The Artful Egg (15 page)

“H’m,” said Zondi.

“I’ve had an idea,” announced Kramer. “You know what you were telling me about how Kwakona Mtunsi saw ‘fear’ in Naomi Stride’s eyes when she was given that letter to read by the kid at the mission school? He didn’t say what colour paper it was on, did he?”

“No, boss.”

“Apart from its contents, did he give any other description of the thing?”

Zondi thought a moment, and then repeated from memory, mimicking Kwakona Mtunsi’s slow, gentle voice: “I remember
it was full of bad spelling and capital letters in the wrong places! Oh, a very short note to Ntombifikile’s—”

“Hold it,” said Kramer, opening the bottom right-hand drawer of his desk and taking from it a tattered folder.

“But those are our own poison-pens,” said Zondi, surprised.

“Uh-huh, and when you glance at the stuff what strikes you immediately? Especially where attempts have been made to disguise its origin? Look.…”

With a snap of his fingers, Zondi replied: “The bad spelling and capitals in wrong places! Now I get the point, Lieutenant—Ntombifikile’s note could have reminded Mrs. Stride of the letters she had been receiving, and Mtunsi was probably right when he thought she looked afraid.”

Kramer nodded. “Something like that, old son. Guesswork, admittedly, but it does help to back up the idea that the blue envelopes are mixed up in all this.”

“Then, what is our next stop, boss?”

“Jaap du Preez’s told the Colonel that nothing resembling hate mail has been found at Woodhollow, but I’m not satisfied the place has been searched as well as it could be.”

“So we go out there, take another look?” said Zondi, picking up his jacket.

“The Colonel’s exact orders,” confirmed Kramer, hooking his own jacket over one shoulder. “Meanwhile, Jones and Gagonk have been sent to find that Indian postman for a further statement—you never know, if there’s been a series of blue letters to the house, he could have noticed something useful about them.”

“That one!” chuckled Zondi, with a shake of his head. “A hen is an egg’s way of making another egg.…”

“Come again?” asked Kramer.

Jones poked his head into the Bantu detective sergeants’ office and snapped: “Hey, you! Gagonk Mbopa! Get your fat arse out
of that chair and come along—hurry! We’ve got important work to do, man. You’re not paid to sit around reading all day!” Then he disappeared again.

“When the jackal is on heat,” said Mbopa, rising unhurriedly and pocketing a paperback, “even the elephant must watch his back.…”

Which made his grinning colleagues laugh out loud, but he left uncertain of why they had also winked at one another.

“Come on, come on!” nagged Jones, grinding his gears in the vehicle-yard. “We’ve got to go round to the main post office.”

Mbopa grunted and climbed into the passenger-seat, where he took out the paperback again and flipped it open at his place.

“Gagonk.…” said Jones, threateningly, as the car jerked abruptly out onto the street, lurched, and then straightened up for the short journey down to the first traffic lights.

“Lieutenant?”

“Put that bloody book away! How many times must I repeat myself?”

Mbopa kept it in his hands. “I thought the Lieutenant would be interested to see the name of this book,” he said smugly.

“Oh, you did, did you? Now, let me make one thing quite clear: my only interest, as of this minute, is finding this—”

“A big clue,” cut in Mbopa.

“What’s that you say?” asked Jones, looking round as he stopped at the red light.

Holding the paperback up so that its title was impossible to miss, Mbopa said slowly and carefully, trying not to explain too much at once: “Does the Lieutenant remember the remark made by Zondi, who said ‘the last magnolia’ was a big clue?”

“You mean it’s that thing?”

“And can the Lieutenant see who wrote it?”

“Naomi—hey, wait one minute! Where do you get that?”

“I borrowed it, sir.”

“From Zondi and, er.… They’ve
lent
it to you? But why would they—?”

“No, but it is true I borrowed it from them, sir, because we can give it back later when we’re finished.”

Something very close to a smile came to Jones’s thin, bloodless lips. “So they don’t know we’ve got it? But how did you, er, you know …?”

“I found it in a very clever hiding-place in their office, sir, and I thought maybe the Lieutenant would like to study it for himself.”

“What’s everybody hooting at?”

“The light has turned green, sir.”

“This is a police vehicle—they can bloody wait!”

“Have I done wrong, Lieutenant, in—?”

