The Artful Egg (11 page)

“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?

“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:
TEBELI 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.