Fifteenth Chapter
A leopard who changes his spots (said Oom Schalk Lourens) is like a wolf in sheep’s clothing…bloody dangerous.
Fresh horses, that was all Peet Jansen and Knocky Koch required from Bergville that day, and the town kindly provided them.
Outside the Bergville police station, where her boyfriend worked, Nurse Evelyn watched Peet Jansen and Knocky Koch gallop off towards Winterton. Then she went back inside, past the constable at the desk and through to the office where she spoke to her boyfriend.
“They’re on their way,” she said, breathing hard as if she had been out running.
“You know what to do,” said her boyfriend, sounding as tense as she did.
“May God forgive us.”
“God knows we’re doing the right thing,” her boyfriend said. “Do you know how much paperwork it would take to lay a decent charge? He could claim he was hallucinating from the pain.”
“Will someone warn Knocky’s wife? Ralie doesn’t want her baby’s father killed.”
“Knocky will spend some time in prison, that’s all, please stop worrying and kiss me.”
Nurse Evelyn kissed her boyfriend so furiously his police sergeant’s cap fell off. Then she hurried out and across the road to the town’s tiny hospital where Neef Berg was still asleep in the arms of Sister Morphine. He did wake up when he felt the prick of the needle in his arm. In his semi-drugged state he thought: Nurse Evelyn is giving me morphine again. Didn’t she inject me before Peet and Knocky got here? Knocky, what a name for an undertaker.
He was watching Nurse Evelyn’s breasts while she worked on him. Small breasts, but delightfully firm. Like the breasts of the retarded girl. He was eighteen or something and the retarted girl eleven or something, her breasts made her look older.
They were cousins. He took her into the summer twilight of the barn on her father’s farm. The grownups were burying someone’s grandmother in the family graveyard. Or was it someone’s grandfather? He heard the voices singing “Nearer my God to thee” as he unbuttoned his cousin’s dress. Or was it “Shall we gather at the river?” His cousin was giggling, she thought they were playing a game.
He was trying to penetrate her when the roof of the barn fell on him. That was what the weight of the girl’s father felt like. She started crying because her father was using very bad language. Next thing there was a rough rope around his feet and he was dragged to the stable where his cousin’s father leapt on a grey horse, or was it a black horse? Something was happening to his memory. The morphine slowly ate pieces of his brain, going crunch, crunch.
The horse dragged him all over that farm, over rocky land and ploughed field, until he had no skin left. The morphine did something strange to the light in his hospital room. It was getting dark and the dark had wings flapping at him. He tried to scream for help but Nurse Evelyn was the only person who came and she just stood there and glared at him.
She did speak once.
“My boyfriend can read Dutch,” she growled at him.
For some reason she sounded like his cousin’s father. The horse dragging made him feel as if he had been dunked in lava.
It was total agony. Everything hurt again. Why, for God’s sake? Did the collapsing balloon hit sharp rocks? Was he still in the gondola, being dragged by the wind over sharp stones in a field ploughed by his cousin’s father? Why did he have to keep on suffering like this? Was it really morphine or something worse? Fuck her, the bitch, Nurse Evelyn poisoned him, she should be shot. What happened to his pretty cowboy gun? Something was eating the light in his hospital room. He could hear the crunching sound, crunch, crunch, crunch, and he could feel the heavy darkness pressing down on
Nurse Evelyn, so tense she was close to screaming, waited a few seconds, then checked for a pulse before she closed his eyes. The vomit on the pillow was mixed with dark blood. Her police sergeant boyfriend had warned her this could happen. She stuck the filthy pillow, a vial with some poison and morphine still in it, and the used syringe into her shoulder bag. She went to the window and dropped the shoulder bag inside a bush where her boyfriend could find it. Then she ran to her matron’s office, calling for help.
Captain Lawrence sat on his bench and watched the rocks of the Drakensberg flash past his compartment window. The train was travelling downhill, gathering speed. According to the railway time table it would reach its next stop, the town of Frere, in less than two hours.
The floor of the compartment had turned into a misshapen mirror. It reflected a bit of the compartment and the mountains flitting past. The mirror was Lieutenant Connelly’s blood.
Emily Gibson took the great blue stone named after her smile, and she shot the young army officer to get it. This was not the army officer actually charged with the holy task of taking the Gibson diamond to Durban harbour and shipping it safely to the United Kingdom where it was supposed to become an eternal blue flame in the royal crown. That officer did nothing, absolutely nothing, to stop Emily Gibson from taking Emily’s Smile.
Captain Lawrence could see that cowardly officer, that snivelling bastard, when he leant forward and looked down at himself in the mirror of blood.
His wife, always protecting, always hiding the truth, knew he blinded himself in one eye when he couldn’t face the enemy. His only son, now off running cattle in the shadow of the bushveld hill where the battle happened, probably knew the truth as well.
Soon the entire civilised world would know it. His Majesty, the King of the British Empire, would know the full name and rank of the man who had lost him the greatest jewel ever found, this pale, disgusting, one-eyed coward staring up at Lawrence from the surface of a real hero’s blood.
At this shrieking moment in time, on this earth, only one person could save Lawrence from the sneers, the mocking, the utter shame of it. That person was staring up at him from the pool of blood. And that person was holding a forty-five Webley, his own service revolver.
