The Artful Egg (3 page)

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 of 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?”

“Ach, I’ve changed my mind,” said Kramer. “I don’t want to cause brain damage.”

“Sir?”

So Kramer used short words and simple sentences to get across to Jaap du Preez the seriousness of a key witness being left unattended down at Miss Simson’s place, and Jaap du Preez promised to kick the two constables for failing to mention the postman to him; and the constables protested, saying that the message they’d received from Control had made no mention of any postman, just that the householder at Woodhollow was in trouble.

“Then, let that be a lesson to you,” said Jaap du Preez, cheerfully booting them all the same. “And now, Lieutenant, if you’ll just follow me, sir.”

They went through the doorway, crossed a room with its walls covered in bookshelves, and then into an adjoining room that had a huge sliding window on one side. The first things Kramer noticed were a postbag lying in the middle of the floor and, just outside the partly open window, a pair of black boots.

“Why are you barefoot?” Zondi asked Ramjut Pillay, yet again.

But the postman still wasn’t responding to even the simplest questions. Lost in a world of his own, he kept muttering on about eggs.

“What happened to you up at that house?” Zondi persisted. “What did you see there?”

“A ghost by the look of it,” whispered Miss Simson, awed by the postman’s blank stare, greatly magnified behind smudgy wire-rimmed glasses.

“Time the brute was brought to his senses,” grumbled Major Hamish MacTaggart, practising a swing with his golf club. “Give him a good clip round the ear, Sergeant—can work wonders with his sort. I remember a dhobi wallah having the damned cheek to try a spot of dumb insolence on me once, some hardly trivial matter of betel stains on a dress kilt, and I—”

“Oh, no, please don’t resort to violence!” begged Miss Simson, catching a hand to her throat. “I simply won’t allow it!”

And yet her eyes flashed, Zondi noted.

“You could at least try prodding him,” suggested Major MacTaggart, holding out his golf club. “Mind you, you’re dealing with a frightful idiot there, even in the best of circumstances. God knows how he got the job—beggars the imagination.”

Ramjut Pillay turned to the old man and glared indignantly. Then his hand went to his tunic pocket, extracted a worn and bulky wallet, and from it he took a sheet of folded paper that he slapped down hard on the veranda floor.

Opening it out, Zondi read:

Zondi folded up the letter again and then motioned politely to Major MacTaggart, indicating he would value a private word with him, if this were at all possible.

They moved down to the far end of the veranda.

“Sir, I would like to do as you suggest,” said Zondi in a very respectful whisper. “What this bloody coolie needs is a good slapping—maybe some fist.”

“Thought it’d have to come to that. Well, just you carry on, Sergeant! Not really any need to ask, not when a fella’s doin’ his duty.”