The Artful Egg (14 page)

Tiens Marais waggled his eyebrows, which were unnaturally bushy and stuck out a mile. “You don’t think you should now reconsider that decision, sir?”

There was a long silence. “Only perhaps,” said Colonel Muller.

“The time being wasted!” Kramer muttered to himself, as he reached the last address on his list of suspects. “Fine! Why should I worry?”

Number 18 Ladysmith Terrace was one of the really old bungalows in a twisting road by the Town Stream. Red brick, corrugated iron roof, fancy woodwork in the twin gables, and behind it red-brick stables with a bright-yellow door. This door was ajar, and through it drifted a pretty blue smoke, smelling of hot lead. Kramer used his car-keys to rap twice, loudly.

“Sweet Jesus! Who’s that?”

“Sorry if I gave you a fright, hey? Lieutenant Kramer, Murder and Robbery. You’re Mr. Gareth Telford?”

“Come in, come in, for Christ’s sake! I can’t be expected to drop everything just because.…”

So Kramer stepped through the doorway, expecting a glamour-boy comforter of ballerinas, and saw a squat figure bent over a stained-glass window that lay in pieces on a huge, paper-covered table.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” said Telford, using both hands to steady the soldering-iron he was using, “don’t ever do that again—promise me. I’ve put six months into this little lot, and you nearly made me balls the bloody thing.”

“Sorry,” said Kramer, who’d never spoken to a white hunchback before.

“I suppose this is about Stride?” Telford went on, still without looking up from his task of joining together the lead strips between segments of coloured glass superimposed on a pencilled pattern. “You’ll be going round all the bloody beneficiaries.”

“Oh ja?”

“Stands to reason. Almighty God, look what I’ve done now! Could you stand further out of my light? No, I didn’t kill her—haven’t had the time.”

“You knew her well?”

“Patronising bitch.”

“You sound like a man with a chip on his shoulder.”

“It’s a hump, or hadn’t you noticed?”

“I’d noticed,” said Kramer, stubbing out his Lucky Strike. “Tell me, how long can you last in the desert on just one drink of water?”

Telford barked a laugh and glanced in his direction, showing for an instant a broad, flat face as expressionless as a welder’s mask. His eyes were a bright iridescent blue, like the reflections of the flame of an acetylene torch adjusted to sear through thick metal. “All right,” he said, “what is it you want?”

“How do you know there was money bequeathed to you?”

“She told Tess Muldoon, and Tess told me last night.”

“When you had the bottle of wine together?”

“Yes, I was bitching about what the bloody thing had cost me, and Tess said I could deduct it from my thousand,” replied Telford, showing no surprise at what Kramer already knew, which made a nice change in an interview. “Jesus wept! Why leave me anything? I never done anything except insult the woman!”

Kramer pondered the heated way the man spoke, and toyed with a fragment of rose-tinted glass, holding it in front of his eye so that Telford turned a much more attractive colour. “You were once in love with her?” he asked.

Again the man laughed and glanced across, but this time he wasn’t showing any amusement. “It’s as obvious as that, is it?” he said. “I suppose I was, for all of two months.”

“And then?”

“I couldn’t take it any more, that indiscriminate
pity
she lavished on everything. I began to think she was bogus, on a glorified guilt trip.”

“Sorry? You’ve lost me.…”

“I took her one weekend,” said Telford, putting his soldering-iron aside, “on what was supposed to have been a camping trip into the bush. She empathised all bloody day with the wretched rustics we came across and then, when it was time to pitch our tent, she absolutely refused to sleep on the ground. I had to drive inland about fifty kilometres to find a hotel for her.”

“And so?”

“God Almighty! Isn’t it obvious enough? No wonder she felt so sorry for blacks! Don’t they sleep on the floors of their huts?”

“Some, but sleeping on the floor can be a cultural thing,” objected Kramer.

“My point exactly,” cut in Telford. “Stupid cow wasn’t really interested—only in how
she
would feel under the same conditions.”

Kramer nodded. “So when did you last see Mrs. Stride?” he asked.

“When we got back from that trip a day early—oh, about four weeks ago.”

“But while you were still in cahoots, so to speak, with the deceased, did she ever mention having trouble with hate mail?”

“Poison-pen stuff, you mean?”

“Ja, anything along those lines.”

