Riotous Assembly by Tom Sharpe Read Free Book Online

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

    happy 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    withdrawn from its scabbard, while his right hand held the thonged leash of a wild boar which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