The Artful Egg

by James McClure

  “What’s that noise?”

  “The maidservant can’t stop crying, sir.”

  “Zondi hasn’t been—!” Colonel Muller gulped. “Didn’t I tell you I’ve got Time and all the rest on my bloody doorstep?”

  “Ach, nothing like that, Colonel. She says her heart is sore for her white madam.”

  “Oh, really? Huh! And is that it, the sum total of their statements?”

  Kramer nodded. “Tomorrow,” he said, “Zondi will take them over to the house to see if they can notice anything missing, et cetera.”

  “A long shot, man! But why not tonight?”

  “They’re in no condition, sir. Dumela’s had them on the road all day.”

  Colonel Muller shook his head dolefully. “God in Heaven,” he said, “unless something happens soon with this Stride case, the press are going to start looking elsewhere for a story—and the last thing I want is them getting hold of the Zuidmeyer business.”

  “But I thought Jones was working on a new lead? He sort of dropped a hint to that effect when I crossed paths with him in the courtyard.”

  “Didn’t he tell you what it was?”

  Kramer shook his head. “I think he wants to keep all the glory to himself, sir. Another of his bullshit theories, I suppose.”

  “Actually, he may be on to something. What it boils down to is that Pillay, the postman who found the body, could be involved in some fashion.”

  “You’re joking, Colonel! Zondi—”

  “Zondi can what? Explain where Pillay has vanished to and all the rest of it?”

  “The rest of what, Colonel?”

  “Tromp,” said Colonel Muller, glancing at his watch, “it’s not really your worry, hey? I’m the one who’s doing the co-ordination, and for now you’re supposed to be concentrating on the Zuidmeyers, OK? That is top priority. Ach, I really must be going; it’s after eight o’clock, and Mrs. Muller is waiting supper for me.”

  Kramer watched him hurry off, then turned just as Zondi emerged from the interrogation room. “Well, Mickey?”

  “Still nothing, boss, so I’ve told Dumela to find them a place to sleep for the night.”

  “Fine,” said Kramer.

  Zondi locked pace with him as they made their way back up to his office above the courtyard. “What’s next, boss?” he asked.

  “I’ve had a total gutsful today, one way and another, so I suggest we just both bugger off. It’s what the Colonel’s just done, and he’s leading this so-called investigation.”

  “But what about the Zuid—?”

  “To hell with Zuidmeyer! There’s nothing I can do about him until Doc Strydom confirms those bruises were inflicted a long time before death, when the lady supposedly slipped in her shower. By the way, maybe you should know that everyone directly involved in the case has been sworn to such secrecy that their balls will fall off if they divulge one word about it.”

  “Hau, so that was the soft bouncing sound when you stood up just now.…”

  “Hey, kaffir, just you—”

  “Phone!” cut in Zondi.

  Kramer reached his desk at the fifth ring and lifted the receiver. “Doc?” he said.

  He was right. It was Strydom on the line, talking in a curious half-whisper, like a man torn between high excitement and extreme caution. It took a few moments for his words to sink in properly, and by then he’d rung off again.

  “Boss?” prompted Zondi, as he watched Kramer replace the receiver in its cradle very carefully.

  “Those tissue slides of Ma Zuidmeyer’s bruises.…”

  “Yes, boss?”

  “Doc Strydom says he can’t be a hundred percent sure, but from the look of them under his microscope he’s pretty certain the bruising occurred at about the time of death, tying in with Zuidmeyer’s version of events. Or, in other words, it now seems it could be the son who’s doing the lying.”

  “The son?” said Zondi, withholding a match flame from the two Lucky Strikes he’d been about to light. “But why should he want to lie?”

  “The mind bloody boggles,” agreed Kramer.

  11

  “AND WHAT ABOUT this chappie?” asked a tall white man in a white coat, pausing the following morning by Ramjut Pillay’s cot in the crowded admitting-ward at Garrison Road Mental Hospital. “Um, Peerswammy Lal, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right, Doctor,” said the Indian male nurse in charge, whose name-tag read N. J. Chatterjee. “He spent all last night under his bed.”

