The Artful Egg

by James McClure

  Zuidmeyer nodded dully. “Agreed, Colonel. I have never seen what good it does, and I have had more than my fair share of publicity in my day, so I should know.” Then he looked across at Kramer. “I put myself entirely in your hands, young man.”

  It was a second or two before Kramer responded. The Colonel’s little speech had come as a surprise to him, and he wasn’t at all sure he liked the role in which he now found himself, although he’d been a fool not to have suspected something of the sort earlier. On top of which, the expression in Zuidmeyer’s eyes, now turned in his direction, was so strange that he couldn’t think of the right word to describe it. “Creepy” came close, but wasn’t quite right.

  “Fine, sir,” said Kramer, taking out his own notebook and a pen. “All I want you to do is to tell me what happened here this morning.”

  “Well, I was out in my garage, sorting through—”

  “Sorry, sir, but if you’ll go back a bit. I really need the whole picture.”

  “Tromp—” began Colonel Muller.

  But Kramer ignored him. “I don’t want to know what you had for breakfast or anything like that, sir, just a general idea of Mrs. Zuidmeyer’s state of mind, when she went for her shower, that sort of thing.”

  “Of course,” said Zuidmeyer, nodding. “I’m sorry to sound so like an amateur at this! God knows, I have done investigations like this myself often enough, so I’m fully conversant with what is wanted. Let me see.…” He sank back in his chair and covered his face with his hands. “The day began badly—for which I now curse myself.”

  Kramer waited and heard a dry sob.

  “Curse myself!” repeated Zuidmeyer, his face still covered, then he sat up a little straighter. “A stupid argument that got so stupid in the end that I just decided to forget breakfast and get out of the house to find some distraction. I haven’t any projects on the go at the moment, so I started tidying my magazines. I can’t tell you when my wife went into the bathroom. As you can see, I didn’t even shave this morning, didn’t bother to wash, just went charging out. Usually I shower first, and she uses the bathroom after me. I suppose she could have gone in straight away.”

  “Which would have been about what time, sir?” asked Kramer.

  “I’d say a quarter to eight, maybe ten to.”

  “And so, if it was about eleven o’clock when your son called you to go see what the matter was in the bathroom, your wife could have been lying there for more than three hours?”

  Zuidmeyer nodded behind those hands. “Why? Why didn’t I go into the house sooner?”

  “Ja, why didn’t you, Willem?” coaxed Colonel Muller.

  “Because … because—my God, how petty can a man be?—I was still so annoyed with her. I thought she owed me an apology; I was waiting for her to come to me, to say she was sorry. There was that, and also the fact that once I start with my magazines I start reading pieces here and there, and I don’t notice how the time flies.”

  “Wasn’t there a servant who might’ve—?”

  “No servants,” replied Zuidmeyer shortly. “They are not welcome in my house.”

  “Uh-huh. And then what happened, sir? Your son came up to you?”

  Zuidmeyer brought his hands down and fixed his eyes on the blank television screen. “Jannie came and grabbed me, said something was wrong in the bathroom. I told him to stay out of the way as soon as I—as I saw my wife lying there. I turned the water off first, and I felt how cold it was. Because of that, I realised immediately she had been lying there for quite some time. I did not want to look at her. I made some sound when I saw her eyes looking up at me. Then I realised she was still alive. I was sure of it. I went frantic. I got hold of her and tried dragging her out of the shower, to get her on her back to give her the kiss of life. She was slippery and wet and I couldn’t get a proper grip. I knew I was being rough, jerking at her and pulling, heaving on her arms as hard as I could—but, Almighty God, she was heavy. It was a struggle, but finally I did it and she came out of the shower with a bump. I’d lost my footing, crouched down like that, and I’d toppled backwards. When I got back on my knees, she was gone. I was too late. I wouldn’t accept it. I grabbed her and shook her, I got blood from her head on my chest. I tried mouth-to-mouth. Cardiac massage. I held her to me and cried. Later, before I went to telephone, I covered her with her dressing-gown.” And he went on staring into the television screen, as though doomed through all eternity to watch the same scene repeated again and again.

