The Artful Egg

by James McClure

  “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:

  Dear Student,

  It is with regret that I note you have once again failed to obtain a desired position despite having attained a Distinction in the relevant Diploma. Do not be downhearted! Do not listen to those who, as you report in your latest communication, say that your Diploma isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. (You’d soon realise what rubbish that was if you could see my printing bill, believe me!) Persevere, my friend, persevere, always remembering that the road to Rome was not built in a day. And, while I’m on the subject, I wonder if you have seen that, owing to the acute manpower shortage, non-white persons of Asiatic extraction are now permitted to obtain gainful employment as Postal Operatives? I would not hesitate to recommend a person of your talents and aptitudes for such a Position, and will gladly furnish you with a Reference to that effect should one be required (when writing, enclose return postage).

  Yours sincerely,

  PRINCIPAL, EASIWAY CORRESPONDENCE COLLEGE

  Dr. Gideon de Bruin, DD (Alabama), BA Hons. (Univ. of SA), AFRPS

  P.S. Attached you will be pleased to find the latest Supplementary List of Courses, now on offer at 20% off to all Honour Roll Students such as yourself. I am confident that Tax Law (Part I) and/or Coastal Navigation are well within your grasp, by the way.

  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.”

  “But … er, well, the young madam, sir.…”

  “Ah,” said Major MacTaggart. “Tricky.”

  “Unless, sir, it would be possible for you to take the young madam inside the house—maybe to the back veranda? For a few minutes only?”

  “Ah,” said Major MacTaggart. “A nod’s as good as a wink, what?”

  Uncertain of quite what this meant, Zondi was relieved to see Miss Simson being coaxed away, with several backward glances, a minute or so later, leaving him free to interrogate the postman as he saw fit.

  “Well, well,” he said, handing Ramjut Pillay back the letter, “who was that old fool calling an idiot? Anyone can see that you are indeed a very educated man—and it isn’t often we detectives get a chance to speak with such a scholar, so this is for me a great privilege.”

  “It is?” said Ramjut Pillay, sitting up and polishing his glasses.

  The body lay quite naturally, thought Kramer. So often the limbs had an ugly twist to them, an arm bent at an impossible angle, or a leg turned in underneath, but here it suggested simple repose, relaxation.

  “I think she was probably lying just like this when it happened,” remarked Dr. Christiaan Strydom, the diminutive District Surgeon, scratching at the back of his shock of grey hair. “But why she was nude at the time, don’t ask me.”

  “Ach, I don’t think I have to,” said Kramer. “There’s her clothes over there, and right here, by the couch, is her wet swimming-costume. I reckon she had just taken the cozzie off, and felt like a bit of a lie-down. Y’know, a couple of minutes to get her breath back after twenty lengths—then choonk.” And he made a downward stabbing motion.

  “H’m,” said Strydom, probing deeper into her side and altering the angle of his penlight torch. “Ja, that would fit the facts as we see them, only what was she doing swimming at about one in the morning? You saw what her temperature was—she can’t have died any earlier.”

  “She was a writer, hey? Maybe she liked to work late, only she decided on a swim to freshen her up again. I see she left a page in the typewriter next door, so she could have been going back to it.”

  “And what if a servant had seen her?”

  “You don’t expect servants in the house at one in the morning, do you? Besides, no servants seem to have been on the property, although Uniform is still checking.”

  “You’re very full of guesses today, Tromp,” grunted Strydom, taking up his magnifying glass. “Try to guess what she was stabbed with.”

  But Kramer remained where he was for the moment, several feet away towards the sliding window. This was the last chance he’d have of seeing Naomi Stride looking reasonably human, and he wanted to build up a picture of her, something personal he could hold in his memory when everything else about her was coming to him secondhand.

  She was basically what the buxom Widow Fourie would describe as petite, being five-one at the most and as light, in all probability, as the average well-filled golfbag. The Widow Fourie often resorted to this comparison with golfbags, which was consistent with the irrational, poorly disguised envy that such women aroused in her. As for the shape of Naomi Stride’s body, it wasn’t at all bad for someone middle-aged, once proper allowance had been made for the fact that the belly had begun to distend with death a little, it being a day well up into the nineties. Perhaps the thighs were slightly plumper than they might have been, yet the cushioning effect this gave to the area around her dark triangle was undoubtedly attractive; and, as for her breasts, they were surprisingly youthful, suggesting that if she’d had children she had certainly fed them with bottles. It was a pity that blood, pouring from the hole in her upper left side, had streamed down over the nipples, congealing into an uncons
cious attempt at posthumous modesty. Even so, a little of the textured areola on either side was still visible, defining a neat circumference the size of a cent, and reinforcing that youthful illusion. Her heart-shaped face had a touch of innocence in it, too, but was wholly without laughter-lines, rather surprisingly. Such a mouth, small and perfectly formed for planting light, fondly amused kisses, should have had a bracketing of fine wrinkles, and the intense blue eyes had no crow’s feet at their corners to confirm that she’d often seen the funny side of things, this despite the high forehead.