  “It was seeming so much safer there,” said Ramjut Pillay, glancing nervously around him at the other patients.

  “Of course, of course. People after you, are they?”

  “Oh, no! I am really totally unknown and perfectly innocent, Doctor!” Then he dropped his voice to a whisper. “My fears were entirely connected with the persons who slept with me.”

  “Sexual fantasies, you mean?”

  “I did not dare to think as far as that. Doctor!”

  “H’m, I’m beginning to see what might have brought you in here.” The doctor shuffled some notes. “Oh dear, we’ve been making a bit of a nuisance of ourselves up at the railway station.”

  “You as well?” said Ramjut Pillay, most surprised.

  The doctor smiled kindly. “No, you misunderstand me,” he explained. “When I say ‘we,’ what I really mean is ‘you.’ ”

  “But if—”

  “Don’t argue with the doctor,” said Nurse Chatterjee, pressing him back against a nasty hard pillow. “He is here to make us better.”

  Us?

  A person could go mad in a place like this, thought Ramjut Pillay.

  Kramer woke, rolled over, stared up at the ceiling and saw that it did not belong to Tess Muldoon, neither was it the Widow Fourie’s. He was glad of that. Sometimes, on the rare occasions he went out alone and became very drunk, he ended up doing the opposite to what he’d planned while still sober. But here he was, back in the privacy of his own small room, free to do a little quiet thinking with nobody fussing over him or, for that matter, regarding his body with a ballet dancer’s detachment.

  He put his hands behind his head and went on looking at the ceiling. He wondered idly whether Mickey now had a ceiling in his bedroom, following his recent move from Kwela Village, where the Zondi family had for years lived in two rooms with a stamped-earth floor, to the new Bantu urban development area at Hamilton, eight miles outside the town. Then he recalled the first ceiling he had ever known, damp-stained and sagging, in the dilapidated Free State farmhouse where he’d been born. Born the day before Christmas, because his church-elder father had become so alarmed at the presumption implicit in a child born on 25 December, that he had induced premature labour by having his wife jolted about in a donkey cart the night before and then given some foul brew by a witchdoctor. In a crude sort of way, this ploy had worked, although, as the old man had so often reminded his cronies, the price he’d paid was that it’d made him both a father and a widower in one and the same day. The listening boy, on the other hand, had always thought that it’d also made him a—

  Kramer jumped out of bed, breaking his chain of thought, stretched his arms wide and rose onto his toes. “Ach, that’s better.…” he said to himself, and went for a shower, feeling quite different from the way he’d done the day before, when everything had ended up getting on top of him.

  The bathroom brought back an immediate picture of Marie Louise Zuidmeyer as he had last seen her, with Strydom’s herringbone stitches running right up her middle, after all her guts and stuff had been poked back in again. A massive woman, certainly, but a short one, and in terms of weight, kilogram for kilogram, probably not much heavier than he was.

  This tempted him to try some experiments in the bath. First, he tested the slipperiness of the bath while dry, and found his feet stuck to it. He tested it again, after sprinkling it with some water from his landlady’s hair-rinsing device. This hardly made much difference. He dropped in a bar of soap and stood on it. If he
placed himself correctly, his foot shot from under him immediately, but time and again, when he simply stepped on it, willy-nilly, all that happened was that the soap went flying, squeezed out from beneath his instep. And so, he finally concluded, slipping on the soap in a shower was not so much an accident as a freak accident—something which might happen, strictly by chance, perhaps only once in a hundred years.

  Unlucky Marie Louise Zuidmeyer, then, who had got no further than her fifty-fourth birthday before these long odds had caught up with her. Or, unluckier still, the others who had suffered a similar fate, for rumour had it that they’d all been quite young men.

  Crouching by the bath, Kramer wondered how else—short of being grabbed and made to fall—Mrs. Zuidmeyer could have lost her footing. Then he had an idea. What if the soap had been left lying around on the floor of the shower after the last person had used it? This could easily have created a not-too-noticeable area of slipperiness and, if her foot had landed anywhere on it, over she would have gone. Pleased with this theory, he gave it a practical trial by smearing shampoo over the bottom of the bath and then stepping on it without looking. He almost had a bad fall.

