‘Oh, Mma!’ said the girl. ‘I can see that you are hungry today—’
‘Rum,’ Mma Ontoaste said, cutting off the waitress. ‘I want some rum. A big glass. Or a bottle. Yes. A big bottle. Sharpish. And wait! A cigar. And none of the local rubbish. I want a Cuban cigar.’
And it was while she was drinking this rum, which was strong enough to make her eyes run, and smoking this cigar, that a tall young man in a pale suit emerged from the sliding doors of the main grass hut and squinted in the sunlight, obviously looking for someone. In each hand he held a suitcase: one of the suitcases was of ordinary proportions while the other suitcase was long and thin, as if it might have held a snooker cue, or a fly-fishing rod, and these were both possibilities the man had allowed to customs officials on his way from London Heathrow.
The Englishman was very pasty-skinned, with a mop of straight hair, thin lips and the most eerie blue eyes that Mma Ontoaste could imagine. He stood for a second, trying to get his bearings, looking perhaps for the taxi queue, until he fumbled for some sunglasses and slid them up his pointed nose. That was better, thought Mma Ontoaste, and she waved an arm in the air to attract his attention.
Tom Hurst had never been to Africa before and would have had no idea what to expect had the Dean not insisted he take a copy of When the Lion Feeds by Wilbur Smith with him to read on the flight. Tom now saw the fat woman waving at him and he knew from the pictures that had lined the walls of the refectory at Cuff College that this must be Mma Ontoaste herself.
‘I see you, Nkosikazi!’ he said, removing his bush hat and placing it on the table so that Mma Ontoaste could admire the leopard-skin hatband.
When a man comes to Africa for the first time in his life, he is usually taken by the happiness he finds all around him. People have the time to stand and stare on that continent, and they avail themselves of it, fulsomely, as is right and proper. What, after all, is life if we do not have the time to stand around the place and just watch others? Of course, there are some countries where peace and happiness do not reign universally or continually, as even Mr JPS Spagatoni, that proud African, might go so far as to admit, but Botswana was not one of those countries. Of course it had its fair share of problems, what country did not? But it was still the best country in the world and, although she was by now quite drunk, Mma Ontoaste was still the best woman in that country and now, as the rum and the antivenom mixed in her bloodstream, she began to realise that, because she was the best woman in the best country in the world, that surely meant that she was the best woman in the world and anyone who disagreed with her would get what was coming to them, white man or not, and no mistake.
‘Hello, Rra,’ Mma Ontoaste said, blowing a series of aggressive smoke rings into the warm Botswana air. Tom Hurst sat down at the table opposite Mma Ontoaste. After a minute the waitress brought him his bush tea and then she stood there for a second giggling behind her hand while he took a sip. She had obviously never seen a white man drinking bush tea before. Or perhaps she had never seen a white man wearing a full safari suit, complete with epaulettes and patch pockets. Or perhaps it was the other present that Wikipedia had forced on Mr T Hurst as he waited for his flight: a sjambok (also known, Wikipedia explained, as an imvubu – Zulu for hippopotamus – or a kiboko – the same animal in Kiswahili – or mnigolo in Malinké, and there was quite a lot of other information besides).
The Dean and Wikipedia had led Tom to expect a large, thoughtful woman given to philosophical pronouncements of happy banality, but here was a terse, drawn, distracted woman, drinking rum and smoking a cigar and it not yet midday.
‘It’s very kind of you to agree to help me, Ms Ontoaste,’ Tom started. Mma Ontoaste grunted and exhaled another pile of smoke rings.
‘The Dean and Professor Wikipedia send their regards,’ he tried again, but this time Mma Ontoaste just shrugged carelessly. This was going to be harder work than he thought.
‘I will get right to it, then, if you don’t mind. The Dean tells me that you might be able to help me with this.’
He pulled from the long thin case something Mma Ontoaste only vaguely recognised as a spear.
