The Artful Egg

by James McClure

  He looked questioningly across to Colonel Muller, standing there pinch-lipped and pale.

  “She just went into the shower and slipped,” repeated the man. “The soap must have got under her foot. It was an accident!”

  Colonel Muller reached out a hand and placed it on his shoulder. “Now, keep calm, Willem, keep calm,” he said. “Try not to get too upset, hey? Why not take my advice and come through to the lounge to wait for Doc Strydom?”

  Willem? Kramer looked again at the man.

  Suddenly the penny dropped. Why, of course, Willem Martinus Zuidmeyer, pensioned off these last ten years or more! And Kramer, caught completely unawares, very nearly gave a laugh.

  Before realising with a jolt the extraordinary implications of the situation.

  9

  “I’VE NEVER YET come across a coolie you could trust,” grumbled Lieutenant Jones, as he and Gagonk Mbopa continued their search of central Trekkersburg for Ramjut Pillay, driving up one street and down the other. “Ach, just take this description we’ve been given by that other churra postman for a start! Who, except a raving lunatic, would be going around in a plastic raincoat on a sunny day like this?”

  “Ermph,” said Mbopa, turning another page of The Last Magnolia and devouring it silently.

  “Has that story started to improve yet? Or is that stupid woman still moaning about not having any proper job to do, except having to look pretty for her husband and chase the servants?”

  “Ermph.”

  “Then carry on keeping it to yourself until you get to an action part. I only like books with plenty of action parts. I wonder what all this business is on the radio, all this fuss about 146 Acacia Drive.”

  “Ermph.”

  “Christ, fatso, I’m talking to you, hey?”

  Mbopa looked up from a fascinating description of two whites engaged in a very vigorous act of adultery. “Acacia Drive? Is that where this postman lives, sir?”

  “Ach, you’re impossible!”

  “But,” said Mbopa, pausing briefly to find a way of redirecting their efforts along more promising channels, “I thought the Lieutenant must have decided to visit the home of this Pillay. Perhaps he has returned there for his midday meal—perhaps his family can inform the Lieutenant of his present whereabouts.”

  “Obviously,” said Jones, altering course. “Where do you think I’m heading, thick head? But that wasn’t what I asked you about.”

  “It wasn’t, sir?”

  “Gagonk, just you get on with that boring bloody book and leave the thinking to me, OK?”

  Zondi went through to the kitchen at Woodhollow and then decided he’d had enough tea for the morning. It was simply that, being convinced that the blue envelopes were no longer on the premises, he was now feeling at a loss as to what to do.

  He looked at the clock. The Lieutenant had been gone almost half an hour. Was there a possibility that this Acacia Drive call had in fact something to do with the Naomi Stride case? The thought hadn’t crossed his mind earlier, yet it made sense of a lot of things. Just say, for example, another writer lived at that address, and had been found with a fatal stab wound and the mysterious line ‘II, ii!’ added to the page in his typewriter. A coincidence like that would certainly have put Colonel Muller into an unhappy state of excitement.

  Then, again, wasn’t that taking the idea of coincidence too far? Did Trekkersburg, which was hardly a major cultural centre, really stretch to more than one proper author? Questions, questions, but no real means of finding out the answers, not while he was stuck at Woodhollow and without a car.

  “But wait a minute.…” Zondi said to himself.

  He hastened back to Naomi Stride’s study and went straight to a large volume entitled The Writers’ Directory. He took it down and found an entry for her without any difficulty. So he started flicking through it, reading further entries at random, but failed to come up with any other South African writers. If only he knew the name of the person living at 146 Acacia Drive, he’d be able to test his latest theory very much more quickly.

  “Ah!” said Zondi.

  Having dialled the Trekkersburg Public Library, and asked for the reference section in his most guttural Afrikaans accent, he then identified himself as a police officer and asked the librarian to check the electoral role.

  “Ja, lady, that’s 146 Acacia Drive,” he confirmed. “Many thanks, hey?”

  She was back on the line in under two minutes, sounding very self-important and delighted to have her uneventful life enlivened by assisting the police with their enquiries. “The name of the householder is given as Willem Martinus Zuidmeyer,” she said. “Are you sure that’s all you want to know, sir?”

