The Artful Egg

by James McClure

  “There are no words,” he said, reaching out for her.

  She smiled gently, hearing nothing trite in that, knowing he knew no clichés. “Like wood smoke,” she said, as his chest brushed her lightly, raising her nipples. “A deep, dark gorgeous smell.…”

  “Like wild mint,” he said. “Sharp in the nostrils. No, slowly. We must be slow, maybe this is the only time.”

  And then followed the descriptive passage that carried over on to the last page ending abruptly with ‘II, ii!,’ a totally enigmatic statement, even when taking into account the bewilderingly cryptic dialogue that had come before it.

  Kramer shrugged and opened the folder of recent interviews. They were also in English, but far better written, being quite clear in their meaning; and one from the Washington Post, which really did try to get to the facts about Naomi Stride, became his favourite. He read it again and again.

  At two o’clock Ramjut Pillay was suspended from duty, pending a full Post Office enquiry into how he had come to abandon a postbag, not to mention a pair of Post Office boots, in a reckless and unthinking manner, thereby putting at risk the safety of the Republic’s mail.

  This came as a bitter blow to him, all the more so because he now believed every word of the story he’d told the remarkably understanding black detective sergeant who had interviewed him after his ordeal—a story which he was still trying to repeat to Mr. Jarman, his supervisor, whose powers of concentration were obviously so poor that they’d certainly never gain him a diploma in anything worthwhile.

  “But I am telling you, Mistering Jarman,” Ramjut Pillay patiently persisted, “and I am telling you truly, the spirit was present with the remainders of this poor lady, and the spirit said unto me, ‘I have great need of—!’ ”

  “Pillay,” said Mr. Jarman, pointing to his door. “Out.”

  “A moment more, Mistering Jarman, suh! There is much you are not fully comprehending of a religious and cultural nature! One example, if you will permit, concerns the wearing of leather articles upon the feet when in the close proximity of—”

  “Out.…” hissed Mr. Jarman, becoming quite threatening.

  Sergeant Van Rensburg’s own frame of mind could hardly have been much worse when two o’clock came, and the only people in his mortuary were all dead.

  “Ja, you can bloody laugh,” he said savagely to a travelling salesman who was baring his teeth in a rigored grin on the first slab along. “You’re not trying to run an efficient department, are you? Christ, you couldn’t even drive a motor car in a straight line, or you wouldn’t be here, would you?”

  Clanking and rattling his trolley over the duckboards, Van Rensburg returned to the refrigerator room, yanked the big double doors open, and grabbed hold of the end of a tray near the foot of the right-hand stack. The tray, a sort of metal stretcher designed to hold a corpse during transportation or storage, wouldn’t budge. He heaved at it, and realised a split-second too late the thing was empty, before it suddenly shot out and caught him on the shin.

  “You bastard!” bellowed Van Rensburg, hopping about on one leg. “You think you can play games with me, hey? Don’t worry, I know that you’re in there, and when I—”

  “Taken up Scottish dancing, Van Rensburg?”

  The sudden voice badly unnerved him, making him spin round with a loud expletive. “Oh my God,” he added in frantic haste. “That wasn’t meant for you, Colonel!”

  “Just as well, my friend; these are new trousers I have on today.”

  “And aren’t they terrific?” smarmed Van Rensburg, missing the point as usual. “Just look at those creases!”

  “Who,” asked Colonel Muller, “were you talking to when I came in? Is Doc Strydom here? I didn’t see his Mercedes parked outside, and so I assumed—”

  “Ach, no, that was just a dead coon. Colonel—the burglar CID shot last night in the supermarket. Only I was catching a bit of a panic on account of the Doc not being here yet; and Lieutenant Kramer hasn’t pitched up, either; and, with one thing and another, matters are getting a bit out of hand.”

  Colonel Muller pondered this reply, tapping his swagger-stick against his front teeth. “Sergeant Van Rensburg,” he said at last, “I hope you haven’t been drinking this lunchtime.”

