The Artful Egg Page 2

  At first, he acted with cold calculation. He cleared his throat loudly, and when this failed to produce a reaction he gave a rap on the glass door. He did not rap a second time, however, having satisfied himself she was not merely dozing. And then he took his boots off, leaving them outside on the patio before setting off on tiptoe across the wooden floor of the sun-lounge.

  This was when a feverish, dizzying feeling overcame him. He would never have believed such a perfect pallor of exposed skin possible, not in a million trillion years, and wanted desperately to caress it, to feel its cool sheen soothe his brown fingertips like magnolia blossom. Nothing could stop him now, and if she awoke suddenly, too bad—he’d just have to do something drastic.

  There was a low buzzing in the room. He ignored it.

  He marvelled instead at the glittering bluey-green bikini, shimmering as though stitched over by thousands of iridescent sequins, and moved closer, his weak eyes greedy for strong detail. The bikini had some red in it, too, he noted. The blurry face was as he remembered it—rosebud lips and long sweeping eyelashes. The breasts seemed heavier than he had suspected, the mound between her thighs far more pronounced than he could have dreamed. All of a sudden, he hated that bikini and wished it away, wanting to see beneath it.

  He got his wish.

  No sooner had his advancing shadow fallen across the female body lying languorously before him, than the bluey-green glitter disintegrated into a buzzing swirl of angry flies, rose up and disappeared over his shoulder.

  2

  TUESDAY MORNING HAD started well for Lieutenant Tromp Kramer of the Trekkersburg Murder and Robbery Squad. At 5 A.M. exactly—the Widow Fourie’s body clock came complete with its own alarm—he’d been woken by her blowing gently in his left ear. “Trompie,” she had said, “it’s any moment now, hey?” He’d lit a Lucky Strike, wanting to stay awake long enough to mark the moment. “Is it over yet?” she’d whispered a few minutes later. Her timing was perfect, because even as she said this he had seen in his mind’s eye a trapdoor, five hundred miles away, fall with a crash and the hangman’s rope snap straight, before beginning its slow twirl.

  And Tuesday morning had progressed from there. When he’d been woken again, it had been by the Widow Fourie making secret love to him, which he had pretended not to know about; and then, when he’d woken for the third and final time, it had been to find his favourite breakfast waiting on the locker beside her bed. Two jam doughnuts and a bottle of ginger beer.

  Burping quietly—he found the burps that went with this breakfast one of its more attractive and lasting features—he had then taken himself out onto the veranda, there to scratch at the pelt on his chest in remarkably contented fashion.

  A note, sticky-taped to a veranda-post, had read: “Me and the kids have gone out for the day to Myra’s and I’ve told Johannes to take the day off also so you can have peace and quiet for a change. XXX”

  Quite what he had done with the time between then and now, which had to be somewhere around eleven o’clock, he wasn’t at all certain, except that he’d enjoyed himself. There had been the long, deep bath, which had lasted until the water had lost its heat, and then the change into fresh clothes, his first in over a week. After that, he had wandered round the old farmhouse, visited the pumpkin patch, and had eventually settled down in a crude hammock that her children had rigged between two peach-trees.

  He lit another Lucky Strike, noticing that the match flame was almost invisible in the brilliance of the blazing sun. There would be a storm later on, there always was when the weather turned as hot as this, but for the moment it was as near to a perfect day as anyone with nothing to do, and absolutely no intention of doing anything, could wish.

  A butcher bird came to sit on a branch above him. It had a fledgling in its beak, still struggling feebly. After a while, the fledgling hung limp, but the butcher bird remained where it was.

  Kramer looked down and away. The coarse lawn was burned almost the colour of the tinder-dry veld beyond the barbed-wire fence surrounding the property; and far off, murky-grey at this distance, Trekkersburg lay in its wide bowl, brimmed by rocky outcrops. Nothing was distinct: the scraps of bright colour, the metallic glints, the little white shapes were like ants’ eggs, bits of beetle, gaudy scraps of butterfly wing and other insect debris caught at the centre of a cocooning spider web. Poke it with a twig, and God knows what might come crawling out.

