The Artful Egg (6 page)

“No, but you’re warm, I think,” said Strydom, applying his
forceps to the object, and beginning to draw it out. “Something a bit old-fashioned.…” Then he held it up to the light and said, with a grunt of self-satisfaction: “As I thought, the broken end of a rapier.”

“Come again?” queried Van Rensburg, his perpetual frown deepening.

“I said ‘rapier,’ man—which is English for one of those thin swords they used to use for sword fights.”

“Ah,” said Van Rensburg. “It was the ‘rape’ part that fooled me.”

But Colonel Muller didn’t share his look of sudden enlightenment. “A
sword?
” he said, lowering a corner of the newspaper. “That’s a bloody funny thing to go round sticking into people—especially lady writers.”

“Not if you don’t like blood on your clothes,” said Kramer.

Zondi turned another page
of Ebbing Hill
, astonished by how well Naomi Stride was able to describe the conditions in a municipal hostel for Bantu males. He couldn’t imagine a white woman ever being allowed in such a place, let alone permitted to observe day-to-day life in one, and anyway, even if she had, the occupants of those bleak eight-man rooms would certainly not have behaved normally. Yet here were four instantly recognisable characters, doing the sort of things they would ordinarily do: squabbling, sharing a small orange, pining for their wives and their children, hoping that this year they’d be able to return to see them again. Two pages further on, the story switched to the distant families, and to the difficult lives led by the wives trying to bring up youngsters on their own—youngsters whose bellies were never full, just as their hearts always had an emptiness in them. Again, he could see and hear these people, almost as though he were a lizard in the grass roof above their heads.

Then he became restless. Supposing that he was feeling
slightly guilty about the time he’d squandered on reading banned literature, Zondi returned the book to its place on one of the shelves in the study, resisted an impulse to see what was in the typewriter, and lit another Lucky. His glance fell on the folder marked “Household.”

Why had the Lieutenant taken it from the filing cabinet? Something to do with finding out about the dead woman’s delayed departure.…

Zondi opened the file. It was filled with bills and business letters. Leafing through the latter, he came on one from Cyclops Security, confirming the arrangements made to safeguard Woodhollow while Naomi Stride was away for a period of six weeks, beginning the previous Sunday evening.

He noted the security company’s telephone number, moved across to the smaller desk and used a pencil to dial, although he very much doubted that the killer had been the sort to leave fingerprints anywhere.

“Oh ja, Cyclops Security?” he said in Afrikaans and the most guttural of accents. “Police here, lady, with a couple of questions, hey?”

“Anything at all we can do to help, sir,” she replied.

Driving back to Morningside with the car windows down, trying to get the stink of the mortuary out of his nostrils, Kramer took a small bet with himself: somewhere in Naomi Stride’s house would be a room that had old guns and spears and Zulu shields and other such items on its walls—houses like hers often went in for things like that, just as they favoured a big brass gong outside the dining-room and he’d already spotted one of those. Discovering where the murder weapon had come from would be no problem.

But who could have used it on her was another matter. The simplest answer—and the one most likely to prove correct—lay in the idea of an intruder having stumbled across her.
Most whites, even of her class, tended to be early risers, and could be expected to have been in bed long before midnight. The intruder had probably imagined he had the whole ground floor to himself, and then, hearing noises from the sun-lounge, had taken down a sword from a wall display and had gone to explore. Or had he already armed himself with the sword as a precaution? Ja, that did seem more likely. Burglars, as a breed, tended to be very nervous people.

An Indian urchin darted into the traffic at an intersection, taking advantage of the red light to sell copies of the afternoon paper to waiting drivers. Reminded of Colonel Muller, hiding behind his first edition back in the mortuary, Kramer had to smile. Marriage had certainly softened the old bastard up and no mistake, even allowing for the fact his new bride would be about the same age as the late Naomi Stride.

The light changed to green, giving the driver in the car ahead an excuse to accelerate off with the afternoon paper without paying for it.