  * * *

  Kramer looked up as the study door opened and Zondi poked his head into the room. “Hey, Mickey, how did it go, man? That postman had all the answers?”

  “No chance,” said Zondi, coming in and closing the door behind him. “The man is a happy fool.”

  “Didn’t you get anything out of him?”

  “Some nonsense about hens and eggs to cover up how he had tried to take a look at a white woman with no clothes on. Correct, boss? She was naked?”

  Kramer nodded. “Nothing else?”

  “I went seeking information from servants who know the people working at this house—they have all gone home for six weeks’ holiday.”

  “Holiday?” echoed Kramer, astounded. “What were they, white?”

  Zondi laughed at the very idea. “No, two Zulus, husband and wife—house boy and cook; there was also a Xhosa, garden boy. It seems that it was the custom of this madam when she was going to be away on a long journey.”

  “But who’d look after the place?”

  “She hires special guards with big dogs.”

  “But—”

  “All I can tell you, boss,” said Zondi, shrugging, “is that the servants left here on Sunday, and that was when the madam was supposed to leave, too.”

  “Ja, to go to some prize-giving in England. All the details are there in that pile of bits and pieces from newspapers.”

  Zondi took up one of the cuttings. “Maybe,” he suggested, “the son can tell us what is going on.”

  “I’ve been trying to contact him,” said Kramer, nodding at the telephone. “Seems he’s away today on a business trip, but the girl in his office is still ringing different places. Hey, there could be a quicker way of finding out.…” He crossed over to the red filing cabinet.

  “What is the son’s work?” asked Zondi.

  “African curios,” replied Kramer. “So you’ll have to watch your back, hey? I bet he could get a good price for you.”

  “H’m,” said Zondi, preoccupied by the newspaper cutting.

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Who is it?” demanded Kramer, extracting a folder marked household.

  “It’s Jaap, Lieutenant. Can I see you a moment?”

  Zondi palmed the cutting and moved several paces away from Kramer.

  “Ja, come in,” said Kramer.

  Jaap du Preez entered breezily. “Sorry to disturb, Lieutenant,” he said, “but I should have knocked off quarter of an hour ago, and I was wondering how many blokes you need up here from the next shift—you know, to help you.”

  “The next shift? Jesus, is it after two o’clock already?”

  “Two-sixteen, to be exact.”

  “Then, I’m late, bugger it,” said Kramer, throwing the folder into the swivel chair. “How many do I need? Let’s say just three Bantu constables to secure the property, and tell the van sergeant to keep an eye on them.”

  “Fine, sir. Also, Fingerprints was wondering when they should do this room?”

  “When I’m finished with it.”

  “Whatever you say, Lieutenant,” said Jaap du Preez, moving back to the door before adding: “This is going to be quite a case, hey?”

  “Not if I can help it,” said Kramer.

  Then, when Jaap du Preez had gone, he gave Zondi a pile of reading to do, explained he was overdue at the postmortem, and took a short cut through the window.

  Zondi plumped down in the swivel chair and tried a few revolutions, three clockwise, three round the other way. He’d never had the chance of sitting in such a chair before, and could see its attractions. Then he tipped back his hat, reached for the clippings and shuffled through them, searching for a picture of the deceased woman.

&nbs
p; There were several single-column head-and-shoulder shots among the newspaper stories, all a bit smudgy and probably very dated, for she looked about twenty in them. Then he found what he wanted: a full page from the glossy magazine Fair Lady, which showed Naomi Stride seated exactly where he was seated, her fingertips resting on the keyboard of her electric typewriter.

  Zondi wondered if she were beautiful. He was never too sure when it came to white women. He had seen some on film posters that puzzled him deeply: jaws like a man, cheeks flat and hard, the shoulders straight, the hips too narrow to bear a child worth having. This woman, however, was at least plainly feminine and there was a neatness about her features that was pleasing, even though the large eyes seemed too open and vulnerable, like windows without any glass in them.

  Keeping the picture in front of him, he arranged the clippings in chronological order and read them through once. Then he lit a cigarette, leaned back in the chair, and sorted through all that he’d learned, paring it down to the bare bones of a life so abruptly ended.