  The butcher bird had its head cocked, watching him.

  He twisted round in the hammock, facing downwards through its wide mesh, finding a hole through which his blunt nose fitted comfortably. Below him, in the fine red dust, were two conical depressions made by a couple of ant lions. The ant lions were buried out of sight at the bottom of each depression, waiting for an unwary ant to come slithering down the treacherous walls of the pits they’d dug. A tiny moth, dizzy in the daylight, rang the changes by becoming a victim, and he turned away as the ant lion closed its pincers.

  The butcher bird had gone.

  He tried to doze. He left the hammock and went indoors, where he strapped on his shoulder holster. A minute later, having made sure all was secured and locked, he climbed into his Chevrolet, started it up, and drove off.

  “Naomi Stride?” said Colonel Hans Muller, pausing to blow hard into his pipe-stem. “Damn, the bloody thing’s properly blocked this time. I best send out for some cleaners.”

  “Ja, Naomi Stride,” repeated Lieutenant Jacob Jones. “Do you know who that is, Colonel, sir?”

  “Is her dad that Jewish tailor on the corner opposite the prison?”

  Jones, an Afrikaner to the core, despite such a ridiculous name, gave one of his tight little smiles and said: “Let me give you a clue, sir.… Books.”

  “Just a minute,” growled Colonel Muller, setting his pipe aside and glowering up from his desk. “This is the CID, hey? The Criminal Investigation Department! I haven’t got time to bugger around with bloody clues!”

  “Sorry, Colonel, I just—”

  “So spit it out, man! Let me hear what is so important that it’s OK for you to come running in here, just banging open the door like that, making me break off the match I’m using to—”

  “She’s dead, Colonel—murdered.”

  As accustomed as he was to receiving reports of sudden death, Colonel Muller needed a moment or two to adjust to this information. He spent the time wondering why Lieutenant Jacob Jones had such a pale, bloodless complexion, and why Mrs. Muller had confided to him, during the last police ball at the city hall, that the detective’s brooding eyes and sensuous lips gave her the creeps.

  “Oh ja? Where?”

  “Here in Morningside. There’s just been a report from a Uniform van. It seems they got a tip-off from some neighbours, went round to the house and there she was. She’d been stabbed.”

  “I see,” said Colonel Muller, choosing the sharpest of his two dozen 2B pencils, and making a note of the name on a pad. “Naomi Stride.… But what has this got to do with books?”

  “She wrote them—you know, a world-famous novelist! Hell, when this gets out, you’re going to have the press here from every—”

  “Oh, no,” said Colonel Muller very firmly. “Not unless I give the word. And, anyway, she can’t be as famous as you say, because I always look in the bookshop window down the road, and I don’t have any memory of—”

  “Well, you wouldn’t, Colonel, sir. Her books are all banned.”

  The pencil point snapped. “Banned?” echoed Colonel Muller, staring at the name on his pad. “God in Heaven, now I do smell trouble. Remember how it was when that stupid bloody political detainee—what’s-his-name—hanged himself in the cells here?”

  “Ja, and the overseas press tried to prove we’d done it to put a stop to his—”

  “Please! I need no reminders, hey?”

  “But, Colonel, sir, it was you who—”

  “Quiet, Jones. We must nip all such talk in the bud.”

  Colonel Muller glanced
at his blocked pipe, pointed to the packet of cigarettes in the pocket of Jones’s safari jacket and snapped his fingers. Having accepted a light as well, he then rose from behind his desk and began to pace the strip of worn carpet by his window, never taking the cigarette from his lips.

  “Lieutenant Kramer,” he said. “Where is he?”

  Again Jones gave another of his tight little smiles, making this one look even more like he was sucking something sweet through a straw. “I thought you’d want to know that, sir, so I put my head in his office on my way up. Just his boy was there, playing at doing a report.”

  “What did Zondi have to say?”

  “Oh, the usual cock-and-bull story you can’t follow, so I thought that you’d like me to take charge, Colonel, sir, seeing as Kramer’s decided to take the day off to go round his popsies and give them all a—”

  “Ah, talk of the devil,” interrupted Colonel Muller, turning from his reflection in the window to wink at the big man standing behind Jones on a less worn part of the carpet.