‘A spear,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ Tom said with a smile. ‘Do you recognise it?’
Mma Ontoaste thought for a minute. Why should she recognise it?
‘It’s not mine,’ she said after a pause. ‘You think that because I am an African I know about spears?’
‘No—’
‘And witchcraft? And cannibalism? How to bribe officials? How to take a bribe? How to strip and reassemble an AK47 in the dark? Just because I am an African?’
Tom was startled.
‘It comes from Botswana,’ he said.
‘Tch! Botswana. I go on about it enough, with all this the sun blazing down, but today it seems just like a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.’
‘Right,’ Tom said, sitting back. ‘I can see you are not in the mood for this.’
‘No,’ she said, looking away, a tear in her eye. ‘I am not in the mood for this.’
Tom recalled the Dean telling him that the College’s detectives had not been as effective as usual, that they had been getting things wrong and hitting too many dead ends. This was the first time he had come across someone so depressed that they had given up altogether.
‘You are obviously a bit depressed, Ms Ontoaste,’ he said. ‘I know that ordinarily that is good in a detective, but—’
Mma Ontoaste held up a large hand to stop him.
‘I know, Rra. I know. It is what sets me apart. But ever since my tiny white van was destroyed I have been having doubts.’
‘Doubts?’
‘Yes. Doubts. Well, maybe not doubts.’
‘I see. And who destroyed your van, Ms Ontoaste?’ the white man asked.
‘I do not know, Rra,’ said Mma Ontoaste. ‘I do not know.’
It suddenly occurred to her that she had not really bothered to find out what happened to her van. That was where it had all started to go wrong. Again fat tears rolled down her cheeks. This was awful. Mma Ontoaste was reduced to drinking rum and weeping at eleven in the morning. Tom would have to do something about it. Perhaps she needed a break? A change of scene? But first he would have to find out why someone had used this spear to stab Claire Morgan in the Library back at Cuff College.
It was just as Tom Hurst was returning the spear to its case that he became aware of an elderly, scholarly-looking man at the next table. He had a round face and a fuzz of grey hair and was peering at them over the top of his gold-framed pince-nez. He was wearing a 15-piece tropical-weight tartan suit and had been sitting with a book on medical ethics and a copy of African Adventure by a man called Willard Price, which was a book that Tom had read as a boy and gleaned enough information from it about the various predators of the Savannah to win some sort of science prize and therefore give hope to his father and his father’s father that he might have some future in the Genre.
The old gent at the next-door table was drinking tea from a cup and saucer and occasionally jotting down little observations and pensées in a commonplace book by his side. He appeared to be wearing heavy dark make-up – as if for one of those shows where white men played black men, or Othello – and behind it his bright blue eyes twinkled like those of a mischievous schoolboy.
‘I say,’ he said politely in a rather smart accent. ‘I do hope you’ll excuse an interruption from an old chap like me, but I wonder if that is not a rather rare and valuable assegai? It looks just like the one in the collection of the Botswana National Museum.’
Mma Ontoaste rolled her eyes.
‘That’s all we need,’ she groaned. This sort of thing happened to her all the time these days; some clever bloody dick who knew what he was talking about. What about feminine intuition? What about sympathy and human bloody understanding?
The man introduced himself as Sandi Rudisandi, a Lecturer in Medical Ethics at the University of Gaborone and from there it was onl
y a matter of time until, with Sandi Rudisandi’s help, Mma Ontoaste and Tom made their way to the National Museum of Botswana and the Curator’s office in a small well-kept grass hut, separated from the main grass hut by a concrete path.
‘Would you like some bush tea, Mma?’ he began, settling himself down behind his desk for a long talk in the old-fashioned Botswana fashion.
‘Oh, God save us, Rra,’ cried Mma Ontoaste, a heavy fist thumping sloppily on the desk. ‘Don’t you have anything stronger?’