  - Naomi Stride had been born Naomi Esther Cohen forty-seven years ago, the only child of Emmanuel and Esther Cohen, proprietors of a small jewellery store in Johannesburg.

  - She had won a scholarship to the University of the Witwatersrand at seventeen, and at the early age of twenty-two had been awarded her doctorate in English Literature. “A brilliant student,” her professor had said.

  - That same year, she had failed to take up a post as lecturer at the University of Natal, having in the meantime met and married William James “Big Bill” Kennedy, an eminent heart surgeon.

  - While pregnant, she had begun a short story that grew into The Last Magnolia, her world-famous first novel that critics said “penetrated to the very heart of the tragedy of apartheid.” It’d won five prestigious awards in Europe and America. Success after success had followed with each new novel; all of which had been banned in the Republic.

  - When she was forty-two, her husband had died of a heart attack, leaving her a very rich woman. She had spoken of leaving South Africa and of taking up residence in London, to be at “the hub of the literary world,” but had moved instead to Trekkersburg, where her son was at university.

  - Naomi Stride had not written a word for several years after her husband’s death, but had confined herself to encouraging creative talent in others—young writers, poets, painters and sculptors of all races. Then, roughly two years ago, she had begun Ebbing Hill, the novel that had just been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and she had agreed to be there at the presentation ceremony in London this week.

  - The various descriptions given of Naomi Stride tended to repeat the same set of adjectives: unequalled, modest, masterly, sensitive, articulate, passionate, tender, acute, outraged, apolitical.

  Apolitical? The last of these words was lost on Zondi, so he decided to remedy this by leaving the swivel chair and going over to the bookshelves to find a dictionary. But on the way there he became sidetracked by all the things she had collected to have around her.

  He liked the feathers in the brass vase over the fireplace, and enjoyed the feel of the egg-shaped rocks. The dozens of tortoises amused him too, especially the one made in dough, which was growing mildew, and he saw how interesting the different green bottles were, and the same applied to the assortment of oddly shaped corks. He remembered what it was like to be a child, pockets bulging with salvaged trifles, and as he moved from one to the other, touching and admiring, he let his imagination roam.

  Yes, thought Zondi, a writer of books would probably have need of a child’s mind, that same capacity for wonder and for making up stories based on little or nothing.

  Sometimes, being a detective was a bit like that, too.

  “What requisition sheet?” snapped Dr. Strydom, lifting out Naomi Stride’s brain.

  “Ach, the one I handed you last Wednesday, of course,” said Sergeant Van Rensburg, picking bone dust from the teeth of the saw he used to take the tops off heads. “I’m getting really short of some of the stuff on it—you know, stitching thread, DH-136, sample-bottles, all sorts. Can’t you just sign it, Doc?”

  “I’ve already signed it!”

  “You couldn’t have, because—”

  “Do you two never stop arguing?” said Colonel Muller, looking up with a frown from the midday paper.

  “Sorry, Colonel,” said Van Rensburg, “it’s just that a bloke tries to run an efficient—”

  “Efficient?” said Strydom. “Since when was this mortuary—?”

  “God in Heaven, surely—” began Colonel Muller, and then stopped, having noticed that Kramer had joined them. “Anything to report from the scene, Tromp?”

  “No, nothing Doc can’t have told you already, sir,” said Kramer. “Except that we know now she had a son, and I’m trying to find him to explain why his ma didn’t go to England on Sunday as planned. I’ll also want to get from him how many people would’ve known she’d be alone in the house without any servants.”

  “Last night, you mean?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Kramer looked Naomi Stride over and recognised only the legs and feet. The face was hidden by a glistening flap of scalp pulled down to expose the cranium, and the body had been opened up from pubic arch to chin, so that the breasts faced the other way now, hanging down by her sides.

  “Brain’s weight is average,” declared Strydom, taking it off his scale and cutting it into thick slices. “No unusual characteristics—so who says the lady was a genius?”

  “This paper does,” said Colonel Muller. “Mind you, they waited until she was dead first.”

