The Song Dog by James McClure Read Free Book Online Page B

in her arm to take her mind off things.”
    “Then what about a close friend outside the force he might have talked to? Perhaps some bloke he went hunting with?”
    “
Hunting
with?” said Terblanche, glancing away from the track to look at Kramer in amused surprise.
    “Ach, the Colonel told me Kritz always took him a—”
    A sour laugh escaped Terblanche’s lips. “Ja, I know, big pieces of venison!—only he’d buy those off the game rangers, hey? Same as he once bought a box of mussels off me, only I bet he never told the Colonel that. Made sure he kept him happy, see, so he could carry on doing things his own sweet way, which meant just about ignoring the rest of us!”
    “Hmmm,” said Kramer, who knew the feeling.
    They reached the T-junction, where the track met thedistrict road from Jafini, and Terblanche stopped to check for oncoming traffic. Then he turned right.
    “Hey, wrong way!” said Kramer. “Jafini’s the other—”
    “Ach, I’ve changed my mind,” said Terblanche. “I’ve got my second wind now, and besides, if you go back for your car, you could be late for the postmortems.”
    Kramer knew a lie when he heard one, and wondered what had really prompted this sudden about-face in the station commander. “Listen, Hans,” he began, “if you think—”
    “Don’t worry, Tromp! I’ll be fine! I bet my stomach’s as tough as yours any day, hey?”
    Dear God, so that was what lay behind all this bullshit, thought Kramer: Terblanche was afraid he’d be branded a sissy if he turned tail on the postmortems. Nothing scared a member of the SAP more than being suspected of cowardice, of course—bar perhaps being seen as a kaffir-loving liberal, but then that was virtually one and the same thing, come to think of it.

6
    N KOSALA TURNED OUT to be Jafini times about three, only it did have a civic hall of sorts, built to an imposing Victorian design out of corrugated iron sheeting and painted maroon with brown woodwork. There was also a fairly modern police station in a pinkish brick, and right opposite, the sprawling, single-story hospital had been constructed of it, too.
    Terblanche drove straight round the back to an isolated building that had high, tiny windows, and stopped the Land Rover beside a mud-splattered Oldsmobile already parked there.
    “Doc’s beaten us to it, I see,” he said.
    “A doctor who’s
English-speaking
drives a heap like that?” said Kramer. “Why not the usual Merc? Isn’t he any bloody good?”
    “Ach, no, relax, Tromp! Doc is the dedicated type, hey? And a tip-top district surgeon, too—you ask any policeman around here. Whenever your wife or kiddies are sick, just give Doc a bell and he’ll soon have them—”
    “But what if they’re dead?” asked Kramer. “Is he any good at telling you how and why?”
    Terblanche winced. “Put it this way, I’ve never heard any complaints made.”
    “Hmmmm,” said Kramer.
    Back in the Free State, he’d had some bad experiences with doctors part-timing as district surgeons in remote rural areas.Some had not known much more about forensic pathology than the average backyard mechanic, armed with a grease-smudged manual from a newsstand, knew about automotive engineering. This meant, in practice, they were fine while coping with something fairly straightforward like strangulation by neck ligature, the equivalent of diagnosing when a fan belt was too tight, but God help the investigating officer if things proved any more complicated than that.
    “Come, and I’ll introduce you,” said Terblanche. “You’ll soon see there’s no basis for any misgivings!”
    Kramer followed Terblanche into a refrigeration room, empty except for about fourteen thousand flies, a hoist, and the acrid stench common to mortuaries, and saw two blurred figures through the frosted glass panels set in a big pair of cream doors.
    Terblanche hesitated, looking very shaky. “Er, that’s Doc through there and with him is Niko Claasens, the