The Artful Egg Page 10

The only time letter-boxes were cleared on a Saturday was at 11 A.M. Anything posted at the weekend after that “cut-off” was not processed until 7:30 A.M. on Monday morning, making it too late for delivery until Tuesday. The trouble was, however, many members of the public had the idea that noon was the deadline—as indeed, not too long ago, it had been—and kept posting things well after 11 A.M. in the expectation that they would be included in Monday’s local delivery. Obviously, the anonymous writer of terrible threats had made this same all-too-common mistake, and his apparently contradictory behaviour was a mystery no longer. He’d simply wrongly supposed that Naomi Stride would read his letter before he murdered her.

  Then Ramjut Pillay, instead of continuing to feel elated by the brilliance of his deduction, suddenly shuddered. “Oh, dear, dearie, dear,” he lamented, as he reeled under a full realisation of what all this signified.

  Not only had he proved fairly conclusively that the letter was without doubt the work of Naomi Stride’s killer, but he’d also confirmed the fact that he was in illegal possession of vital evidence that the police would willingly give their right arm for.

  Cold Comfort was now making much more sense as a name than it had done on Gagonk Mbopa’s way up to the farm. He was finding it very cold comfort indeed to be confronted by so many real men, and yet, because of the circumstances, to be frustrated by the namby-pamby way in which his interrogations had to be conducted.

  “Well, what have you got for me so far?” asked Jones, coming out of the farmhouse and taking him to one side.

  “So far nothing, sir,” replied Mbopa, very nearly allowing the hint of an apology to creep into his voice. “These farm boys are not as other farm boys that I have ever come across.”

  “Ja, they certainly seem a cheeky lot,” agreed Jones, coldly surveying the group of confident-looking, well-fed and decently clothed black men gathered outside the cowshed. “Mind you, this is a bloody weird set-up and no mistake. The suspect here has just been trying to explain it to me.”

  Everyone tried to explain things to Lieutenant Jacob Jones, reflected Mbopa, and some tried so hard they very nearly succeeded. Maybe this time it would be worth saying, “Ermph, sir?”

  “This place,” confided Jones, dropping his voice, “is what the farmer—I mean, suspect—calls a workers ‘korropativ,’ which must be a Russian word by the sound of it, although he denies this with a big laugh. What it means, apparently, is that the boys you see here do not get the usual bag of maize meal, some meat and a few rand for wages. Ach no, what they get instead—and I’m not bulling you—is a share in the farm’s profits.”

  Mbopa gave a surprised and disbelieving hoot.

  “Show more respect, you black monkey!” snapped Jones, glancing uneasily at the group outside the cowshed.

  “Sir, do not misunderstand me. It is not sir’s statement that causes amusement. I am laughing at what fools these boys are.”

  “In what way?”

  “Thinking they get a true share of the profits, sir. How do they know the farmer doesn’t just pretend a much smaller number is the profit?”

  “He claims he holds meetings with them where they talk about the farm’s finances, and every month a different boy gets a chance to look after the accounts.”

  “Hau, hau, hau.…” said Mbopa, shooting his own glance at the men he had assembled. “Is sir going to give Security Branch a tip-off about this place?”

  Jones turned to go back into the farmhouse. “Too right, man. You can never tell where something like this could lead to—if it hasn’t done so already.”

  A happy smile came to Mbopa’s lips. He noticed that it had an immediate effect on the farmworkers which he didn’t altogether understand. But he knew enough to keep the smile going, and saw the general nervousness increase as he returned to his interrogating.

  At nine-forty Warrant Officer Jaap du Preez turned up at Colonel Muller’s office, bringing with him the results of routine enquiries made in and around Jan Smuts Close.

  “Nothing, Colonel,” he said.

  “Nothing?”

  Du Preeze ran a hand over his ginger crewcut and grimaced, reminding Colonel Muller of some remark of Kramer’s about an orangutan. “Absolutely not a thing, sir,” he confirmed, “although, God knows, we’ve tried hard enough. Nobody in Jan Smuts Close has any memory of a vehicle travelling up or down the road at or about one o’clock on the night in question. Nobody around there has any idea of who may have felt sufficiently strongly about Naomi Stride to want to murder her. The neighbours aren’t the sort of folk she associated with.”