  Ten minutes later, Kramer was ready to leave for Morningside. All he needed now were the keys to his police car. There was a jingling from the steel fire-escape leading from the CID building into the vehicle-yard, and down it came a trim, jaunty Zulu in a snazzy suit and snap-brim hat, making those steps ring like a tap-dancer. Reaching the asphalt, he did a soft-shoe shuffle, spun round on his heel, then switched to a casual saunter, both hands deep in his pockets.

  “So the world is good today, Bantu Detective Sergeant Michael Zondi?” grunted Kramer.

  “Boss, the world is beautiful!” replied Zondi, taking out the jingling car-keys again, and getting in behind the wheel. “Have you looked to see what day it is? I had forgotten, and then I saw the calendar on my way out of the office. Today, early this morning, far away in Pretoria, a certain Fritz—”

  “Christ, kaffir, you’re not going morbid on me, hey?”

  “What is the derivation of this difficult word ‘morbid,’ master?”

  “Drive,” ordered Kramer.

  And they were both laughing as the big Ford bucked out of the vehicle-yard, slewed round and dived into a gap in the passing traffic. After this, Zondi made his own gaps, ran two red lights and generally had a good time, until they reached the dual carriageway out to the suburbs, where there was too much room to make his kind of driving interesting. So he eased back and took the Lucky Strike that Kramer had lit for him.

  “Ja, I also noticed it was execution day,” murmured Kramer. “I’m still not sure you should have stopped me that time. I tell you, his throat felt good in my hands.”

  Zondi shrugged. “The same throat that was squeezed shut this morning in Pretoria. Your reach is long, boss.”

  “And so is yours. Was your evidence that really nailed him.”

  “Hau, a pair of dangerous men.…”

  “Too true, old son.”

  And again they both laughed.

  The police mortuary van went rocketing past them with the considerable bulk of Sergeant Van Rensburg crouched over its wheel, his tongue curling up into his moustache in intense concentration.

  “Do you know of this woman who has died?” asked Zondi.

  “Ach, just that she’s a banned writer or something,” replied Kramer. “The Colonel’s having pups that it’ll cause a big fuss.”

  “Then he wants results right this minute?”

  “Something like that.…”

  They left the dual carriageway and plunged down a slip-road into Morningside. Every house was different, every house a testament to the taste and pocket of its original owner; some were big, some were small, some exotic, some very plain, but they did have two things in common: a bonding of lush tropical vegetation and an air of earnest middle-class pretension. This made it a terrible place to work in uniform, because if you were called to a man-and-wife fight the violence would be all verbal, and they’d be saying intellectual things about each other in English that the average constable had a hard time understanding. “Ach, lady,” Kramer could remember a colleague remarking with a sigh, “if it’s just your husband has anal fixations, why don’t you get him one of those blow-up rubber rings he can sit down on?”

  Zondi’s memory, developed as a pupil at a mission school which never had enough textbooks to go round, came into its own on an occasion like this. Show him anything, even a map of the more complicated parts of Trekkersburg, and it was imprinted for good, allowing him immediate and easy reference. Without taking a single wrong turning, he found his way to Jan Smuts Close and accelerated towards the top end of it.

  “Hey, slow down,” said Kramer. “There’s some woman with an old man who’s shaking a golf club at us.”

  Zondi was already slowing down. He stopped outside 20 Jan Smuts Close, and Kramer lowered his window.

  “Excuse me, but are you the police?” asked the woman. “Only Major—”

  “Ja, lady—and who are you?”

  “Er, Miss Simson, actually. I live on my own here at number 20.”

  He had already guessed as much. Miss Simson’s petticoat dropped beneath the hemline of her skirt, which was something that anyone on an even vaguely intimate basis with her would surely have pointed out before breakfast. He put her age at around thirty-eight, and noted her very small chin. He lamented the fact that she stooped a little, spoiling the effect of two very fine, rather girlish breasts, and wondered if she bought her sanitary towels by mail order.

