The Artful Egg Read online

  The bill from the suppliers of swimming-pool filtration equipment seemed to be quite genuine, if such huge figures could be believed, and he set it aside after only a few minutes.

  He spent far longer on the letter in a cream envelope sent from a place called Bumstead in England, suspecting something decidedly fishy about such an address. In the end, however, he had no choice but to discount it as a fan letter of sorts. Although the signatory had been “appalled at the way the book sided with the terrorists,” he had gone on to say that the esteemed authoress of Winter Sun had “caught the Rhodesian landscape magnificently,” just as he remembered it.

  Exhibit Three was a moving letter from the father of a boy with an incurable disease asking, on his behalf, for her to autograph the five pieces of white card enclosed.

  After which Exhibit Four, a request from some magazine or other for a photograph it could use with an article on South African novelists by Professor Andre P. Brink, seemed very dry stuff indeed, and took no more than a minute or so to authenticate.

  Ramjut Pillay made another adjustment to the lamp wick, and then steeled himself for Exhibit Five, the sheet of cheap blue stationery that had earlier so horrified him, but which he now felt able to study with the necessary professional detachment.

  “Bad speller,” he noted, tut-tutting. “Deduction: person of low intellect, minimal educations.…”

  Right you Filthey JUW bitCH. You haVe haD all tHe WARNingS you Are goING to Get. I suPPose You tHInk yOu can Put ME in a BooK and MaKe a Mock of Me and GeT aWAy wiTH it. you Know I can’t sue you beCoz tHe booK is Banned here (anD so It shOULd be!!!!) but Peopele still gett coPies and so I hAVe had enouGh and nOw yoU Are reALLy goINg to Pay For It. ReMEMber Richelieu, Act II, Scene ii—‘The PEn iS mighTier than THE swORD?’ Ha ha ha. We’ll soon see AboUt tHAT–just you Wait!!!!!

  * * *

  Zondi’s torch batteries were almost flat when Kramer returned to the car and found him engrossed in a dimly lit page of The Last Magnolia.

  “No wonder they say it’s a mistake to teach you buggers to read,” he said, getting in on the passenger’s side. “You’ll all end up bloody blind at this rate.”

  Zondi smiled and pocketed the book again. “The Lieutenant sounds as though he has also learned something,” he said, turning the ignition key. “What was this Boss Carswell like?”

  “Ach, you saw for yourself, Mickey! One word to him out on the porch and he goes running inside to Mummy—the sort of arty-farty character you imagine puts a rubber teat on his wine-bottle. Go back over the bridge and I’ll have decided by then where we go next.”

  The Ford churned up the verge, bit into the asphalt of the street and took off. “So that’s why all the lights in his house are on? He’s afraid of the dark, too?”

  “Could be—although when I made some remark about it he came back with a whole lot of crap about ‘an artist must have light all around him’ or something. Anyway, that’s beside the point.”

  “Except this artist does not sound like a murder suspect.”

  “No chance, but I’ll give you the main points of the interview later. The important thing, old son, is that Anton Leonard Carswell was able to explain all this nonsense about the ‘fights over money’ that Theo Kennedy had with his mother.”

  “Uh-huh?” said Zondi, reaching over to re-adjust the rearview mirror.

  “It was the son’s job,” said Kramer. “His way of making a living. His mother kept wanting him to give it up, claimed he was ‘corrupting the Zulu culture’—accused him of exploitation. She said it disgusted her that a son of hers should be part of a ‘cheap and shoddy’ operation, et cetera, where only money—”

  “Exploitation, how?”

  “Ja, I asked that. Apparently the son got into the curio business after some birdwatching trip he took in a jeep to a really remote area, up near the border. He came across this village where there was a man who had made some really good heads out of clay—you know, heads of different people—and the bugger was willing to sell them at fifty cents apiece or around that. Kennedy saw straight away that the same heads could be fetching twenty—thirty times that back in Durban, and that’s how his business began. He offered this bloke five rand a head, cash in hand, and said he’d be back in a month to pick up more of them to—”

  “Five rand?” queried Zondi, giving a low whistle. “The son must be a good man. Many would have said, ‘OK, fifty cents,’ and—”

  “Ja, I didn’t follow where the exploitation came in, either, when you take into account transport and all the other overheads. On top of which, you know how bare-bummed poor those buggers are, out in the sticks.”