  “But Jan Smuts Close can’t have much late-night traffic, man! Surely somebody must’ve—”

  “Not a soul, Colonel. Not even Mr. Parry Evans, who says he’s an insomniac. Mind you, he also added he was in a bedroom at the back of his place, listening to music on some headphones.”

  “Terrific,” sighed Colonel Muller, slumping back in his chair. “What about the search of the house—y’know, Woodhollow? Has that been completed?”

  “Nothing, sir. Or, at least, nothing that looks suspicious in itself.”

  “You’ve been through all her correspondence?”

  “The three detective constables you sent out are still working on it, sir,” said du Preez, standing there and scratching his right knee without having to reach for it. “There’s not been anything ‘sinister,’ as you might say, for the last year anyway.”

  “No sign of the murder weapon, either?”

  “None, Colonel. The grounds are now being searched for the second time.”

  Colonel Muller grunted and started to dig about in his new briar pipe. “You’ve sent someone to fetch the deceased’s servants back?”

  “Hopeful Dumela, sir—he volunteered.”

  “Dumela? Oh ja, a good man, his pa. How’s Hopeful turning out?”

  “For a coon, first class, sir.”

  “And when do you expect—?”

  “His instructions are to be back by nightfall, sir.”

  “Then we have that to look forward to,” Colonel Muller remarked gloomily. “Not that I can see what they’re going to contribute. Don’t ask me why, Jaap, but I’ve got a feeling we’re really up against it this time.”

  “Give us a ride!” begged the children of Tebeli Mission School, tugging at Zondi’s coat tails. “Just a short ride, Mr. Big Town Detective, down to the mimosa-trees and back.”

  “You’ve made an impression,” said Kwakona Mtunsi, the great sadness leaving his face momentarily.

  “Huh, I have you to blame for that!” grumbled Zondi, winking his offside eye. “Many thanks for inviting me to drink tea with you.”

  The sadness came back. “When you catch this man, tell me.”

  “If it was a man,” agreed Zondi, with a nod.

  Again, Mtunsi smiled, very slightly. “There speaks the policeman I could never be,” he said. “Surely no woman—”

  “But you said earlier you couldn’t imagine anyone taking such a life, my brother.”

  “Verily, those were my words,” admitted Mtunsi.

  “Then have you since had thoughts which suggest to you some male person who might’ve—?”

  Mtunsi shook his head. “I have no knowledge of Mrs. Stride, apart from her coming here to Tebeli to encourage me in my sculpture and to bring the children small gifts. She never spoke of her own life, although once—” And he paused. “Yes, that is correct: once she told me I must never have any dealings with her son. I had forgotten.”

  “Did she say why?”

  “No, and I thought it impolite to ask. I could see from her face muscles that there was much conflict within her.”

  “When was this?”

  “Long ago—maybe last year.”

  “What has her face told you recently?”

  Mtunsi used a thumbnail to scrape dried clay from a brass button on his dungarees while he did some thinking. “About a month ago—she came here each Friday—Mrs. Stride was so unhappy inside that I m
ade some excuse not to begin work on her portrait. Hers was the tired head of an old woman, sunk down on its neck.”

  “And since then?”

  “The chin has been up, although once I saw a strange fear take the brightness from her eyes. That was two Fridays ago, when the nose was giving me—”

  “What happened to cause this fear?”

  “Nothing here at the school, I am sure of it. A memory, maybe; some idea that forced its way into her mind. Little Ntombifikile had come into the hut to show Mrs. Stride a letter she had written in class, and just as Mrs. Stride took it in her hand to praise the child, that’s when the look came.”

  Zondi took out his car keys. “Could it have been—something contained in the wording?” he asked. “Can you remember what the letter was about?”

  “I remember it was full of bad spelling and capital letters in the wrong places! Oh, a very short note to Ntombifikile’s father, who lives in a factory hostel in some very far-away place. Ntombifikile asked him by which year he hoped to have saved enough money to come home again for ten days.”