  Then too much detail began to impose itself. The fly trapped in the sticky blood on the lower breast, another glutted in her pubic hair, where there had been seepage, and most unpleasant of all, for no particular reason, the nail missing from the smallest toe on her left foot—a recent injury that’d been healing. So Kramer half-closed his eyes, and looked at the body again, this time intent only on forming a general impression.

  What he saw this time made him smile, as the pallor of her skin, her jet-black hair and red lipstick combined to create a risqué image of Walt Disney’s Snow White, with obviously one of the Seven Dwarfs in attendance.

  “What’s so funny?” demanded Strydom.

  “Nothing, Doc! But I must be right in saying this lady was in the habit of using her swimming-pool at night. See how pale she is? Where’s her tan, if she was used to going out there in the daytime?”

  “Oh ja, that’s a great help—any of her friends could probably tell you that,” said Strydom. “What I still want to know is how this stabbing was done.”

  Kramer took the magnifying glass from him and bent low over the wound.

  “Ja, I can see what you mean.… The hole’s a funny shape, isn’t it? Why a stabbing? How can you tell this wasn’t a big bullet?”

  “From the way the skin’s been turned and pushed in. Besides, there’s no burn marks of any kind. Whatever went in there can’t have been hot.”

  “Uh-huh, that sounds logical.”

  “I’ll just have to get her back to the mortuary and cut down through here, try to work it out that way.”

  “When will this be?”

  “Well, as soon as Fingerprints has arrived and taken pictures, I suppose. To hurry things up, I’m having her own doctor to come round and identify her.”

  “Can we fix a time, so I can be there?”

  “Say two o’clock, then, Tromp,” said Strydom, glancing at his watch. “Which reminds me, where has that bloody fool Van Rensburg got to with the mortuary van? I don’t suppose you passed him on the way out here, did you?”

  “Not exactly,” said Kramer.

  3

  THEN THE USUAL party atmosphere began to establish itself, as more and more police vehicles came up the drive, spilling out men who joked nervously and laughed a lot. Many arrived by invitation, ready to perform the tasks that made them specialists at a murder scene. Most of the others were gatecrashers, uniformed patrol officers from neighbouring beat areas whose curiosity had been aroused by the flurry of radio calls. The new arrivals mingled on the patio, stealing glances through the sliding window at their hostess for the afternoon, now wearing a pink sheet from the airing cupboard.

  When Dr. Strydom left, giving a curt nod to Jaap du Preez, two Fingerprint officers were admitted. One immediately set about doing conjuring tricks with dusting powder and sable brushes, producing latent prints from nowhere, while his partner flicked back the sheet and started taking pictures, bobbing around his subject with all the deference of a Society photographer.

  The murmurings on the patio became a cocktail titter, several rather bitchy things were said about middle-aged spread, and then they all looked behind them, distracted by a loud diversion. This was provided by a police dog which, entering into the spirit of things, had decided to go skinny-dipping in the swimming-pool, inadvertently dragging its master, who’d been on tiptoe, off balance and into the water with it. This earned the pair of them, both dog-paddling furiously, a ragged cheer, and an athletic uniformed sergeant leaped up on to the springboard to bawl directions, almost falling in himself. More cheering, and when everyone turned around again the sheet had been replaced and Sergeant Van Rensburg, looking like some form of extremely pompous and obese butler, was to be seen carrying in his mortuary tray.

  At this point, Kramer, who never had much time for parties, did what he generally did at them, and took himself off into a quiet room, closing the door behind him.

  The room he chose for this was the one that had the typewriter in it and books filling the shelves on every wall, all the way up to the beamed ceiling. Seating himself in the large swivel chair at the desk, he lit a Lucky Strike, tucked the spent match into his breast pocket, and leaned back, delaying the moment when he would look to see what Naomi Stride’s last words had been. He had a feeling they’d come as something of a disappointment.

