The Artful Egg (16 page)

Kramer got out and started up the driveway, on which was parked a gleaming red Datsun, expertly fitted out with innumerable extras. The garage door was wide open, showing that it was used also as a workshop, for there were tidy rows of both car and woodwork tools along the back wall, above a solid workbench. On the floor lay several piles of the American magazine
Popular Mechanics
, and beside them stood a large cardboard box. Someone must have been sorting through them when presumably called away.

A uniformed constable of barely seventeen, so pale in the face his pimples looked like cherries on an angel cake, came out of the house. “Excuse me, but are you Lieutenant Kr-Kramer, please?” he asked, coming to attention and saluting.

“Just seen your first stiff, hey?”

“H-h-hell, no, sir, but this lady’s the first white one.”

“Ja, they’re often the worst, so I’m told. Well, where is she? Haven’t you been sent out to show me the way?”

The youngster nodded and shambled into the house.

“Do you know what all the fuss is about?” Kramer asked him in the spick-and-span hallway, where even the telephone directory had its own ornamental shelf.

“Honest, I can’t understand it, sir,” the youngster admitted in a whisper. “We got a call to come here, because somebody was dead, and it all seemed normal enough to me. But my sergeant, he takes one look, has a word with the son, tells me to keep the husband talking, and he shoots out to the van to get Colonel Muller on the radio.”

“Just what exactly—?”

“It’s in here, sir,” said the youngster, pausing outside a door and knocking softly on it. “Colonel, sir? Lieutenant Kramer’s arrived.”

“Enter!”

Kramer found himself in a very pleasant bathroom, lined with pale-yellow tiles and smelling of apple. There was a bottle
of shampoo with an apple on its label standing on the glass shelf below the washbasin mirror. To the right of it, fixed to the wall, was a chrome-plated device holding three toothbrushes, two of which were for dental plates.

Then Kramer glanced at Colonel Muller and down at his feet.

A dead woman lay there, sprawled on her back, naked, covered over in an orange dressing-gown. A big woman, verging on obese, with legs like bolsters and long grey hair that spread out, tangled, on the cork flooring. She had been wet. Small puddles surrounded her, and water had soaked into the dressing-gown.

The shower dripped.

“My wife.…” said the man sitting on the edge of the bath.

He spoke in Afrikaans. He was about seventy, stocky, dressed in khaki shorts, a sports shirt and sandals. His face rang a bell somewhere. It was the puffy bags beneath the eyes, the jut of those thin ears, the feeling that such a jaw had been cast in reinforced concrete. Also, the mildness of the mouth, which made such an odd contrast.

“She slipped in the shower,” said the man, trembling.

Kramer could see wet patches on the man’s shirt, and some blood on his collar. He must have rushed in, grabbed his wife, and dragged her out of the shower cubicle. That made sense, only.…

To be sure here, at 146 Acacia Drive, lay a dead body. But so what? As dead bodies went, this particular body was nothing special at all; everyone knew that mishaps in the home accounted for hundreds of lives every year and, so far as he could see, this body was simply part of those dreary statistics. In fact, it was so ordinary and pathetically humdrum that, when compared with the sort of corpse which usually came his way, the bloody thing was an affront to his intelligence.

He looked questioningly across to Colonel Muller, standing there pinch-lipped and pale.

“She just went into the shower and slipped,” repeated the man. “The soap must have got under her foot.
It was an accident!
”

Colonel Muller reached out a hand and placed it on his shoulder. “Now, keep calm, Willem, keep calm,” he said. “Try not to get too upset, hey? Why not take my advice and come through to the lounge to wait for Doc Strydom?”

Willem? Kramer looked again at the man.

Suddenly the penny dropped. Why, of course, Willem Martinus Zuidmeyer, pensioned off these last ten years or more! And Kramer, caught completely unawares, very nearly gave a laugh.

Before realising with a jolt the extraordinary implications of the situation.

“I’
VE NEVER YET
come across a coolie you could trust,” grumbled Lieutenant Jones, as he and Gagonk Mbopa continued their search of central Trekkersburg for Ramjut Pillay, driving up one street and down the other. “Ach, just take this description we’ve been given by that other churra postman for a start! Who, except a raving lunatic, would be going around in a plastic raincoat on a sunny day like this?”

