He was just considering what the Viceroy would have done had he found himself in a similar situation when his attention was drawn to one of the blue gums. An odd sort of knocking and ripping sound was coming from its trunk. Kommandant van Heerden peered into the gloom. Something strange was moving there. By bending down so that the creature was silhouetted against the orange glow that coloured the night sky, the Kommandant could make out its shape. In imitation of a woodpecker, the great vulture hung to the trunk of the tree and contented itself with scraps of the late Zulu cook.
For the second time that night the vulture brought a message to a watcher in the garden of Jacaranda House, but if the Bishop of Barotseland had mistaken the bird for the shape of God, Kommandant van Heerden made no such error. What he had seen of the scavenger's hooked profile reminded him too closely for comfort of several prisoners in Piemburg gaol who would welcome his arrival there with just such relish. The Kommandant shuddered and turned hastily away from this vision of his future. And as he turned away he heard a loud splash coming from the back of the house. Loud splashes played no part in the régime he had imposed on Jacaranda Park. There was something, he felt, positively sinister in loud splashes at this time of night, a view which was evidently shared by the vulture which flapped away from its hors d'oeuvres to see if its next course was going to be something drowned.
Kommandant van Heerden followed it less optimistically and found himself beside a privet hedge on the other side of which he could hear something going about some grim business. Whatever was busy behind the hedge was reciting to itself as it worked, work which necessitated the dropping of large heavy objects, weighted no doubt, into deep water. The Kommandant couldn't hear much of the song because from behind him across the Park there came the sound of running feet and a slobbering and snuffling noise which gained intensity from moment to moment. He glanced over his shoulder and saw racing towards him the pack of tracker dogs and dozens of policemen. A few seconds later they were on him and, pinned to the hedge, he watched the tide of animals and men wash past him and round the corner. He sighed with relief and followed in their wake.
The Bishop of Barotseland was less fortunate. His poor hearing and the fact that he was still wearing the bathing-cap prevented him hearing the approach of the dogs. One moment he was standing by the pool looking down at the revolver, and reciting from his grandfather's favourite poem, and the next he was engulfed in dogs. Muzzles raised, fangs bared, with slobbering jowls they came, and the Bishop, overwhelmed by their rush, fell backwards into the swimming-pool, still clutching the revolver. As he went he involuntarily pulled the trigger and a single shot disappeared harmlessly into the night sky. The Bishop surfaced in the middle of the pool and looked around him. The sight was not one to reassure him. The pool was filled with struggling Alsatians and, as he watched, others launched themselves from the edges and joined the hordes already in the water. A particularly ferocious hound just in front of him opened its mouth and the Bishop had just enough time to take a gulp of air and disappear before the dog bit him. He swam the length underwater and surfaced. A dog snapped at him and he swam back. Above him paws thrashed the water into foam as the Bishop pondered this new manifestation of the Almighty. Evidently he had not got out of the pool quietly enough the first time, and God had come in to get him in the shape of dozens of dogs and he was just wondering how this collective appearance could be reconciled with the notion that God was one and indivisible when his arm was seized and he was dragged out of the pool by several policemen. Thankful for this deliverance and too bewildered to wonder how policemen fitted into this spectacle of divinity he stared back at the water. Hardly a foot of the surface of the pool was free of dogs.
The next moment his wrists were handcuffed behind him and he was swung round.
'That is the swine all right. Take him into the house,' said the Kommandant, and the Bishop was frogmarched by several konstabels across the drive and into the family home. Naked and wet, Jonathan Hazelstone stood among the potted plants in the great hall still wearing the bathing-cap. From a great distance and far beyond the frontiers of sanity he heard the Kommandant whisper, 'Jonathan Hazelstone, I charge you with the wilful murder of one Zulu cook and God knows how many policemen, the wilful destruction of Government property and being in unlawful possession of weapons calculated to harm life and limb.'
He was too dazed and too deaf to hear the Kommandant tell Sergeant de Kock to take him down into the cellar and keep him safely under guard until morning.
'Wouldn't he be safer down at the police station?' the Sergeant suggested.
But Kommandant van Heerden was too exhausted to leave Jacaranda House and besides he was looking forward to spending the night in a house renowned throughout South Africa for refined living.
'The place is ringed with men,' he said, 'and besides, we've been having complaints from the neighbours about the screams from the cells. Up here nobody will hear him when he yells. I'll cross-examine him in the morning.'
And as the Bishop of Barotseland was led down into the cellar of Jacaranda House, Kommandant van Heerden wearily climbed the staircase to find himself a nice comfortable bedroom. He chose one with a blue bedspread on an enormous double bed, and as he stepped naked between the sheets, he considered himself a lucky man.
'To think that I can commandeer the house that once belonged to the Viceroy of Matabeleland,' he said to himself and turning on his side between the remarkably smooth sheets, promptly fell asleep.
Chapter 9
Few other people in Piemburg dropped off to sleep so easily that night. Too many disturbing things were happening around them for their sleep to be anything but fitful. In Upper Piemburg the searchlights swung slowly to and fro around the perimeter of Jacaranda Park, illuminating with quite astonishing brilliance the great hoardings that announced the arrival of death by two of its most awful means. Designed originally for the Army before being turned over to the police force, the searchlights did a great deal more than that. As they traversed the Park, the neighbouring suburbs and the city itself, they turned night into brilliant day with some remarkable results, particularly in the case of a number of chicken farms whose battery hens were driven to the verge of nervous breakdown by finding their already short nights suddenly diminished to something like four minutes.
Families which had taken the precaution of locking their dogs in the backyard and of sprinkling their sheets with DDT and whose bedrooms lay in the path of the searchlights found dawn break upon them with a rapidity and brilliance they had never before experienced, to be succeeded by a duskless night, and the process repeated endlessly while they tossed and turned in their itching beds. Outside along the roads rumbled the armoured cars and trucks of the police and bursts of firing interrupted the silence of the night, as the crews followed the Kommandant's instructions to shoot any small bush resembling Luitenant Verkramp.
The switchboard at the Piemburg Hospital was deluged with calls from agitated callers who wanted to know the symptoms of bubonic plague and rabies and how to treat the diseases. In the end the frantic telephonist refused to take any more calls, a dereliction of duty that had fatal results in two cases of heart attack.
Only Konstabel Els slept soundly in the isolation hospital. Occasionally he twitched in his sleep but only because he was dreaming of battle and sudden death. On the Vlockfontein road families whose cars had broken down in the long queue trudged towards Piemburg. It was a hot night and as they walked they sweated.