  Not that Kramer had any high literary expectations of the woman, still less had he ever read anything of hers before, having no interest in the much thumbed collection of banned works which the Vice Squad kept in its office. It was just that if working Murder and Robbery had taught him anything, then it was the dreary fact that most people died when they were least prepared for it, and very rarely with any style. The most he could hope for was that she’d just typed: “And then.…”

  He turned his attention instead to the room and its furnishings. They were curiously unsettling, and reminded him of something. He allowed his mind to go blank, while concentrating on the burning tip of his cigarette. Then he had it: Boy Joshua’s wheelbarrow.

  Boy Joshua was one of the best-known figures in Kwela Village, the vast black township of identical two-roomed, concrete-block houses where Zondi had once lived with his family. Each and every day, Boy Joshua could be seen trundling that cloth-covered wheelbarrow about, carrying in it, as the victim of a tropical disease that enlarges testes to monstrous proportions, his balls. People marvelled at their size, and even those well used to the sight seldom failed to accord Boy Joshua a certain veneration, which he found very pleasing—as did his three wives. Once a white doctor, working at the township’s tuberculosis clinic, had sent for Boy Joshua and promised to rid him of his remarkable condition almost overnight, as there happened to be a very simple cure for it. Boy Joshua, according to bystanders, had left that clinic very quickly indeed, pushing his wheelbarrow all the way to the top of the hill without once stopping, which was in itself a feat that won him further notoriety. One had only to glance at the barrow to gauge the considerable weight of it, even when the contrivance stood empty. Boy Joshua had been decorating it for years, twisting coathangers and other short lengths of wire to form a high arch across the front, and then attaching to this arch every interesting trifle that caught his eye. Among the more readily identifiable were old sparkplugs, keys, gear-wheels, used ballpoint pens, pieces of mirror, broken combs, wheel-nuts, chrome-plated petrol-caps, light-bulbs, copper tubing off-cuts, soft-drink cans, throwaway cigarette-lighters, piston rings and colourful circuit-boards.

  Kramer had thought he’d never see its like again, but here in this room, in what Naomi Stride had presumably called her study, was evidence of much the same thing. Without getting up, he could count three large bowls filled with beach pebbles, and in the copper vase on the mantelpiece was a handful of old feathers. Egg-shaped stones and pieces of wood lay dotted about everywhere; there were quite a few shiny white bones, oddments of driftwood, a baboon’s skull, yellowing greeting cards, three stuffed finches under a glass dome, small picture frames crammed with too many snapshots, old-fashioned green bottles in different shapes, bulrushes in one corner, and dozens of tortoises made of everything from porcelain to dough, occupying the front edge of the bookshelves. More greeting cards, postcards, letters and even a telegram or two protruded from between the books themselves, and into what space remained she had squeezed further collections of rubbish, such as strangely shaped corks, pencil stubs, toy cars, a military badge, some blue marbles and, for
reasons only Boy Joshua could possibly understand, little stacks of used typewriter ribbons.

  Suppressing a mild shudder, Kramer got up and walked over to the red filing cabinet beside another, smaller desk where the telephone stood. He pulled open the top drawer, taking care not to smudge any potential fingerprints, and was surprised to find everything neatly filed away in blue folders, each of which was clearly labelled. He wasn’t sure why he’d looked in there, although a start had to be made somewhere on the tedious business of filling himself in on the dead woman’s background, and letters, even business ones, could be useful in this respect. But the sight of so much paper to wade through, and so many lines to read between, weakened his resolution, and he began to push the drawer shut again. If only, of course, he could simply ask the dead woman a few simple questions about herself, how much easier life would be.

  Then he gave a slight smile and took out a folder he’d just noticed, earmarked interviews. Inside it were a score of cuttings, at least three of which promised to reveal the real Naomi Stride, prizewinning authoress, housewife and mother.

  “That, too,” he murmured, pleased with his discovery, and returned with it to the swivel chair.

  But, before settling down to the first of the articles, he leaned forward to take a look at the sheet of paper left in the typewriter. What he saw was:

  p/237

  a fine membrane, paler than the moon,

  ‘II, ii!’

  Puzzled, he glanced round for the preceding page, and found it in a wire basket under a glass paperweight. A quick scan revealed that it was a sexy scene between two youngsters in the dunes near Durban, both of whom seemed unusually alive to the odours of each other’s body.

  “Yes. And you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Abelard.”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t know the words for this,” she said. “Not your words.”