  “Too true. Five rand by itself would be much, much money. The man made more heads?”

  “He’s still making them, apparently, and he’s got half the village helping him, finding the right clay, looking after the ovens he bakes them in. Mind you, he’s not the only one supplying Kennedy these days. There’s woodcarvers, women doing beadwork, people using cowhide for Zulu shields—ach, all sorts.”

  Zondi took the lit Lucky Strike being offered him. “But.…”

  “I know, you want to know what the mother thought was so wrong about this? Shall I tell you what Carswell said when I asked him the same thing? He said all the heads the first bloke made, for instance, were still the same six heads Kennedy bought the first time.”

  “And so?”

  “I’m buggered if I can see the crime in that, either,” said Kramer, winding down his window.

  “What was the connection between this Boss Carswell and—”

  “The Stride woman? Basically, she paid big money for his paintings after he’d given her all the right sort of chat, I’d say.”

  “His pictures are no good?”

  Kramer shrugged. “Christ, how can you tell, Mickey? They all looked the bloody same to me, except some were different sizes.”

  6

  COLONEL MULLER WAS halfway across the vehicle-yard at eight the following morning when Jones drove in off the street and stopped beside him. “I’ve already seen two of the suspects on my list, sir,” he said, getting out. “And my boy ran a double-check by interrogating their servants. Cast-iron alibis for both lots, I’m afraid.”

  “How can you be so sure?” asked the Colonel, not pausing, but forcing Jones to fall in step with him. “And, anyway, it’s me that’s doing the co-ordinating, taking the final decisions in these matters.”

  Jones flipped open an immaculately kept and detailed notebook. “Roger Michael Slater, white adult male, fifty-five years of age, poetry-writer and bookshop-owner by occupation. At approximately seven-fifteen last night, a lady friend came up to his flat to show him some etchings.”

  “Oh ja? That’s a new twist.”

  “Pardon, Colonel? Have I missed something I should’ve—?”

  “Just get on with it, man.”

  “This lady friend—namely Shareena Gordon, thirty-eight years of age—then had an evening meal with the aforesaid Roger Slater, prepared by Moses Tetwe, house boy, who resides in Kwela Village. Tetwe was asked to serve coffee at approximately ten-twenty, by which time he had fallen asleep in the kitchen. Slater reports that the lady had by now ‘had a few drinks’ and was in a ‘boisterous mood.’ She knocked over the first pot of coffee and another one had to be ordered. When Tetwe arrived in the lounge with this second pot, he informed his employer that he could not return to Kwela Village as curfew was at ten-thirty and he was not in possession of a late pass. Slater offered to drive him home personally, and to make the right excuses if stopped by a patrol van, but Tetwe said that as his boss had just knocked the second coffee-pot over perhaps he was not really in the mood for driving. Slater agreed with him, and told him to make himself comfortable for the night on the kitchen floor, using any bedding he liked to take from the basket beside the washing machine. He then wished Tetwe ‘happy dreams’ and said not to bother with more coffee, as he had just remembered he had some cognac somewhere. Accordi
ng to Slater, ‘I thought cognac might help Shareena to calm down,’ and at approximately midnight she was calm enough to be left to sleep on the couch in the lounge while he retired to his bed. Tetwe reports that he himself did not fall asleep again until approximately four-twenty by the kitchen clock, owing to the lady visitor frequently saying prayers out aloud such as, ‘O God, that’s beautiful—Jesus, I love you!’—which he, as a self-confessed pagan, grew very tired of. Personally, Colonel, I think—”

  “Ja, ja, so do I, Jones. But surely the point is, this Tetwe can vouch for the fact Slater was on the premises all night?”

  “Exactly, Colonel. As to Slater’s connection with the deceased—”

  “Who was the other suspect you interviewed, hey?” said Colonel Muller, making a show of consulting his wristwatch at the foot of the fire-escape.

  “Miss Yvonne Frobisher, white adult female—”

  “Can’t I just have the main drift for now?”

