The Gooseberry Fool (20 page)

Kramer got the gist of this from grizzled Detective Constable Lourens, who, having failed his sergeant’s examination for three decades, haunted the building incessantly in the hope of being there, all alone, when it happened—it being, apparently, something unimaginable which would make a merit promotion imperative.

“But what are you doing here at this time, if I can ask, Lieutenant?”

“Ach, just come to pick up a few things before I blast off for the Free State.”

“Leave, sir?”

“Couple of days off. Anybody around?”

“No, sir. Duty man in Housebreaking is investigating a report in Greenside, and then there’s me. Colonel was in earlier, round ten, with the new officer.”

“Uh huh?”

“Made a few phone calls and went off again. From the sound of it, the Colonel was having him back to his place.”

“Hmmm.”

“Know what you mean, sir. Colonel Muller’s my man.”

Kramer gave him a wink and then began up the stairs, pausing on the landing to light a cigarette and take a look at Lourens from behind his cupped hands. It was all right: the man was back sitting in his chair in the office by the entrance, where he had put his feet in a desk drawer and dropped his chin to his chest for another of those life-sustaining catnaps.

Not that Kramer was planning to do anything illegal exactly, but he was decidedly anxious to be left to his own devices.

He had to think his way into this one, just as he always did, by a careful examination of the murder scene. His real chance had been missed in a blasé exhibition mainly for Strydom’s benefit; now he had to settle for photographs, but they were better than nothing.

Scott had been given a desk in the clerk’s office adjoining that used by Colonel Du Plessis. The photographs were in a brown envelope on the blotter.

Kramer shook them out and studied each of the prints very carefully, struck as always by how much more depressing things looked in monochrome. He turned them this way and that, wondering why they seemed unusual; it was not so much the images but the feel of them. Then an idea occurred to him; he picked up the clerk’s ruler and measured the longest side of the photograph in his hand. There was no white margin—Photographic always printed edge-to-edge—and from one corner to the other it was nine inches. And yet Prinsloo, the resident cameraman, always spoke of “ten-by-eights.”

He slipped them back in the right order into the envelope, replaced it in precisely its original position, and then went down the corridor and through Fingerprints to where Prinsloo had his domain. There he started on the negative file, finding the packet he sought almost immediately. The death of Hugo Swart had been recorded on 120 film by a camera that took square pictures. Usually this meant part of each picture was lost in the enlargement, but from the top and bottom and not the sides.

The darkroom had been left in a state of readiness, with fresh developer in the tray, covered by a sheet of glass, and fixer ready-mixed in a Winchester bottle. Kramer, who had learned enough of the art in a special course at police college, set to work without wasting a moment.

He selected a negative that seemed to be the same general shot which topped the pile on Scott’s desk, and placed it in the enlarger’s holder—having peered at it first in the light from the lamp housing but found the detail too small for the naked eye. He took a sheet of paper from the box by the easel and then racked the enlarger up so that the image it threw went edge to edge. There, on the right, was a small rectangular object about half an inch inside the full picture.

Of course, the bloody hearing aid—a mere detail. All that effort wasted. Yet, talking of effort, someone had gone to the trouble of trimming all the prints down to an odd size. Perhaps he should make a print in case there was something else that had escaped him in the reversal of tones.

So Kramer flipped on the red filter, replaced the ten-by-eight with an unexposed sheet, gave it a burn for five seconds, then dumped it in the first tray. He tipped a little of the fixer into the next one along, did a taste test on the acidity of the stop bath, and came back to watch.

In the yellow light of the safety lamp, faint shadows stole onto the white bromide, darkening into two dark dots and an irregular streak; they were the eye sockets of Hugo Swart and his spilled blood. Shade by shade, the picture built up: the dead man’s face rounded then slackened, the pieces of glass sharpened to bright splinters, a stain appeared on the trousers by the crotch that had not been noticeable before. Finally each tiny particle of silver, which in other circumstances might have merged with others to create a thing of beauty, proclaimed the basic ugliness of man and his works.

And there seemed nothing remarkable about the hearing aid whatsoever.

Kramer pitched the print into the stop bath and then into the fixer. He lit another cigarette from the one burned down in the ashtray, and then snapped on the white overhead light. When he looked this time, it was not with any hope of seeing anything significant.

But he did. He saw very faint parallel gray lines, too pale for visibility under the yellow safety, and rendered almost indistinguishable by the disruption of grain, running round and round the hearing aid.

God, what an oversight! When the priest had remarked upon the fact that the gadget had suffered willful damage, Kramer’s reaction had been one of professional intolerance. He had been annoyed that anyone who claimed to know his fellow men would not also know that the more violent of them often took out excess feelings on inanimate objects associated with their victims—just as a kid might thump his sister, then kick down her pile of blocks. He had wanted to tell him how burglars crap on beds and pee into dressing tables. He had got caught up with a trifle and quite missed the appallingly obvious.

Which went something like this: the assumption had been that the hearing aid fell to the floor during the death struggle. But here it was, its lead wound neatly around it, as it would be when the fastidious Swart was not wearing it. And yet the priest had stated the radio was on when he found the body—which was a lot of use to a deaf man.

“Hold it,” said Kramer to himself, trying to think of reasonable explanations for this gross contradiction of fact. There was the thought that the killer had switched the radio on to smother the sound of his retreat; but this was rubbish, because if he had been quiet enough to take Swart by surprise—wait a minute. That presupposed Swart could hear, and turned the argument on its head.

Kramer started again. A deaf man comes into his kitchen and switches on the radio. It is about nine o’clock so probably he wants to hear the news. Then he decides to unhitch his aid—probably bothersome in the heat—and does so. This cancels the radio for him anyway, and perhaps he is about to switch it off when the killer attacks.

