The Artful Egg Read online

  “Ah!” said Ramjut Pillay, with sudden inspiration. “Because, we must remind our dear selves, the aforesaid lady victim might take such colossal frights she will run away, or tell the police of her problems, thereby making it difficult to be executing such a devilish scheme!”

  But, no, something wasn’t quite right about that notion, either, as logical and rational as it seemed.

  “Ah!” said Ramjut Pillay.

  Logic and rationality were not to be expected from the sort of madman who had written the letter. To have done so at all, risking the letter being traced back to him by the CID, showed he was not one for astute reasoning but a bloody foolish fellow.

  Which did not necessarily make him a killer, though.

  “Oh dear, oh dear, if only I am knowing of some proper link,” sighed Ramjut Pillay.

  Kramer sipped his tea and tried not to think about Vicki Stilgoe. He concentrated instead on the fact that Theo Kennedy had seemed much calmer when he’d come sidling into the kitchen, a terrible hangover notwithstanding. It was obviously doing him good to have Amanda around, because her chirpy remarks made the poor bugger keep smiling. On top of which, Vicki was the perfect—

  “Right, Mickey!” he said to Zondi, who was fitting a new lead to the electric kettle. “Enough of this pissing about, let’s have your ideas on where we should start today. With Carswell out of the way, that leaves four others on our list to see. Jesus Christ, this is a stupid bloody way of going about things.”

  Zondi nodded. “The money in each case is now small,” he agreed. “And was it only to people here in Trekkersburg that Mrs. Stride left these presents in her will?”

  “Ach, I don’t know, man—and I care even less. What I want are practical suggestions.”

  “Then, to do this quicker, we split up, boss.”

  “You crafty bugger,” grunted Kramer, picking up the list. “That means you get just the one—this Kwakona Mtunsi bloke—while I get the other three.”

  “Are you not three times the man I am, O Great White Father?”

  “Six times the man, kaffir,” Kramer replied. “Because, the way I feel right now, I’m likely to go out and bite each one of these bastards in half.”

  Gagonk Mbopa was becoming heartily sick of questioning domestic servants. His idea of an interrogation was something a good deal more lively, less inhibited, and best carried out after dark, well away from squeamish people with sensitive hearing. His favourite place had long been a children’s play-park, hidden in a remote grove of wattle-trees on the edge of one of the city’s more prosperous white suburbs, but then some overimaginative housewife had noticed bloodstains under one end of the seesaw, and he had reluctantly decided to change venues for a while. Time and place weren’t the only things, neither was improvised equipment; a real man like Gagonk Mbopa needed another real man to get his teeth into, not this assortment of overfed, hysterical women, or the obsequious, head-bobbing creatures who passed for males among them.

  “And, like I say, while I do that,” Jones was whining on, “you get round the back and sort out the farm boys and everything, OK?”

  “Ermph,” said Mbopa, and then, as a grudging afterthought, “sir.”

  They carried on up the steep dirt road, watching out for a sign to direct them to a farm called, for some very strange reason, Cold Comfort. Twice, Jones hit huge potholes that could have been easily avoided, and Mbopa gave an involuntary grimace to hear the police vehicle labouring in quite the wrong gear.

  “So what gives you the right to make faces?” Jones demanded. “The first and only time I allowed you to drive me anywhere, you nearly ruined the bloody gearbox and the clutch, and we spent half the time trying to get back on the road. Honest to God, a drunken bloody gorilla, with a bucket over its head, couldn’t have done any worse than you—do you know that? I’ve never seen such an example of dangerous, completely crazy kaffir-driving in all my life!”

  “Hau, I am ashamed,” said Mbopa, who could genuinely handle any car with consummate skill, but preferred, for reasons associated with his ego, to make Jones act at what he called “my little pink chauffeur.”

  Yawning, Kramer reached for the door-knocker and clattered it impatiently, hardly pausing before he clattered it again. He wasn’t too sure he had scribbled down the correct address, because this place seemed a lot more like an old warehouse than someone’s home.

