The House Gun Read Free Page B

was down. The police searched the garden and found a gun in a clump of fern. Baker and Dladla immediately identified it as the gun kept in the house as mutual protection against burglars; neither could recall in which of their three names it was licensed. The police proceeded to the cottage. There was no response to knocking on the door, but Ntuli insisted that Lindgard was inside. The police then effected entry by forcing the kitchen door and found that Lindgard was in the bedroom. He seemed dazed. He said he had been asleep. Asked whether he knew his friend Carl Jespersen had been attacked, he went white in the face (interpretation) and demanded, Is he dead?
    He then protested about the police invasion of his cottage and insisted that he be allowed to make several telephone calls, one of which was to his lawyer. The lawyer evidently advised him not to resist arrest and met him at the police station where fingerprint tests were inconclusive because the clump of fern had been watered recently and the fingerprints on the gun were largely obliterated by mud.
    This is not a detective story.
    Harald has to believe that the mode of events that genre represents is actuality.
    This is the sequence of actions by which a charge of murder is arrived. When he recounts to Claudia what he heard from the lawyer she moves her head from side to side at each stage of detail and does not interrupt. He has the impression she is hearing him out; yet when he has finished, she says nothing. He sees, from her silence, he has said nothing; brought back nothing that would explain. Duncan came out of that man’s house and dropped something in the garden on his way back to his cottage. A gun was found. Duncan said he was asleep and did not hear either his friends or the police when they knocked at the door. None of this tells anything more, gives any more explanation than there was in the confrontation across the barrier in court. His brief embrace with head turned away. His reply to any need: nothing. Harald
sees, informed by Claudia’s presence, that what he has related, to himself and her, is indeed a crude whodunnit.
    Bail application by the good friend cocksure lawyer had been again refused.
    But why? Why? All she can call to mind is some unquestioned accepted reasoning that one who is likely to commit another crime cannot be let loose on the mere security of money. Duncan, a danger to society! For god’s sake, why?
    The prosecutor’s got wind of some idea that he might disappear—leave.
    The country?
    Now they are in the category of those who buy themselves out of retribution because they can afford to put up bail and then estreat. He did not know whether she understood this implication of refusal, for their son and themselves.
    Where does the idea come from?
    The girl’s been called for questioning, apparently she said he’s been threatening to take up a position he’s been offered with a practice in Singapore. I don’t know—to get away from her, it sounds like. Something she let slip, maybe intentionally. Who can fathom what was going on between them.
    If Claudia is dissatisfied with what little Harald has learned in explanation, could she have been more successful? Well, let her try, then.
    An awaiting-trial prisoner has the right to visits. Her turn: I’d like to talk to that Julian whatever-his-name, before we go.
    Harald knows that both have an irrational revulsion against contact with the young man: don’t kill the messenger, the threat is the message.
    Claudia is not the only woman with a son in prison. Since this afternoon she has understood that. She is no longer the one who doles out comfort or its placebos for others’ disasters, herself safe, untouchable, in another class. And it’s not the just laws that have brought about this form of equality; something quite other. There’s
no sentimentality in this, either, which is why she will not speak of it to anyone, not even to