“Ermph,” said Mbopa, turning another page of
The Last Magnolia
and devouring it silently.

“Has that story started to improve yet? Or is that stupid woman still moaning about not having any proper job to do, except having to look pretty for her husband and chase the servants?”

“Ermph.”

“Then carry on keeping it to yourself until you get to an action part. I only like books with plenty of action parts. I wonder what all this business is on the radio, all this fuss about 146 Acacia Drive.”

“Ermph.”

“Christ, fatso, I’m talking to you, hey?”

Mbopa looked up from a fascinating description of two whites engaged in a very vigorous act of adultery. “Acacia Drive? Is that where this postman lives, sir?”

“Ach, you’re impossible!”

“But,” said Mbopa, pausing briefly to find a way of redirecting their efforts along more promising channels, “I thought the Lieutenant must have decided to visit the home of this Pillay. Perhaps he has returned there for his midday meal—perhaps his family can inform the Lieutenant of his present whereabouts.”

“Obviously,” said Jones, altering course. “Where do you think I’m heading, thick head? But that wasn’t what I asked you about.”

“It wasn’t, sir?”

“Gagonk, just you get on with that boring bloody book and leave the thinking to me, OK?”

Zondi went through to the kitchen at Woodhollow and then decided he’d had enough tea for the morning. It was simply that, being convinced that the blue envelopes were no longer on the premises, he was now feeling at a loss as to what to do.

He looked at the clock. The Lieutenant had been gone almost half an hour. Was there a possibility that this Acacia Drive call had in fact something to do with the Naomi Stride case? The thought hadn’t crossed his mind earlier, yet it made sense of a lot of things. Just say, for example, another writer lived at that address, and had been found with a fatal stab wound and the mysterious line ‘
II
,
ii!’
added to the page in his typewriter. A coincidence like that would certainly have put Colonel Muller into an unhappy state of excitement.

Then, again, wasn’t that taking the idea of coincidence too far? Did Trekkersburg, which was hardly a major cultural centre, really stretch to more than one proper author? Questions, questions, but no real means of finding out the answers, not while he was stuck at Woodhollow and without a car.

“But wait a minute.…” Zondi said to himself.

He hastened back to Naomi Stride’s study and went straight to a large volume entitled
The Writers’ Directory
. He took it
down and found an entry for her without any difficulty. So he started flicking through it, reading further entries at random, but failed to come up with any other South African writers. If only he knew the name of the person living at 146 Acacia Drive, he’d be able to test his latest theory very much more quickly.

“Ah!” said Zondi.

Having dialled the Trekkersburg Public Library, and asked for the reference section in his most guttural Afrikaans accent, he then identified himself as a police officer and asked the librarian to check the electoral role.

“Ja, lady, that’s 146 Acacia Drive,” he confirmed. “Many thanks, hey?”

She was back on the line in under two minutes, sounding very self-important and delighted to have her uneventful life enlivened by assisting the police with their enquiries. “The name of the householder is given as Willem Martinus Zuidmeyer,” she said. “Are you sure that’s all you want to know, sir?”

“Perfect,” said Zondi. “My, you were quick.”

“Well, being alphabetical, Acacia Drive’s very near the start of the roll.”

“Even so, my thanks again, hey?”

“All part of the service! Ring me whenever you like—or pop in, if you’re passing.”

“Careful, I might do that,” said Zondi. “Bye, now!”

Then he sat back in the swivel chair at the desk and spun round three times, saying to himself: “Willem Martinus Zuidmeyer?
Major
Willem Martinus Zuidmeyer? Hau, it has got to be! But how is he mixed up in this?”

Major Zuidmeyer must have retired from the South African Police at least ten years ago, after spending most of his latter service in the Security Branch up in the Transvaal. And there had been quite a stir when he’d been transferred down to Trekkersburg, following a series of allegations against him which, although never substantiated, had caused sufficient
embarrassment for his superiors to want him tucked away in some relative backwater, out of the limelight. Major Zuidmeyer’s basic problem had been what he himself had described as “a lot of bad luck with prisoners.” Two political detainees in his charge had jumped out of the same tenth-storey window in Security Branch headquarters, two more had died after tripping and falling down some stairs at the HQ, and no less than three others had slipped on the soap while taking showers under his supervision, fracturing their skulls and never regaining consciousness.

