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.
take a good look at
yourself, pa
(if the cops
want me I’m at
Marlene’s)
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, bu
t 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?”
“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.
12
“SO 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 Nxum
alo 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.”
The Artful Egg Page 17
