[TML] Ditzie Spofulam: The Later Years

[The Sayat Menace]

Found in Chapter 3 of "Riotous Assembly", by Tom Sharpe, 1971 (below, exercepted heavily for brevity). Wherein the elderly Ditzie, posing as a certain "Miss Hazelstone", has murdered her cook; the police arrive.

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Reputation, it seemed to the Kommandant, was all that remained to Sir Theophilus. Certainly his bust had disappeared from its pedestal and lay fragmented over half an acre of otherwise spotless lawn. Beyond the lawn the trunks of the gum trees were gashed and splintered and the azalea bushes looked as though they had been the subject of the concentrated attention of some very largeand desperately hungry animal. Branches and leaves lay scattered and torn in a gap some twenty yards across. For a moment the Kommandant drew fresh hope that Fivepence's sudden death must have been the result not of any human agency but of some natural cataclysm.

She sat, a thin, angular, almost frail elderly lady dressed in dark chiffon with lace to her throat, in a frail, elderly wicker chari complete with an unnecessary antimacassar and cradled in her lap a weapon which startled Kommandant van Heerden and even Kostabel Els and which explained all too readily the scene of devastation that lay beyond the contorted figure of Fivepence and the bustless pedestal. It was a four-barrelled rifle, some six feet in length and its bore was of a diameter so large that it suggested one of Sir Theophilus' favourite weapons, the ten-inch naval gun. 

The Kommandant eyed the rifle cautiously. "What is it?" he inquired at last.

"It's a magazine-loaded multi-barrelled elephant gun," Miss Hazelstone replied.  "Its rate of fire is forty bullets a minute and it can incapacitate a charging elephant at a thousand yards." 

"That rifle is far too heavy for a woman... I beg your pardon, for a lady to use," he said and regretted the remark almost as soon as it was made. She rose from her chair and aimed the great rifle into the garden. 

The Kommandant had discounted any possibility that she might fire the thing. Konstabel Els, for once, acted with greater resourcefulness and threw himself to the ground. That the ground he chose was already occupied by a large Doberman Pinscher [...] was lost to Kommandant van Heerden as Miss Hazelstone, aiming now at the ground and now at the sky, pulled the trigger.

The Kommandant, who was standing some eighteen inches to the right of the four barrels and almost level with their muzzles and who, but an instant before, had been a rational-thinking human being in full possession of his senses, found himself as it seemed to him, in a vast and rapidly expanding bubble of flame. The sensible world of the garden, sky, twittering birds, even the screams of Els being savaged by the Doberman, all disappeared. Kommandant van Heerden knew only the absolute silence at the still heart of an enormous explosion. There was no pain, no anxiety, no thought, only the certain realization, not that the end of the world was at hand, but tht it had already been irremediably accomplished. For one brief, illuminating moment Kommandant van Heerden experienced the highest form of mystical understanding, total bodily dissolution. It was some time before he returned to the world of physical sensation and too late for him to hear anything of the thunderclap that had volleyed forth from Jacaranda Park in the direction of the Drakensberg Mountains. With the glazed eyes of an awakened sleepwalker and the singed moustache that comes from standing too close to an enormous gun barrel, he looked at the scene around him. It was not one to reassure a man doubtful of his own sanity.

Konstabel Els' contretemps with the Doberman had been exacerbated, to put it mildly, by the broadside. It was doubtful which of the two animals had been more maddened by the roar of the elephant gun. Kommandant van Heerden turned what remained of his attention away from this unpleasant spectacle and tried to look at Miss Hazelstone who lay stunned but satisfied in the wicker chair where the kick of the rifle had thrown her. Through his singed eyelashes the Kommandant could partially see that she was addressing him because her lips were moving but it was some minutes before he recovered his hearing sufficiently to be able to make out what she was saying. 

