“Ja?”
“Well, I’ll admit I’d had a few. Started looking through our old snapshot albums, remembering the good days with Marie, when we were both young and stationed out in the bushveld. The simple life, a few faction fights, cattle theft; now and again, a stabbing, some arson—haystacks and the like. Then my scrapbooks, because I got quite a few nice little write-ups from the courts when I first joined the CID. Marie was the one who had time to keep it up, and I noticed there were a few I’d personally not have included. Two were about this same Ahmed Timol, and there was a gap on that page where another cutting had been pulled out. Whether or not it pertained to Timol, I can’t say, but it struck me as strange the name should come up again in conversation like this.”
“I didn’t realise you’d done rural work,” said Kramer, beckoning to Zondi, who had just appeared in the doorway with a cowering little Indian. Then he covered the receiver’s mouthpiece with a hand, and added: “I won’t be long, Mickey. Put the kettle on for tea.”
“Oh, I was on a horse for four years,” said Zuidmeyer. “The best kind of policing there is for a youngster.”
“Which reminds me, is Jannie home yet, sir?”
“He came back last night at about eleven. We didn’t talk, but I respect that. He needs time to adjust.”
“And today?”
“Funnily enough, he’s just phoned me. He wants me to go down to some lawyer’s office at four—Grant & Boyd-Smith, do you know where that is?”
“Grant & Boyd-Smith? No, Major.”
“Oh, well, I can find out from the phone-book. He says his ma left her will with them, although it’s news to me she had one. With me working all hours, they became very close over the years, of course, and so—”
“Major, I’m sorry to interrupt, hey? But the Colonel’s just come in and wants me to interview this prisoner in the Stride case.”
“Ja, I heard about the arrests on the radio, a newsflash. That was excellent work, young man. But I won’t keep you, so I’ll say bye for now.”
“Bye, Major.”
“Boss?” asked Zondi, as soon as the receiver was replaced. “Was the cutting from the son?”
Kramer nodded. “I’m pretty sure it must’ve been, Mickey. He was probably too young when all that was going on to know his pa had already left Security by the time of the Timol business. But, as for what he thinks he’ll gain from giving the Colonel a seizure this morning, don’t ask me.” Then, turning to the prisoner, he said: “Well, Ramjut, what are we going to do with you, hey?”
The little Indian raised his handcuffed wrists in front of his smudgy round glasses, bent his bandy legs at the knee, and would have fallen prostrate before Kramer, had not Zondi pulled him upright again.
“Behave,” said Zondi. “This is not the temple.”
“O Mighty and Vengeful Lieutenant, do anything with me that you will! Great are my sinnings against postages and against persons, and I am never denying that I am most guilty!”
“Too right you are, if only a quarter of what you say here is true,” said Kramer, tapping Colonel Muller’s notes. “But all that really interests me, Ramjut, is whether this blue letter is hidden in a hole under a tree near your house.”
“True, true, in a plastic bag as exhibit numbering five!”
“Oh ja, so the white ants won’t have got it? That was smart of you.”
“It was?” said Ramjut Pillay.
“While you were fetching him up, Mickey,” Kramer said to Zondi, “I had the Colonel on the line. Vicki Stilgoe’s explaining the lot now—including this blue letter. She says she could never understand why we hadn’t acted on it, because it clearly made it seem as though a Jewish bloke at the varsity could have been Ma Stride’s killer.”
“But he wasn’t, boss, so how did she—?”
“Ach, man, she wasn’t stupid. She planned it so we’d find out the bloke was innocent and then we’d go on to try to find out who’d tried to frame him.”
“On and on and on, boss?”
“That’s right, until we got sick of it and gave up, but always keeping us thinking it had to be someone intellectual Naomi Stride’d put in one of her books.”
“Hau, a good plan, boss!”
“Which would have worked perfectly, maybe, if our four-eyed friend here hadn’t buggered off with it. Oh, and by the way, you know the other blue letters before it? Which she used to build up the idea of a series, if it went the way she planned?”
“The ones which upset Mrs. Stride so she wouldn’t show them to her friends? Were they threats?”
Kramer couldn’t help a smile. “No, just criticisms of her writing, really putting the knife in where it hurt. So it wouldn’t have mattered if she had shown them to her friends—only, as Stilgoe expected, she—” The telephone rang. “Ja, Kramer here. OK, Colonel, I’ll be along in two minutes.”
“Two minutes will be deciding the fate of Ramjut Pillay?” the little Indian said, going again at the knees.
“One minute,” said Kramer. “Take his cuffs off, Mickey.”
