The Steam Pig (4 page)

“Well, you see,” Miss Henry explained, arching her voice with tact, “once upon a time Dr Matthews used to see to Mrs Bezuidenhout. It was when Miss Le Roux first came here. She asked the name of a -er, good family doctor, nothing flashy, and we told her Dr Matthews.”

“She should have changed when I got rid of him,” Mrs Bezuidenhout said defensively. “He didn't know his job.”

Which had been proved partly true, although for ninety-two Mrs Bezuidenhout had the sort of rude health best maintained on self-administered doses of totally ineffectual patent medicine.

“Were either of you in the flat when he arrived?”

“Oh, yes!”

They would not have missed it for worlds.

“Shocking, it was,” Miss Henry sighed. “He hardly looked at the poor thing. Said she was a heart case and these things were to be just expected. He signed the certificate right there on her bedside table.”

“And then?”

“He asked us if we knew who to contact, you see,” Miss Henry continued, reliving a glorious hour. “I said—remember, dearie?—I said the name of her lawyer was on the lease thing. I went and got it and Dr Matthews rang him from the flat. The lawyer took a bit of time and then he told the doctor that Trixie had some sort of insurance for funerals and gave him the undertaker's name.”

“Vultures were here in two-two's,” Mrs Bezuidenhout muttered. “But they had to wait.”

“Oh?”

“The death certificate has to be witnessed by another doctor for a cremation,” Miss Henry explained kindly. “I think that's very wise, don't you?”

“Huh! Not when it's Dr Matthews's partner, two of a kind, if you ask me,” Mrs Bezuidenhout sneered.

“Who's that then?”

“Dr Campbell. Terrible old soak.”

“Really, dearie!”

“He is.
He
didn't even bother to come right into her bedroom. Stood there in the doorway moaning about being up all night.”

Kramer had overlooked the fact that a second opinion would have been compulsory, but that was a minor point and no doubt Strydom had thought so, too. Neither of the doctors seemed remotely capable of being party to an intelligent act of destruction.

“What about the flat?” he asked Mrs Bezuidenhout.

“Her lawyer's promised to see to it and it's paid up for the month so why should I care?”

“Untouched?”

“I'm not doing his work for him, sonny.”

Kramer rose.

“It is necessary that I have a look at it.”

“Now?”

“Yes, and we'll probably have to trouble you again in the morning. Fingerprints, photographs.”

“Well, if you have to, you have to. But see you use the side gate. I'm too old for this sort of commotion.”

Something ugly shaded her bright eyes for an instant. Strange it had taken so long.

“Are we—are Miss Henry and I in any danger through what's happened?”

“No, madam, we don't think so.”

“Oh.”

Almost a hint of disappointment. Perhaps a less formidable son had thought the burglar guards advisable.

“I mean it's a
murder,
isn't it?” Miss Henry said. “These things are usually very personal.”

“Quite right,” Kramer agreed, and then cautioned them not to say a word about it. They joined the conspiracy with self-important nods.

Kramer wanted to take a second look at Miss Le Roux's underwear. But he was finding Miss Henry's presence most inhibiting. In fact she was beginning to get on his nerves badly. From the moment she unlocked the door to the flat, the avowed vegetarian had displayed an astonishing taste for gore. He was tired of grunting evasively as she sought to extract details of the Royal Hotel double-killing. And he was tired of being asked if he had given himself to Jesus. The time had come for his Jehovah's Witness ploy.

“Oh, Christ!” he said, looking at his watch. “I'd better get a bloody move on or I'll be late for Mass.”

Miss Henry shuddered away into the night.

And Kramer opened the wardrobe. Nine dresses hung from the rail, each demure and rather dull. There was also a raincoat in a severe military cut and a worn overcoat which had been altered. Nothing here to conflict with the picture the old girls had conjured up. Then he pulled out one of the drawers. In it was a large collection of what women's magazines termed “romantic undies” while refraining from specifying under what circumstances they would appear so. The colours were strong and the lace a main ingredient rather than a trimming. He thumbed through them again with the idle notion he might have missed something men's magazines called “exotic”. Some of them came damn close but that was all. It worried him. Bothered him because he could not reconcile the striking contrast between the inner and outer Theresa le Roux.

