The Artful Egg

by James McClure

  “Of course,” said Zondi. “The dead.”

  14

  THE UNIVERSITY BUILDINGS were a mess and a muddle, scattered all over a slope above Trekkersburg in among far too many trees. No wonder the local paper continued to report disappointing results for first-year students, thought Kramer; it probably took the poor little buggers their first six months to find their classrooms.

  So he didn’t even attempt to search for the English Department, but went directly to the old main building, with its clock tower and dome, and sat outside it until he recognised a face from the mug shots of minor dissidents kept by Security. All he had to do then was slightly raise one finger, and after a glance at the aerial at the back of the car the student almost dropped his books and hurried over.

  “Full Marx,” said Kramer, enjoying his private pun. “Where do I find a bloke who calls himself Doc Wilson?”

  “Deputy Head of English?”

  “The same. You can take us to him?”

  “But you must be.…”

  “Ja, police—so don’t try to run away, hey?”

  Looking like someone who wishes he could turn his collar up so friends won’t recognise him, but having been foolish enough to come out in just a T-shirt and jeans that morning, the student slunk along as fast as he could, which suited Kramer perfectly. He had by now begun to develop Piet Baksteen’s distrust of a simple solution, and wanted to eliminate the University from his enquiries as soon as possible.

  The student led the way into a modern building that was more glass than concrete, and then into a passage with a long grey carpet and numbered doors on the right. He pointed to the third door down and stopped.

  “He should be in there,” he said, very pale.

  “Fine,” said Kramer. “Oh, and if you hear any screams, it’ll only be this thing.”

  One glance at the brown-paper parcel being wielded in Kramer’s left hand was enough. Off went the student, even paler, and after a quick rap-rap on the door marked DR. W.B. WILSON, Kramer walked in with a smile. The gullibility of students, and of dissidents in particular, never failed to delight him.

  The room, in one sense, was empty. In another, it was doubtful whether anyone could have packed into it more shelves of books, more piles of papers, or more cigar-ends into its ashtrays, which were perched everywhere. For decoration, it had an oil painting of a nude woman coloured purple—her head was so badly drawn it didn’t help to distinguish her race, either, which made it difficult to decide whether Wilson’s admiration for her was entirely legitimate—and a human skull, minus its lower jawbone, on a corner of the cluttered desk. Beyond this desk, which had a chair that looked more like a wooden throne, the wall was almost all a sliding window.

  Weaving his way through an untidy arrangement of low chairs, Kramer went to the window and looked out. A pasty-faced man of about forty, with long greying hair swept back over his ears, old-fashioned granny glasses, and a cigar jutting from a thin, curvy mouth, was basking in a deck chair with a book balanced upright on his fancy waistcoat.

  “Doctor Wilson, sir? Lieutenant Kramer, the CID officer who phoned you earlier on.”

  “Wot? Ah! Whoops!” said the Deputy Head of English, struggling to get up.

  “Stay where you are, if you like, sir, and I’ll come out.”

  “ ‘Not so, my lord; I am too much in the sun.…’ ”

  “Whatever suits you best, sir,” said Kramer, puzzled to know why Wilson was looking at him as if he expected him to clap or something.

  “Act I, scene i,” said Wilson. “I tend to become besotted.”

  “Ja, it’s often best to wear a hat,” said Kramer, backing into the office. “Mind you, today started out overcast.”

  “Um, take a pew,” said Wilson.

  Kramer couldn’t see one. So while Wilson settled down on his throne he took the skull off the corner of the desk and sat there, as was his habit in Colonel Muller’s office.

  “ ‘Alas, poor Yorick,’ ” said Wilson, pointing to the skull.

  “Must’ve been quite an exam,” agreed Kramer, who could also make up bullshit when the occasion demanded. “And the Yorick family don’t mind you keeping it?”

  Wilson threw back his head and made a sound like a donkey being castrated. “Excellent!” he said. “Superb! Must remember that!”

