The Blood of an Englishman Read Free

cold, and there was certainly less of a draught in there. As a matter of fact, he hadn’t breathed through that particular nostril in three days. The fly moved across.
    The prisoner plainly found all this fascinating. He sat pretty still himself, and just stared and sweated a lot.
    Kramer stared back and didn’t sweat at all. His fever had left him overnight, and now his sore throat had almost gone too. He felt the fly move upwards and pause. Paper handkerchiefs, each guaranteed softer than the kinky alternative of a baby’s bum, had rubbed his upper lip raw, giving it an unusual sensitivity, and Kramer found it easy to picture what was happening. The fly was standing on five of its legs, scratching its horrible hairy head with the sixth, and wondering if it should toss a coin or something. Another shuffle. It had opted for the left nostril after all, and was tickling its way in against the hairs.
    This brought a small, sly smile to the prisoner’s narrow face. Meerkat Marais—Mongoose to his English associates—always liked to think he knew more than you did, and it didn’t much matter what.
    Kramer reached for the tissue box without any hint of this movement reaching his head. He spread the tissue out over his right hand. He pinched his nose suddenly, quite hard, and then blew the dead insect into the exact center of the paper square.
    “It never fails,” he murmured.
    Fully five minutes went by before the prisoner finally stopped thinking about the fly, and broke the silence to ask, in a thin, strained voice, why he had been made to sit on top of the filing cabinet.
    Kramer shrugged, and dropped the crumpled tissue into the waste-paper bin at his side. “I heard you have this fear of heights, Meerkat old son.”
    “Hey?”
    “Ach, I thought we might as well start off in a small way, and see where we go from there. Okay?”
    Meerkat went ashen and gave a short, shocked laugh. “This is too way out for me, man!” he said. “I don’t understand! What heights?”
    Across the far side of the CID vehicle yard they were building an eighteen-story office block for the Mutual Insurance Company, and the top floor was almost finished. Kramer turned away from his window and looked at the flashily dressed figure perched in handcuffs on his filing cabinet. Meerkat understood all right. He was trembling like a church elder unwrapping dirty photographs of himself.
    “Come,” said Kramer, getting to his feet. “I know where there’s a nice stiff breeze.”
    “No!”
    “Pardon?”
    “Be fair, Lieutenant,” Meerkat pleaded. “How many hours have you had me here? Three? And you’ve—”
    “Just the two, Meerkat.”
    “Two then, but what have you asked me? Nothing! How am I supposed to know what you want? How am I supposed to guess? Hell, it could be
anything
, couldn’t it?”
    Kramer sat down again behind his bare desk. “No, man, it couldn’t,” he said. “Personally, I only deal in murder and robbery, so if I bring a guy in to talk to me, the topic’s already decided. If I don’t say anything, hell, that’s just because it’s not nice to interrupt.”
    “Interrupt what?”
    “Your flow, Meerkat. Your outpouring. The cleansing of your soul, your great unburdening. Believe me, Meerkat, you will feel a whole lot better for it.”
    Meerkat relaxed slightly. “I’m supposed to have something to confess?” he asked with a jittery smile. “This is the first I knew of it!”
    “Ja, that’s possible,” agreed Kramer.
    The prisoner was a proper little psychopath of the kind that starts at three by pissing in his granny’s hot water bottle, and after that there’s no holding him. People just didn’t matter to Meerkat, and he’d done things to people that didn’t bearthinking about, all without turning a hair, sometimes without even noticing.
    “You’re still not putting me in the picture, Lieutenant.”
    “Maybe it’s the other way round.”
    “Sorry?”
    “Archie Bradshaw—tell me about