  “Ah,” said Zondi, remembering Naomi Stride’s description of a Bantu men’s hostel. “Can you be sure what you saw in those eyes wasn’t fear, but understanding and sorrow?”

  “I am sure it was fear,” said Mtunsi, “although you are right; I cannot swear to it.”

  “Give us a ride, please give us a ride!” chorused the children.

  “Perhaps soon your teacher will have his own vehicle in which to take you to the mimosa trees and back,” said Zondi, opening his car door. “You heard what I told you about the thousand rand, Mtunsi?”

  “I heard, my brother. But what we really need is a tank so we can catch rainwater for drinking.”

  Tess Muldoon sprang out of bed and reached for her turquoise silk kimono. “I hate to say this,” she said, “but much as I’d like to lie here all day, having my back rubbed and gossiping about poor Naomi, some of us have work to do! My first private pupil is at twelve-thirty, and she’s only got her lunch-hour.”

  Kramer nodded, preoccupied by seeing her upright and moving so lightly. “Christ, lady, you’re beautiful.”

  “I know,” she said.

  He laughed. Ballet dancers were not as other women, or so his first encounter with one seemed to suggest. They had this down-to-earth, very professional detachment from themselves which was, in a land of preening females, so refreshing.

  “And, anyway, I doubt if there’s anything more I can tell you.”

  “True,” he agreed. “Ja, I’d also best get going. I’ve still two other people to see by eleven.”

  “C’est la vie, my love. Although.…”

  “What?”

  “I will be free again later.”

  “Oh ja?”

  “After nine this evening?”

  “But I thought we’d run out of things to talk about?”

  “Oh, I do hope so,” she said, smiling wickedly.

  Kramer smiled back. “Well, maybe until later, hey, Theresa Mary Muldoon?” And he made his farewell bow very formal.

  Lieutenant Jones’s driving came close to being passable on tar roads that ran reasonably straight and level. Almost effortlessly, he and Gagonk Mbopa were heading back into Trekkersburg, intent on checking out at least one more suspect before reporting at eleven o’clock to Colonel Muller.

  “I wonder if Kramer has come up with anything this morning,” mused Jones.

  Mbopa shrugged.

  “Hey, who asked you to butt in? Can’t you tell when I’m talking to myself?”

  The WELCOME TO TREKKERSBURG sign came and went.

  Daydreaming, Mbopa spent a few pneumatic moments with an old friend, Zsazsa Lady Gatumi, and then found himself in Leonard Street, where the witchdoctors had their shops, buying a very potent aphrodisiac. Just two drops of which he’d sneak into Jones’s coffee at eleven tomorrow, and when the hullabaloo had died down, and the ambulances had evacuated the CID typists’ pool, then Colonel Muller would come across and say, “Bantu Detective Sergeant Joseph Mbopa, expect news of promotion within the week. If you hadn’t been on hand, to restrain a very sick man, God in Heaven, what else might have happened!” And Mbopa would give a small, self-effacing laugh.

  “What was that?” snapped Jones.

  Mbopa looked round at him, all innocence.

  “You’re giggling away to yourself again,” Jones complained. “Honestly, there are times when I seriously wonder what I’ve done to deserve a Bantu like you! But, that aside for the moment, did you see any magnolias at the farm? I’m buggered if I did.”

  “White flowers? Uh-uh, Lieutenant.”

  “You don’t think that little bastard Zondi isn’t just trying to have us on by letting slip ‘the last magnolia’ is a clue?”

  “The Lieutenant may be right, but he plays a sly game, that one.”

  “Ja, and ‘magnolia’ definitely rings a bell somewhere.…” conceded Jones, nibbling his lower lip pensively. “Mbopa, put your thinking-cap on, hey? We mustn’t let ourselves be beaten by those two.”

  On that, if on nothing else, the pair of them were agreed.

  The suspect next on Kramer’s list made his life easy.

  “Dead,” said the hard-faced woman who opened the door of the boarding-house which had been given as the address of Richard Pomeroy, short-story writer and civil servant. The place smelled of boiled turnip.

  “Oh ja? Dead for how long, lady?”

