The Artful Egg (21 page)

“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 till 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.

But, first, Kramer went to inspect the small bedroom at the back. It was tidy enough to be a cabin on a spaceship. Apart from a few selected items on the desk beneath the window—a globe of the world, a gadget from which five metal balls dangled on thin wires, a quartz alarm clock—everything else seemed to have been tucked away, out of sight, in sleek storage units arranged against its walls. Even the bed, which was more of a bunk really, formed part of one of these units, and had a panel of buttons beside it that apparently worked everything from the lights to a hidden music-centre somewhere. Drawer after drawer slipped soundlessly out to reveal its tidy contents; none of those containing clothing showed any sign of having been rummaged through in a hurry, neither was it obvious that much, if anything, could be missing. Reaching up to the last of the cupboard space, and sliding back the matt-textured pale-blue doors, Kramer found, as he’d half-expected, row upon row of science fiction novels, mostly in paperback. Interesting, the contrast between the father and his son, who appeared to have opted out by escaping to other worlds altogether.

Then Kramer saw the message, scrawled with a blue felt-marker on the full-length mirror fixed to the back of the bedroom door.

With that little mystery solved, Kramer made sure that Zuidmeyer hadn’t come back into the house, and then returned to the bathroom.

*   *   *

Woodhollow was deserted except for two Bantu constables, posted to guard the property, when Zondi drove up to the front steps and got out. It was a dull, overcast morning, the sky heavy with rain clouds, and the flowers in the carefully tended garden had lost their vivid brightness.

“Come on,” he said to Naomi Stride’s three servants, “you get out of the car, too; there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“Hau, but the spirits are bad in this place!” wailed Betty Duboza, the maid, cowering in her corner of the Ford.

She had been working herself up to this, all the way from the vehicle-yard, and her husband, Ben Duboza, the cook, had been almost as tiresome. For a couple in their fifties, who affected sophisticated white manners and even spoke English with an almost white accent, it was surprising they felt no shame in behaving like a pair of raw peasants straight from the bush.

“I said ‘come on,’ ” repeated Zondi. “Your duty to your employer is not yet over. If you can help us find out who killed her, then—”

“I will come,” said Harry Kani, the stocky gardener, opening the front passenger-door. “I am a Presbyterian, which protects me from ignorant superstitions.”

“And I, an Anglican!” retorted Ben Duboza.

“Good,” said Zondi, “so you’re coming also?”

The cook almost opened his door, then shook his head.

“Harry, what do you know of inside the house?” Zondi asked the gardener.

“I know only the kitchen, Detective—it is not my place to go in any other room. I know the kitchen, because it is from there I fetch my food.”

“But have you never peeped into other rooms from the outside? Eavesdropped on what is being said?”

“Who, me, Detective? Harry Kani is a most trustworthy and—”

“Listen, I was once a garden boy, and a house boy, too,”
said Zondi, “so don’t pretend more than I can believe—is that understood?”

The gardener grinned and popped his knuckles.

After careful examination, it seemed beyond a doubt that the shower nozzle in the Zuidmeyer bathroom had not been tampered with. If any attempt had been made to unscrew it from the pipe delivering the mixture of hot and cold water, then this would have cracked the three or four coats of white enamel paint covering the join. But quite plainly this paint was intact—and had been for some very considerable time.

So how else could someone have filled the inside of the nozzle with, say, a viscous, slippery substance?

He could have injected it, using a hypodermic syringe, thought Kramer. But, again upon examination, this theory collapsed: all the holes in the nozzle were far too small to admit even the finest needle.

That “getting warm” feeling stayed, though. Something
had
to have been introduced to the shower to make Mrs. Zuidmeyer take such a tumble—unless, of course, freak accidents happened a lot more often than the laws of chance allowed for.

Getting down on his hands and knees, Kramer peered at the shallow porcelain base to the shower, and felt its surface with his fingertips. It was no more slippery than the bottom of the bath had been, back at the house where he rented a room. Then he felt along the edge of the porcelain base. Behind the plastic curtain on the far side, over to the right where one end of it hung anchored from a cleat in the rail above, his fingertips skidded slightly. He withdrew his hand and rubbed thumb against forefinger, sensing between them a very slippery substance indeed. It appeared colourless, but had a faint scent of pine.