  Kramer turned to Colonel Muller, who had stopped taking shorthand at roughly the point where Zuidmeyer’s account had diverged so markedly from that given only a short time ago by his son. The Colonel was even paler now than he had been before.

  “Willem,” he said softly, his voice not working properly, “are you sure that’s what occurred here this morning?”

  “I’m sure,” replied Zuidmeyer, looking up at them.

  “Because, you see, according to—”

  “It was an accident,” said Zuidmeyer. “What else could it possibly have been?”

  Then Kramer realised what it was about Zuidmeyer’s eyes that gave them their strange quality. They were haunted.

  “Gagonk, do something with this crazy old bitch,” whined Jones. “I tell you, I can’t stand another minute of this.”

  So Mbopa picked up the aged mother of Ramjut Pillay, shook her until her fly-whisk fell from her hand and she stopped flailing him with it in the face, then carried her out to the car and put her in the boot.

  “Now you can finish what you were saying,” Jones told the father of Ramjut Pillay, who stood smiling nervously before him, one bare big toe hooked over the other. “When exactly was it your son came back?”

  “I have no watch, my master. I am a poor man, my health—”

  “OK, OK, just give us a rough idea. Was it long ago? Not so long ago?”

  “Not so long ago, my master.”

  “And what did he do here? Did he talk to you?”

  “No, no, my master! No talk. Ramjut go in his room, come quick-quick out, then run away again on kneecaps.”

  “Kneecaps?” echoed Jones. “Any idea what this silly bugger means, Mbopa?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Ach, never mind, that can come later. Listen, you, which way did your son go?”

  “Up hills and far away, my master.”

  “Where?”

  “Backside.”

  “Hey, you watch what you’re—”

  “Excuse me, suh,” interrupted Mbopa, who wanted to get back to his book. “I think what is meant is the hill at the back of this man’s house.”

  Jones took a look at it, lost interest almost immediately and then asked: “Why did your son come back here? Have you any idea?”

  “I am seated in privy, my master. There are only two nail-holes I am being able to see through. I see only that he takes big bag with him.”

  “From his room, you say?”

  “Yes, my master.”

  “Then we’d better search the place, hey, Gagonk? This is all a bloody mystery to me, but something funny’s obviously going on.”

  “Room is lock, my master. Ramjut a bad boy, never allow me to keep key.”

  “From the look of you, you shifty old bastard, I’m not bloody surprised,” said Jones. “You’d be straight in and under his mattress for his money-sock, wouldn’t you? But never to worry; I’ve brought my own key with me.”

  Thanks very much, thought Mbopa, who was really bored with kicking down doors.

  The bathroom at 146 Acacia Drive was a different place with Doc Strydom huffing and puffing about in it, doing tricks with his blue braces. His presence lent a clinical gleam to the yellow tiling, and the body, until now so totally uncommunicative, seemed poised to divulge certain truths, however grudgingly.

  “Well, Doc?” asked Colonel Muller. “There’s only me and Tromp present, so I would appreciate it if you just said what comes to mind.”

  “Hm,” responded Strydom
. “Difficult.”

  “Then, can we start with estimated time of death?”

  “Very difficult. Shower running, artificial cooling effect.… Thick layers of fat, well insulated.… Temperature-loss, h’m, could be misleading.”

  “Cause of death?”

  “Ah, head injury. Fractured skull?”

  “You’re the man who’s supposed to have the answers, Doc.”

  “You can’t wait for the P.M.?”

  “Ja, naturally, but a bit of a conflict of evidence has come up—hard to know who to believe. For my own peace of mind, I’d like—”

  “What sort of conflict?” asked Strydom.