  “Perfect,” said Zondi. “My, you were quick.”

  “Well, being alphabetical, Acacia Drive’s very near the start of the roll.”

  “Even so, my thanks again, hey?”

  “All part of the service! Ring me whenever you like—or pop in, if you’re passing.”

  “Careful, I might do that,” said Zondi. “Bye, now!”

  Then he sat back in the swivel chair at the desk and spun round three times, saying to himself: “Willem Martinus Zuidmeyer? Major Willem Martinus Zuidmeyer? Hau, it has got to be! But how is he mixed up in this?”

  Major Zuidmeyer must have retired from the South African Police at least ten years ago, after spending most of his latter service in the Security Branch up in the Transvaal. And there had been quite a stir when he’d been transferred down to Trekkersburg, following a series of allegations against him which, although never substantiated, had caused sufficient embarrassment for his superiors to want him tucked away in some relative backwater, out of the limelight. Major Zuidmeyer’s basic problem had been what he himself had described as “a lot of bad luck with prisoners.” Two political detainees in his charge had jumped out of the same tenth-storey window in Security Branch headquarters, two more had died after tripping and falling down some stairs at the HQ, and no less than three others had slipped on the soap while taking showers under his supervision, fracturing their skulls and never regaining consciousness.

  Could there be a link, perhaps, between such an obvious patriot and the death of a writer whom he’d no doubt have regarded as a dangerous subversive? It was still impossible to guess exactly what the Lieutenant was dealing with over in Acacia Drive, yet Zondi felt certain now that he was getting a lot warmer.

  “Ja, my mother and father had been quarrelling,” said Jannie Zuidmeyer. “They had been having a row that lasted nearly all night, and I heard it start up again before breakfast. I thought, that’s it, I’m not going to sit around while this drags on and on—and so I took the dog for a long walk. He slipped his lead, ran off, and I spent hours trying to find him again. He’s a puppy still, and hasn’t been trained properly. Eventually, I decided to leave it to the SPCA to find him, and I came home. My father was kneeling in the garage with his back to me, sorting through his Popular Mechanics. I didn’t want to talk to him, so I sneaked by and went into the house. I heard the shower going. I felt like a shower myself, after all the running around I’d been doing after the dog, and I hoped my mother wasn’t going to use up all the hot water. Our hot water boiler is not very big, you see—more for two people. So I went to my room at the back, and I kept an ear cocked, waiting for the shower to be turned off, which would be a signal she was nearly finished in the bathroom. But the shower went on and on until I realised something was wrong. I went to the door and knocked. I didn’t get an answer. I called out several times to my mother, and still no answer. So I went to get my father. I didn’t go into the bathroom myself because I did not think it proper. My mother could have had no clothes on. I tapped on my father’s shoulder and he jumped. I saw his face was pale. I said I was sorry I’d given him a fright, but I felt something was wrong in the bathroom and had been trying to keep calm—this was why I hadn’t shouted out for him. I asked him to go and see whether my mother was all right. As he stood up, I saw
he was trembling. He went quickly into the house and into the bathroom. There is no lock on the bathroom because my mother has always been afraid of becoming faint with the heat when she uses the bath, and has fears of drowning without nobody able to get in and help. She has always liked very hot baths, though, and it isn’t often she takes a shower. It’s really only when she’s upset and not in the mood to lie there reading one of her love stories. She showers when she’s wanting to get washed and get going with the day, when she has early-morning shopping to do. I saw my father go into the bathroom. I heard him give a small cry, and the sound of the shower stopped. I heard him saying my mother’s name over and over again, and then I heard a grunting noise I could not understand. That’s when I went to the door. I saw my father holding my mother under the arms from behind and gently lifting her out of the shower. She was all flopped and looked very heavy. The grunting noise was my father straining to move her backwards onto the floor. He did it slowly, as though not wanting to hurt her, but already I could see she was dead. She was a terrible colour. There was also blood on the top of her head, which was getting smeared on my father’s shirt. When he had got her onto the floor, he tucked her dressing-gown over her and put his fingers against her throat to find her pulse. I wanted to tell him to do mouth-to-mouth, hit her on the chest, do anything to bring her alive again. But he just knelt there. I suppose he has seen a lot of dead people as a policeman and knew, in his heart of hearts, none of that would do any good. I felt sick then. My knees just gave way and I nearly fell over as I came back down the passage. I sat down under the phone shelf. When my father came out of the bathroom a few seconds later, I thought how calm he looked. But when he saw me sitting there his expression changed and I expected him to start crying. He told me that my mother was not with us any more, and that I mustn’t look in the bathroom. He reached over me and rang the police. His face went calm again. He told me it was an accident. Mother must have slipped and fallen. A pure accident, he said. Then the police van came and the sergeant saw me first, because my father was sitting in the bathroom to keep my mother company. I said that my mother was dead and my father called it an accident, but it wasn’t one. I said it was all his doing. He was a murderer and I could prove it. The sergeant said I was just saying that because of the shock. I asked him if he knew my father, and he said, yes, he did. He remembered him from when he was in the police. I said that he was therefore going to take my father’s side, but the fact remained he had killed my mother. The sergeant said I should go and sit in the lounge, and I waited there while he went to the bathroom with another policeman, the young one, and then went out to his van. I waited some more, and this important man in a suit came. The sergeant told him things, out on the lawn, and then the sergeant came to sit with me in here. I have been sitting with him ever since. He says I shouldn’t be talking so much, but I can’t help it. Sorry.”