  Then the small door within the big door opened very slightly, and a bleary but bewitching green eye took a look at him. “Go away,” a sleepy voice said in English.

  “Here,” said Kramer, pushing his warrant card through the crack. “It tells you who I am, lady. The rest comes when you let me inside.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “I’ll stand here and sob my heart out.”

  She laughed. “How grotesque! No, I don’t think I could stand that.…” And there was the sound of a chain lock being unhitched. “Count to ten and then let yourself in,” she said. “You got me out of bed to answer this, and I’m not really in a state to be seen receiving visitors.”

  Kramer began to take an interest in the morning.

  He counted to ten, pushed the door open and stepped into a vast room that had been partially divided into two levels. The ground level had a polished wooden floor, a circle of enormous cushions almost dead-centre and, over in the far corner, an L-shaped kitchen area, equipped with the biggest spice-rack he had ever seen. Also on a grand scale was the huge wall-mirror that rose a good six feet from the skirting and had a curious banister or handrail running across it.

  “I’m up here,” said the sleepy voice.

  Having closed the door behind him, Kramer crossed over to a spiral staircase made of cast iron and painted fire-engine red, hesitated for only a moment, and then started up it. The lady, he reflected, would have to be quite a little mover to have covered the same distance so silently and in only ten seconds.

  The first thing he saw on the second level was the cross-section of a thick white carpet. This was followed by the foot of a very wide, low bed, and then by two large built-in wardrobes on either side of it, each painted black. It was not until he actually left the spiral staircase that he finally got to take a proper look at what went with that one green eye.

  Another green eye, thank God—just as bewitching.

  A nose, too, and a mouth.

  A face straight from a make-up ad, high-cheeked, finely modelled, impeccable in its detail, framed by a tumble of long hair the Coca-Cola brown of a Cape mountain stream.

  It wasn’t often Kramer felt poetic.

  “Theresa Mary Muldoon?” he said.

  “Usually just ‘Tess,’ ” she said. “But fine, if you prefer to be so formal.”

  “Always,” said Kramer, sitting down on the foot of her bed.

  “I see,” she said. “And?”

  “I’m here because I’m enquiring into the death of a friend of yours, the writer Naomi Stride.”

  “God, I can’t bear to think about it!”

  “You were close?”

  “I adored her. She was.…”

  Kramer raised an eyebrow.

  “Good,” said Tess Muldoon. “Would you rub my foot?”

  He thought about it, then turned back a corner of the patchwork quilt. The foot wriggled its long toes in greeting.

  “M’m, gorgeous.…” she said, closing her eyes and letting herself relax totally. “What big strong hands you have—how did they get like that?”

  “Ach, pulling the wings off flies,” said Kramer.

  Zondi blinked, not entirely sure he was seeing right. But there, against the skyline, was undeniably a gigantic dragon-lizard, akin to those whose bones were on display at the Trekkersburg Museum, held together by iron rods and wire. It stood on four great pillars of legs, its long body arched, its slender neck and almost identical tail dipping down to the ground.

  Then the rough track took a sudden twist and some mimosa-trees got in the way. A dilapidated noticeboard announced: TE
BELI MISSION SCHOOL. It took another hundred yards of cautious driving before the dragon became visible again, very much closer, and revealed itself to be more mythical than reptilian, for it had two rows of mammary glands under its belly. There were also children climbing all over it.

  “Mad!” said Zondi, chuckling as he stopped the car.

  From each pair of teats hung the ropes of a swing, and the tail of the creature was actually a slide, reached by climbing the rough steps fashioned in its neck. Never in all his life had he seen such a marvellous contraption, not even at a school for whites.

  “Greetings, my brother,” said a Zulu of his own age, appearing at his car window. “May I be of service to you?”

  “Greetings. Yes, you can tell me who made this thing.”

  “Kwakona Mtunsi, with much help from the children.”

  “Are you Mtunsi?” asked Zondi, alerted by the modesty of the reply.

  “Yes, my brother, I am he.”