  Kramer put the skull aside and drew the sword from its brown-paper wrapping. “What I’d really like you to try to remember, sir,” he said, “is whether you have ever seen this weapon before? Would you like to hold it?” And he handed it over, hilt first.

  “ ‘I know a hawk from a handsaw.…’ ”

  “You do, sir?” said Kramer.

  But there was no way he could make himself sound impressed. Wilson would be bragging next that he knew his arse from his elbow. Bouncing about on that throne, he was, just like a big kid, saying weird things with that show-off look in his self-absorbed little eyes, expecting grownups to tell him how clever he was.

  “Good God,” said Wilson quietly. “Where did you get this?”

  “Why, sir?”

  “It’s Laertes’.”

  “He’s what? A student here?”

  Wilson looked up. “It’s a sword we used in our recent production of Hamlet,” he said. “These are the glass beads my wife found for it in her mother’s trinket-box. I’d no idea it’d gone missing, none at all. This could be rather serious.”

  “Oh, it is, sir,” said Kramer, pleased the man had at last decided to act his age.

  “You didn’t say on the telephone where you’d found it.”

  In the circumstances, what with it being the English Department, Kramer decided to allow himself a little poetic licence. “Ach, we found it sticking in the side of Naomi Stride, sir.”

  “Naomi Stride!” Wilson almost dropped the thing, before going several shades lighter and gulping. Then he held the sword away from him, gazed at it, and said very softly: “ ‘I will speak daggers to her, but use none.…’ ”

  “Then you didn’t like the lady?” asked Kramer.

  “Actually, that was more Hamlet, I’m afraid. You’re familiar with the play? Know what Hamlet is about?”

  “At a guess, it must be about a village, sir. Aren’t hamlets—?”

  “A village, did you say? How original! Life seen as a macrocosm?”

  Kramer just looked at him, quite sure they were both speaking English, and in a place that was actually designed for English, and yet once again he had the bewildering feeling that neither of them was really communicating. Something had, however, struck home when he’d suggested that Wilson had disliked Naomi Stride, so he decided to try a variation on that theme. And if he stuck to inviting “yes” or “no” answers not much could go wrong.

  “You knew Naomi Stride, sir?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Sir,” said Kramer with a sigh, taking the sword back, “please explain.”

  “Yes, I did know Naomi Stride the writer, just as I know Jane Austen, from having read and studied her books. But no, I didn’t know—what was her married name?”

  “Kennedy.”

  “Mrs. Kennedy, the person, as it were, I never knew, apart from seeing her across the room at a few functions, and having appeared on the same platform as her on one occasion.”

  “And why was this, sir? Wasn’t she a world-famous writer, living, as it were, right on your doorstep? Wouldn’t it be in your interests to know her and, instead of maybe just theorising, get to hear first-hand how she sucked her books out of her thumb?”

  Wilson smiled slightly, then hunted for his matches to relight his cigar. “Setting aside for the moment the academic point you have raised, which clearly invites one to define what one means by literary criticism, and could well—”

  “Sir, could we set that part of it aside for good?” asked Kramer.

  “If you like,” said Wilson, dispersing the smokescreen around him with a flap of his hand. “Your question was, why didn’t I want to know the woman.
The answer is, Lieutenant, she didn’t want to know me. I’m afraid that some of my criticism, directed at her more recent work in particular, did not go down frightfully well.”

  “You pissed her off, you mean? Why, what was it about her recent writing you didn’t like?”

  “ ‘The lady doth protest too much, me thinks.…’ ”

  “Ja, and the Security Branch would agree with you, but—”

  “No, no, it’s this streak of feminism that’s come creeping into things, accentuating an already rather humourless—”

  “Sir,” said Kramer, “this sword. That’s what I really came about. Any idea why it isn’t still where you expected it to be?”

  Wilson stood up. “Let’s go over and start some enquiries,” he said.

  At last, thought Kramer, someone who speaks my language.

  Zondi returned to CID headquarters, feeling very much at a loose end. He had definitely collected some useful information during his brief visit to the Dubozas, but he hadn’t any idea what to do with it, other than to store it in his memory until the Lieutenant showed up.