  “Major Hamish MacTaggart, Cameron Highlanders Retired,” gruffly announced the stumpy, grey-haired warrior standing beside her with his golf club at slope arms. “Neighbours. Bloody poor show.”

  Kramer liked these old lunatics, who really should have been dead and buried long ago, but persisted in staining their corners of the globe Empire Red with shakier and shakier pourings from the port-bottle. “What’s a bloody poor show. Major?” he asked.

  “Dammit, man, you can see the state this young woman’s in, having that infernal idiot left on her doorstep! Good God, when she first came battering at my door I thought we’d another uprising on our hands, and her—”

  “No, honestly, Major, I’m really quite all right now,” said Miss Simson, “although it was very sweet of you to rush to my rescue.” Then she turned to Kramer and said: “I’m afraid it’s the poor Indian postman, you see. He just came tearing down here, dived on to my veranda, and began the most dreadful howling. I couldn’t get a word of sense out of him until the Major—”

  “An accident of some sort, I gathered—blood and that sort of thing,” Major MacTaggart explained. “Got him calmed down long enough to sound that out, then gave the local police station a ring. Any idea what’s happened to the poor woman?”

  Kramer exchanged glances with Zondi, before replying, “We’re not sure yet. But let me see if I’ve got this straight: the postman was the one who raised the alarm?”

  “Correct.”

  “And what precisely had he seen?”

  “No idea. The man’s a gibbering—”

  “He’s obviously very upset,” said Miss Simson, “and we do think something ought to be done about him, if you know what I mean. All the other police we’ve seen have just shot past.”

  Kramer shook his head, wearied by the juvenile excesses of the uniformed branch, which had grown far worse since the introduction of television in the mid-seventies. “And you say this witness’s still over there on your veranda?”

  “Yes, sitting huddled up in the corner.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Well, mumbling away to himself, actually.”

  “Gibbering,” said Major MacTaggart.

  “OK, fine. I’ll leave my sergeant here,” said Kramer, and moved over to take the wheel as Zondi slipped out of the driver’s seat. “Just get a brief statement, and then meet me up at the—”

  “I trust,” cut in Major MacTaggart, “you are going to arrange for him to be carted off as quickly as possible? I can’t see how what he’s saying is going to be o
f the slightest—”

  “That’s for my sergeant to decide, hey?” said Kramer, putting the Ford into gear and releasing the handbrake.

  “Humph,” snorted Major MacTaggart, giving Zondi a sharp glance. “Then I take it this chappie has an uncommonly lively interest in eggs.”

  “Eggs?”

  “Hen’s eggs,” explained Miss Simson. “Poor Mr. Pillay appears quite obsessed with them.”

  Two patrol vans, a police Land-Rover and the District Surgeon’s Mercedes Benz were parked haphazardly on the circle of gravel outside the Spanish-style house at the end of the long drive. There were palms to go with the curved red tiles of the low roof, and bougainvillaea to hint, like festoons of crumpled pink tissue-paper at fiesta time. For the pretty señorita, seeking something bright to wear in her hair, there were hibiscus and azalea blooms, and for the dead grasp of the woman within there were some arum lilies.

  Kramer kneed shut his car door and went up the steps of the uncovered veranda. The front door was wide open, so he carried on through into the large hallway, hesitated a moment, then continued across it and down a wide corridor. A curious feature of this corridor was that its gaily coloured rugs weren’t spread over the polished black floor-tiles, but had been placed on the walls, of all impracticable places.

  Two young constables were standing outside the last door on the right. They glanced round, saw who was approaching and stiffened to attention, hiding their cigarettes in cupped hands.

  “Relax,” said Kramer. “It isn’t your arse I’ve come to kick. Who’s in charge here?”

  “What’s this?” demanded a high-pitched voice, and an orangutan in a warrant officer’s uniform and a ginger crewcut stepped into the doorway behind them.

  “Oh Christ,” said Kramer, “I might have known.… How goes it, Jaap?”

  And Jaap du Preez grinned good-naturedly up at him, exposing more gum than tooth in a mouth as wide as a saucepan. “It goes fantastic, sir. Everything’s under control. So, why am I going to have my backside kicked?”