And yet he was expecting a visitor at any minute, the priest had arranged to call, he would want to hear the knock. All right, so the priest had been early by ten minutes, but nobody relied on callers to time their arrivals so exactly.

The counter to that was simply that Swart had intended to go and wait out on the front veranda for the priest, but was struck down before he could do so.

The counter-counter was that this left him very little time to enjoy his illicit drink, which he would hardly carry out with him. Or again, he might, seeing it was vodka.

Counter, counter, counter. But when you came right down to it, a hearing aid was like a heavy-framed pair of spectacles: habitual users were unlikely to be aware of their weight and inconvenience any more than a well-stacked dolly was aware of her mams. Unless, of course, in each case their equipment was sham. Then, in the privacy of the home, during a heat wave, shedding could well take place, foam rubber the lot.

“Man, oh, man.…”

Kramer lifted the print out of the fixer, swished it through the wash, and then rolled it flat on the small glazer. While it dried, he tidied up the bench and left nothing for Prinsloo to find out of place.

Then he went back to the clerk’s office and compared the two pictures. He had chosen exactly the same negative—there was a water mark in the same place on each one—and the degree of enlargement had been, within a millimeter, identical. Which suggested Prinsloo had done as he had done—blown it up to fit the paper and pressed the button. It also suggested that somebody had trimmed off the hearing aid from the one picture in which it appeared, and then had cut the other prints down to give them a uniform size.

Without actually handling them, Kramer might never have noticed any difference; it was also extremely unlikely that the examining magistrate would have given the dimensions a thought. It was just the echo of Prinsloo’s “ten-by-eights” that had triggered him off. And was, in the final analysis, the crux of the matter.

Suspicion bred suspicion, Kramer knew that, but felt the hearing aid itself now warranted his attention.

But before going along to the exhibits room, he made a quick check on Lourens. The friendly ghost was still snuffling and snoring away. The ball pen lay where Kramer had left it on the duty book after signing in. Good.

He used his own key to open the heavy door and locked it again behind him. Then he began a hunt along the shelves, prodding and peering and pulling at labeled plastic bags half hidden by larger items, such as an enigmatic chamber pot. His heartbeat stepped up as he reached the end of the last shelf empty-handed. The sod–ding thing was not there.

Wait a minute, though. He had just remembered that the Chevrolet had been clean out of plastic bags; Zondi just may have used a few of the old issue of paper ones that had been lying around in the glove compartment, and there were a couple of them back near the door which he had taken to date from old unsolved cases.

The first paper bag had Zondi’s careful printing on the outside and inside it were the fragments of a broken glass. And the other contained a hearing aid, again identified in Zondi’s hand. Kramer shook the bag and heard pieces of innard rattle about. That was as far as he could go, knowing bugger all about electronics, but there was a bloke on his private list of experts who could tell soon enough if there was anything significant in the way that picture had been trimmed.

12

B
OB
P
ERKINS WAS
away over Christmas. Kramer hid the accumulation of milk bottles behind an azalea bush, spat at the cat very realistically, slammed the garden gate behind him, and stalked to his car. Bloody hell, Bob had been perfect for the job; he had worked on a burned tape Zondi found in the Le Roux case and come up trumps. He was also, being a yoga fanatic and teetotaler, the sort of bloke you could rouse at four on a public morning-after and expect to deliver a sensible opinion—even if his funny little woman pupped in the pantry in protest. But Bob was away over Christmas and that was that. Except Kramer still had to find himself another whiz kid who would (a) know what he was talking about; and (b) not mind talking about it before breakfast. Patience was, in Kramer’s view, a vice, particularly when he had to return the hearing aid before anyone noticed it was missing.

He forked left past the hospital, catching sight of a nurse at a high window. He slowed down. She was sneaking her last cup of coffee at the end of a long night shift, probably finding the new day as unreal as he did, probably praying the ambulance men would not be delivering before seven. She raised her cup to him, laughed, and backed away. Any girl, especially in a nurse’s uniform, looked beautiful at that distance, even desirable. That she was perhaps as plain as a pancake just made the brief encounter all the more poignant.

He wondered if the Widow Fourie was awake yet or, indeed, if she had slept at all; his sudden departure on Christmas Day might have set her thinking those thoughts again. He wondered if Miriam Zondi was asleep, or still twisting knots in her handkerchief. He had no doubt that Zondi himself was asleep.

Kramer’s train of thought meandered about and stopped at every siding, but finally it brought him to where he should have driven in the first place: Trekkersburg Fire Station. It had traveled by way of ambulance men, who were also firemen, who had a radio link-up between their vehicles, who relied on Leading Fireman Ralph Brighton to keep this equipment in perfect order, who was a transistorized nut case. A genius.

He braked on the concrete apron outside the high, wide doors and brought the Ford right up to the watch room door. The duty fireman left his switchboard and leaned across the counter.

“What’s up, cock?” he called out

Tommy Styles, like Brighton, was another honest-to-Gawd Englishman, who had gone through the Blitz then got the hell out of a country with old buildings.

“Kramer, cock.”

“Oh, aye?”

The Ford door clicked shut and Kramer took the three steps in a stride. Styles opened the counter flap.

“Sun fair blinded me. Don’t say you’ve gone and set fire to some poor bleeder this time—dead nasty, the stories I hear.”

His attitude toward the law was typical of the station’s limeys: unusual to say the least, at times—incredible as it seemed—almost disrespectful. Not that it mattered; just something in their upbringing.

“Where’s Brighton?”

“His flat. Only got in at half three.”

“On ambulance?”

“Native maternity. Had to wash his ambo out, too, when he got back—hasn’t got the touch, y’know. Won’t be happy if he’s wanted before his tour ends.”