Could there be a link, perhaps, between such an obvious patriot and the death of a writer whom he’d no doubt have regarded as a dangerous subversive? It was still impossible to guess exactly what the Lieutenant was dealing with over in Acacia Drive, yet Zondi felt certain now that he was getting a lot warmer.

“Ja, my mother and father had been quarrelling,” said Jannie Zuidmeyer. “They had been having a row that lasted nearly all night, and I heard it start up again before breakfast. I thought, that’s
it
, I’m not going to sit around while this drags on and on—and so I took the dog for a long walk. He slipped his lead, ran off, and I spent hours trying to find him again. He’s a puppy still, and hasn’t been trained properly. Eventually, I decided to leave it to the SPCA to find him, and I came home. My father was kneeling in the garage with his back to me, sorting through his
Popular Mechanics
. I didn’t want to talk to him, so I sneaked by and went into the house. I heard the shower going. I felt like a shower myself, after all the running around I’d been doing after the dog, and I hoped my mother wasn’t going to use up all the hot water. Our hot water boiler is not very big, you see—more for two people. So I went to my room at the back, and I kept an ear cocked, waiting for the shower to be turned off, which would be a signal she was nearly finished in
the bathroom. But the shower went on and on until I realised something was wrong. I went to the door and knocked. I didn’t get an answer. I called out several times to my mother, and still no answer. So I went to get my father. I didn’t go into the bathroom myself because I did not think it proper. My mother could have had no clothes on. I tapped on my father’s shoulder and he jumped. I saw his face was pale. I said I was sorry I’d given him a fright, but I felt something was wrong in the bathroom and had been trying to keep calm—this was why I hadn’t shouted out for him. I asked him to go and see whether my mother was all right. As he stood up, I saw he was trembling. He went quickly into the house and into the bathroom. There is no lock on the bathroom because my mother has always been afraid of becoming faint with the heat when she uses the bath, and has fears of drowning without nobody able to get in and help. She has always liked very hot baths, though, and it isn’t often she takes a shower. It’s really only when she’s upset and not in the mood to lie there reading one of her love stories. She showers when she’s wanting to get washed and get going with the day, when she has early-morning shopping to do. I saw my father go into the bathroom. I heard him give a small cry, and the sound of the shower stopped. I heard him saying my mother’s name over and over again, and then I heard a grunting noise I could not understand. That’s when I went to the door. I saw my father holding my mother under the arms from behind and gently lifting her out of the shower. She was all flopped and looked very heavy. The grunting noise was my father straining to move her backwards onto the floor. He did it slowly, as though not wanting to hurt her, but already I could see she was dead. She was a terrible colour. There was also blood on the top of her head, which was getting smeared on my father’s shirt. When he had got her onto the floor, he tucked her dressing-gown over her and put his fingers against her throat to find her pulse. I wanted to tell him to do mouth-to-mouth, hit her on the chest,
do anything to bring her alive again. But he just knelt there. I suppose he has seen a lot of dead people as a policeman and knew, in his heart of hearts, none of that would do any good. I felt sick then. My knees just gave way and I nearly fell over as I came back down the passage. I sat down under the phone shelf. When my father came out of the bathroom a few seconds later, I thought how calm he looked. But when he saw me sitting there his expression changed and I expected him to start crying. He told me that my mother was not with us any more, and that I mustn’t look in the bathroom. He reached over me and rang the police. His face went calm again. He told me it was an accident. Mother must have slipped and fallen. A pure accident, he said. Then the police van came and the sergeant saw me first, because my father was sitting in the bathroom to keep my mother company. I said that my mother was dead and my father called it an accident, but it wasn’t one. I said it was all his doing. He was a murderer and I could prove it. The sergeant said I was just saying that because of the shock. I asked him if he knew my father, and he said, yes, he did. He remembered him from when he was in the police. I said that he was therefore going to take my father’s side, but the fact remained he had killed my mother. The sergeant said I should go and sit in the lounge, and I waited there while he went to the bathroom with another policeman, the young one, and then went out to his van. I waited some more, and this important man in a suit came. The sergeant told him things, out on the lawn, and then the sergeant came to sit with me in here. I have been sitting with him ever since. He says I shouldn’t be talking so much, but I can’t help it. Sorry.”