Perhaps, thought Kramer, the intruder theory was a trifle simplistic: a crime is discovered, and automatically the assumption is that a criminal must have committed it. Yet the world was filled with evil bastards, with scum who wouldn’t think twice about cheating a ragged kid out of his profit on fifty papers—or, if it seemed worth it to them, somebody out of their three score years and ten—while maintaining every outward appearance of the model citizen. On top of which, murder was a rather unusual type of crime in that, the chances were, the victims generally knew their killers, and it always paid to take a close look at those closest to them at the start of any investigation.

The bunched traffic reached the dual carriageway and spread out. He moved over into the fast lane.

Motive, that came next. The woman had been rich, she’d been famous. Greed could have provided one reason for
wanting her dead, jealousy another. Perhaps patriotism had had something to do with it, if she’d been writing about South Africa in a subversive manner—but he wasn’t sure yet whether her books had been banned for that or for being too sexy. And then of course, on a more basic level, motivations like hatred had to be considered, because being rich and famous didn’t exempt a person from the passions which made so many of the humblest citizens kill each other. The best idea was simply to start collecting information and to allow it to produce its own patterns; this sort of theorising without proper facts wouldn’t get him anywhere.

The turn-off to Morningside was coming up, so he slapped down the sun-visor on his passenger side, bringing into view a notice clipped to it that read polisie-police, held his hand on the horn, and forced the car travelling in front of him to draw over sharply to the curb. As he got out and walked back, the startled driver emerged, tugging a driver’s licence from an inside pocket.

“Look, I don’t know what this is about,” he said, smiling and politely deferential. “I’ve only driven two blocks and I know I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t jump the lights, I wasn’t speeding.”

Kramer looked at him blankly. What a mother’s joy the man was: a winsome, open face; clean teeth and fingernails; a freshly laundered pale-green safari suit and beneath it, without a doubt, an impeccably clean pair of underpants which would uphold the family’s honour in the event of an accident.

“Ach, I’m sorry,” the man apologised, switching smoothly from English into Afrikaans, “it’s just I’m forced to speak the bloody language most of the day because of my job—software, you know. The name’s Hennie Vorster, sir. Here, you can see it on my licence, and it’s clean.”

Kramer took the licence, then glanced over the car.

“A beauty, isn’t it?” the man went on. “I’m afraid, if this is
one of those spot checks, you’re not going to find a thing to give me a ticket for—I only took delivery on Monday. Oh, thanks very much.”

And he reached for the licence which Kramer had just held out to him, giving a sharp little cry as the handcuff snapped over his wrist.

“Jesus Christ!” he gasped, in English. “You can’t be arresting me! Whatever for?”

“Theft of one newspaper,” said Kramer. “But don’t worry,” he added, attaching the other handcuff to the man’s steering-wheel. “I’ll leave a little note for the next patrol van coming by, explaining all about it.”

Z
ONDI HAD THREE
things to tell Kramer when he arrived back at Woodhollow and went into Naomi Stride’s study. The first concerned what he had learned from Cyclops Security.

“They said, boss, Mrs. Stride rang up last Friday to inform them she had changed her plans and would be leaving for London tomorrow, Wednesday, and they were not to worry about guarding this place until then. They were not very clear why she was leaving later, but it had something to do with her being at a point in her latest book where she did not want to stop until the chapter was finished.”

“Uh-huh, and what else?”

“The son’s secretary has phoned. He is on his way here, should be arriving any time now.”

“Does he know his old lady has—?”

“No, just that the police want to contact him.”

“Fine. What was the third thing?”

Zondi did a three-quarter turn in the swivel chair and pointed to the sheet of paper in the typewriter. “I have been looking at that last line, boss.”

“Oh ja? Something about ‘two, comma, two’—didn’t make any bloody sense to me, unless it’s just that two and two make four. But, then, the whole book seems to be so bloody strange that—”

“Boss, I don’t think this Naomi Stride missus wrote that. Take another look.”

Kramer took another look, leaning low to view the paper at an angle to the light coming in through the window. “The pressure used on the keys is the same as with the lines before it—which is only logical, since this is an electric typewriter. What’s there to tell apart?”