  So he wandered into the Bantu detective sergeant’s office to ask Tims Shabalala for further gratifying details of Gagonk and Jones’s accident. Tims wasn’t there, but Wilfred Mkosi was, strumming on his guitar.

  “And there was Good Dog Gagonk on his knees, his faithful snout in his master’s lap,” sang Mkosi. “Neither one, alas, was dead, but when the traffic cop came along his face went red! Oh, what were they doing? What were they doing?”

  Zondi clamped a hand over the guitar strings. “Exactly, what were they doing?” he asked. “What is this nonsense I’ve heard about them thinking the man Ramjut Pillay is a major suspect?”

  Mkosi put his guitar down and began to roll a cigarette. “I have not seen Gagonk today, Mickey, so I cannot give you an up-to-date. I just know they have been rushing around, looking for him everywhere.”

  “But why?”

  “Yesterday, the postman ran away from home, after spending all night engaged in mysterious activities in his bedroom. He took all his money and vanished.”

  “What else?”

  “Gagonk says much evidence was found in the bedroom, pointing to the man as being of a highly criminal nature. He had, he says, many, many disguises.”

  “Disguises? They didn’t have any idea where he had vanished to?”

  “Not last night, but they did put out a description to all SAP stations, the Railway Police, the municipal police and all the rest. Do you want to see it?”

  “Too right. I can’t imagine how that poor fool couldn’t have been caught by now.”

  “Then, I think you’ll find a carbon of the Telex in Gagonk’s wire basket on his desk,” said Mkosi, licking his cigarette-paper.

  Zondi found the carbon copy lying right on top. He read no more than the first two lines before beginning to chuckle.

  “What’s so funny, Mickey?” asked Mkosi, folding his long thin legs under him. “I didn’t notice any Gagonkish spelling mistakes.…”

  Catching up the carbon copy, Zondi turned to him and said: “Where did they get this amazing description? Where? Pillay’s forty, if a day, and no mention of his needing to wear glasses, or what kind they are. But that’s nothing when you come to his height and weight! One-seventy-six centimetres and eighty-one kilos! This makes him tall and sound a real muscle man, whereas he’d be lucky if he weighs half so much, and his height is only—”

  “The figures are wrong?” gasped Mkosi, beginning to share the joke.

  “Wrong?” said Zondi, suddenly aware that he was jeopardising a golden opportunity to settle a few more old scores. “Oh, no, my friend, pretend I never said that.”

  “You never said that,” said Wilfred Mkosi happily, picking up his guitar again. “And anyway, if you did, what a pity I was singing my new song too loudly to hear it.…”

  Kramer had to bend almost double to fit under the stage in the main hall of the University. Wilson shuffled ahead of him, pushing aside the wicker baskets of costumes and tea-boxes of props that kept getting in his way, and eventually reached an old plastic rubbish-bin in which an assortment of stage weapons was standing, point down.

  “As you see, Lieutenant, they’re the very devil to get at.”

  “Ja, but what I also see is that this place under the stage isn’t locked, it hasn’t even got a bolt on it, there’s a notice on the door saying ‘Drama Club Store,’ and the hall was wide open, too.”

  “Yes, but one simply doesn’t think of anybody wanting to—”

  “Have you no Bantus working on the premises? What if one of them gets upset with his boss and comes here to get himself a—”

  “Our Africans just aren’t like that!” said Wilson, shocked.

  “Oh, so they’ve all got degrees, too?”

  “I don’t think this argument is entirely apposite, quite frankly.”

  “You’re right,” agreed Kramer, picking over the other swords in the bin. “We’ve already established that anyone could come in here, with an excellent chance of not being noticed, and help themselves to whatever they liked.”

  “Er, the main building is locked after dark.”

  “Always?”

  “Well, not when there’s a function on, either here in the main hall or perhaps in one of the side rooms.”

  “And how often is that?”

  “During term-time?”

  “It’s been term-time ever since the play was on, hasn’t it?”

  “Every other night at least, I suppose,” said Wilson lamely.