  “Er, certainly, Colonel,” replied Jones, his mouth going sulky. “The aforesaid, a librarian by trade, claims to have had an early night after listening to some concert on the radio, and the maidservant, resident on the premises, who helps her with her wheelchair, corroborates the above statement.”

  “Excellent, Jones!” said Colonel Muller, clapping him on the shoulder. “Now, I really must—”

  “Any news from Kramer, sir?”

  “Aha,” said Colonel Muller mysteriously.

  Two reporters and a television crew were hanging about outside Theo Kennedy’s flat at Azalea Mansions, eating what smelled like bacon sandwiches. Kramer walked right past them.

  “Bugger it!” he said under his breath, not having expected the press to be out and about so early.

  Then a familiar figure came running up to him. “Mummy says you must come,” she said, reaching for his hand. “Come with Amanda.”

  “Oh ja? But what does Daddy say?”

  “Daddy’s not there—Daddy’s in Heaven, silly! Come on, or I’ll pull you!”

  He let her tug him all the way to the door of Number 7. The reporters, he noticed, gave him no more than a glance, having no interest in the commonplace. A moment later he was inside the flat, which also smelled of bacon, and the front door had been closed behind him.

  “I hope you didn’t mind that,” said Vicki Stilgoe, smiling shyly and showing that she, too, had a dimple or two. “But I guessed you probably wanted to see Theo, and we’ve got him in here with us.”

  “T’eo’s in the bath,” Amanda confided. “Washing.”

  “Really?” said Kramer.

  “He’ll be out in a moment, though,” said Vicki Stilgoe. “Can I offer you a cup of coffee in the meantime? Come through to the kitchen.”

  Kramer followed her down the short passage, wishing he could see whether she had more dimples where her neat little bottom joined the small of her back. But she was fully dressed, in pressed blue jeans and a crisp cotton blouse, and he had to content himself with admiring her earlobes.

  “With milk, or without?” she asked, lifting a coffee-pot.

  “With, please.”

  She laughed. “At least someone took it quietly last night,” she said. “Bruce and Theo have been drinking theirs black and very, very strong, I’m afraid.”

  “Ja, I packed in early, about seven-thirty—this artist bloke got right up my nose—and decided it’d be better making a fresh start this morning. But what happened here?”

  “Bruce went over to Theo’s, who didn’t want to know him at first, and then, so I gather, one thing led to another. I heard them coming in about two, and noises while they tried to find more booze for themselves; and, the next thing I knew, I had two corpses on my hands in the living-room. God knows how Bruce pulled himself together enough to leave for work—I’d hate to be one of his factory boys this morning!”

  “The lady’s a widow,” Kramer was telling himself. “Is that why she gives me this feeling? Christ, I must have some sort of thing about widows! Is it they’re touched with death in some way, and this appeals to me because death is my business—my life even?” He had never thought of himself as a pervert before, and stood mildly shocked by the very suggestion.

  Joseph “Gagonk” Mbopa was looking at the single rose which grew in the courtyard of the CID building. A black prisoner on loan as a cleaner from Trekkersburg jail, distinctive in his red jerkin, khaki shorts and leather sandals, squatted nearby, brushing cigarette ends into a small dustpan, and giving him anxious sideward glances. Mbopa was not a man generally reputed to have an interest in horticulture, let alone a gentle, whimsical side to his nature.

  Very nearly as broad as he was tall, perpetually scowling and given to deep booms of displeasure, the detective sergeant had been given the name “Gagonk” early on in his police career, and it had suited him so perfectly nobody had ever thought to change it. Not even the purists, who did, however, point out that strictly speaking it should have been “Igogog(o),” the Zulu word for the ubiquitous four-gallon paraffin-can, much in use for fetching water, which has thin, almost square sides that make a “gog-gog” or “gagonk-ish” sort of sound when being carried empty.

  The rose trembled in the pink palm of Mbopa’s cupping hand, its stem between his fat fingers. He thrust his broad flat nose up close and sniffed, grimacing appreciatively. Yet his sharp, red-rimmed eyes never left the main entrance, and Zondi, who had chosen to come in through the rear entrance for a change, noticed this.