“But O Mighty—”
“Listen, Pillay, it could be we owe you a favour, hey? But, more important than that, do you realise how much bloody paperwork it’s going to take to bring a case against you for withholding this evidence? Statements from the Railway Police, the loony-bin, doctors, nurses, your work colleagues, God knows who else? Which is to say nothing of all the charges the Post Office will want us to add on? So what I suggest is this. That we get that stuff back from under the tree, and we’ll change your story to read that you gave it to Sergeant Zondi on Tuesday when he first interviewed you in Jan Smuts Close. Have you got that?”
“Only, if you were possessing these documents, sir, then—”
“What difference does that make? We weren’t fooled by the blue letter, that’s all, which is why we didn’t follow up on it. Do you understand now? Can you get that guilty look off your face?”
“There it goes, by jingo!” whooped Ramjut Pillay.
Vicki Stilgoe was watching Colonel Muller’s every move. It was the least of the things which made him uncomfortable about having her in his office. Never, in all his days, had he encountered a woman so cold, so controlled, so totally without any discernible conscience.
He reached for his telephone and dialled Kramer’s number. He lit another of the cigarettes he kept in a drawer for emergencies, and pulled a face at the thin, acrid taste the thing had when compared to his pipe tobacco. He felt very angry with whoever had bought a yellow rose and a greeting card that morning. He wished he knew his identity, because it would definitely cost the swine the price of a new briar. If not a meerschaum.
“Tromp, Tromp, Tromp, answer, dammit!” he said under his breath, for it had been five minutes since he’d last rung the man’s office, and he could not imagine where Kramer could have got to in that time.
“And am I expected to go on just sitting here?” asked Vicki Stilgoe.
“That’s right, you go on just sitting there,” said Colonel Muller, dialling the duty officer’s number. “But don’t worry, there are no more questions I want to ask you.”
“None at all?”
He glanced at his query sheet.
“Was it your brother who got Mr. Kennedy to waste his time waiting in a Durban hotel on the night of the murder?”
“Yes, we wanted to provide him with a cast-iron alibi so that the police would leave him—and me—alone.”
“Why did you pick last Monday night to kill the deceased?”
“It had to be after a weekend, so it would look as though the threatening letter had been posted to arrive on the Monday.”
“But why not the Monday before?”
“Amanda had her birthday.”
“Or the Monday before that?”
“We weren’t ready. Bruce was still scouting the lie of the land.”
“You realise now you left it too late in a sense?”
“It was a mistake we couldn’t have known
about.”
“It was why you got caught.”
“No, that was due to a different mistake.”
“What mistake?”
She looked away and gave no answer.
Once again Colonel Muller dialled Kramer’s number, but again had no reply. He decided to give him one minute before there would really be trouble.
“Mrs. Stilgoe, what was your—?”
“Fatal error?”
“If you like.”
“Not realising.…”
“What?”
“That everywhere that Mary went her little lamb was sure to go.”
“You’re talking in riddles, woman!”
“Nursery rhymes, Colonel. Out of the mouth of babes.”
“Now, I warned you!” said Colonel Muller, and turned to the two policewomen sitting quietly in the corner. “Keep a strict eye on her. I’m going down to the Lieutenant’s office again. I can’t imagine what questions he could still find, but he must get the chance if he wants to.”
“Colonel Muller,” said Vicki Stilgoe, showing her first sign of emotion by tightening the grip of her clasped hands, “may I ask you a question?”
“Make it a quick one, Stilgoe. You heard I’m about to—”
“It was him, wasn’t it?” she said with sudden vehemence, almost spitting the words out. “That little black bastard, Zondi.”
“Who did what?”
“Noticed.”
“Riddles again.”
“Amanda keeping on saying ‘boy,’ which wasn’t very liberal at all, was it? Rather spoiled the image I was busily trying to—”
“Ach, I don’t think the average Bantu even notices when—”
“So the first chance he got of getting my daughter alone he started asking her questions about Bruce, about what Bruce thought of Theo—oh, yes, I managed to get that much out of her. But what else did he ask?”
Colonel Muller shrugged. “I have heard nothing of this conversation.”
“Don’t lie to me! That’s what—”
“See she doesn’t leave that chair, all right, girls?”
Colonel Muller closed his door behind him, glanced down at his rose-bush for consolation, and went along the balcony. Kramer’s office was empty. A pair of handcuffs lay on the desk. The electric kettle was boiling itself dry.
Then, taking up Kramer’s memo pad, he stared in bewilderment at what had been scrawled there:
G. & B.S./Rooms 1019/1023
Zondi had his foot down.
“Go,” urged Kramer, “go, man!”
They jumped the red, missed a bus by the thickness of a bus ticket, and straddled the central white line, horn blaring.
“Boss, why are we doing this?” asked Zondi, going through another red light. “What was that phone call you suddenly made to Grant & Boyd-Smith? I was telling Ramjut where to wait and I couldn’t quite hear—”
“A pair of good Afrikaner names.”
