving Rolls Royces because the glass partition behind the driver stopped livestock breathing down your neck on the way to market. He was also beginning to see why Maaties Kritzinger had felt so attracted to Grantham’s company, having only a detective sergeant’s pay and a large family to provide for, yet a chance here to share in the good life whenever he fancied it. What else was on offer at Moon Acre, he wondered—and what did Grantham himself get out of this unusual liaison of the cop and the sugar baron? Some bending of the law, when it came to his labor force, that much was already apparent … But was that all? And what was it about Grantham’s coons that they caused so much mayhem?
    “Lieutenant?” prompted Grantham. “We appear to have become sidetracked …”
    “Maaties was getting ‘bolshy,’ you said, because you couldn’t follow what he was talking about.”
    “Well, I’m damned if anyone could have made sense of it, and that’s why, until now, I’d dismissed the whole thing as a bit of drunken nonsense. Thing was, Maaties muttered something about some native whose name I didn’t catch and then started getting worked up over something he kept saying in Zulu. I’ve had a fair knowledge of the lingo myself, but the best I could make of it was:
the song dog
. I’d just asked him whether this was a flowery sort of reference to the jackal, with its well-known weakness for howling at the moon, when he lost his temper with me, silly sod, and now we’ll never know. I’d like to have, though, because as fearless as he was, this brute had very definitely put the wind up the poor fellow.”
    Hell, I’m going to be dreaming bloody dogs tonight, thought Kramer.

9
    T HE POLICE STATION at Jafini looked a lot better after dark, almost welcoming, in the way its unshaded bulbs thinned the thick surrounding hedge of Christ-thorn, filling it with speckles of bright light.
    Terblanche must have heard the Chevrolet, which had somehow lost part of its exhaust pipe, approaching from quite a distance, for he was there to meet it, hands on hips and his mouth pursed tight, more than ever a picture of utter fatigue.
    “I must get that exhaust fixed for you in the morning, Tromp,” he said. “You can’t go sneaking up on bad guys with that!”
    “Ja, it’s a bit