  “Bull’s eye,” he murmured to himself, and reached for the hot tap to run his bath. “It also explains why I saw no soap there. If the shower had been running for hours on top of that, then what was left would’ve completely melted and gone down the plughole.”

  But his hand came back and he scratched himself with it under one ear instead. Mrs. Zuidmeyer—and this wasn’t disputed—had been a woman who’d liked a long bath, just as he did. It stood to reason, then, that she’d not step in under a shower until the water was running hot; in fact, he had known very few people prepared to step into showers while the first cold drips were still contained in the nozzle.

  So what effect, then, would perhaps a minute of running water have on the slippery surface left by a bar of melting soap? He again made use of his landlady’s hair-rinsing device, and discovered that shampoo on the bottom of the bath was dissolved and rendered harmless in seconds.

  “Not so clever,” he muttered, and this time turned on the hot tap.

  The plumbing gave a clunk, and after the tap had been running for a moment or two there was another clunk and it spat out about a half a glassful of rusty-coloured water before returning to normal. By the time his bath was poured, and Kramer lay stretched out in it, most of the flakes of rust had sunk to the bottom out of sight, but one managed to become washed up on to his chest where he mistook it at first for a small scab he hadn’t known about. He gave it a dab with his finger, studied it, and flicked it at the wall.

  Then another idea struck him, so forcibly that when he sat up he created a small tidal wave and sank the soap-dish. “Where’s that bloody nozzle?” he said, feeling the floor at the side of the bath for the rinsing device. “What if we put a whole load of shampoo in there, so it’s still coming out when the water’s hot?” He unscrewed the nozzle, squeezed the remainder of his shampoo into it, and emptied the bath so that he could complete the experiment. It was only a partial success. The shampoo continued to be released through the nozzle for a good minute or more, but the mixture it made with the water then covered the bottom of the bath with a pretty carpet of bubbles that didn’t prove very slippery at all. Moreover, unless one were very shortsighted, bubbles such as these would be spotted instantly, exciting caution and bewilderment.

  “Will you be in there much longer, Mr. Kramer?” his landlord called out anxiously, with a rap on the bathroom door. “The wife is on tenterhooks. We think we may have found the answer.”

  “Two minutes at the most,” Kramer reassured him, grabbing up a towel.

  After all, for years and years now, they had been the ones using this bathroom as a laboratory, which really gave them first rights to it. They’d even had extra shelves fitted to hold the vast selection of aperients, laxatives and purgatives with which they experimented endlessly in various permutations to little or no effect, spending hours on their test-bench in the corner. “I’ve been thinking,” Kramer had once remarked to the Widow Fourie, “if they could only get together with a group of like-minded people in California or somewhere like that, they could set up the Bowel Movement.”

  Back in his room he finished drying himself and then took a clean shirt, socks and underwear from one of three cardboard boxes beneath his divan. Another of the boxes held his tax forms, car insurance policy and other personal documents, while the third was used for odd items of shopping, like spare jars of instant coffee. He had left his suit neatly arranged on the one chair he allowed in the otherwise furnitureless room, and his shoes, which had been cleaned by the house boy, he fetched from outside his door. In no time, he was dressed, had dragged a comb through his hair, and was on his way, shaving himself with a battery-powered razor.

  Perhaps his experiment with the shampoo in the nozzle hadn’t worked out too well, but nonetheless he felt pretty sure he’d come close to an answer there. Close enough, anyway, to make his first stop the home of Willem Martinus Zuidmeyer.

  Modern pipe-cleaners, like certain CID lieutenants he could name, simply did not have the spine to them they’d had in his younger days, reflected Colonel Muller, as he struggled to clear an obstruction in his new briar.

  “But, Colonel, I could hardly go on searching personally all night,” Jones was whining. “I’d got the warrant issued, I’d put out the alert, plus a detailed description. What more should I have done? It’s not my fault—or even Gagonk’s—that nobody has yet reported a sighting.”

