The Artful Egg (12 page)

“Come,” said Mtunsi, “permit me to show you.…”

And he loped off towards a round mud hut set a little apart
from the rest of the school’s rudimentary buildings. Chickens squawked from Zondi’s path as he followed him, and a small child, hugging a broken slate, suddenly leaped up from a hollow in the long yellow grass and made its escape, too. The hut had an unusually large doorway, no door, and the far wall had an oversize window-space in it.

Mtunsi motioned Zondi to pass through the doorway ahead of him. To his left was a long trestle table, covered in crudely made pots; to his right were two forty-gallon oil-drums, filled almost to the brim with plastic bags of dark brown clay. There wasn’t much else in the room. Just a wooden crate with an old cushion on it, and several feet away, where the daylight was strongest, stood a very tall and strangely narrow stool on top of which rested a large lump wrapped in wet sacking.

Mtunsi took the end of this sacking and started to unwind it. Gradually a dark brown head was revealed, so strikingly lifelike that, for a moment, it seemed about to utter a few choice Zulu words in protest over the rather undignified way it was being handled.

“Hau, but I know that face.…” began Zondi, tantalised by an elusive quality that mocked his photographic memory.

“Of course, I must still put the curls of her hair on,” remarked Mtunsi, “once I’ve finished the—”

Zondi laughed softly. He’d just realised his mistake, and that, in effect, this was the
negative
in dark clay of the portrait he’d seen of novelist Naomi Stride in the magazine.

“So cold, like this,” murmured Mtunsi, touching his long fingers to her cheek.

“Yes, cold.…” said Zondi. “My brother, I think I have some bad news to tell you.”

Kramer came back up the spiral staircase with a cup of black coffee in each hand. Real coffee, not the instant stuff, and it smelled pretty horrible.

“What a sweetie you are,” said Tess Muldoon, sitting up eagerly in her bed and exposing the top half of her bare self with not so much as a blink. “Oops, you nearly got that on your trousers.”

He sat down where he had been massaging her foot, and handed over her coffee. She had firm, fairly flat breasts with nipples like pink icing.

“Oh, naturally I thought about it when I first heard,” she said, taking a sip. “Went utterly to pieces. I had to get Gareth over in the end, told him to bring a bottle of something large, and we held a sort of wake last night. Apparently, or so Gareth insists, I kept wanting to telephone the police and tell them I knew who’d done it. But as Naomi’d—”

“Not so fast, Tess, hey? What gave you the idea you—?”

“A feeling, mainly. Have I told you I spent the weekend before last at Woodhollow?”

“No, but go on.”

“Well,
part
of the weekend, anyway. Naomi had asked me to dinner on the Friday evening—an awful flop, poor darling—and she begged me to stay behind when the others were leaving. We thought those boring Carswells would never go, but finally the two of us had the place to ourselves, and we sat beside the swimming-pool and gossiped for absolutely ages. In fact it got so late that I flopped out on the couch in the sun-lounge, while Naomi was fetching more ice from the kitchen, and that’s where I woke up on Saturday morning, covered with a rug she’d found for me. She really was a—”

“Was it something you’d gossiped about that gave you this ‘feeling?’ ”

“No, no, I’m still coming to that. I woke late, right? My God, the time! So I decided to sneak through Naomi’s study and—well, that wasn’t very clever, was it? The post had just arrived, and she was going through it at her desk. I caught her gazing at a letter on cheap blue paper, the kind with lines ruled,
and it was a second or two before she realised I’d barged in. ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked—it just popped out. ‘Oh, just another crank letter,’ she said, as if it didn’t bother her one bit. But I could see she was badly shaken by something.”

“You got to see this letter?” asked Kramer, setting his coffee aside.

Tess Muldoon shook her head. “Naomi slipped it quickly into the middle drawer of her desk and locked it in there,” she said. “But, as she did so, I glimpsed something.”

“Let me guess—another blue envelope already in the desk?”

“
Two
others, my love.”

“Same size?”

“They looked identical.”

“How were they addressed?”

“Oh, it was all too fast for that. As I said, a glimpse and she shut the drawer again.”

“But.…” Kramer rose and went over to examine a Japanese fan on the wall. “OK, then tell me what happened next. How long did she stay looking ‘badly shaken,’ as you call it?”

