Thirteenth chapter
It’s sad but most of us prefer destroying (said Oom Schalk Lourens) to building. Making something is much harder work than blowing it up.
(Historical note: Herman Charles Bosman, author of the famous short stories featuring the tale-spinning farmer of Abjaterskop, never actually revealed who he really based Oom Schalk’s character on. This story uses family lore and legend to arrive at that version of events. I believe Bosman would have raised a glass of peach brandy to the invention.)
The next stop, said Bernardus van Aswegen after checking his railway time table, was Tugela at six thirty this morning. Tugela was hardly a station, more of a siding with a large water tank, but many Zulu workers from the gold mines were getting off there to visit family in the mountains. The train also needed to take on water. The duration of the stop was scheduled for fifty minutes.
“Lekker, good,” Gerrit Johannes said with his mouth full, “we can get off there.”
They were all eating bowls of curry and rice from the train kitchen, even Miss Emily perched on the cot. Johnny Zulu and Manny Porra ate squatting against the locked door, pick-axes leaning against their knees, ready for action should someone forcibly try to enter the train conductor’s wagon.
Bernardus van Aswegen shared the seat under the little window with Gerrit Johannes. He was not in a good mood.
“Get off there and go where?” he growled. “You’re surrounded by fucking mountains.”
“Come on, jislaaik,” Gerrit Johannes shot back, “Emily’s move against the one-eyed coward changes everything, I have the real diamond now, we don’t have to go to Durban anymore.”
The way Bernardus van Aswegen understood it, Gerrit Johannes was just saying this because Miss Emily believed she had taken the real diamond. Bernardus van Aswegen believed the real diamond was on its way to Louis Botha in Pretoria, where the Prime Minister would quietly sell it for enough money to help start a war against the English.
“Ja, ja, orright,” he said, trying not to shout, “but what are you going to do with the real diamond in the middle of nowhere?”
Johnny Zulu grinned. “Not nowhere, it’s home. many huts in the mountains, many friends.”
“Many pretty girls,” giggled Manny Porra.
“Their friends will hide us,” Gerrit Johannes said. “They know there’s a train from Durban to Pretoria every week, ordinary train without soldiers, it stops everywhere, please check for us when it arrives here. We will board it back north.”
“I’m not hiding in a stinking black hut!” Bernardus van Aswegen shouted.
Johnny Zulu and Manny Porra gave the bearded giant a cool look, perhaps considering their pick-axe swings to remove his large head.
Gerrit Johannes smiled. “Relax, Oom Bernardus, you’re not hiding anywhere. You’re not under suspicion. Stay on the train, help Lieutenant Connelly’s men look for us, do what a good train conductor does, no-one’s after you.”
“The train has to go to Durban, am I right?” asked Miss Emily, looking as if she wished she could use her cute little pistol on everyone present. “It can’t stop and turn around?”
Bernardus van Aswegen grimly shook his head. “There’s no turn around point on this line. If Lawrence demand I telegram Pretoria from Frere, the next station with a telegram service, we could have Pretoria ordering the train to a siding, to wait for assistance.”
“That means a train from Durban,” said Johnny Zulu. “It’s much closer now than Pretoria.”
“Durban always sends a train to help a train in trouble,” said Manny Porra.
Bernardus van Aswegen did not look pleased about this. “That’s true, Gerrit. The train coming to help would most likely be the train you want to grab going north, and I guarantee you there will be military reinforcements on board.”
Gerrit Johannes gave Miss Emily a dark little smile. “You see what you did? We’re bloody well stuck here.”
She glared at him. “We can get off at Frere, idiot. That’s the nearest station if you want to send a telegram for help. Everyone will be worried about that and Connelly’s wound, we can sneak off easily.”
“Ja-nee, sure, of course, as easily as your peanut brain screwed up my really great plan,” he shot back.
During her rather sleazy days as a saloon performer, Miss Emily obviously did hear quite dirty and even explosive language. What she now suggested Gerrit Johannes did with his really great plan nearly blew out the wagon’s window, causing Johnny Zulu and Manny Porra to look at her with something close to respect.
Nurse Evelyn’s surname is lost in time now, we know she was young but not what she looked like. What we know with some certainty is that, after Neef Berg persuaded her to deliver an important sealed letter to someone in the neighbouring town of Winterton, she borrowed her father’s best horse and rode through the early dawn as fast as she could.
The someone in Winterton was its undertaker, of all people. Enoch Koch was the son of a proud German and a good English woman. His name had been his late mother’s idea, the Bible told her Enoch was Methuselah’s father and lived for a long time as well. She hoped the same for her only son. On the day Nurse Evelyn knocked at his door with that fateful letter from Neef Berg, he was just twenty-three years old, some distance from beating his biblical namesake’s three-hundred-and-something years. And nobody ever called him Enoch, not even his mother. He was known far and wide as Knock, Knocky. Pronounce his given name loudly and correctly and you will understand why.
Knocky Koch asked his young wife to brew Nurse Evelyn fresh coffee, while he went through to his funeral parlour and sat down at the foot of the coffin he was polishing. He unsealed the letter, read it slowly. He was not a fast reader. And then he had to read it a second time, because he couldn’t believe his good fortune. The right hand of Louis Botha was reaching out to him from Bergville’s small hospital, asking him to urgently perform a glorious task in the name of the lost Transvaal Republic. His late father Heinrich rode with General Louis Botha and Neef Berg, and fell in their final battle with seven English bullets in him. Knocky was only thirteen at the time, but he made his father a beautiful cherrywood coffin with his own hands.
Knocky faced one problem. Where, in such a short time, could he get enough explosives to blow up a train track?
Ralie Koch, the plump wife of Knocky and as Boer as biltong and peach brandy, was only a year older than Nurse Evelyn and very glad of her company. After the second strong coffee and second slice of home-baked milk-tart, their talk turned to babies. Ralie was pregnant with her first and wanted two, a boy and a girl. Nurse Evelyn recently helped bring a baby into the world, her first attendance at such a bloody and nerve-shattering event, and since then her boyfriend risked losing teeth if he as much as laid a hand on her knee.
Ralie wanted a family, not another war. She wanted Knocky to stop going to those so-called secret meetings everyone in the district knew about. She wanted him to get pissed with men who had wives and children, who planned for the future, not these fools who talked of a grand rebellion against the English. Knocky was thirteen and basically the man in the house when his father’s body came home shot to pieces, what in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost did Knocky know about fighting a war?
Knocky, at that moment, was quickly scribbling a note to one of the foolish rebels he regularly got pissed with. Peet Jansen, road-builder, someone who knew how to blast a hole in a mountain and build a road through it, an expert who knew everything there was to know about explosives, and how to get them.
Lieutenant Connelly ignored Captain Lawrence cowering on the bench, but he made Detective Constables Blair and Thatcher swear they would use his men to find that evil woman and retrieve the King’s Diamond he was sacrificing his life for. And then the young officer died.
Captain Lawrence mumbled something about Connelly’s bravery, then rang for someone to come and clean up the incredibly wide pool of blood. Nobody came. He asked Blair and Thatcher to find the train conductor, please.
“Yes, sir, right away, sir,” the detectives said and went away, leaving him alone with the body and the blood.
Blair and Thatcher were not simply after a thief now. Stealing a diamond was one thing, killing a man was murder. Emily Gibson was a murderer, and the streets of London taught Scotland Yard detectives how to catch a murderer.