Next, he took off his shoes and then stepped into the empty bath, hoping to be able to see behind this piece of curtain without having to touch it. But it was too close to
the yellow-tiled outer wall, and he had to lift it slightly away. There, on the outer surface of the shower curtain, was a shiny streak that smelled and looked exactly the same. It occurred about a metre from the floor. There was a second streak of the stuff at about his chest level, but nothing higher than that.

“Oh ja, very clever.…” he muttered. “Just how did it get there? In that narrow gap against the wall and window?”

He went up on tiptoe and took a look at the sill of the window’s fanlight, which was slightly ajar to keep the bathroom aired. There, on the sill, was another small drop of the stuff.

Had someone stood outside and squirted it through the gap? No, that would have meant it making a mark all the way down the outside of the shower curtain. On top of which, this method would hardly have ensured that sufficient amounts of the fluid reached the floor of the shower unit; for that, one would have to have something to duct it there directly.

In the next instant, Kramer saw exactly what must have happened. Someone had run a small-diameter plastic tube through the gap under the window, down the wall behind the shower curtain, and then into the porcelain base. He had waited until Mrs. Zuidmeyer had stepped under the shower, and then he’d injected his slippery fluid through the tube. Once this fluid had done its work, he’d then withdrawn the tube, and on the way out it’d dripped twice on the shower curtain and once on the window-sill.

Rubbish! he thought. Mere fantasy.

But the idea stuck. It fitted all the observable facts. It made sense. It just had to be right.

Refinements then began occurring to him, such as the notion that a clear plastic tube had been used, making it even less likely to have been noticed. Now, where had he seen plastic tubing like that? Didn’t garages sometimes use it for fuel-lines? Near the carburettor, so one could see whether petrol was being delivered?

His immediate reaction was to want to go straight round and take a look at what Zuidmeyer had in the way of spares in his workshop. He paused, however, and made himself assess the situation more carefully, before deciding to do two other things instead. First, using the corner of a piece of toilet paper, he soaked up a minute sample of the shiny substance from the shower curtain, and stowed it away for forensic examination. Second, he stole out of the back of the house, using the kitchen door, and inspected the area immediately beneath the bathroom window.

It was a flowerbed, about almost a metre wide, planted with daisies. Being as wide as that meant that, if his theory were correct, then the person with the plastic tube would almost certainly have had to step on to the flowerbed at some stage in the process. But the surface of the flowerbed, made up largely of small dry clods of earth, appeared undisturbed.

Kramer crouched down and began lifting the top layer of clods away. He did not discover a layer beneath them that had been trodden on and then covered again, but he did find a curious damp patch on one of the clods he set aside. A patch that smelled faintly of pine.

Why, of course, he thought, the tube must have been placed in position from
inside
the bathroom, leaving one end dangling within easy reach of the edge of the lawn outside; hence no footprints on the flowerbed.

Then he twisted round and checked to see how exposed a position this was. The property backed onto a large timber-yard, which had a corrugated-iron fence higher than a man. To the left, the kitchen extension blocked the view of those neighbours. To the right, no neighbours could see through, either, because of a trelliswork screen densely covered in a granadilla vine. Or, in short, someone squatting there would be invisible from all directions, including the bathroom, which was fitted with a rather high, frosted-glass window.

*   *   *

To Gagonk Mbopa’s extreme annoyance, the second chapter of
The Last Magnolia
contained no further mention of the two adulterers who’d so enlivened Chapter One, but was taken up instead by an endless description of a half-witted Zulu whose ludicrous ambition it was to become a Member of Parliament. Not only did this idiot keep brooding over his job as a garden boy, his Bachelor of Arts degree, and the dead flowers he had to sweep up from under a magnolia tree, but he also seemed to have absolutely no sex life at all, apart from a strange admiration for female prime ministers.

So he decided against starting Chapter Three, flung
The Last Magnolia
into this desk drawer, and took himself out into the courtyard. The prisoner on loan from the jail was busy digging a hole for the new rose-bush, which lay wrapped in a huge sheet of brown paper beside it. Mbopa was just about to go over and check on his progress when the telephone rang, making him hurry back into the Bantu detective sergeants’ office.

“Any sightings yet?” asked Jones.

“No, Lieutenant, everything’s dead quiet. Just one call from the Municipal Police, asking if we’d made the arrest last night in case they wasted their time today keeping a watch for—”

“All right, all right, I’ve got the picture! I’m still here at the bus station, double-checking, but I’ll be back to pick you up in about twenty minutes for another look around Gladstoneville. By then the duty officer will have got someone organised to take over the phone again from you—OK?”