Her second firing had destroyed what remained of the pedestal on which Sir Theophilus' bust had stood and, being aimed at ground level, had almost obliterated all traces of Fivepence's recently obeisant corpse. Almost but not entirely, for the fragmentary and dispersed remains of Sir Theophilus' bust had been joined on their widely separated patches of lawn by the no less fragmentary and dispersed remains of the late Zulu cook, while patches of black skin had attached themselves limpet-like to the blasted trunks of the gum trees that fringed the once-immaculate lawn. Kommandant van Heerden couldn't bring himself to focus on the round black object that kept trying to draw attention to itself by swinging wistfully from a branch in the upper reaches of an otherwise attractive blue gum. Down the centre of the lawn the elephant gun had cut a straight trench some eight inches in depth and fifteen yards long from whose serrated edges arose what the Kommandant despairingly hoped was steam.

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(The Kommandant tries to think of a way to cover up "Miss Hazelstone's" criminal behavior (and sex life); he phones HQ and summons heavily armed reinforcements. Unfortunately, he also orders Konstabel Els to ensure that no one enters the grounds of Jacaranda Park. Els takes the gun and conceals himself in a heavily fortified bunker overlooking the drive...)

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... the sight of his only possible ally scuttling away and leaving him in the lurch convinced the deperate Els that the time had come to use the elephant gun if here were not to die alone and deserted at the hands of the desperados down the road. He could see movement in the bushes on the hillside opposite him and he decided to try a volley there. He mounted the great multi-barreled rifle in the gun port, aimed at the bushes concealing the plain-clothes men and gently pulled the trigger.

The detonation that followed was of an intensity and had about it a seismic quality which came, when he could pick himself off the floor of the blockhouse where the recoil had thrown him, as a complete surprise to Konstabel Els. This time he could appreciate the true qualities of the weapon.

The four barrels of the elephant gun erupting simultaneously had opened up a vista before him he never would have believed possible. The great wrought-iron gates of Jacaranda Park lay a twisted and reeking heap of partially molten and totally unidentifiable metal. The stone gateposts had disintegrated. The boars rampant sculpted in grainte that had surmounted the posts would ramp no more, while the roadway itself bore witness to the heat of the gasses propelling the shells in the shape of four lines of molten and gleaming tarmac which pointed down to what had once been the thick bushes that had obscured his view of his adversaries. Konstabel Els had no need now to complain that he couldn't see what he was shooting at.

The cover his enemies had used was quite gone. The hillside was bare, barren and scorched and it was doubtful if it would ever regain its original look. There was no such doubt about the five objects that remained littering the ground. Bare, barren, and horribly mutilated, the five plain-clothes policemen who had sought cover from Els' fire in the bushes needed far more cover now than mere bushes could provide. Dying instantaneously, they had in some sense been luckier than their surviving comrades, some of whom, Els noted with satisfaction, were wandering about naked and blackened and clearly in a state of mental confusion. Els took advantage of their defencelessness and shocked state to wing a couple with his revolver and wasn't very surprised that they seemed to take little notice of these new wounds which were obviously an anti-climax after the ravages of the elephant gun.

Standing in the turret of the leading armoured car, Luitenant Verkramp had heard the enormous explosion and had immediately jumped to the conclusion that the magazine at the police barracks had been blown up by saboteurs.

[...]

In one last desperate move to avert tragedy, Konstabel Els aimed the elephant gun at the armoured car. He held his fire until the Saracen was only ten yards from the gate and then pulled the trigger. Again and again he fired, and with a mixture of awe and satisfaction saw, silhouetted against the searchlight, the great armoured vehicle grind to a halt and begin to disintegrate. Its guns were silenced, its tyres were shreds of rubber and its occupants trickled gently but persistently through a hundred holes drilled in its sides.  He fired his last shot. The searchlight exploded into darkness and Els, with desperate energy, gathered up all the evidence of his recent occupation and stumbled out of the blockhouse and dragging his awful accomplice, sneaked off across the Park.

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K.