The Artful Egg (22 page)

“OK, Lieutenant.”

Tims Shabalala shambled in, flicking with his short rhino-hide whip at the almost bare buttocks of two terrified urchins who were handcuffed together and carrying several bundles.

“Look,” said Mbopa in Afrikaans, so he wouldn’t be understood by them, “I don’t want a lot of screaming and wailing
going on in here today, Shabalala—not while I have important things to hear on the telephone.”

“So you hope, Gagonk! Let me tell you now, that coolie is far, far away, and the Colonel will be transferring you and the jackal to fight SWAPO in Namibia tomorrow!”

“Huh! That will be Zondi and Spokes! Just you wait, me and Jones—”

Shabalala laughed rudely, and said in Zulu to his prisoners: “Come on, you whore’s whelps! Empty out those bundles so I can see properly what you’ve got.” Then switching back to Afrikaans, he added: “Relax, Great Elephant, these two have already confessed as I caught them red-handed. And, if I wanted to know more, just one crust of bread would make them say anything; they are so hungry their breath gives a terrible stink. Can you smell it?”

The phone rang and Mbopa snatched it up.

“Gagonk,” said Colonel Muller, “why are there no roses on that new rose-bush you bought me?”

“Colonel?”

“I’ve just taken a look from the balcony, and no roses can I see.”

“But that is right. Colonel. The boss by the garden shop tells me that you must plant it first and wait. They are never sold with flowers already growing, the boss says.”

“Rubbish, man! That was the whole idea of a new rose-bush, so I could have something nice to start my day with. Where did you buy the thing?”

Mbopa found the receipt, which he was keeping to use when making that sly bastard Zondi pay his half-share, and read out the firm’s name, address and telephone number.

“Someone is about to get a call from me,” said Colonel Muller in a voice that made Mbopa want to duck. “God in Heaven, anyone would think I hadn’t enough on my plate today!” And he slammed his receiver down.

“Hay-bah-bor.…” said Mbopa, very relieved that was over.

“Ramjut Pillay?” said Shabalala.

“No, it wasn’t about that; it was the Colonel. He—”

“Isn’t Ramjut Pillay the name of your coolie postman?” interrupted Shabalala, hefting a tattered paperback in one hand.

“Why? What’s this about?”

“It’s the name written inside this book,” said Shabalala, “above an address in Gladstoneville.”

The two urchins shrank back as Mbopa lunged across the room and made a grab. “Where did you get this from?” he shouted.

“It was in this big bag with a plastic raincoat,” said Shabalala, grinning.

“That we not steal!” piped up one of the urchins, who looked about nine and the older of the pair. “True’s God that we find just lying—no person was near it.”

Shabalala brought his whip down across the shoulders of the other urchin, who shrieked, burst into tears, and sobbed: “True’s God, true’s God! We never steal the big bag! It was left just lying!”

“Lend me the whip,” demanded Mbopa. “Come on, quick, Shabalala!”

“There is no need; I believe them—the other one has wet himself now. Why not ask where the bag was found, Murder Squad detective, or must a humble Housebreaking sergeant do all your work for you?”

Mbopa scowled but managed to restrain himself and put the question.

“L-l-last night.…” said one urchin.

“After buses st-stop,” his companion blurted out.

“I asked
where
, not when, you street rats! Answer, or I’ll—”

“By station!”

“Park by station!”

“Railway Street?”

They nodded.

“S
O THERE YOU
are, you bastard,” grunted Kramer, finally running Piet Baksteen to ground in the State mortuary. “This is the third place I’ve had to look.”

“Third time lucky!” said Baksteen, who stood alone in Van Rensburg’s small office with the smell of brandy on his breath.

Kramer grinned. Trust Baksteen to have discovered the secret of the locked desk drawer, the key to which Van Rensburg wore around his neck on a greasy length of string. Trust Van Rensburg, come to that, not to have realised that the lock on that drawer was easier to pick than a camel’s nose.

“So what’s brought you down here, Baksteen, besides the free booze?”

“The Mad Doctor—another of his strange enthusiasms.”

“Strydom? Ach, not more of those snails again?”

“To be fair, properly prepared, the extract can help distinguish between white blood and black blood, but he—”

“Should leave that kind of thing to the experts?”