“No, can’t help you there,” said Telford, stepping back to review his work. “Although, from what I gathered, her son had some bother with something like that not long ago. I don’t know the details, just that it caused quite an upset.”

“In what way?”

Telford shrugged, his gaze still fixed on the stained glass before him. “These things are always such bastards to judge until you can get a proper light behind them.”

“Ach, I don’t know,” demurred Kramer. “Holy Mary looks OK to me, and the same goes for God Almighty and Sweet Jesus.”

F
EET UP, HAT
tipped back, Zondi had made himself comfortable in his corner of the office and was waiting for the electric kettle to come to the boil, when he’d brew himself a pot of tea. It was just after eleven.

There came the sound of heavy breathing outside on the landing overlooking the CID courtyard. One day, unless he did something about his weight, those stairs were going to be the death of Gagonk Mbopa—or possibly Zsazsa Lady Gatumi’s strenuous demands would see him off in much the same way. A happier death, which would enrage a lot of people.

“Zondi,” said Mbopa, appearing in the doorway and blocking almost all the direct sunlight entering the room, “you have to pay half—it is only right.”

“Half of what?”

“The new rose-bush I must buy the Colonel. Hau, I have just made enquiries about the price of such things, and they are very, very expensive.”

“Huh! It wasn’t me who pulled the rose off the—”

“But it was still your fault!” growled Mbopa. “If you hadn’t—”

“Tea?” asked Zondi, swinging his feet down off the table that served as his desk. “Come in and sit down, Joseph. Let us discuss this matter in the manner of reasonable men.”

Mbopa hesitated, eyeing him sharply as though suspecting
a trap in this somewhere. Then he grunted and moved into the room.

“Have my seat,” invited Zondi.

Suspicion mounting, Mbopa shook his head and stood instead beside the filing cabinet, where he produced a small horn. He uncorked it, took two great pinches of black snuff between thumb and forefinger, and pushed them a considerable distance up each nostril.

“You remind me of my father,” remarked Zondi, switching off the kettle and reaching for the teapot. “He was always taking snuff. Kept his snuff-horn in his earlobe, with a big wooden plug in his other lobe to balance it.”

“Is that so?” said Mbopa, plainly even more disconcerted by this pleasantry.

“What a morning,” sighed Zondi. “Did you have the same trouble that we had? You go round all these addresses, hoping the suspects will be at home, and how many answer the door?”

Mbopa gave a snort. “So that’s what this is all about?” he said. “You’re trying to trick me into telling you how well our investigations have been going! Like you falsely accused me of doing this very same—”

“That’s rubbish,” said Zondi, a shade too quickly.

“Interesting.…” murmured Mbopa, enjoying this. “I know I’m right, and so what does that tell me? It tells me that things have not been going so good for you and Spokes.”

“More rubbish!” scoffed Zondi. “And will you look? There are still tea-leaves in the pot from last time—I must first go and wash them out.”

Mbopa didn’t spare the teapot a glance; he seemed too busy suppressing some silent laughter. “Yes, you do that,” he said, taking out a crackly handkerchief to wipe the tears away.

So Zondi went downstairs, round the back of the CID building to the Bantu Males’ lavatory, and marked time there with the perfectly clean teapot under one arm. A good five
minutes went by before his return to the office, where he found Mbopa on his way out.

“But what about the tea? What about this business of me paying half of—?”

“Not now,” said Mbopa airily, “there is no great urgency. It’s more important that I go and make a check with Records about a suspect we interviewed this morning—I had nearly forgotten all about it.”

“Huh! You just don’t think you could win the argument, that’s all!”

“Later,” said Mbopa, hurrying off.

Zondi watched him go, then turned and entered the office with a broad smile. A smile which grew into a grin when he looked for a book he’d hidden in rather an obvious place. To his immense satisfaction, the book had vanished.

“Ja, ja, ja,” said Colonel Muller, cutting short Jones’s second reading from his immaculately kept notebook, “it may be the gospel truth, but spare me all the verbatims. The farmer could tell you nothing, and now what does the interview with this composer suspect boil down to? He wasn’t in town on Monday night?”

“That’s true,” admitted Jones. “Like I said, he was returning from Johannesburg by train, only—”

“Is that a fact which can be verified?”

“I suppose so, Colonel. Well, he was in charge of forty kids from the school he teaches at, the senior orchestra. My interest was more in his—”

“Forty alibi witnesses are enough for any man,” declared Colonel Muller very firmly.