“Here,” said Zondi, taking down at random a novel from the bookshelves. “Have you ever noticed that in books, when they show the words people speak, they don’t always use double inverted commas for quotation marks, they just use one?” And he held out a page for Kramer to inspect. “Ordinary people, though, use the double quotation mark, because that’s what they learn at school.…”

“Wait a minute,” said Kramer, taking up some sheets of manuscript from the wire tray. “Ja, but Naomi Stride actually typed the same way as the printers, with one mark.”

“And suddenly there are double quotation marks around that last line.…” murmured Zondi. “I don’t think that someone who typed so much would break a habit just once in more than two hundred pages.”

“You’ve looked?”

Zondi nodded. “I can’t find any other place she has used double marks.”

Kramer walked over to the window and stared out of it for a while. Then he turned and nodded. “You’re right, Mickey,” he said. “It can’t have been her, and so it had to be—well, bugger it, the murderer? Leaving us some kind of message? Having a little joke?”

“It seems so, boss.”

“But ‘two, comma, two’ means nothing to you, either?”

“No idea, boss,” replied Zondi, shrugging.

Ramjut Pillay was exhausted by the time he reached Gladstoneville, a sprawling shanty town set aside for Asiatics on the north-western edge of Trekkersburg. Normally, he had
permission to use his Post Office heavy-duty bicycle for getting to and from work, but now that he was under suspension this privilege had been withdrawn from him. Barefoot, too, because his boots had been retained for forensic examination by the police, and because he was in no position to requisition another pair, his progress had been slow and painful, especially over the last three kilometres, a dirt road down from the asphalt highway skirting Gladstoneville. The heat hadn’t helped, either, seeming to become more intense each weary step he took.

“Ten thousands five hundred and ninety-one, ten thousands five hundred and ninety-two,” he murmured, reaching the corner of Apricot Street, “ten thousands five hundred and—ah, jolly good!—ninety-three.”

He was home.

“Ramjut?” his mother croaked from her wicker chair on the slanting porch. “Where have you been, you shameful son of respectable parents? Your poor aged father is out looking for you, begging news of a fully grown-up boy who should have returned from his work many hours ago. What have you to say to your—?”

“Mother, would you like to know how many pacings it is from the Post Office to—?”

“Pah!” she said, dismissing him with that familiar wave of her fly-whisk.

Which, for once, pleased Ramjut Pillay immensely, because all the way back to Gladstoneville he had been turning over in his mind the most exciting thought he’d entertained in years, not excluding several associated with brahmacharya experiments.

And so, indifferent to his limp, he went through the house and out to the corrugated lean-to in which he lived at the back. It was like stepping into an oven, save for the fact that few ovens held such a pungent odour of warm horsehair mattress, and for several seconds he was tempted to leave the door ajar. But, no,
that would be wholly unprofessional, so he closed it firmly and did up its seven bolts and two chain locks. Then, feeling a little faint, he edged his way between his divan and the bookshelves he had constructed out of orange-crates, and drew aside the faded curtain in the far corner. Behind it, hanging from a sagging length of string, was his entire wardrobe: shirts, trousers and a couple of jackets, motor mechanic’s overalls, a chemist’s white coat, an advocate’s black gown, a loincloth, a Scout uniform, a grey plastic raincoat, a tracksuit, nineteen ties in various designs, and a pillowcase containing hats, caps, helmets and a gas-mask. From a termite-proof tin box hidden beneath all this he selected a diploma and pinned it to the edge of one of the orange-crates. He stepped back to admire it, collided with his divan and had to sit down suddenly.

Ramjut Pillay
, said the diploma, in beautifully curly writing,
Has Passed With Distinction All The Exacting Requirements Of This Course & Is Henceforth Qualified To Practise As A Private Investigator
.

Theo Kennedy, only child of the late Naomi Stride, arrived at Woodhollow in a Land-Rover painted black and white in wavy stripes to resemble zebra hide.

“ ‘Afro Arts,’ ” murmured Zondi, reading aloud the sign-writing on the cab doors. “ ‘Wholesale and Export.’ ”

“You’d best bugger off and find yourself a good place to listen from outside the window,” suggested Kramer.

“On my way, boss!”

Kramer walked out on to the front veranda at much the same moment as young Kennedy started up the steps. He looked angry, very pale.