Zondi chuckled. “Grant & Boyd-Smith? They are so English that—”
“Exactly, Mickey. Then what was a dyed-in-the-wool Afrikaner woman like Marie Zuidmeyer doing taking her business to them, when the town’s full of solicitor’s firms like Brandsma and Du Plessis, Van der Merwe and Kros? I rang them to ask where they were situated.”
“And?”
“I’ve already told you the address, Chadlington House. Right opposite the Trekkersburg Gazette, where half the world’s bloody press is busy using its Telex facilities.”
“Boss, that still is not an answer.”
“It bloody is, old son. Can you guess what floor Grant & Boyd-Smith has its offices on?”
“What floor?” repeated Zondi, going through another red and leaving two cars to untangle themselves. “Hau, not the—?”
“You’ve got it,” said Kramer. “And it’s just gone four o’clock, the time Jannie told Zuidmeyer to be there.”
Thirty seconds later, Zondi screamed to a stop across the street from the Trekkersburg Gazette, and they jumped out. The lobby of Chadlington House was empty and the lift stood open.
“Christ, we’re in luck!” said Kramer, as they dashed for the lift before the doors could close. “Hit ten and hope.”
The lift doors took a lifetime to close, but the lift itself was swift. It rose with gathering speed, so that when it stopped at the tenth floor Kramer felt his stomach surge up and come down again. Considering what else his stomach was doing, that was the least of its tricks. With a rubbery sigh, the lift doors parted.
“Rooms 1019 to—”
“To the right, Lieutenant!” said Zondi, getting a head start.
Kramer caught up with him and they pounded down the wide corridor towards a suite of offices with a glass front and the name of the firm, Grant & Boyd-Smith, in a discreet shade of gold. There was a grey-haired woman seated behind the reception counter, powdering her nose. She must have been slightly deaf, because when they burst in through the door, she jumped so much that she powdered the left lens of her bifocals.
“Goodness, what on earth—?”
“The Zuidmeyers!” said Kramer. “Quickly, where are they?”
She looked too startled to comprehend.
“The father and son? Four o’clock appointment?”
“Oh, oh, yes, to see Mr. Boyd-Smith. He’s running a little late as usual, I’m afraid, so they’re in the waiting-room. But can I ask you—?”
There was a hoarse shout and then the sound of breaking glass.
Kramer shouldered the waiting-room door almost off its hinges. The first thing he saw was a gaping hole in the window, and through it the neon-rimmed letters that spelled out Trekkersburg Gazette along its rooftop. Then as Zondi stepped to his side he became aware of a movement to his left and behind him. Zuidmeyer was crawling backwards on his hands and knees, his eyes staring at the window and his mouth agape.
“Jannie!” he said, noticing Kramer. “Jannie, my boy Jannie!” And he raised a shaking finger to the window.
Faint shrieks and the sound of braking came from down in the street.
“Check, Mickey,” said Kramer.
Zondi crossed to the window, leaned out, turned a little grey and brought his head back in with a shake.
“Jannie, Jannie, Jannie!” sobbed Zuidmeyer, getting himself into the corner and curling into a ball. “Not one word!”
“What in—?”
Kramer turned. A smooth-looking man, grey above the ears, impeccably dressed and manicured, was approaching the doorway. “Mr. Boyd-Smith? Don’t come in here, it’s a police matter. But I’d like to ask you one question.” And he held out his warrant card.
“Y-yes, what is it?”
“Do you hold the will of a Mrs. Marie Louise Zuidmeyer?”
“We don’t handle wills; we’re strictly—”
“Thank you, sir, I will be out to explain in a minute,” said Kramer, and shut the door in his face. “It was a complete set-up, Mickey.”
Zondi nodded and looked out of the window again. “Already there are cameras, boss,” he said. “And a man with a movie one, across there in that window.”
“Jannnnniiie.…” howled Zuidmeyer. “Why? Why? Why?”
“Major, it’s Tromp Kramer. Can you tell me what happened here?”
Zuidmeyer knelt and looked up, his eyes no longer haunted but lit by a terrible light. “Nothing, Nothing! I came in. I.…”
“Go on, sir.”
“I said to the boy: ‘Well, I’m here. What’s all this about?’
He looked at me. He said nothing. He—”
“Don’t stop, Major!”
“The boy looked at me. He said not one word. I said: ‘Jannie, I’m asking you a question!’ Then he smiled. Just smiled! Then he turned and he took three big steps and he—” Zuidmeyer pitched forward on to his face and beat the floor with his fists. “Why? Why, why, why? For the love of God, why?”
“It’s a pity you were alone in the room with him, and we have only your word for all this.”
; “What?” said Zuidmeyer, staggering to his feet. “What’re you—?”
“As your wife’s inquest will show,” said Kramer, with a glance at Zondi, “your boy had something he wouldn’t want to confess to you, Major Zuidmeyer.”
The Artful Egg Page 30