“No, Gagonk,” said Jones, and he actually laughed then, a sound so strange and unfamiliar that it affected the hair at the back of Mbopa’s neck. “For once, you idle bastard, I’d say you’d done an excellent day’s work! Carry on reading.…”

“Lieutenant?”

“The bloody book, man! Nice and loud, so I can take it in while I’m driving.”

“Where’s Hopeful Dumela?” murmured Zondi, as Kramer braked to a halt outside Woodhollow and two unfamiliar black constables came out onto the veranda.

“Ach, I meant to tell you—sorry, Mickey,” said Kramer. “He volunteered to go and fetch the three servants, and the Colonel says he’ll be back by nightfall. Now, what we’re expected to do here is—”

Zondi held up a hand. “Quiet a second, boss! I think I just heard Control calling for you on the radio.”

“Shit, what now?” growled Kramer. “I suppose Gagonk and Jones have come across some long word they can’t understand.”

“Indubitably!”

It helped to share a laugh at a moment when intuition had hollowed the stomach a little. Kramer reached for his radio mike and gave Control his position. There was a slight pause, and then Colonel Muller himself came on the air.

“Lieutenant Kramer, are you receiving me? Over.”

“Loud and clear, Colonel.”

“Drop everything, Tromp, and leave Zondi to deal with Woodhollow. Highest priority. I want you at 146—I repeat, 146—Acacia Drive. Have you got that?”

“Ja, Colonel—the place is off Brandsma Road?”

“Correct. How soon can I expect you?”

“Say, ten minutes?”

“Sooner, man!”

“Can I ask what the problem is, sir?”

“Just hurry,” said Colonel Muller. “Over and out.”

Tidying his work locker for the ninth time, Ramjut Pillay reflected on what a boon it was to have been born with a rather remarkable mind. In a flash of pure inspiration, which had come to him just as he’d hurtled down into Trekkersburg through a set of red traffic lights, a brilliant idea had presented itself, making the loud hooting all around him sound like a fanfare of trumpets.

Very simply, he’d remembered that one of his colleagues at the Post Office, Harry Patel, had often boasted of having a brother in the CID—a detective sergeant, no less, who assisted in all the most difficult cases. Just the fellow, in other words, to have the facts of the Naomi Stride case at his fingertips! And, as Harry Patel made a practice of divulging the details of his brother’s latest cases at every opportunity, all Ramjut Pillay had to do was to wait in the changing-room at the Post Office for a chance to engage him in idle chatter.

Quite a wait it was turning out to be, but no matter; Harry Patel, who had one of the more distant rounds to do, frequently
arrived back after most of his colleagues had already hung up their postbags and gone home. On top of which, it would certainly be more advantageous to encounter him on his own, for that way the conversation could be more easily steered in the desired direction.

“There you are, Ramjut old fellow!” remarked a cheery voice behind him. “What a coincidence! Only five minutes ago I was being asked the exact whereabouts of our naughty suspended postman.”

Ramjut Pillay turned round. Who should it be but Peerswammy Lal, Asiatic Postman 3rd Class, beaming from ear to ear. The same Peerswammy Lal, let it be remembered, who had last year placed in Ramjut Pillay’s postbag a large toad which had done urines over nine items of personal mail and a library postcard.

“There is no rule to say I cannot come in and locker my tidy,” snapped Ramjut Pillay, caught so off guard his speech became garbled.

“My God, you are a card!” applauded Peerswammy Lal, with the heartiest of laughs. “Always so full of quips and merriment! What, may I ask, is the artful saying you have chosen for today’s meditations?”

“Buggering off,” hissed Ramjut Pillay.

Which delighted Lal so much that he clapped him on the back, making his glasses shoot down his nose. For one terrible moment, it was touch and go whether the Mahatma’s pacifist teachings were going to be enough to prevent a bloodbath.

“Damn fool! Can’t you—?”

“Now, wait one minute, old chum!” warned Lal, a martial-arts enthusiast, moving his weight on to one foot. “My intentions are entirely pure, I have no wish to engage you in fisticuffs! But, if you are persisting in this fashion, I’ll kick you in the ghoolies so damnably fast your navel will hear only the echo.”

Deeply sobered by this thought, Ramjut Pillay let his shoulders drop and said: “Was it Mistering Jarman who was making enquiries?”

“No, the police.”

“
What?
” gasped Ramjut Pillay.

“As I say, not five minutes ago, I was walking by the boss’s office, after overtime working, and I saw two CID fellows talking to him. Or, to be entirely correct in my particulars,
one
CID fellow was talking; the other detective was a black chappie, just listening.”