No-one on board the train heard the shot. The wheels on the tracks, the slamming of the carriages and the rushing wind were making far too much noise.
Bernardus van Aswegen unlocked the door of his conductor’s wagon and stepped inside. Johnny Zulu and Manny Porra lowered their pick-axes and moved out of his way.
Gerrit Johannes was walking up and down, glaring through windows at the mountains roaring past, his face a rock. Miss Emily was still seated where the train conductor last saw her, but her face and body, her entire being, had turned into a clenched fist.
It was obvious to Bernardus van Aswegen that the two were not on speaking terms. He prayed the break between them would turn out to be permanent. That he could use against them. He had a plan of action now, a possible way of saving the disastrous situation and still get the real Gibson diamond to Louis Botha in Pretoria, but he needed time and patience to implement it. He needed to get to Frere and a telegram office first. Until then he had to play the ignorant fool Gerrit Johannes obviously believed him to be.
“Next stop, Frere,” he said quietly, “just under two hours from now, according to the time table.”
“Thank you,” Gerrit Johannes said curtly.
Miss Emily kept her pretty little mouth shut.
Bernardus van Aswegen looked forward to seeing their reactions when they realised he knew the truth. In his mind’s eye he could already see her pretty little mouth spew vomit all over her expensive dress. Fear and pain often caused that reaction.
Gerrit Johannes would probably try to talk his way out of it, come up with some bullshit explanation why the real diamond was still on the train. He was, Bernardus van Aswegen believed, a far greater danger than Emily Gibson. She did shoot Connelly but couldn’t bring herself to actually kill him. Gerrit Johannes would have put a bullet right between the young lieutenant’s eyes. When a leopard changed his spots, a comrade turned traitor, you were dealing with a being capable of anything. A bullet between his eyes might be the only sure way of stopping the monster.
Detective Constable Thatcher watched Connelly’s men stow the body at the back of the army wagon, in the space between the last seat and the wall. It bothered him, and he knew it would bother the hell out of his colleague Blair as well. They were taught a dead body should always be kept in the rear of a train, in case of infection. It didn’t bloody matter how clean the conductor’s wagon was.
Why did Bernardus van Aswegen insist on time to tidy it up first?
Perhaps the soldiers were right with their teasing. Perhaps the train conductor did have a lovely willing stowaway in his bed. Perhaps he wanted to put her off at Frere.
Where was the harm in that?
Watching a soldier cover Connelly’s stiff face with the flap of his sleeping bag, Thatcher reached a decision. He sincerely hoped Blair would agree with this: to him it seemed best to let Bernardus van Aswegen get away with this silly little subterfuge. Allow the man time to rid himself of whoever or whatever could probably cost him his job if discovered. So far he had proved himself a most admirable and dedicated train conductor.
(Historical note: according to traditional retelling, train conductors in India first started stowing bodies in their rear wagons to prevent passengers from robbing the deceased. Apparently they would steal the pennies from a dead man’s eyes if you let them)
Knocky didn’t stop at Winterton to tell his wife Ralie he would be missing lunch. That was something he always did if he had to miss lunch. Today he forced his sweating horse after Peet Jansen’s and they clattered loudly through the town and continued on their way to Frere. Time was of the essence, he could eat later.
The train must be on its way to the cutting by now. All thanks to the heavenly Father, the mountainous terrain forced the railway tracks through various tunnels and a number of turns; on an open plain instead of the Drakensberg the line would have been straight and downhill all the way. They would not have even considered what they were trying to achieve now.
Meanwhile the two Winterton policemen eating Ralie Koch’s milktart, sent to her kitchen by an urgent telegram from Bergville’s police sergeant, soon realised they were not going to apprehend Knocky quietly at home and thus probably save his life. They didn’t tell sad-eyed Ralie this, but what awaited her husband and dynamiter Peet Jansen on their way to Frere was a well-armed ambush organised by that town’s almost legendary police captain.
James Christian Wellington was not, as he himself often insisted, a blood relative of the great soldier who finally brought Napoleon Bonaparte to his knees. A brave forebear did do battle under that Wellington and later assumed the majestic surname out of respect, but James Christian’s mother stupidly lost it when she married a lowly carpenter named Smith. Yes, really, Smith. The worst surname a son with James Christian’s mighty ambitions could possibly suffer.
As he grew, his resistance against the surname grew stronger. He desperately wanted to be a Wellington again. Finally even his father named Smith relented and everyone started calling him James Christian Wellington. And he did his utmost to fill those boots.
In the war against the Boers no-one fought harder or dared more than James Christian Smith. After the signing of the peace, he was even mentioned in a speech of reconciliation delivered by Louis Botha himself. What Botha did not mention, let us be kind and say the union’s first prime minister probably did not know, was the terrifying fact that James Christian Wellington never took prisoners in the war. As the whispered saying went among those who knew: Raise a white flag against Wellington, and you sign your own death warrant in blood.
Frere, the town of his birth, refused to see him as anything but a war hero and quickly made him its district’s captain of police. And soon a new whispered saying started: Frere’s jails may be empty, but its graveyards are full.
This was the man waiting for Knocky Koch and Peet Jansen just outside Frere on the road to Winterton.