  Zondi got out of his car. Mtunsi was tall and thin, as loosely connected at the joints as a Railway Street drunk. He wore workman’s blue dungarees, kept his long thumbs hooked behind the shoulder straps, and on his head was a wide grass hat, frayed around its brim. His feet were bare, just like the feet of the children in his charge. Zondi had never seen a teacher before who didn’t try to keep up appearances in a patched jacket and pants, shiny tie, sagging socks and lace-up shoes with many cracks in them.

  “What is your job here at the school?” he asked.

  “I am the principal,” Mtunsi replied, adding with a slow smile, “and the only member of staff.” He held out his hand.

  “Detective Sergeant Mickey Zondi, Trekkersburg CID.”

  Mtunsi nodded, widening that smile. “I understood you were from the police. Usually, when any visitor comes to Tebeli, the children run to greet the car, and to beg a ride.”

  “Only they saw the radio aerial on the back?” said Zondi, smiling, too, and completing a Zulu handshake.

  “Something like that, Sergeant—I’d not noticed it myself. But how is it you knew my name …?”

  “The writer woman, Naomi Stride.”

  “Mrs. Stride?”

  “You must know her.”

  “Of course,” said Mtunsi without hesitation, yet showing some puzzlement. “She was here last Friday.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Sitting.”

  Zondi cocked his head to one side, puzzled himself now.

  “Come,” said Mtunsi, “permit me to show you.…”

  And he loped off towards a round mud hut set a little apart from the rest of the school’s rudimentary buildings. Chickens squawked from Zondi’s path as he followed him, and a small child, hugging a broken slate, suddenly leaped up from a hollow in the long yellow grass and made its escape, too. The hut had an unusually large doorway, no door, and the far wall had an oversize window-space in it.

  Mtunsi motioned Zondi to pass through the doorway ahead of him. To his left was a long trestle table, covered in crudely made pots; to his right were two forty-gallon oil-drums, filled almost to the brim with plastic bags of dark brown clay. There wasn’t much else in the room. Just a wooden crate with an old cushion on it, and several feet away, where the daylight was strongest, stood a very tall and strangely narrow stool on top of which rested a large lump wrapped in wet sacking.

  Mtunsi took the end of this sacking and started to unwind it. Gradually a dark brown head was revealed, so strikingly lifelike that, for a moment, it seemed about to utter a few choice Zulu words in protest over the rather undignified way it was being handled.

  “Hau, but I know that face.…” began Zondi, tantalised by an elusive quality that mocked his photographic memory.

  “Of course, I must still put the curls of her hair on,” remarked Mtunsi, “once I’ve finished the—”

  Zondi laughed softly. He’d just realised his mistake, and that, in effect, this was the negative in dark clay of the portrait he’d seen of novelist Naomi Stride in the magazine.

  “So cold, like this,” murmured Mtunsi, touching his long fingers to her cheek.

  “Yes, cold.…” said Zondi. “My brother, I think I have some bad news to tell you.”

  Kramer came back up the spiral staircase with a cup of black coffee in each hand. Real coffee, not the instant stuff, and it smelled pretty horrible.

  “What a sweetie you are,” said Tess Muldoon, sitting up eagerly in her bed and exposing the top half of her bare self with not so much as a blink. “Oops, you nearly got that on your trousers.”

  He sat down where he had been massaging her foot, and handed over her coffee. She had firm, fairly flat breasts with nipples like pink icing.

  “Oh, naturally I thought about it when I first heard,” she said, taking a sip. “Went utterly to pieces. I had to get Gareth over in the end, told him to bring a bottle of something large, and we held a sort of wake last night. Apparently, or so Gareth insists, I kept wanting to telephone the police and tell them I knew who’d done it. But as Naomi’d—”

  “Not so fast, Tess, hey? What gave you the idea you—?”

  “A feeling, mainly. Have I told you I spent the weekend before last at Woodhollow?”

  “No, but go on.”