“S-s-sergeant Zondi?”

Lal shrugged. “No name was mentioned. All I am hearing is something about the CID thought you would be willing to help them, reference some blue envelopes, and the boss called out and said: ‘Oi, Peerswammy, you don’t know where Ramjut is today, do you?’ And I said to him: ‘I caught one quick glimpse of his flying figure this morning, Mr. Jarman, sir, equipped with raincoat and pedal cycle, coming down the topmost end of Club Street. Perhaps he—’ ”

“No, no, no!” wailed Ramjut Pillay. “It is impossible you could have done such a thing to me! I am lost! I am finished! Never will I see my old mother again!”

“Ramjut?” said Lal, his smile fading. “Ramjut, what is the matter? Your
mother?
Why do you despair so greatly you say such mad things?”

“The police will arrest me! Brand me a thief! Cast me in deepest dungeons!”

“My dear chum, you have a misunderstanding. All they seek is some information from you, not to—”

“It is
you
who has the misunderstanding!” cried out Ramjut Pillay. “O, traitorous dog and betrayer of bosomy brothers!”

And with that he began running.

*   *   *

Zondi was glad to be back in Naomi Stride’s study. There were quite a few oddments lying about that he hadn’t had time to admire properly before, and one of them was a tortoise made of fired clay, bearing the unmistakable stamp of Kwakona Mtunsi.

Yet it was hard to take full advantage of the moment, what with half his mind still caught up in conjecture concerning Colonel Muller’s urgent and mysterious radio call.

There were no blue envelopes in the middle drawer of the desk. Zondi pulled the drawer right out and turned it over. People sometimes tried to hide documents by taping them to the underside, but that hadn’t been attempted in this case. He sat back in the swivel chair and allowed his gaze to roam about the room, trusting it to seize upon any other likely hiding-places.

Colonel Muller had sounded badly shaken, too badly shaken for an ordinary run-of-the-mill murder or robbery. Whatever it was he wanted the Lieutenant to help him with would therefore have to be something very extraordinary, something totally outlandish, impossible to imagine.

All the letters and postcards, which Naomi Stride had poked between the books on her study shelves, had been removed, presumably by Warrant Officer Jaap du Preez and his team. But had they troubled to look between the pages of those books themselves? Yes, the big dictionary had changed position, and Zondi had to hunt for the title he remembered having seen previously on either side of it. Obviously the shelves had been emptied and refilled in haphazard order while just such a search could be carried out.

On the other hand, Colonel Muller might have sounded so shaken simply because a crime had been committed that affected him personally. Even a burglary could come as a severe shock to a police officer—all the more so because he had always thought of burglaries as happening just to “them,” to the public, of which he never saw himself a part.

Looking for hiding-places in Naomi Stride’s study was ridiculous, thought Zondi. Everything he had learned about the woman indicated that she was fiercely open in all she did and believed. Hiding things would not have been in her nature. The filing cabinet had not been locked, and neither had the middle drawer of the desk.

But the idea of Colonel Muller being so badly shaken because of some personal involvement was difficult to sustain. So far as he knew, Colonel Muller lived nowhere near Acacia Drive, and neither did he have any relatives residing locally.

There was, Zondi decided, only one conclusion to be drawn: either Naomi Stride had removed the blue envelopes from the drawer herself, presumably to have them destroyed, or else the murderer had taken them at the time of the killing.

But just why this business at 146 Acacia Drive was being given the “highest priority,” over and above the slaying of a world-famous woman novelist, and just why Colonel Muller should have sounded so disturbed, still eluded him.

Or, as the Lieutenant was wont to say, the mind bloody boggled.

The house at 146 Acacia Drive was a bungalow in a street lined by jacaranda trees. Kramer parked his car between Colonel Muller’s official vehicle and a patrol van, lit a Lucky, and took a look at the place.

It was neat, it was modest, it seemed to be the sort of dwelling that either newlyweds or a retired couple would choose because, to judge by the depth of the building, it had at most only two bedrooms, one of which would be rather small. The roof was low-pitched corrugated asbestos sheeting, the outer walls were plastered and painted pale yellow, the woodwork trimmings had been done in dark green. There was a garage joined onto the right-hand side of the house, and a short driveway made of crazy paving. It seemed very unlikely that this was the home of anyone of the slightest importance.