  The prisoner could have spoiled what happened next, but wisely averted his gaze and moved crablike until his back was turned on Zondi’s advancing figure. The soft dust of the courtyard absorbed footsteps without a sound. The Walther PPK automatic left its shoulder holster as silently. Moving swiftly, holding a hand against his left trouser leg to keep his loose change from giving a telltale clink, Zondi closed the gap and then poked his gun muzzle into the small of Mbopa’s broad back.

  “Hey-bar-bor!” exclaimed Mbopa, wildly startled, leaping into the air and spinning round with clenched fist raised.

  “Good morning, Gagonk,” said Zondi, grinning and putting his gun away.

  “Bastard son of a bastard!” snarled Mbopa, the fist still high. “Pox-ridden whore’s whelp conceived on a dung—”

  “Don’t do anything stupid, the Colonel’s watching,” Zondi said out of one corner of his mouth.

  Mbopa glanced up at the balcony behind him and saw this was true. He brought his clenched fist down and laughed heartily as though he and Zondi were just indulging in a little friendly horseplay.

  “It’s OK, he’s gone now,” said Zondi. “But tell me—why were you waiting here to see me as I came in?”

  Mbopa cast another wary look behind him.

  “The Colonel’s gone—like I told you. Don’t you trust your comrades, Gagonk?”

  “I wasn’t waiting to see you!”

  “Rubbish,” said Zondi. “You were hoping to have a little chat. Hoping to find out how far me and the Lieutenant had got with our investigations last night.”

  “Huh, what you and Spokes—”

  “The big question being, where was I myself when you drove past the Carswell house last night?”

  “We never came anywhere near the—”

  “I’ll tell you,” said Zondi, beckoning him closer. “I was attending to one of our big clues: The Last Magnolia …’

  “That what?” asked Mbopa.

  “Magnolia—you know, man, it’s English for a kind of big flower. I thought, from the way you were sniffing away, flowers must be a special subject of yours.”

  “Zondi, you—” Mbopa began threateningly.

  “Just a minute, Gagonk,” said Colonel Muller, striding towards him from the foot of the stairwell. “What have you done to that rose, hey?”

  Zondi gave a polite nod and discreetly withdrew, followed by the prisoner who had probably learned, after a spell in Trekkersburg jail, that Afrikaans spoken in a certain silky tone boded little good.

  �
��I asked you,” Zondi heard Colonel Muller say behind him, “what the hell you’d done to that rose I look at every morning?”

  “But, Colonel,” protested Mbopa, “I hardly touched—”

  “Open that fist, you heathen monstrosity. Open that fist! There, now tell me what that is.…”

  Whistling, Zondi started up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

  “Ramjut?” came his mother’s querulous voice from outside the door to the lean-to. “Ramjut, are you there? And, if you are there, why are you there? This is not a Sunday, not a day of rest, Ramjut. Ramjut, can you hear me …?”

  “Go away, Mother,” he said rudely. “Go away and dropping dead.”

  “What, boy? What did you say to me?”

  “Please go away, Mother,” he sighed.

  Then turned back to what he had been doing the whole night long, caught up in a fever of excitement mixed with uncertainty. He read, for the umpteenth time, the threatening letter on cheap blue stationery that described Naomi Stride as a “Filthey JUW bitCH” and, again for the umpteenth time, he wondered whether it hadn’t in fact been written by her killer.

  Everything seemed to point to this being so. Each word of the letter was charged with murderous hatred, and there, quite plainly, was a promise that she would be made “to pay for it” through what the writer would do to her. And yet.…

  “Ramjut!” came his mother’s voice again, quavering pathetically. “I’m an old woman, the sun is already hot, I cannot stand here many minutes longer, pleading for a word from you. What is the matter? What is going through your mind?”

  “A postmark!” snapped Ramjut Pillay.

  Monday’s postmark, to be exact, and this was where his half-formed theory foundered. Naomi Stride had been murdered on Monday night, before the letter could reach her. What sense was there in that? Obviously she had been intended to read the thing and to feel shame for what she had done. Just as obviously, the writer had wanted to gloat over the mounting terror she would feel while she waited for him to strike. Why jump the gun, and let her off so much terrible punishment, when there was such hatred in your heart?