  Kramer took out a sword with a cup over the hilt to protect the hand. “Why didn’t Lay-whatsit use this one?”

  “Laertes? Funnily enough, he rehearsed with that one, but our costume designer wanted something more in keeping with the flamboyance—”

  “So who adapted the murder weapon?”

  “Er, I did—from another foil that was a bit battered. I think that, as the producer, one should remain infinitely flexible, catering to the—”

  “So that’s why you know the thing backwards and it’s still going round in your head?”

  “ ‘These are but wild and whirring words.…’ I become, as I admitted earlier, besotted, obsessed—on top of which, Hamlet is one of our examination pieces this year, and Shakespeare is my special study.”

  “How do you test somebody on watching a play?”

  “Oh, they don’t have to watch it so much as read and reread it.”

  “But aren’t books the things you read? I thought the whole idea of a play was to sit there and see—”

  “The ideas can be—well, just take the raw plot of the thing. A son who discovers his father was murdered so that his mother can marry his—”

  “It’s a murder story?”

  Wilson gave a little laugh. “Well, in a way—a bit of a ghost story, too, if we’re resorting to such terms, plus a sad love story in which Hamlet’s girlfriend is driven mad and he loses her.”

  “ ‘God in Heaven,’ ” said Kramer.

  The men in white brought in a cross-eyed old Hindu who had burned his feet in an attempt to simulate the fire-walking ceremony, held every Good Friday at the temple down Harber Road, by standing on his daughter-in-law’s electric stove with one foot in the curry and another in the rice. He screamed and shouted a great deal, not because he was in pain—he denied having felt a thing—but because he resented having been interrupted in the middle of a spiritual exercise.

  But Ramjut Pillay was barely aware of his presence. He was wrestling with his conscience, and it had him pinned to the mat, demanding that he find a way to get the anonymous letter on cheap blue paper with ruled lines into the hands of the CID without further delay. An impossible task, of course, for a poor fellow locked behind bars and with high walls surrounding him.

  For an instant, he toyed with the idea of going to Nurse Chatterjee and telling him that, quite frankly, he was as sane as the next man, and had only pretended to be a parachutist to
get himself out of a bit of a fix. But the problem was that Nurse Chatterjee would doubtless want to know more about this bit of a fix before he’d let him go, and that could lead to even sorrier complications.

  If only, Ramjut Pillay reflected bitterly, he had taken up that course he’d seen offered in mental telepathy, then he could send his thoughts out through those bars to that nice understanding fellow, Sergeant Zondi, telling him where the letter could be found. He was sure that Sergeant Zondi would be so delighted to be put on the right track in finding the murderer that he would arrange for his release from Garrison Road Mental Hospital and no questions asked. But, having stupidly neglected to take the course, just as he’d neglected to take one in self-hypnosis before having a tooth out, he had only himself to blame again for his unnecessary suffering.

  Ramjut Pillay sat up in his cot with a jerk, filled with the joy of a marvellous inspiration that only his rather remarkable mind would be capable of. It must have been thinking of correspondence courses that had done the trick, for he had suddenly realised there was a way of sending his thoughts out between those bars without his needing to accompany them. He would post Sergeant Zondi a map, giving the location of the clueful letter in the hole beneath the tree, and enclose a short note explaining its significance! A short anonymous note, perhaps? Yes, yes, even better! Later, when the murderer was caught, and the police were pleased with him, he might then reveal the note-writer’s identity, but in the meantime he would remain safely where he was, with a beautifully clear conscience worthy—dare he think it?—of the Mahatma.

  Jumping out of his cot, Ramjut Pillay felt for a pen. But he had no pen, and what he’d also overlooked was that he had no paper, envelope or stamp. Then, just go and see if Nurse Chatterjee has what you want in the drawer of the duty desk, whispered another side to him. Go quickly, while he is distracted by that noisy old fool in the corner.

  Ramjut Pillay nipped over to the desk, then hesitated. What good would this act of theft be to his conscience? Look, grumbled another side to him, I have just about had enough of your cowardly scruples.