  The abrupt silence in the room had its own loudness.

  Kramer glanced at the sergeant; at Colonel Muller, who completed his shorthand note barely three strokes after the final word of apology; and he looked at the son, who was seated on the floor in front of the television set.

  Jannie Zuidmeyer bore no obvious resemblance to either of his parents. Thin and wiry, curly-haired, brown-eyed on the left, blue-eyed on the right, he was all arms and legs, and seemed to rest very lightly on this earth. His face, downy with a mid-teen fuzz, did nothing in itself to declare him much older than that, but made one think of soppy films in which lonely boys had loyal pets with soulful eyes. Young Zuidmeyer was, in point of fact, all of twenty-one, according to the Colonel, and held a clerical post at the municipal abattoir.

  “Tell me, Jannie,” murmured Colonel Muller, “why did you say to the sergeant that your father was a murderer?”

  “Because he is.”

  “You’ll have to explain that to me.”

  “Hadn’t he been rowing all night? Wasn’t it him that got her so upset that she took a shower this morning and didn’t look to see what she was doing? If he hadn’t done that, then nothing would have happened. Christ, I hate him! Hate him!”

  It was hatred that everyone else in the room could feel, striking a chill to the bone. But Kramer, who had been wondering how long the youngster could sit there, describing events so unemotionally, took it as a healthy sign.

  Crawling on his hands and knees through the long grass and bedsprings and rusty cans down the slope behind his house on the outskirts of Gladstoneville, Ramjut Pillay experienced a moment when his uppermost thought was to wonder whether, in a former life, he had not perhaps been a Red Indian. He was really remarkably good at secretive stalking.

  Then panic again took possession of his entire being, and he crawled on with heart thumping and thorns going into the palms of his hands unnoticed. He simply had to reach his room, destroy the evidence of his crime, snatch up his savings, and take to the hills, all before the police could get there. The one good thing that could be said about Peerswammy Lal, may the God Kali persecute him unceasingly, was that he had given those detectives the idea their prey was lurking about town, but of course there was no way of telling when they’d complete their eliminations.

  The sound of a car churning up the dirt road to his house made Ramjut Pillay drop flat and close his eyes tightly. But the car carried on by, and when he dared to take a peep at it he saw that it was only Sammy Govender’s old Oldsmobile, dragging a broken exhaust-pipe. The same peep sufficed to reassure him that nobody was about to spy on his approach, and so he crawled twice as fast the rest of the way, ending up panting behind his lean- to extension.

  Here, he listened very carefully. All was quiet. His father was probably out looking for him somewhere, and no doubt his mother was seated on the front veranda killing flies with her fly-whisk. It wasn’t a sight he’d ever imagined would move him, but it was hard to think he might never see it again.