  “Ah, well, I don’t want to prejudice you in any—”

  “Tromp,” said Strydom, poking his rectal thermometer at Kramer, “can you tell me what your esteemed superior is being so coy about?”

  “Let’s put it this way, Doc,” he replied. “We could be interested in any bruises or abrasions, even small ones. Have you come across—?”

  Strydom laughed. “Have I come across bruising? What’s the matter with you two? Haven’t you taken a look at the lady yet? Are you turning soft?”

  “Willem’s been in here nearly all the—”

  “That’s irregular,” remarked Strydom sternly. “But, in answer to your question, look for yourself.” And he flipped back the orange dressing-gown.

  There was bruising on the upper arms, the lower arms, the chest, the shoulders, and on the left jawline. Not deep purple bruising, pale blue in most cases, but bruising all the same.

  “Could gentle handling have done that?” asked Colonel Muller.

  “Huh, you have to be joking, Hans!”

  “More important,” said Kramer, “did it occur before or after death?”

  “Before, almost without a doubt,” said Strydom.

  “How long before?” asked Kramer.

  “Ah, there you have me. The post-mortem might be able to help us on that one. It could, I suppose, have been hours before.”

  “Hours before?” repeated Colonel Muller. “How many hours before?”

  “Oh, about two or three.”

  “Or about the time something made the lady slip,” said Kramer, watching the Colonel’s face. “The funny thing is, you know, I’ve just taken another look in this shower cubicle and I can’t see any soap.”

  10

  THE PROBLEM WITH being on the run, decided Ramjut Pillay, was that unless a poor fellow were in training, then the running itself proved impossible to do after a time. With a stitch in his side, and knees all wobbly, he slowed to a jog, to a fast walk, and finally to a brisk shuffle.

  Not long after that, he sat down.

  “Mechanise,” said Ramjut Pillay.

  So he took out his knotted sock and began to untie it, confident that he should have enough money for a prodigious train-journey. Someone had once told him that Cape Town lay no less than a thousand miles away; exactly what this figure represented in more modern kilometres he wasn’t too sure, but it still sounded the right sort of distance to put between himself and his pursuers.

  “Thash an inneresting sock,” someone slurred in his ear.

  Ramjut Pillay shrank away when he saw who had come to share his bench in the park at the bottom end of Railway Street. Strictly speaking, it was a white man, only his face was the colour of a tomato, and a very rotten tomato at that, with its skin gone all squishy and wrinkly. Some of the red had seeped into the whites of his watery blue eyes, and his teeth, bared in a leering smile, were the yellowy orange of tomato pips. He did not, however, smell anything like a tomato.

  “Washa marrer?” asked the man. “You deaf?”

  Lifelong teetotalism, inspired by the Mahatma, had left Ramjut Pillay ill-prepared to withstand the fumes of cheap sherry now being breathed out so close to him, and he suffered an attack of slight dizziness, making the man’s deep voice sound terribly far away.

  “You wansh me to undo thash knot?” said the man, reaching out a great grimy hand. “Not take—pardon me—a minute.”

  “Many, many thanks,” said Ramjut Pillay. “But I will untie it later. First I have to—” But as he tried to rise from the bench he felt the weight of a heavy arm draped in friendly fashion around his shoulders.

  “Give us the sock!” growled the man.

  “That bespectacled gent over there is staring our way,” said another side to Ramjut Pillay.

  “Lesh him!”

  “But do you know why, sir? It is the bench.”

  “Bensh? What bensh?”

  “The bench you are presently sitting on, sir. A bench which states clearly on its notice that it is for ‘Non-Whites Only.’ Perhaps he is thinking he has never before seen an Indian gent so light-skinned as yourself, sir, and—”

  “Wazzat? He thinks I’m a coolie? I’m not having thash!” said the man, staggering to his feet. “Hey, you! Four-eyes! Just who d’you thinksh you’re insulting, hey?”