“About three seconds—which you’d know, if you’d ever met Naomi. She hated to dump her problems on anyone else, said that sort of thing was so unfair. Next moment, she was chattering away, coming out with the most marvellously bitchy remarks about Erica Jong you’ve ever heard, and—”

“This Erica woman,” interrupted Kramer, “could she in fact be connected in some way with the blue letters? Was Naomi giving vent in a roundabout way?”

With a giggle, Tess Muldoon shook her head. “Erica Jong’s an American novelist,” she explained. “And the stamps on those envelopes were definitely not foreign ones.”

“Uh-huh, that narrows things down a bit. Was the handwriting on them big or small?”

“No idea. I thought I’d said—”

“Go on with what else Naomi Stride chattered about,”
prompted Kramer, turning from the Japanese fan and digging into his jacket pocket for his Lucky Strikes.

“You’re not going to smoke, are you? Because I was rather hoping.…”

“Oh ja?”

“That you’d give another bit of me a rub,” said Tess Muldoon, flinging the quilt completely aside and rolling over, stark naked. “It’s my gluteus maximus. I did something silly with it on Monday, and it’s been an absolute bastard ever since.”

G
ROWING DESPERATE IN
his attempts to come to some conclusion about the anonymous threat sent to Naomi Stride, Ramjut Pillay tried pacing his room. Unfortunately, it was not of a size conducive to undisturbed thought, as he had to keep stepping on and off the corner of his divan, and after ten minutes of this he was in a muck sweat and no closer to solving the paradox of the postmark.

“By golly,” he said to himself, flopping down for a rest, “a case, we think, for Sir Sherlock Holmes!”

This reminded him that somewhere, buried in among all sorts of useful little items he had picked up, he had a magnifying glass and a pipe with a big bend in it. The pipe was easily found, still tasting of the terrible trading-store tobacco he had briefly experimented with, and after only about another five minutes or so the magnifying glass came to hand.

Seated on his divan, puffing at the empty pipe and studying the hairs on the back of his left index finger, his spirits soon improved. He wondered what else he might look at, and picked up the plastic bag containing the cheap blue envelope in which the dreaded
Exhibit Five
had been mailed.

“Euripides!” cried out Ramjut Pillay, whose brush with Ancient Civilisations (Parts I and II) had taught him that the Greeks had a word for it. “How could we be so blind, dammit?”

For there, too faint for his spectacles, but distinct enough
under a magnifying glass, he could see four tiny numerals printed on the right-hand side of the postmark.

0730
.

All was explained in a twinkling.

The only time letter-boxes were cleared on a Saturday was at 11
A.M
. Anything posted at the weekend after that “cut-off” was not processed until 7:30
A.M
. on Monday morning, making it too late for delivery until Tuesday. The trouble was, however, many members of the public had the idea that noon was the deadline—as indeed, not too long ago, it had been—and kept posting things well after 11
A.M
. in the expectation that they would be included in Monday’s local delivery. Obviously, the anonymous writer of terrible threats had made this same all-too-common mistake, and his apparently contradictory behaviour was a mystery no longer. He’d simply
wrongly supposed
that Naomi Stride would read his letter before he murdered her.

Then Ramjut Pillay, instead of continuing to feel elated by the brilliance of his deduction, suddenly shuddered. “Oh, dear, dearie, dear,” he lamented, as he reeled under a full realisation of what all this signified.

Not only had he proved fairly conclusively that the letter
was
without doubt the work of Naomi Stride’s killer, but he’d also confirmed the fact that he was in illegal possession of vital evidence that the police would willingly give their right arm for.

Cold Comfort was now making much more sense as a name than it had done on Gagonk Mbopa’s way up to the farm. He was finding it very cold comfort indeed to be confronted by so many real men, and yet, because of the circumstances, to be frustrated by the namby-pamby way in which his interrogations had to be conducted.

“Well, what have you got for me so far?” asked Jones, coming out of the farmhouse and taking him to one side.

“So far nothing, sir,” replied Mbopa, very nearly allowing
the hint of an apology to creep into his voice. “These farm boys are not as other farm boys that I have ever come across.”

“Ja, they certainly seem a cheeky lot,” agreed Jones, coldly surveying the group of confident-looking, well-fed and decently clothed black men gathered outside the cowshed. “Mind you, this is a bloody weird set-up and no mistake. The suspect here has just been trying to explain it to me.”