Being something of an expert himself in the field of biochemical analysis, Baksteen shrugged kindly, as people so often did when Christiaan Strydom, MD, was the topic of conversation. “Actually, this time the idea’s his own and it might even prove a help to us in the lab. Without getting too technical, and trying not to bore you, the hypothesis is—”

“Hold it, Piet, you’re over my head already,” said Kramer,
producing the cigarette-packet in which he’d placed his forensic samples from 146 Acacia Drive. “And, anyway, I’d be more interested in what you can find out for me about this stuff.”

“Er, can we …?” Baksteen gave his little black beard a tug, as he glanced uneasily out of the windows surrounding Van Rensburg’s office. “I’d rather move to somewhere else in case—”

“Oh, so Van is around? I thought he must be away on a removal.”

“No, he’s out at the back, accusing Nxumalo of keeping meat in the fridge,” said Baksteen, making for the postmortem room.

Kramer followed his lanky figure through, and then produced the piece of toilet paper on which gleamed, despite the paper’s absorbent qualities, some of the substance he’d found on the shower curtain.

“What’s that? Jesus, it can’t be semen!”

“Well, that’s a relief,” said Kramer. “But don’t you buggers in the lab ever think of anything except—?”

Baksteen had taken the sample from him and was sniffing it. “No good. Too great a mixture of other smells in here,” he said. “I think we’d best go outside ourselves.”

They were just in time to see Van Rensburg turn his back on a very solemn-looking Bantu constable who broke into a broad grin a second later.

“That bloody Nxumalo,” complained the mortuary sergeant, coming stumping up, “that’s the second time in two weeks I’ve found goat hairs on a fridge tray.”

“Sure it
is
goat hairs?” asked Baksteen.

“As sure as a man can be, Mr. Baksteen, but naturally he denies it.”

“Then, let me have some, and I’ll get it analysed.”

“You will? You’ll do that for me?”

“Anything to help a colleague, Sergeant.”

Van Rensburg beamed, and then said, very pointedly, with
a sideways look at Kramer: “You, Mr. Baksteen, sir, are what I call a real white man, a
proper gentleman
.”

“Think nothing of it, hey? Now, let’s take another sniff at this and see if the smell can give us our first clue.”

“Can I join in, too, Mr. Baksteen?” smarmed Van Rensburg. “I’ve always been really good at smells.”

“Ja, I’d noticed,” said Kramer.

“I’ve got it in one, Mr. Baksteen! That’s DH-136, sir.”

“DH-136, Van? All I can pick up is a pine scent.”

“Ja, but a DH-136 pine scent,” insisted Van Rensburg. “Sort of like a detergent only it’s also a disinfectant, cleans like magic. You must have noticed it in the
P.M
. room.”

Baksteen looked at Kramer and then back at Van Rensburg. “Well, thanks for the suggestion, not that there aren’t dozens of detergents on the market, all smelling of pine. On top of which, it may not even be a—”

“It’s not just the pine, Mr. Baksteen—ach, I can’t explain. I tell you what, though, let me show you.…” And off he went into the mortuary, returning only moments later, huffing and puffing, with a very large white plastic container. “OK, now take a sniff of this stuff as well, and you’ll see it’s identical.”

“I’m off,” said Kramer, who simply hadn’t the patience. “I’ll be phoning the lab at four for a result, hey?”

“But, Tromp, with all the possibilities there are, that’s asking for a—”

“Then stop arsing about with Balls-ache the Bloodhound and get on with it, man.”

Somewhere, Zondi felt sure, he had a scrap of paper that the Lieutenant had given him, bearing a telephone number at which Theo Kennedy could be contacted. He wished he’d taken the trouble to glance at it, imprinting it on his memory, because he wanted Naomi Stride’s servants off his hands and quickly. This
whole stupid exercise of bringing them out to Woodhollow had proved, as he’d half-expected, a complete waste of time, and there were other things he could be doing. Like, for instance, finding out exactly what all the fuss was about Ramjut Pillay, the Indian postman, of which he’d heard rumours while picking up his police car this morning. He was certain his judgement of the man could not have been so wide of the mark that he’d overlooked a devious criminal brain beneath that childishly innocent exterior.

“Ah!” said Zondi, and took off his hat.

The scrap of paper was tucked behind the leather band inside it, and within seconds he had dialled the number and could hear the ringing tone.

“Hello, Vicki Stilgoe, here.”

“Good morning, madam, it is Detective Sergeant Zondi speaking, Murder and Robbery Squad. I have a message I must give to Boss Kennedy.”

“Oh, yes?”

