The Artful Egg (26 page)

“You found it embarrassing, too?” Zondi asked Ben Duboza.

“Hau, I never saw this little missus, Sergeant. Remember, I am working as chef boy in the kitchen.”

“No, it was just me and madam,” continued Betty Duboza, settling back in a velvet-covered chair that went with her extraordinarily well-furnished room. “We could not believe our ears, either, at some of the things she said. It was never ‘Excuse me,’ but ‘Hey?,’ and she kept on coming out with ‘Ach’ at the start of almost every sentence. We could see that Theo was trying not to be embarrassed as well, being so infatuated with this strange creature, but as the evening progressed even his smile was wearing thin. What puzzled us most, of course, was what he could
see
in her, for her figure was dreadful and her features were worse than plain. In the end, it just had to be her talent as a window-dresser he was exploiting, while clearly, in her own way, she was exploiting him. We noticed
that, halfway through dessert, she began watching Theo and had learned to use her fork as well as her spoon by the time dinner ended. It simply wasn’t
on
, we decided, and the sooner it ended, the better. Oh, yes, even for the girl, for he would eventually see her with the same clear vision, once his infatuation had passed, and she would find herself rejected. Would you care for another drop in that?”

Zondi, bemused, was a second or two late with his response. “No, no, thank you, Mrs. Duboza,” he said. “And Miss Muldoon? You said you know her as well.”

“Sweet little Tess—a bit batty at times, but so refreshing,” Betty Duboza confirmed with a quick half-nod. “Another drop for you, Ben?”

Not once, during the long interrogation last night, had the woman given that quick half-nod, realised Zondi. A very distinctive nod, expressing the personality of someone terribly sure of herself, caught up in her thoughts, not unaware of how brusque it might seem to others. A nod which must once have belonged, not to Betty Duboza, but to someone else.

“Now, where was I?” she asked, setting down her teapot again.

“Wife, speak Zulu,” muttered Ben Duboza, who had started to look very ill at ease. “There is no need all of a sudden for English, and hasn’t Sergeant Zondi always done us the courtesy of addressing us in our own tongue?”

“Tess,” his wife continued in English, “was appalled when she heard how Theo was selling his soul in all directions. We had her round here the very next day, and the madam spoke to her for hours about the problem. But, of course, without being seen to be interfering, there wasn’t much anybody could do. Tess said she thought it’d sort itself out soon enough, and thankfully it did. The girl proved to be an utter hysteric, started accusing poor Theo of all sorts of shady things, and … Well, my dear, they parted and it was over, thank God. The
last time Tess stayed here for the night, we could even have a little laugh about it.”

“
You
did not have a ‘little laugh about it,’ ” said Ben Duboza, putting his tea aside on the floor, which earned him an immediate scowl. “All you did was take the two madams out their coffee after dinner beside the swimming-pool.”

“I laughed when I came back to the kitchen—not so?”

“I don’t remember,” he grunted.

“Well, I did.” She gave that quick half-nod again, and crossed her thick ankles in a way which only a woman with trim ankles would think of doing. “I do hope I have been of some use to you, my dear. There’s nothing else I can think of, not at this moment.”

“Many thanks,” said Zondi, rising and placing his teacup on her tray.

The cook politely walked him as far as the hibiscus, where Ben Duboza shook his head again and murmured in Zulu: “Bad, bad spirits.…”

“Cheer up, my friend!” Zondi replied, also in Zulu. “At least Boss Kennedy has promised you that you still have your job, and soon he will be here at Woodhollow to change the way things feel.”

“Huh! All that didn’t seem so bad while she was still alive, but now! You do realise who you’ve just been speaking with, Sergeant?”

“Of course,” said Zondi. “The dead.”

T
HE UNIVERSITY BUILDINGS
were a mess and a muddle, scattered all over a slope above Trekkersburg in among far too many trees. No wonder the local paper continued to report disappointing results for first-year students, thought Kramer; it probably took the poor little buggers their first six months to find their classrooms.

So he didn’t even attempt to search for the English Department, but went directly to the old main building, with its clock tower and dome, and sat outside it until he recognised a face from the mug shots of minor dissidents kept by Security. All he had to do then was slightly raise one finger, and after a glance at the aerial at the back of the car the student almost dropped his books and hurried over.