  “Well, part of the weekend, anyway. Naomi had asked me to dinner on the Friday evening—an awful flop, poor darling—and she begged me to stay behind when the others were leaving. We thought those boring Carswells would never go, but finally the two of us had the place to ourselves, and we sat beside the swimming-pool and gossiped for absolutely ages. In fact it got so late that I flopped out on the couch in the sun-lounge, while Naomi was fetching more ice from the kitchen, and that’s where I woke up on Saturday morning, covered with a rug she’d found for me. She really was a—”

  “Was it something you’d gossiped about that gave you this ‘feeling?’ ”

  “No, no, I’m still coming to that. I woke late, right? My God, the time! So I decided to sneak through Naomi’s study and—well, that wasn’t very clever, was it? The post had just arrived, and she was going through it at her desk. I caught her gazing at a letter on cheap blue paper, the kind with lines ruled, and it was a second or two before she realised I’d barged in. ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked—it just popped out. ‘Oh, just another crank letter,’ she said, as if it didn’t bother her one bit. But I could see she was badly shaken by something.”

  “You got to see this letter?” asked Kramer, setting his coffee aside.

  Tess Muldoon shook her head. “Naomi slipped it quickly into the middle drawer of her desk and locked it in there,” she said. “But, as she did so, I glimpsed something.”

  “Let me guess—another blue envelope already in the desk?”

  “Two others, my love.”

  “Same size?”

  “They looked identical.”

  “How were they addressed?”

  “Oh, it was all too fast for that. As I said, a glimpse and she shut the drawer again.”

  “But.…” Kramer rose and went over to examine a Japanese fan on the wall. “OK, then tell me what happened next. How long did she stay looking ‘badly shaken,’ as you call it?”

  “About three seconds—which you’d know, if you’d ever met Naomi. She hated to dump her problems on anyone else, said that sort of thing was so unfair. Next moment, she was chattering away, coming out with the most marvellously bitchy remarks about Erica Jong you’ve ever heard, and—”

  “This Erica woman,” interrupted Kramer, “could she in fact be connected in some way with the blue letters? Was Naomi giving vent in a roundabout way?”

  With a giggle, Tess Muldoon shook her head. “Erica Jong’s an American novelist,” she explained. “And the stamps on those envelopes were definitely not foreign ones.”

  “Uh-huh, that narrows things down a bit. Was the handwriting on them big or small?”

  “No idea. I thought I’d said—”

  “Go on with what else Naomi Stride chattered ab
out,” prompted Kramer, turning from the Japanese fan and digging into his jacket pocket for his Lucky Strikes.

  “You’re not going to smoke, are you? Because I was rather hoping.…”

  “Oh ja?”

  “That you’d give another bit of me a rub,” said Tess Muldoon, flinging the quilt completely aside and rolling over, stark naked. “It’s my gluteus maximus. I did something silly with it on Monday, and it’s been an absolute bastard ever since.”

  7

  GROWING DESPERATE IN his attempts to come to some conclusion about the anonymous threat sent to Naomi Stride, Ramjut Pillay tried pacing his room. Unfortunately, it was not of a size conducive to undisturbed thought, as he had to keep stepping on and off the corner of his divan, and after ten minutes of this he was in a muck sweat and no closer to solving the paradox of the postmark.

  “By golly,” he said to himself, flopping down for a rest, “a case, we think, for Sir Sherlock Holmes!”

  This reminded him that somewhere, buried in among all sorts of useful little items he had picked up, he had a magnifying glass and a pipe with a big bend in it. The pipe was easily found, still tasting of the terrible trading-store tobacco he had briefly experimented with, and after only about another five minutes or so the magnifying glass came to hand.

  Seated on his divan, puffing at the empty pipe and studying the hairs on the back of his left index finger, his spirits soon improved. He wondered what else he might look at, and picked up the plastic bag containing the cheap blue envelope in which the dreaded Exhibit Five had been mailed.

  “Euripides!” cried out Ramjut Pillay, whose brush with Ancient Civilisations (Parts I and II) had taught him that the Greeks had a word for it. “How could we be so blind, dammit?”

  For there, too faint for his spectacles, but distinct enough under a magnifying glass, he could see four tiny numerals printed on the right-hand side of the postmark.

  0730.

  All was explained in a twinkling.