Everyone
tried
to explain things to Lieutenant Jacob Jones, reflected Mbopa, and some tried so hard they very nearly succeeded. Maybe this time it would be worth saying, “Ermph, sir?”

“This place,” confided Jones, dropping his voice, “is what the farmer—I mean, suspect—calls a workers ‘korropativ,’ which must be a Russian word by the sound of it, although he denies this with a big laugh. What it means, apparently, is that the boys you see here do not get the usual bag of maize meal, some meat and a few rand for wages. Ach no, what they get instead—and I’m not bulling you—is a share in the farm’s profits.”

Mbopa gave a surprised and disbelieving hoot.

“Show more respect, you black monkey!” snapped Jones, glancing uneasily at the group outside the cowshed.

“Sir, do not misunderstand me. It is not sir’s statement that causes amusement. I am laughing at what fools these boys are.”

“In what way?”

“Thinking they get a true share of the profits, sir. How do they know the farmer doesn’t just pretend a much smaller number is the profit?”

“He claims he holds meetings with them where they talk about the farm’s finances, and every month a different boy gets a chance to look after the accounts.”

“Hau, hau, hau.…” said Mbopa, shooting his own glance at the men he had assembled. “Is sir going to give Security Branch a tip-off about this place?”

Jones turned to go back into the farmhouse. “Too right,
man. You can never tell where something like this could lead to—if it hasn’t done so already.”

A happy smile came to Mbopa’s lips. He noticed that it had an immediate effect on the farmworkers which he didn’t altogether understand. But he knew enough to keep the smile going, and saw the general nervousness increase as he returned to his interrogating.

At nine-forty Warrant Officer Jaap du Preez turned up at Colonel Muller’s office, bringing with him the results of routine enquiries made in and around Jan Smuts Close.

“Nothing, Colonel,” he said.

“Nothing?”

Du Preeze ran a hand over his ginger crewcut and grimaced, reminding Colonel Muller of some remark of Kramer’s about an orangutan. “Absolutely not a thing, sir,” he confirmed, “although, God knows, we’ve tried hard enough. Nobody in Jan Smuts Close has any memory of a vehicle travelling up or down the road at or about one o’clock on the night in question. Nobody around there has any idea of who may have felt sufficiently strongly about Naomi Stride to want to murder her. The neighbours aren’t the sort of folk she associated with.”

“But Jan Smuts Close can’t have much late-night traffic, man! Surely somebody must’ve—”

“Not a soul, Colonel. Not even Mr. Parry Evans, who says he’s an insomniac. Mind you, he also added he was in a bedroom at the back of his place, listening to music on some headphones.”

“Terrific,” sighed Colonel Muller, slumping back in his chair. “What about the search of the house—y’know, Woodhollow? Has that been completed?”

“Nothing, sir. Or, at least, nothing that looks suspicious in itself.”

“You’ve been through all her correspondence?”

“The three detective constables you sent out are still working
on it, sir,” said du Preez, standing there and scratching his right knee without having to reach for it. “There’s not been anything ‘sinister,’ as you might say, for the last year anyway.”

“No sign of the murder weapon, either?”

“None, Colonel. The grounds are now being searched for the second time.”

Colonel Muller grunted and started to dig about in his new briar pipe. “You’ve sent someone to fetch the deceased’s servants back?”

“Hopeful Dumela, sir—he volunteered.”

“Dumela? Oh ja, a good man, his pa. How’s Hopeful turning out?”

“For a coon, first class, sir.”

“And when do you expect—?”

“His instructions are to be back by nightfall, sir.”

“Then we have that to look forward to,” Colonel Muller remarked gloomily. “Not that I can see what they’re going to contribute. Don’t ask me why, Jaap, but I’ve got a feeling we’re really up against it this time.”

“Give us a ride!” begged the children of Tebeli Mission School, tugging at Zondi’s coat tails. “Just a short ride, Mr. Big Town Detective, down to the mimosa-trees and back.”

“You’ve made an impression,” said Kwakona Mtunsi, the great sadness leaving his face momentarily.

“Huh, I have you to blame for that!” grumbled Zondi, winking his offside eye. “Many thanks for inviting me to drink tea with you.”