  “It’s in there already?”

  “Ja, just the Stop Press. I wonder who the bastard was who tipped them off?”

  “What progress on the murder weapon?” asked Kramer.

  Strydom looked up with a wink. “I’ve been saving that till you got here, hey?”

  “Something special, is it?”

  “Unusual, certainly. I won’t be a sec.” Strydom left the brain on the draining-board of the sink for Van Rensburg to replace later, and crossed over to the slab, picking up a pair of long forceps from his instrument-tray. “Take a peep in that chest cavity.”

  “Hell, she bled a lot,” remarked Kramer, stooping low. “Must be half a bucketful in there.”

  “Actually, we’ve gone metric now,” Van Rensburg pointed out. “So really—”

  “Here,” said Strydom, using the forceps to follow the path of a weapon through the tops of the lungs, “is the culprit. That silvery thing stuck in the anterior scapula—ach, shoulder blade—with just the end showing. No knife could have travelled so deep.”

  Kramer leaned closer. “What is it, then? Tip of an arrow head?”

  “No, but you’re warm, I think,” said Strydom, applying his forceps to the object, and beginning to draw it out. “Something a bit old-fashioned.…” Then he held it up to the light and said, with a grunt of self-satisfaction: “As I thought, the broken end of a rapier.”

  “Come again?” queried Van Rensburg, his perpetual frown deepening.

  “I said ‘rapier,’ man—which is English for one of those thin swords they used to use for sword fights.”

  “Ah,” said Van Rensburg. “It was the ‘rape’ part that fooled me.”

  But Colonel Muller didn’t share his look of sudden enlightenment. “A sword?” he said, lowering a corner of the newspaper. “That’s a bloody funny thing to go round sticking into people—especially lady writers.”

  “Not if you don’t like blood on your clothes,” said Kramer.

  Zondi turned another page of Ebbing Hill, astonished by how well Naomi Stride was able to describe the conditions in a municipal hostel for Bantu males. He couldn’t imagine a white woman ever being allowed in such a place, let alone permitted to observe day-to-day life in one, and anyway, even if she had, the occupants of those bleak eight-man rooms would certainly not have behaved normally. Yet here were four instantly recognisable characte
rs, doing the sort of things they would ordinarily do: squabbling, sharing a small orange, pining for their wives and their children, hoping that this year they’d be able to return to see them again. Two pages further on, the story switched to the distant families, and to the difficult lives led by the wives trying to bring up youngsters on their own—youngsters whose bellies were never full, just as their hearts always had an emptiness in them. Again, he could see and hear these people, almost as though he were a lizard in the grass roof above their heads.

  Then he became restless. Supposing that he was feeling slightly guilty about the time he’d squandered on reading banned literature, Zondi returned the book to its place on one of the shelves in the study, resisted an impulse to see what was in the typewriter, and lit another Lucky. His glance fell on the folder marked “Household.”

  Why had the Lieutenant taken it from the filing cabinet? Something to do with finding out about the dead woman’s delayed departure.…

  Zondi opened the file. It was filled with bills and business letters. Leafing through the latter, he came on one from Cyclops Security, confirming the arrangements made to safeguard Woodhollow while Naomi Stride was away for a period of six weeks, beginning the previous Sunday evening.

  He noted the security company’s telephone number, moved across to the smaller desk and used a pencil to dial, although he very much doubted that the killer had been the sort to leave fingerprints anywhere.

  “Oh ja, Cyclops Security?” he said in Afrikaans and the most guttural of accents. “Police here, lady, with a couple of questions, hey?”

  “Anything at all we can do to help, sir,” she replied.

  Driving back to Morningside with the car windows down, trying to get the stink of the mortuary out of his nostrils, Kramer took a small bet with himself: somewhere in Naomi Stride’s house would be a room that had old guns and spears and Zulu shields and other such items on its walls—houses like hers often went in for things like that, just as they favoured a big brass gong outside the dining-room and he’d already spotted one of those. Discovering where the murder weapon had come from would be no problem.