  “You should have stayed out all night, like you say Tromp would’ve done.”

  “Huh! Do you know where he was last night? Round at the Albert bar—”

  “Jones, that is none of your concern. I thought I’d made it very clear to you that I needed something new to give the press today, and that I needed it very badly, for reasons that don’t concern you, either. Now, if you’d arrested this postman, and he’d been able—”

  “Why not let slip to the papers about the sword, Colonel?”

  The pipe-cleaner jammed fast and buckled. “God in Heaven, my patience is almost at an end, Jones.…”

  “The idea of a sword would make a real sensation, though, sir!”

  “Exactly, you damned fool! It would also leave us looking bloody stupid. Or have you forgotten that all we have of this sword is the very tip? What if the thing turns out to be just a long dagger? What if—?”

  “I can’t really see that we’d do ourselves any harm by just—”

  “You can’t? Headlines this high, saying: ‘South African Police fail to find murder weapon’? Or ‘South African Police think sword killed writer’? Is that the kind of publicity we in the SAP want? As the Brigadier says, here is a God-sent opportunity—and you know he’s a very religious man, so he really means that—to show the world we are not the incompetent fools, who only know how to kill kaffirs, that we’re usually portrayed as overseas. On the contrary, this is our chance to conduct a very professional and impressive investigation in full view of the media, come up with the right culprit, give him a fair trial, and then break the bastard’s neck on the gallows. Understand, now?”

  Jones reddened, creating an unpleasant effect akin to watching a corpse regain its colour during embalming. “Er, ja, Colonel, I’m sorry. It’s just I.…”

  “Of course, if you’d like to come up with the murder weapon instead today,” added Colonel Muller jocularly, having suddenly managed to dislodge the obstruction in his pipe’s mouthpiece, “I’d be prepared to forget my displeasure.”

  “Sir? But I thought Jaap’s blokes had searched Woodhollow and the surrounding area from top to bottom?”

  Colonel Muller sighed and threw the used pipe-cleaner into his waste-bin. “A jest, Jones, just a jest.… Call me a sentimental old fool, but I’d hoped for a smile then. Has any of the rest of this little discussion of ours actually got through? You know what to do now?”

  “I’ll not stop ti
ll I’ve caught this coolie, sir!”

  “Thank you, Jones,” said Colonel Muller.

  Zuidmeyer was sitting on his garage floor, staring dully at a pile of Popular Mechanics. It took him two or three seconds to register that Kramer had just wished him a good morning, and about as long again for him to turn and glance up. His face was haggard, his small bristly moustache now almost facetious, and his eyes hadn’t lost their haunted look—if anything, they’d been visited by fresh spectres.

  “My son’s gone,” he said.

  “How do you mean, sir?”

  “Gone. I went out to buy some cigarettes last night, and when I came back the boy had gone.”

  “Did he take any stuff with him? Clothing, money—that type of thing?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You’ve looked in his room?”

  “Glanced in through the door, but.…”

  “Then, you don’t mind if I go in the house, sir?”

  Zuidmeyer waved listlessly towards it. “Help yourself, young man. The boy’s room is the small one at the rear. Do you think they’ll be bringing the dog back?”

  “Dog, sir?”

  “The one that ran away yesterday. It was only a pup.”

  Kramer shrugged.

  “That’s why I’m waiting outside here, keeping an eye for them.”

  You could be a very clever man, Willem Martinus Zuidmeyer, thought Kramer, as he took the path to the front door of the house, or a sicker soul than anybody has realised. Did he never use the dog’s name, either, just as he never used his son’s name? Had he always kept the world at arm’s length from him?

  There was mess in the house. That was the trouble with treating something as an accidental death: none of the usual precautions were taken to ensure the scene was secure against pollution. One or other of the Zuidmeyer males, perhaps both of them, had littered the living-areas with beer-cans and cigarette-ends, none of which rested in a companionable pair anywhere. The bathroom, however, which had a separate lavatory adjoining it, looked as though nobody had been into it since the body’s removal, and the bristles of the toothbrushes over the washbasin felt bone dry.