“But Colonel—”

“Tromp,” said Colonel Muller, turning to the corner of his desk where Kramer sat, “let’s hear what you have been up to this morning. I’m relying on you to keep to the bare facts as usual, hey?”

Kramer tightened the knot in his tie. “First off,” he said, “I went to see this beautiful little popsie. In ten seconds, I’m up in her bedroom, two minutes later I’m massaging her foot, next she’s showing me her boobs and asking me to fondle her bum. So I—”

“God in Heaven,” sighed Colonel Muller, slumping back, “and you call yourself a true-life detective? What
is
this amazing bullshit?”

“The bare facts, Colonel.”

“Kramer! A joke’s a joke, all right?”

“Sorry, Colonel. Would you like to hear about a possible lead?”

Colonel Muller nodded. “Please,” he said wearily. “I don’t think either of you buggers realise the pressure I’m under.”

Life is never simple, thought Ramjut Pillay, as he made for Trekkersburg on a bicycle borrowed from his second cousin’s brother-in-law’s youngest son. If it were, then all he’d have to do was to go to the police, explain to them that an honest mistake had been made, and hand over the missing mail, including the anonymous threatening letter.

“Ja, we quite understand, Mr. Pillay,” they would say. “Mind you, you did have us running around in the dark for a bit, hey?”

“I only noticed I had them stuffed in my Post Office trouser pocket this very Wednesday morning,” he would reply most earnestly, “on my way to the dry cleaner’s. Better late than never, I suppose!”

“Of course, of course, Mr. Pillay! And it isn’t we’re not grateful. You’ll see, once we have made our arrest, using this invaluable clue, we may even come up with a small reward for you.…”

But he had already gone far beyond the point of being able to do anything like that—far, far beyond. On top of all the Post Office offences he’d committed, he could be charged
with tampering with evidence, obstructing the police in the performance of their duty and goodness knows what else. One wrong move now and Ramjut Pillay was done for.

“Oh, woe is me,” he sighed, pedalling along.

Then he took another pull at himself with a stern reminder that he’d not long agreed he could be jumping to too many conclusions. Half of this could be simply his imagination. The anonymous threatening letter had implied that its fiendish writer intended to use a sword on the unfortunate Naomi Stride, a crazy idea if he had ever heard of one. Just say, for example, that she had been shot—what would happen to his theory then? Crashety-crash, it would go! Surely proving that the letter and the murder were not connected, and he’d be able to destroy the evidence of his crime with a clear conscience, knowing it could play no part in bringing a heartless murderer to justice.

And so all he had to do was to establish that Naomi Stride had indeed been killed by a bullet—or anything else, for that matter, so long as it wasn’t a sword—and this would put his mind at rest, lifting the terrible burden of guilt from his shoulders.

“Tally ho!” whooped Ramjut Pillay, swooping down the last slope into the city.

Then he wished the borrowed bicycle had better brakes, for it had just occurred to him that he really needed to stop a minute and do some more thinking. Exactly how was he going to discover the manner in which the lady writer had died? He could hardly walk into the police station and demand such information.

“You look pleased with yourself,” remarked Kramer, on his return at one-thirty from the case conference with Colonel Muller. “Any of that tea left?”

Zondi poured him a cup. “How did it go, boss?” he asked.

“Jones and Gagonk hadn’t come up with a bloody thing, apart from eliminations.”

“That includes the son, Theo Kennedy?”

“No, he’s still to be interviewed again, but the priority right now is seeing what can be found out about those blue envelopes.”

“So the Colonel agreed they could give us a lead?”

“Christ, he was delighted to—we’ve nothing else, hey? Except for all this loony talk about some bloody stuff called ‘rosemary,’ pansy flowers and the sword being a fake.”

“Boss?”

So Kramer repeated to him what the Fingerprints captain had told the Colonel, and Zondi nodded and said; “Very loony, boss. But the sword is surely a good lead, too—why not use it now? And why not go straight to the son? Didn’t the stained-glass boss say that Theo Kennedy had been personally involved in some ‘upset’ of a similar nature?”

Kramer drained his cup. “The Colonel’s still trying to play this all very cool. He thinks it’d be smarter to find out more about the alleged letters first, if we can. Jones has sold him a theory that Kennedy could have been sending them to his mother himself, part of a master plan to cover his tracks as the murderer.”