Bloody hell. Nothing in the place made sense once you thought about it. He shut the wardrobe, went out into the living-room for his cigarettes, and returned to lie back on the stripped mattress. The low ceiling was white and unblemished by cracks, providing a perfect surface on which to transcribe a confusion of mental jottings.

But his eyes wearied quickly of the glare and wandered to the print of Constable's
Salisbury Cathedral
which hung on the wall beyond the foot of the bed. Its qualities as a best-seller were obvious; a nice, restful scene with a touch of the old spiritual uplift. Yet only two nights before the glass over it had held the reflection of a killer getting his kicks. Oh jesus, this case bent the mind and his had been going flat out since before sunrise.

Presently, he fell asleep.

The face above him was black. His right fist heaved up, missed, flopped back. Somebody laughed. He knew that laugh; he had heard it where children played, where women wept, where men died, always the same depth of detached amusement. Kramer closed his eyes without troubling to focus them and felt curiously content.

Bantu Detective Sergeant Mickey Zondi sat himself primly at the dressing table. Then he opened the large manila envelope he had brought with him and shook out its contents—a batch of photographs and two laboratory reports. As a child at a mission school in Zululand, he had adapted to making do without his own text books. He read fast, read once and remembered. He studied the pictures last of all, aware that Kramer was now watching him through barely parted lids.

An uncanny thing, that laugh of Zondi's—it never seemed to come from him, it was too big a sound. But it fitted. The first time he had seen Zondi was outside the magistrate's court on a Monday when it was thronged so solid with worried wives and families you had to force your way through them. Then the mob suddenly parted of its own volition and through it had come a
kaffir
version of Frank Sinatra making with the jaunty walk. The snapbrim hat, padded shoulders and zoot suit larded with glinting thread were all secondhand ideas from a secondhand shop. The walk was pure Chicago, yet no black was permitted to see a gangster film. No, here was an original, even if someone, somewhere else, had thought of it all before. Zondi walked that way because he thought that way. And if this was fantasy, reality was only one layer down: the Walther PPK in its shoulder holster, the two eight-inch knives held by the elastic trouser tabs on either side.

“Cheeky black bastard,” Kramer grunted.

Zondi tucked in the corners of a smile and went on with his illicit scrutiny of Miss Le Roux's bromide image. Even dead a white woman had laws to protect her from primitive lust.

“You want to get me into trouble, hey?”

Zondi ignored him. The photographs were sharp and expertly printed, but the lighting had been too oblique and Miss Le Roux seemed to have ended up with a lot of her curves in the wrong places. Nevertheless, Zondi nodded his approval before tossing the envelope across.

“A good woman,” he said. “She could have given many sons.”

“Is that all you ever think about?” asked Kramer, and they both laughed. Zondi was an incorrigible pelvis man.

The laboratory reports were long, laborious and uninspiring. Contrary to popular belief, there was not a great deal you could say about a corpse which would circumvent the ordinary processes of investigation. That Miss Le Roux's blood belonged to a rare group seemed wholly irrelevant now it had gone to waste. On top of which the technician concerned was a new man, fresh from the realms of pure science and given to being scrupulously vague in the face of variables. So Kramer ignored everything except the analysis of stomach contents.

“Digestion halted after approximately four hours,” Zondi quoted, noting where Kramer's finger had stopped in the margin.

“Uhuh. Which makes the time of death somewhere between eleven and midnight.”

“Hard boiled egg—see any shells, boss?”

“There's one in the kitchen. Lucky she didn't like them soft or we wouldn't have any pointers. This is interesting about the traces of drugs.”

“The heart ones?”

“No, the sleeping. They had this little dolly all sorted out—and her doctor, too. The bastards.”

Zondi demanded to have the whole story and he got it, right up to the poser of the panchromatic panties.