  And he lumbered off, gathering terrifying momentum, in the direction of this singularly innocent bystander, leaving Ramjut Pillay to flee in the opposite direction, abandoning his bag but clutching the sock to him very tightly.

  Up the steps of the railway station he skipped, through the booking-hall and out onto the platform. Where, behind a porter’s trolley piled with suitcases, he finally got the knot undone. “By jingo!” he chuckled, plunging his hand into the sock. “How cleverly was a great catastrophe avoided by the one and only ours truly! Cape Town stand by, please, for the privilege of Ramjut Pillay!” But an instant later his ebullience evaporated.

  This wasn’t a small wad of rand notes he had just taken from his sock. It was a handful of similarly sized scraps of paper.

  The telephone rang, making Zondi look first to see what time it was. Four o’clock! He had started to read Naomi Stride’s unfinished typescript, supposing that it might well deal with themes which would hint at contemporary problems in her personal life, and had become so completely engrossed he’d not noticed the hours slip by.

  “Mickey?”

  “The very same, Lieutenant. How are things with Major Willem Martinus Zuidmeyer?”

  There was a pause. “Christ, who told you, hey? It’s all supposed to be top—”

  Zondi laughed. “The name is all that I know.”

  “Ach, now I get it,” said Kramer, laughing, too. “You’ve been chatting up some poor unsuspecting female again, hey? Don’t worry, I’ll tell you the lot later when I get the chance. Meet you back at the office tonight.”

  “Boss, the blue letters are not here.”

  “Surprise me. OK, pack it in at Woodhollow when you like, and then wait at CID for Hopeful Dumela to pitch up with those servants. The Colonel wants you to be the one who interviews them.”

  “And you, Lieutenant?”

  “Later, old son, like I said.”

  Zondi heard the line go dead as he dropped the receiver back into its cradle. He took another look at his watch, estimated that he had time for two or three more chapters at least, and settled back with the typescript. It was quite a story, this tale of a young black student in love with the daughter of his father’s white employer. Switch the sexes of the illicit lovers round, make the employer an intelligent middle-class woman instead of a bearded university professor, and it seemed fairly obvious how Naomi Stride might herself have felt in just such a situation. That a son of hers should be breaking the law would have little to do with it; rather, her preoccupation would be with to what extent he was exploiting the vast social gap that lay between him and his lover, making himself appear the chief’s son to her peasant girl.

  “Tromp,” said Colonel Muller, sighing as he came out of the lounge at 146 Acacia Drive, “a private word with you.”

  Kramer nodded and stepped out into the garden with him. A dog, he noticed, had visited the property and cocked a leg over one of the stacks of Popular Mechanics, which only went to prove the crime prevention campaign had been right about never leaving garage doors
open.

  “Why the smile?” asked Colonel Muller. “God in Heaven, I know of nothing to smile about! My mind is in a total state of muddle and confusion. I can’t seem to think.”

  “But there’s a reason for that, Colonel.”

  “Oh ja?”

  “You can’t think because you’re stopping yourself from thinking.”

  “Me, stopping myself?”

  “Or at least from thinking along the lines all your experience over the years as a policeman has taught you to do.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Then, let me try putting it this way, Colonel,” suggested Kramer, perching on a wing of the red Datsun. “Say, for argument’s sake, this call had been to the house of a certain reverend gentleman with fingers like pork sausages. Do you know the bastard I mean?”

  “Hell, I should hope so! The animal who keeps doing indecent things to little kiddies.”

  “Alleged indecent things,” Kramer corrected him. “There’s been a dozen or more complaints, but have we ever got him to court yet?”

  “Ja, but that’s because of his position, man. Because it’s always been his word against some three-year-old, and he’s been careful not to leave any forensic evidence. Only, what this has to do with—”

  “Just say,” went on Kramer, “we got a call to his house right now, and there was a kiddie there who said he’d been putting his hand in her panties. Would you believe her?”

  “Why, naturally, man!”

  “Because?”

  “Because of what we know of him already!”