“Full Marx,” said Kramer, enjoying his private pun. “Where do I find a bloke who calls himself Doc Wilson?”

“Deputy Head of English?”

“The same. You can take us to him?”

“But you must be.…”

“Ja, police—so don’t try to run away, hey?”

Looking like someone who wishes he could turn his collar up so friends won’t recognise him, but having been foolish enough to come out in just a T-shirt and jeans that morning, the student slunk along as fast as he could, which suited Kramer perfectly. He had by now begun to develop Piet Baksteen’s
distrust of a simple solution, and wanted to eliminate the University from his enquiries as soon as possible.

The student led the way into a modern building that was more glass than concrete, and then into a passage with a long grey carpet and numbered doors on the right. He pointed to the third door down and stopped.

“He should be in there,” he said, very pale.

“Fine,” said Kramer. “Oh, and if you hear any screams, it’ll only be this thing.”

One glance at the brown-paper parcel being wielded in Kramer’s left hand was enough. Off went the student, even paler, and after a quick rap-rap on the door marked
DR. W.B. WILSON
, Kramer walked in with a smile. The gullibility of students, and of dissidents in particular, never failed to delight him.

The room, in one sense, was empty. In another, it was doubtful whether anyone could have packed into it more shelves of books, more piles of papers, or more cigar-ends into its ashtrays, which were perched everywhere. For decoration, it had an oil painting of a nude woman coloured purple—her head was so badly drawn it didn’t help to distinguish her race, either, which made it difficult to decide whether Wilson’s admiration for her was entirely legitimate—and a human skull, minus its lower jawbone, on a corner of the cluttered desk. Beyond this desk, which had a chair that looked more like a wooden throne, the wall was almost all a sliding window.

Weaving his way through an untidy arrangement of low chairs, Kramer went to the window and looked out. A pasty-faced man of about forty, with long greying hair swept back over his ears, old-fashioned granny glasses, and a cigar jutting from a thin, curvy mouth, was basking in a deck chair with a book balanced upright on his fancy waistcoat.

“Doctor Wilson, sir? Lieutenant Kramer, the CID officer who phoned you earlier on.”

“Wot? Ah! Whoops!” said the Deputy Head of English, struggling to get up.

“Stay where you are, if you like, sir, and I’ll come out.”

“ ‘Not so, my lord; I am too much in the sun.…’ ”

“Whatever suits you best, sir,” said Kramer, puzzled to know why Wilson was looking at him as if he expected him to clap or something.

“Act I, scene i,” said Wilson. “I tend to become besotted.”

“Ja, it’s often best to wear a hat,” said Kramer, backing into the office. “Mind you, today started out overcast.”

“Um, take a pew,” said Wilson.

Kramer couldn’t see one. So while Wilson settled down on his throne he took the skull off the corner of the desk and sat there, as was his habit in Colonel Muller’s office.

“ ‘Alas, poor Yorick,’ ” said Wilson, pointing to the skull.

“Must’ve been quite an exam,” agreed Kramer, who could also make up bullshit when the occasion demanded. “And the Yorick family don’t mind you keeping it?”

Wilson threw back his head and made a sound like a donkey being castrated. “Excellent!” he said. “Superb! Must remember that!”

Kramer put the skull aside and drew the sword from its brown-paper wrapping. “What I’d really like you to try to remember, sir,” he said, “is whether you have ever seen this weapon before? Would you like to hold it?” And he handed it over, hilt first.

“ ‘I know a hawk from a handsaw.…’ ”

“You do, sir?” said Kramer.

But there was no way he could make himself sound impressed. Wilson would be bragging next that he knew his arse from his elbow. Bouncing about on that throne, he was, just like a big kid, saying weird things with that show-off look in his self-absorbed little eyes, expecting grownups to tell him how clever he was.

“Good God,” said Wilson quietly. “Where did you get this?”

“Why, sir?”

“It’s Laertes’.”

“He’s what? A student here?”

Wilson looked up. “It’s a sword we used in our recent production of
Hamlet
,” he said. “These are the glass beads my wife found for it in her mother’s trinket-box. I’d no idea it’d gone missing, none at all. This could be rather serious.”

“Oh, it is, sir,” said Kramer, pleased the man had at last decided to act his age.