 

4

“SO YOU SEE,”
Kramer added, “there are things which just don't add up in this place. Come through and have a look yourself.”

Before Zondi joined the force, he had spent a year as a houseboy. This had given him an eye for the details of a white man's abode which was as fresh and perceptive as that of an anthropologist making much of what the natives themselves never noticed. Kramer had found it invaluable more than once.

They started in the kitchen; an unremarkable room barely big enough to turn about it, which had presumably been a store-room once.

There was a collection of invoices stuck on a nail.

“She ordered by phone, boss. Groceries, chemists, clothes from John Orr's. But mostly food.”

“She didn't pay by cheque, you know, settled in cash,” Kramer told him. “She kept her money in the post office, just over R200.”

Zondi had the top off the rubbish bin. Understandably enough Rebecca had overlooked her chore in the excitement and it was still full. An inquiring eyebrow was raised at Kramer who grinned back.

“You've got a bloody hope,” he said. “That's
kaffir
work.”

The grin was returned.

“Besides, there's the egg shell on the top. Now don't tell me somebody's going to hide something in there and not break the pieces putting it all back.”

Zondi went on poking into the soggy mess with the handle of a feather duster.

“Well?”

“That's a new lot of washing-up powder on the window sill, boss. When women throw away a box they never squash it down like a man would to make more room for the rest. They put it in just like that with all the air inside.”

“And you can't feel one?”

“No.”

“Come on, Zondi, the one over there is not all that new, you know.”

“But it must be in here, boss.”

Zondi picked up the pair of rubber gloves hanging over the sink and slipped them on. Then he spread a newspaper and began emptying the bin.

Miss Le Roux had certainly been a young lady of regular habits. Levels of the daily round in reverse order—supper, tea, lunch, tea, house-cleaning, breakfast, tea—appeared without variation, although they did become less distinct the deeper Zondi delved.

“No one's been into that lot, I can tell you for a fact,” Kramer remarked, vaguely irritated.

“Quite right, boss.”

Zondi rocked back on his heels and held up a crumpled cardboard container covered in tea leaves.

“Squashed flat,” Kramer said.

“Folded over,” Zondi said, choosing a clean sheet of newspaper to deposit it on. The carton was slippery and he had to try twice before tearing it open. Out rolled a reel of recording tape, badly damaged by flames.

“Jesus.”

“Monday a week ago, I think,” Zondi said. “After this missus's supper.”

Kramer spilled some bread coupons from their box and placed the reel in it. As he did so, a number of small pieces of tape fluttered to the floor. He salvaged them. The whole thing was in bits. He sealed the box with some adhesive tape from the table drawer.

“Sergeant Prinsloo can come and take some pretty pictures of this,” Zondi said with satisfaction, pointing to the mess he had made and shedding his gloves. “That is now white man's work.”

For the moment Kramer was totally preoccupied with the find. He took it through into the living-room and put it on the mantelpiece. He regarded it from three separate angles. He decided that he would know what it contained before the night was out. The hell with official channels.

There was a loud hiss behind him. Zondi was in the doorway, spraying himself all over with an aerosol can of air-freshener.

“Finished in the kitchen, boss?” he asked blandly. He smelt pungently wholesome, like a Swedish brothel.

“I'm going to use the phone,” Kramer said, making for the bedroom door. “Just you take a look at that lot on the piano meantime.”

Zondi obliged. He found the entire contents of the writing bureau, plus other assorted effects, arranged neatly along the lid—but not in the usual twin categories of “personal” and “business”. For, as Kramer had repeatedly stressed during the briefing, there was nothing remotely personal among it all with which to begin a pile. Not a letter, a postcard, or even a snapshot.

What there was hardly made absorbing reading; two receipt books, one full and the other just begun; a ledger for tax purposes; a notebook containing pupils' names, more than a year's bills all stamped “paid”, and a reminder from a jeweller's about a repair. The collection, however, provided the first answer of the day by explaining where all the flowers had gone—or many of them anyway. Miss Le Roux had not taken private pupils in the ordinary sense but appeared to have had some arrangement with St Evelyn's School for Girls round the corner. It was a boarding establishment and term had ended a fortnight before.

