The Gooseberry Fool by James Mcclure Read Free Book Online Page A

quality of cattle grazed the slopes around. He saw none. He listened for the zipping whistles of the herd boys keeping their charges together on dipping day, but heard none.
    He stopped. This place was indeed very peculiar. If an ache in his body had not persisted to remind him of how he had spent the night, he would have cursed himself for drinking too much. Even so, had he sunk an oil drum of Moses Makatini’s moonshine, Robert’s Halt would still have seemed unreal.
    There was nothing tangible he could deduce from his observations, but they bred caution within him. So he found a cross country route to the trading store which would allow him to approach unnoticed—the path was so overgrown he had little chance of meeting anyone else on it, either.
    As he descended toward the river, Zondi began to hear sounds as confusing as everything else: dull thuds and scraping and the squeal of metal, yet no voices. By then he should have been close enough to hear even a child laugh.
    The branches thinned and he saw Robert’s Halt across the river—and a sight quite extraordinary. The place was surrounded by policemen, the whites armed with sten guns and the Africans with spears. Their riot vans unfortunately blocked off a proper view of what was going on beyond them.
    Zondi cursed. Cursed and swore because he had been given a car without a radio. There must have been sudden, dramatic developments in the case he was unaware of.
    As he continued walking toward the hamlet, his mind struggled with conjecture, tried to think of what possible reason there could be for such a turnout. Even if Shabalala had taken a gun from Swart’s home, and was expected to resist arrest, six men at the most would have been sufficient for the job.
    The thuds and squeals ceased.
    Zondi checked his step, slipping behind an aloe to see what happened next. There was the sound of an engine starting up and then, from behind the riot vans, came a truck piled high with villagers and their property.
    What an idiot he had been: it was an eviction. An ordinary Black Spot eviction, one of hundreds, an everyday event—and he had allowed his imagination to distort his vision. Of course there were thuds when furniture was loaded on a truck; naturally there were noises when valuable roof sheeting was stripped off to be removed as well; obviously it was not a time for talk, nor for children to laugh. As for the cordon of police, that was standard procedure to prevent any stupidity.
    A bulldozer roared into raucous life and emerged from the scrub to flatten the vacated homes. It waited, however, for three other trucks to carry away the last of the people. They forded the river close to where Zondi stood and he could see no men among them, except for the very old. Certainly nobody resembling the description he had been given of Shabalala.
    Which was hardly surprising. With the Force out in force, Robert’s Halt was the last place a killer on the run would want to be that particular morning.
    The Trekkersburg police mortuary was a squat red-brick structure almost undetectable in a dip in the long grass and weeds behind the barracks. From the low viewpoint afforded the driver of a modern American car, it was, in fact, invisible; you just had to commit yourself to a well-worn, twisting track that revealed all rather suddenly.
    Kramer braked hard and drew his Chevrolet in beside the Pontiac owned by Strydom. Only one window in the four deadpan walls was at eye level; through it he could see Sergeant Van Rensburg in the office taking a fortifying nip of Cape brandy. Van Rensburg fortunately did not see him; the man was a tiresome bastard at the best of times.
    First the fly screen and then the big metal doors, a sudden chill that was not entirely a matter of temperature, and the familiar sight of Strydom up to his elbows in another man. Enjoying every moment of it, too.
    “Aha!” said Strydom, bringing out a brace of lungs and taking them over to the sluice.
    “Sis,”