‘Perhaps we ought to get to the matter of the spear?’ Tom suggested. He cast a worried eye towards Mma Ontoaste. She was beginning to look rather bedraggled and unfocused. Sandi Rudisandi was blinking owlishly and dabbing at his make-up in the heat of the grass hut.
‘Oh Rra, that is a beauty,’ said the Curator when Tom showed him the spear. ‘Wherever did you get it?’
‘Well,’ Tom said. ‘We were rather hoping to ask you the same question. We wondered whether we could see the one in your collection.’
The Curator paused and looked puzzled.
‘Why?’ he asked.
Tom looked flustered for a second. He had come all this way for – Actually, why had he come all this way? He could not really see what good it would do now. When the Dean had suggested it, it seemed absolutely the right thing to do, but now?
He recalled his training. Press on regardless. Doubt is contagious. Once a detective knows what is to come next in the plot, it is his duty to seal off all other avenues of enquiry. Better still: do not admit they might even exist.
‘I believe that whoever used this assegai to kill Claire Morgan was sending us a message and that the answer lies in the National Museum of Botswana.’
There was a long silence. Tom began to feel uncomfortable with three pairs of eyes on him. None of the others looked the slightest bit convinced.
‘May I see the other spear?’ He changed the subject while they were still confused. ‘Sandi Rudisandi says it is almost identical.’
The Curator pushed his chair back and got to his feet.
‘Well, if you think it will help,’ he said with a doubtful shrug. He led them down a long corridor past scale models of grass huts and broken pottery to a line of spears. They stood in front of the case and stared. There were six spears, irregularly grouped, but there were seven information labels.
‘My God,’ said the Curator. ‘One of the spears is missing. It must have been stolen—’
It was, Tom Hurst guessed correctly, an assegai made by the Bamangwato tribe in what was called Bechuanaland, sometime in the 19th century.
‘It must have been those gypsies from the circus,’ continued the Curator. ‘I thought they’d only got the life-size model of the elephant. I thought this spear had gone to be cleaned. There is a cleaning label hanging there. Look.’
The Curator pointed to a hook, halfway up the back of the glass cabinet, which had, Tom presumed, held the spear in place. From it hung a piece of string attached to a white oblong of thick paper.
‘That is the sort of label the conservators use to inform people that an object has gone to be repaired or cleaned.’
Mma Ontoaste burped. Sandi Rudisandi wrinkled his nose and stepped back a pace.
‘Can we see the label?’ Tom asked.
‘Of course,’ began the Curator and he fumbled with some keys on a ring and set about opening the display case. When it was opened he stretched across to take the label and then looked at it in surprise.
‘Oh!’ he cried.
‘What?’
‘Oh, Rra! This is not good. This is not a conservation label. This looks like a price tag from a shop.’
The Curator passed the label to Tom, who turned it over, a frown puckering his brow. Although one side of the ticket was blank, the other was glossy, and a particular shade of blue that Tom recalled seeing from his trips along the North Circular back in London. On the blue, printed in thick, upper-case yellow letters, was the word IKEA. Beneath this were printed, in a different, later, but more specific process, the words MYSA MÅNE and then a price of some sort: 179,00 kr.
Whatever did it mean? Was it another clue? He wondered if the person who had left this tag here was the same person who had removed the spear and if that spear was the same spear that had had such an unfortunate impact upon Claire Morgan. Then he thought again. Any other conclusion would render all this meaningless.
‘Whoever killed Claire Morgan left this as a clue for us,’ he said. ‘We must find out what it means. Mr Curator, sir, have you a computer with access to the internet?’
The Curator scratched his head.
‘Internet?’ he said, as if he had never heard of such a thing.
‘Yes. You can get onto the internet and get any amount of crazy information you want and it allows you to make the most wonderfully swooping deductive leaps. It is a basic tool of the literary detective.’
‘Oh,’ said the Curator. ‘That. Yes. I have it in my office.’