Kramer came in looking pleased with himself.

“I've got a bloke who'll look at the tape tonight,” he said. “Find any trace of the adult pupils there?”

“Nothing, boss. Maybe she did not want to pay tax on the fellows.”

“Could be.” The thought had occurred more than once, yet it still struck Kramer as being very out of character. The records were meticulous and Miss Le Roux plainly knew nothing of less hazardous tactics such as loading an expense allowance.

Zondi started switching off the lights. He was right, it was time to get going—every minute was worth double until news of the investigation broke. Kramer gathered the papers into a music case, collected the tape and went out on to the small verandah. He just caught a glimpse of someone ducking away from Mrs Bezuidenhout's kitchen window.

The night was wild.

Seen from the air, Trekkersburg was a green-grey mould at the bottom of an unfired bowl. Now, over the brim of blunt mountains to the west, came pouring a hot, thick wind which swirled dead leaves aloft like sediment and infused every living thing with its strange agitation. The wind did not come often, but when it did things happened.

Which suited Kramer down to the ground. He delighted in it, wondered why he had not noticed it before. Each bluster made him more impatient as Zondi fiddled with the front door, making quite certain the lock was secure. So he started alone down the short path and out through the side gate. He found himself in a small lane once used by the night-soil cart, it being a very old part of the town. The lighting was poor but he made his way down it quickly enough to have the car revving loudly by the time Zondi caught up. Then he drove off as if the leopard-skin seats had snarled.

Kramer dropped Zondi outside the city hall and headed for 49 Arcadia Avenue where—according to the telephone directory—Dr J. P. Matthews had his home and surgery. It was well after eleven but the man was a physician and this an emergency call. The tape expert was an amateur, a proofreader at the
Gazette,
who would not be home until 1 a.m.

Zondi had been left with instructions to find Shoe Shoe. He was to wheel him in his wheelbarrow to the corner of De Wet Street and the Parade and wait there to be picked up.

Only four years back Shoe Shoe had been an up-and-coming mobster with a pay-night protection racket just beyond Trekkersburg in the Bantu township of Peacehaven. Every Friday he had twenty men at the bus terminus who would escort breadwinners home at R1 a time. Not a vast sum but on a good night—particularly after some idiot had refused the service and was brutally reprimanded—the takings were nothing to be sniffed at.

Then he had foolishly decided to move in on the Kwela Village terminus, thinking his only competition would be from a few young toughs who stopped once they had sufficient for drink and a dolly. The thing was he had never heard of any trouble there. Why he had heard nothing was ultimately made terrifyingly clear.

Come the first Friday night, his scouts returned with a shock report: the Kwela terminus was already being worked and so subtly that the passengers were bled dry even before they reached the shadows. No one had been able to detect how it was done.

When Shoe Shoe received the news calmly, they felt bewildered and nervous. Normally he reacted to any upset with a tantrum of appalling ferocity. But these were new men, they had not known him long enough to realise that he had got places by a careful study of what he reverently called Big Time.

And this was Big Time all right. It excited Shoe Shoe tremendously, making him repeat Big Time in every other sentence. It also made him determined to discover the system and apply it in Peacehaven, where a street-lighting project threatened to inhibit his present methods.

So he sent all his men in the following week. It was risky but worth it. Anyway, they had strict instructions to do nothing but watch. Big Time would be far too busy to notice.

Wrong again. Big Time decided to set an example—and extend its operations to Peacehaven. Which meant that when Shoe Shoe eagerly answered a knock on his door around midnight, he opened it on Big Time and bad times.

It happened very quickly. He was held down on his sagging divan and had his Palm Beach shirt ripped from tail to collar. A match flared briefly. The first prick of the spoke came near his coccyx—just his legs were to go; a minor infringement. Then the point began to tickle its way up. His arms as well. Higher still. The spinal cord was punctured.