  “Sunday.”

  “He died in what manner?”

  “Choked.”

  “How? On what? Or did somebody—?”

  “Vomit.”

  “Ah, so he—”

  “Alcoholic.”

  “And where exactly did this death take place?”

  “Here.”

  “In his room?”

  “Lavatory.”

  “And I suppose the local police have all the rest of the details?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I must love you and leave you,” sighed Kramer. “But tell me first, do you always reply to every question you’re asked with only one word?”

  “No,” she said.

  With time on his hands before having to be back at the CID building to exchange information with the Lieutenant, Zondi decided to drop in on Bantu Constable Hopeful Dumela at Woodhollow. It was just possible that the youngster had remembered other things he’d heard from the cook about goings-on in the big house.

  But when Zondi reached the top of Jan Smuts Close he remembered with a click of his tongue that Dumela had been part of the two-to-ten shift the day before, making this a wasted journey. He stopped the car and began backing it into a driveway.

  “Coooo-eee!” called out Miss Simson, waving at him from her veranda over the way. “Aren’t you the African detective who was here yesterday?”

  So Zondi completed his turn, parked on her side of the close, and got out to see what she wanted. Miss Simson had pinked her cheeks and was wearing a dress that had frills at the neck and cuffs. Having a murder on her doorstep was obviously making her feel life was worth living.

  “Any news?” she asked, as Zondi came to stand at the foot of the veranda steps.

  “Sorry, madam?”

  “You know, have you people caught anybody yet?”

  “No, madam, not yet. This will be a very difficult case.”

  “I know. Isn’t it shocking to think anybody would—what was it they did to her exactly?”

  “I’m sorry, madam, I am not party to such information.”

  “Oh, no, I don’t suppose you would be,” she said, looking cross. “I really can’t understand why there aren’t more details in the papers.”

  “That is sometimes best, madam.”

  “But to think of her son—that poor, poor boy! What can he be going through?”

  “It must be hard for him, madam.”

  Miss Simson paused, as though awaiting a much more satisfactory reply, and then said: “He isn’t—er, with yo
u people, is he? He’s been allowed home?”

  “Yes, allowed home, madam.”

  “I am relieved! But what about poor Mr. Pillay? I noticed we had another postman this morning. He came terribly early, as a matter of fact, so I only caught a glimpse of him and didn’t have a chance to—”

  “The postman, too, was allowed home, madam,” said Zondi, wishing he could end this silly woman’s questioning of him.

  “Oh dear, it’s so sad in so many ways,” went on Miss Simson, peeling a grape. “Just minutes before he came running down here, Mr. Pillay had been so excited about that letter, poor thing. But as Daddy always said to me—”

  “Pardon me interrupting, madam,” said Zondi, “but what letter is this that you speak of?”

  “The one with the new English stamp on, of course.”

  “The new English stamp?”

  “Mr. Pillay collects stamps,” said Miss Simson. “Hasn’t he told you? I thought detectives always found out everything there was to know about people. Anyway, we’d both admired the stamp, right here where you’re standing, and I’d encouraged him to ask the people if he could have it.” Then she gave a little shudder and added: “Oh, I say! Do you think it could have been one for Mrs. Stride? Perhaps you’ll see the one I mean if you take a quick look through your exhibits or whatever you call them.”

  But Zondi rather doubted that. He had a mental picture of the letters found delivered to Woodhollow the day before, and an envelope with a new (or even an old) English stamp hadn’t been among them.

  Then, at ten-thirty, Colonel Muller had another caller, Captain Tiens Marais, the new head of Fingerprints. He was a quiet man with a taste for loud clothing who always wore gloves. White cotton gloves which, he would explain, hid the horrible results of an allergy he had to certain chemicals used in his darkrooms. This morning he also had on an emerald-green shirt with yellow polka dots, red slacks, a wide green belt and yellow shoes. Some people called him “Tickey” behind his back, in memory of a famous circus clown.

  “I’ve got a few bits and pieces for you, Colonel,” he said, drawing up a chair to the desk. “Nothing too special.”

  “The Naomi Stride case? Excellent!”