Tom placed the spear very carefully back in the slot from which it had been taken, not for a second wondering whether it would fit or not, and the Curator locked the glass cabinet. Mma Ontoaste was fidgeting, but Sandi Rudisandi was busy taking notes as they trooped back along the path to the Curator’s office.
Once they had turned on the computer the Curator brought up Google and typed the words into the search field. There was an infinitesimal pause but finally, after 0.56 seconds, a long list of hits appeared on the screen.
‘A duvet?’
This was the last thing that any of them expected. MYSA MÅNE was the name of a duvet made from artificial fibres in a box construction. Whatever did it mean? Tom shook his head. A duvet? This looked like a dead end if ever there were one.
‘Whoever did this is playing with us,’ he said.
‘I wouldn’t pay 179 krona for a fucking duvet,’ mumbled Mma Ontoaste. Sandi Rudisandi flinched, but Tom Hurst stopped for a second, his mouth gaping. Then he turned to her with a smile of triumph on his face.
‘Ms Ontoaste! You are a genius!’
‘How so?’
‘Krona!’
‘Krona?’
‘Yes. Krona.’
And then:
‘Sweden!’
‘What about Sweden?’
‘That’s where we have to go next. To IKEA.’
Part III
The Hour of the Quilt
1
Rain
Rain.
A silent curtain of rain shutting off everything and everyone. Coming in from the Baltic. Always rain at this time of year before the winter came. Neighbour turned against neighbour, dog against cat. Could we ever truly get away from it? Could we ever truly be free? Winter would be worse though, he thought. Then there would be snow and darkness. After that the sun would shine and then there would be slush and chaos.
It was 8.30 in the morning and he was sitting in his car staring at the shuttered front of the dry-cleaner’s. They were closed again. His stained suit was roughly folded into a plastic bag on the seat next to him. He did not know what he should do. Then he looked at his coffee until it grew cold.
Why had he done it?
Why had he joined the police force in the first place? Did he even want to be a police officer any more? Every day was worse than the last. Every day things got worse. Every day as a police officer he saw terrible things. The police are a microcosm of society. He wondered how long it would be before he lost his fear of being with people.
The town of Ynstead on the southernmost tip of Sweden, overlooking the sea, was one of the few towns where the police actually outnumbered the population. Despite this and the lowest crime rate in Sweden, Colander would come to think of the days that followed as some of the most extraordinary in his long career as a policeman and, when he looked back upon them, he would wonder how he got through them without recourse to suicide.
He started the engine of the car. For a few moments he did not know whether to put the car in first gea
r or reverse. One action would mean the car went backwards, away from the grey wall in front of him, but the other action might mean the car went forward into the grey wall in front of him.
He arrived at the police station at 9.05. Toff Toffsson was on duty behind the desk in the reception area. If Toffsson was surprised to see the police officer from Ynstead, he did not show it. Colander went along the corridor to his office. He was sweating heavily. What is wrong with me now? he wondered. He removed his shirt and wiped his body with the curtains. Lemm Lemmingsson opened the door without knocking. The young policeman was surprised and embarrassed at seeing Inspector Colander naked from the waist up.
‘I am sorry if I have disturbed you, Inspector,’ he said. ‘You called a meeting today for 8.10 and it is 8.10 already.’
Inspector Colander looked at his watch and thought for a minute. He recalled calling the meeting, but he could not remember if he had called it yesterday or a hundred years ago. I have become a stranger to time, he thought, and he could remember nothing.
Outside it was raining.
Lemmingsson stood at the door waiting.
‘You had better come in,’ said Colander after a while, returning his body to the shirt.
Lemmingsson sat down on one of the chairs at the table. He had a cup of coffee with him.
‘Let us summarise what we know so far,’ said Colander.
‘To be honest, Inspector,’ replied the junior police officer. ‘I think we do not know very much at all.’
‘I have always found that a police officer usually knows more than he thinks he does,’ said Colander with a trace of annoyance.
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