It was a clean wound and healed in three days. The neurologist at Peacehaven Hospital found this evidence of sterile procedure even more disturbing than the impressive display of anatomical insight. He mentioned it to Dr Strydom. The DS shrugged and said that as there was nothing the hospital could do, it was rather ridiculous admitting such cases when there were so many patients that some had to sleep under beds occupied by more serious cases.

So on the fourth day Shoe Shoe was discharged before breakfast. Two porters carried him out and set him down on the lawn a few yards from the exit gate. There he sat, with a small plaster visible through his torn shirt, until eleven o'clock when the sun baked a thirst within him that made him call out for help.

It arrived in the form of Gershwin Mkize, following up a hot tip. Gershwin ran the beggar circus in Trekkersburg, often travelling far into the bush for his exhibits positioned strategically about the town, and he was always on the lookout for new attractions. This one needed no improvisation.

The State pension would provide half a loaf of bread a day. Gershwin could offer two loaves, a little meat, a pot of beer and a roof—plus the comradeship of other unfortunates who, between them, could assist in intimate matters such as feeding, dressing, moving and evacuating.

Shoe Shoe accepted without a word and seldom spoke again. A Bantu constable, fresh from the police college, made a few ineffectual inquiries. Shoe Shoe gave him an outline then clammed up. The constable's superiors criticised the spelling in his report and left it at that. After all, this time society had been left better off by a crime.

Now Kramer wanted him to break that silence. He did not relish the thought of working over a man four parts dead already, but he was prepared to go beyond strenuous coaxing. He knew the link was tenuous. But he also knew that Shoe Shoe must have seen his assailants and thereafter maintained a particular interest in anything concerning bicycle spokes.

Kramer turned into Arcadia Avenue and slowed down. About half way along his headlights glinted off a brass plate and he killed the engine to glide up on the grass verge. As he got out he noticed half a dozen cars parked outside the house on the other side. Their owners were no doubt gathered to celebrate a golden anniversary, it was that sort of neighbourhood.

He took the path in four paces and rang the bell.

Dr Matthews was in the hall balancing on one leg. By extending the other as a counter-weight, he had been just able to retain his hold on the telephone receiver while using his free hand to grasp the doorknob. He grinned feebly. Just a smile in return would have been charitable.

“Police,” Kramer said, and walked past into the surgery, closing the thick door behind him.

He was immediately struck by the quiet and the stink of ether. Another man whose profession demanded soundproofing—and another cue to stop breathing through his nose. He went over to see if any of the windows were open behind the long, moulting drapes. Not one. Not touched in fifty years if the rest of the room was anything to go by. He noted the Victorian furniture, the quilted leather, the tassels, the instruments laid out in what resembled museum cases. Across the road there was a movement in the back of one of the cars—ah, the younger generation was succumbing to the wild wind.

And Kramer turned to stare at the couch, half screened off in one corner. So this was where Miss Le Roux had felt it right and proper to undress and recline. Sick. Horrible. The whole room was sick. It was certainly not the place to be told you had three months to go, taking things easy. For that you needed one of those unreal skyscraper suites with pretty receptionists to smile unwittingly at you on your way out to the lift shaft. At the very most it was a room which should serve only for offering up afflictions of the anal region. Which seemed to be Dr Matthews's level anyhow, so maybe he was expecting too much.

The GP was in the room without warning, moving lightly as became a fat man so daintily shod. His likeness to his mother's photograph on the desk was remarkable—except his moustache turned upwards.

“What brings you here, officer?” he said. “Don't tell me—I've made a balls and so has Strydom but he's also getting the glory, lucky man.”

He stopped and frowned.

“As a matter of fact, he was rather rude to me. I told him her history. I told him it was congenital angina. Remained quite unimpressed.
Very rude
when I said I hadn't her previous records but one has to
trust
patients, hasn't one?”

“And doctors,” Kramer observed, ignoring the outstretched hand.