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at them?”
    “What the fuck do you think we’ve been doing? And it’s not anyone behind a bush. I’ll

    take my oath on that. We’ve pumped hundreds of rounds into that fucking bush and it still

    goes on firing back. I tell you it’s bloody well bewitched, that bush.”
    Luitenant Verkramp looked up the road uncertainly. He certainly wasn’t going to fall

    for any crap about bewitched bushes but on the other hand he could see that something

    pretty extraordinary had reduced the men to their pitiful condition. It was on the tip

    of his tongue to say, “You’re out of your minds,” but since they were out of just about

    everything else he thought it better not to. The question of morale was important and it

    had been at the back of his mind ever since they had left the station. One false move now and

    there would be a panic in the convoy. He decided to set the men an example.
    “I want two volunteers,” he told Sergeant de Kock and while the Sergeant went off to

    dragoon two mentally retarded Konstabels into volunteering, Luitenant Verkramp

    turned back to the plain-clothes men.
    “Where is this bush?” he asked.
    “Just inside the gateway. You can’t miss it.” they told him, adding, “And it won’t miss

    you either.”
    “We’ll see about that,” muttered the Luitenant and clambering off the Saracen he began

    to prepare for the reconnaissance. Luitenant Verkramp had attended an anti-guerrilla

    course at Pretoria and was well versed in the art of camouflage. By the time he had

    finished the three men who began crawling up the ditch towards Konstabel Els’ privet

    bush resembled nothing so much as three small bushes themselves. They were not so well

    trimmed, it was true, and certainly not so bullet-proof, but whatever else their

    camouflage served to conceal it was quite impossible to tell even at close range that

    here were three uniformed men of the South African Police.

Chapter 6
    Kommandant van Heerden had just paused for breath under an oak tree in the middle of

    Jacaranda Park and was trying to pluck up courage to return to the house when Konstabel

    Els fired the elephant gun. In the wake of the detonation that followed the Kommandant

    had his mind made up for him. For one thing a vulture which had been waiting with evident

    prescience in the branches above him was startled into flight by the roar of the gun and

    flapped horribly up into the sky. For another the Kommandant readied the immediate

    conclusion that the company of Jonathan Hazelstone was infinitely less murderous than

    the holocaust Konstabel Els was generating at the main gate. He left the cover of the

    tree and raced ponderously towards the house, looking for all the world like the maddened

    pachyderm the elephant gun had been designed to incapacitate.
    Behind him the silence of recent death hung sombrely over Jacaranda Park. Ahead he

    could just make out the tall elegant figure of Miss Hazelstone standing on the stoep. She

    was looking tentatively up into the cloudless evening sky. As the Kommandant plunged

    past her into the drawing-room he heard her say, “I thought I heard a clap of thunder just

    now. I do believe it’s going to rain.” It was good to be back in a world of sanity, the

    Kommandant thought, as he dropped limp and exhausted into an easy chair.
    Presently Miss Hazelstone turned from her study of the sunset and entered the room. She

    carried with her an atmosphere of tranquillity and an acceptance of life as it came to

    her unique, or so it appeared to Kommandant van Heerden, among the people who were living

    through the events of the afternoon at Jacaranda Park. The same could hardly be said of

    Konstabel Els. Whatever life was coming his way he certainly wasn’t accepting with

    anything faintly approaching tranquillity. The only consolation Kommandant van

    Heerden could find was the thought that by the sound of it Els had blown himself and half the

    neighbouring suburb