“You didn’t say on the telephone where you’d found it.”

In the circumstances, what with it being the English Department, Kramer decided to allow himself a little poetic licence. “Ach, we found it sticking in the side of Naomi Stride, sir.”

“Naomi Stride!” Wilson almost dropped the thing, before going several shades lighter and gulping. Then he held the sword away from him, gazed at it, and said very softly: “ ‘I will speak daggers to her, but use none.…’ ”

“Then you didn’t like the lady?” asked Kramer.

“Actually, that was more
Hamlet
, I’m afraid. You’re familiar with the play? Know what
Hamlet
is about?”

“At a guess, it must be about a village, sir. Aren’t hamlets—?”

“A
village
, did you say? How original! Life seen as a macrocosm?”

Kramer just looked at him, quite sure they were both speaking English, and in a place that was actually
designed
for English, and yet once again he had the bewildering feeling that neither of them was really communicating. Something had, however, struck home when he’d suggested that Wilson had disliked Naomi Stride, so he decided to try a variation on that theme. And if he stuck to inviting “yes” or “no” answers not much could go wrong.

“You knew Naomi Stride, sir?”

“Yes and no.”

“Sir,” said Kramer with a sigh, taking the sword back, “please explain.”

“Yes, I did know Naomi Stride the writer, just as I know Jane Austen, from having read and studied her books. But no, I didn’t know—what was her married name?”

“Kennedy.”

“Mrs. Kennedy, the person, as it were, I never knew, apart from seeing her across the room at a few functions, and having appeared on the same platform as her on one occasion.”

“And why was this, sir? Wasn’t she a world-famous writer, living, as it were, right on your doorstep? Wouldn’t it be in your interests to know her and, instead of maybe just theorising, get to hear first-hand how she sucked her books out of her thumb?”

Wilson smiled slightly, then hunted for his matches to relight his cigar. “Setting aside for the moment the academic point you have raised, which clearly invites one to define what one means by literary criticism, and could well—”

“Sir, could we set that part of it aside for good?” asked Kramer.

“If you like,” said Wilson, dispersing the smokescreen around him with a flap of his hand. “Your question was, why didn’t I want to know the woman. The answer is, Lieutenant,
she
didn’t want to know
me
. I’m afraid that some of my criticism, directed at her more recent work in particular, did not go down frightfully well.”

“You pissed her off, you mean? Why, what was it about her recent writing you didn’t like?”

“ ‘The lady doth protest too much, me thinks.…’ ”

“Ja, and the Security Branch would agree with you, but—”

“No, no, it’s this streak
of feminism
that’s come creeping into things, accentuating an already rather humourless—”

“Sir,” said Kramer, “this sword. That’s what I really came about. Any idea why it isn’t still where you expected it to be?”

Wilson stood up. “Let’s go over and start some enquiries,” he said.

At last, thought Kramer, someone who speaks my language.

Zondi returned to CID headquarters, feeling very much at a loose end. He had definitely collected some useful information during his brief visit to the Dubozas, but he hadn’t any idea what to do with it, other than to store it in his memory until the Lieutenant showed up.

So he wandered into the Bantu detective sergeant’s office to ask Tims Shabalala for further gratifying details of Gagonk and Jones’s accident. Tims wasn’t there, but Wilfred Mkosi was, strumming on his guitar.

“And there was Good Dog Gagonk on his knees, his faithful snout in his master’s lap,” sang Mkosi. “Neither one, alas, was dead, but when the traffic cop came along his face went red! Oh, what were they doing? What were they doing?”

Zondi clamped a hand over the guitar strings. “Exactly, what
were
they doing?” he asked. “What is this nonsense I’ve heard about them thinking the man Ramjut Pillay is a major suspect?”

Mkosi put his guitar down and began to roll a cigarette. “I have not seen Gagonk today, Mickey, so I cannot give you an up-to-date. I just know they have been rushing around, looking for him everywhere.”

“But why?”

“Yesterday, the postman ran away from home, after spending all night engaged in mysterious activities in his bedroom. He took all his money and vanished.”

“What else?”

“Gagonk says much evidence was found in the bedroom, pointing to the man as being of a highly criminal nature. He had, he says, many, many disguises.”