“Madam can kindly pass on the message?”

“Madam can do better than that.…” There was the clunk of the receiver being dropped onto a hard surface, and then, faintly: “Theo, my sweet? It’s the police; some boy with something to say to you. Come on, Mandy, off Uncle Theo’s lap!”

“Hello, can I help you?”

Zondi again identified himself, and then explained that the dead woman’s servants had been brought back to Woodhollow.

“The problem is, sir, now we have finished with them, they ask what they must do. Is the boss’s wish that they stay working for him, or are their jobs at Woodhollow finished? They are very worried, sir, and—”

“Oh God, poor old Betty and Ben! And I suppose Harry the gardener is there, too?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Look, I’d best come over right away and see what I can do
to put their minds at rest. I’d not given any of this a moment’s thought, to be honest! See you in two ticks, Sergeant.”

An unusual man, thought Zondi, as he replaced the receiver in Naomi Stride’s studio, who talked to you just as though you were another human being. Perhaps the Lieutenant’s own judgement hadn’t been at fault, either, when he’d dismissed the idea of his being a suspect.

“Detective?” said Harry Kani, appearing at the window.

“You have found something?”

“I have
thought
something, Detective. Will you allow me to show you?”

“Right,” said Jones, drawing up beside the Railway Street public park and clipping the kerb, “which bench did they say they’d found Pillay’s bag under?”

“This one by the drinking-tap, Lieutenant,” replied Mbopa, pointing to it proudly. “Marked ‘Non-whites Only.’ ”

“I can read, hey? And I don’t know why you keep on sounding so bloody pleased with yourself; it’s not as if you did anything special by asking Shabalala if you could look through the stuff those piccanins brought in with them. I had already organised a check on both lost and stolen property—so this bag would have turned up, whatever happened.”

Mbopa frowned, quite sure there was a flaw in that argument somewhere. “Ermph,” he muttered.

“So the bag,” said Jones, “must have been deposited here some time between Pillay leaving home in Gladstoneville and eleven o’clock, when the buses stop running. The first question we ask ourselves is, why?”

“Because he dropped it, Lieutenant?” suggested Mbopa.

“Quiet while I’m thinking.…”

Mbopa noticed a stealthy movement, over by the old Victorian bandstand in the middle of the small, triangular park with its threadbare lawn. Little by little, like a blood-red sun rising
above the stage of the bandstand, the face of a huge white drunk appeared, and peered at the police car warily.

“I can’t see him just dropping the bag and not noticing,” murmured Jones. “Therefore it stands to reason he must’ve dumped it, wanting to get rid of two things that would help identify him: the book and the raincoat.”

The drunk was scratching the side of his nose with a hand bandaged in a filthy handkerchief.

“Don’t just sit there!” snapped Jones, jabbing Mbopa in the ribs with his elbow. “Take some interest, for Christ’s sake! Tell me, for example, how anyone could be stupid enough to dump incriminating property in full view of everybody.”

“Maybe, sir,” said Mbopa, nodding towards a litter-bin just behind the bench, “Pillay hid his bag in there, hoping the street cleaners would throw it away, but a drunk went looking into it, didn’t like the contents, and just left it lying under where he’d been sitting.”

“Possibly,” said Jones. “Next question, why did he choose this park to dump his stuff in?”

“Maybe, sir,” said Mbopa, “he did not want to be found with incriminating matter on a train. At the last minute, his idea was to leave it behind in Trekkersburg.”

“A train? But the Railway Police have already checked their Occurrence Book for yesterday, and they swear that nobody answering Pillay’s description—”

“With respect, Lieutenant, the Occurrence Book tells you only of arrests and other police matters. Why, if he had the money to travel, would they ever notice one coolie among so many?”

“But the ticket-seller for non-whites doesn’t remember his description, either, and I’m talking about the bloke who was on duty two-to-ten yesterday.”

“Well, then.…” Mbopa shrugged. “It is all a big mystery, Lieutenant.”

Jones opened his car door. “I’m going to go and see that Occurrence Book for myself. You stroll around the park, talk to people, try to find out whether anyone here saw Pillay yesterday.”

Mbopa followed him out reluctantly. Strolling around parks, talking to people, had never been something he was terribly good at; most people took one look at his approaching figure and left before he could get a word out. In a less namby-pamby world, a couple of rounds from his Walther PPK would easily overcome this problem of course, but such were the crosses a real man learned to bear.