  Swallowing the lump in his throat, Ramjut Pillay then sprang into action, nipping nimbly round the corner of the extension and plunging his key into his door-lock. Seconds later, almost choked by the smell of hot horsehair mattress, he stuffed Naomi Stride’s letters and their envelopes into his plastic shopping-bag, threw in the knotted sock containing his savings, and snatched up his dog-eared copy of The Life of Mahatma Gandhi. Turning, he was outside again in a single jump, locked the door, and then crawled for all he was worth, back up the slope behind his house, exhilarated by his daring.

  No sooner had he reached the wattle plantation against the skyline, however, than he realised with a sickening thud that he’d committed two terrible oversights. First, although having decided that fire would be the most effective way of destroying the evidence of his crimes, he had forgotten to pick up a box of matches. Second, and this was possibly even more serious, he’d left behind in his lean- to some secret notes he’d jotted down during the course of the night. Would they not in themselves be totally incriminating?

  He had just shuffled round on his knees to begin the descent once again when he was stopped dead in his tracks by the sight of a shiny beige Ford sedan drawing up in front of his house. Two men stepped out. They were too far away to be seen in any detail, but quite plainly one was white, the other black. A whimper escaped him.

  Panic-stricken, Ramjut Pillay crawled frantically to the foot of a nearby tree, found a small burrow beneath it, poked the letters and envelopes down into it with a stick, blocked the hole with a stone, found a bigger stone, blocked it with that, looked back once over his shoulder, and fled again.

  “Doc Strydom has just arrived, Willem,” Colonel Muller said to Zuidmeyer, who was still sitting in the bathroom, staring at his wife’s body. “I think this is the moment when we must ask you to go through to the lounge. OK?”

  Zuidmeyer didn’t even look up, and the young constable, who had been ordered into the bathroom to keep an eye on him while the son was being interviewed, tapped a finger on his temple.

  “Willem, can you understand what I’m saying?” ask
ed Colonel Muller, motioning Kramer further into the room. “Would you like Tromp to help me give you a hand in—?”

  “No, I can manage,” said Zuidmeyer, getting slowly to his feet. “Tell Doc I don’t want her cut up.”

  “But, Willem, you know the procedure when there’s a sudden death and—”

  “That doesn’t concern me. No post-mortem. They’re not doing that to my little girl. There are ways round; I have used them myself on other occ—”

  “Come, Willem, man. All Doc Strydom wants to do here is a small examination.”

  Kramer stood back, allowing Zuidmeyer to pass through the door ahead of him, and then tagged along behind Colonel Muller. They went into the lounge and Zuidmeyer took the big chair by the fireplace, as of habit.

  “Where’s the boy?” he asked.

  “The sergeant’s taken Jannie to be treated for shock at the hospital,” said Colonel Muller. “Don’t worry about him; Sergeant Botha is one of the best.”

  “He recognised me,” said Zuidmeyer, smiling slightly. “Knew straight off who I was. There’s lots that have forgotten.”

  But the English-language newspapers wouldn’t have forgotten, thought Kramer, and, given half a chance, would have a field day reminding everyone of Major “Many a Slip” Zuidmeyer’s notorious bad luck in the past. No wonder the Colonel, who hated certain types of human-interest stories more than anything, had the sweats.

  “Tromp,” said Colonel Muller, bringing out his shorthand-pad, “would you like to ask our friend here some routine questions, just for the record? Then I can concentrate on—”

  “Certainly, Colonel, sir.”

  “You see, Willem,” the Colonel explained to Zuidmeyer, getting his ballpoint ready as well, “what I intend is having Tromp here wrap up this whole unhappy affair as quickly and quietly as possible. That’s why I’ve chosen my best man for the job, a bloke you can trust with your life, I promise you. I know it’s only a simple accident investigation but, if I used anybody else, there could be mistakes in the paperwork, procedures not followed correctly, and that’s when our problems could start, with the magistrate splitting hairs at the inquest and the press finally getting to hear of it. As you know, they don’t as a rule attend inquests, but just take a look at the papers in the Attorney-General’s office later on, when I’m sure some slight oversight could be arranged—papers that go astray, that type of thing. Personally, I see no need for any publicity, do you? I can’t see how it could serve the public interest.”