Jones took a look at it, lost interest almost immediately and then asked: “Why did your son come back here? Have you any idea?”
“I am seated in privy, my master. There are only two nail-holes I am being able to see through. I see only that he takes big bag with him.”
“From his room, you say?”
“Yes, my master.”
“Then we’d better search the place, hey, Gagonk? This is all a bloody mystery to me, but something funny’s obviously going on.”
“Room is lock, my master. Ramjut a bad boy, never allow me to keep key.”
“From the look of you, you shifty old bastard, I’m not bloody surprised,” said Jones. “You’d be straight in and under his mattress for his money-sock, wouldn’t you? But never to worry; I’ve brought my own key with me.”
Thanks very much, thought Mbopa, who was really bored with kicking down doors.
The bathroom at 146 Acacia Drive was a different place with Doc Strydom huffing and puffing about in it, doing tricks with his blue braces. His presence lent a clinical gleam to the yellow tiling, and the body, until now so totally uncommunicative, seemed poised to divulge certain truths, however grudgingly.
“Well, Doc?” asked Colonel Muller. “There’s only me and Tromp present, so I would appreciate it if you just said what comes to mind.”
“Hm,” responded Strydom. “Difficult.”
“Then, can we start with estimated time of death?”
“
Very
difficult. Shower running, artificial cooling effect.… Thick layers of fat, well insulated.… Temperature-loss, h’m, could be misleading.”
“Cause of death?”
“Ah, head injury. Fractured skull?”
“You’re the man who’s supposed to have the answers, Doc.”
“You can’t wait for the
P.M.
?”
“Ja, naturally, but a bit of a conflict of evidence has come up—hard to know who to believe. For my own peace of mind, I’d like—”
“What sort of conflict?” asked Strydom.
“Ah, well, I don’t want to prejudice you in any—”
“Tromp,” said Strydom, poking his rectal thermometer at Kramer, “can you tell me what your esteemed superior is being so coy about?”
“Let’s put it this way, Doc,” he replied. “We could be interested in any bruises or abrasions, even small ones. Have you come across—?”
Strydom laughed. “Have I come across bruising? What’s the matter with you two? Haven’t you taken a look at the lady yet? Are you turning soft?”
“Willem’s been in here nearly all the—”
“That’s irregular,” remarked Strydom sternly. “But, in answer to your question, look for yourself.” And he flipped back the orange dressing-gown.
There was bruising on the upper arms, the lower arms, the chest, the shoulders, and on the left jawline. Not deep purple bruising, pale blue in most cases, but bruising all the same.
“Could gentle handling have done that?” asked Colonel Muller.
“Huh, you have to be joking, Hans!”
“More important,” said Kramer, “did it occur before or after death?”
“Before, almost without a doubt,” said Strydom.
“How long before?” asked Kramer.
“Ah, there you have me. The post-mortem might be able to help us on that one. It could, I suppose, have been hours before.”
“
Hours before
?” repeated Colonel Muller. “How many hours before?”
“Oh, about two or three.”
“Or about the time something made the lady slip,” said Kramer, watching the Colonel’s face. “The funny thing is, you know, I’ve just taken another look in this shower cubicle and I can’t see any soap.”
T
HE PROBLEM WITH
being on the run, decided Ramjut Pillay, was that unless a poor fellow were in training, then the running itself proved impossible to do after a time. With a stitch in his side, and knees all wobbly, he slowed to a jog, to a fast walk, and finally to a brisk shuffle.
Not long after that, he sat down.
“Mechanise,” said Ramjut Pillay.
So he took out his knotted sock and began to untie it, confident that he should have enough money for a prodigious train-journey. Someone had once told him that Cape Town lay no less than a thousand miles away; exactly what this figure represented in more modern kilometres he wasn’t too sure, but it still sounded the right sort of distance to put between himself and his pursuers.
“Thash an inneresting sock,” someone slurred in his ear.
Ramjut Pillay shrank away when he saw who had come to share his bench in the park at the bottom end of Railway Street. Strictly speaking, it was a white man, only his face was the colour of a tomato, and a very rotten tomato at that, with its skin gone all squishy and wrinkly. Some of the red had seeped into the whites of his watery blue eyes, and his teeth, bared in a leering smile, were the yellowy orange of tomato pips. He did not, however, smell anything like a tomato.
“Washa marrer?” asked the man. “You deaf?”
Lifelong teetotalism, inspired by the Mahatma, had left Ramjut Pillay ill-prepared to withstand the fumes of cheap sherry now being breathed out so close to him, and he suffered an attack of slight dizziness, making the man’s deep voice sound terribly far away.
“You wansh me to undo thash knot?” said the man, reaching out a great grimy hand. “Not take—pardon me—a minute.”
“Many, many thanks,” said Ramjut Pillay. “But I will untie it later. First I have to—” But as he tried to rise from the bench he felt the weight of a heavy arm draped in friendly fashion around his shoulders.
“Give us the sock!” growled the man.
“That bespectacled gent over there is staring our way,” said another side to Ramjut Pillay.
“Lesh him!”
“But do you know why, sir? It is the bench.”
“Bensh? What bensh?”
“The bench you are presently sitting on, sir. A bench which states clearly on its notice that it is for ‘Non-Whites Only.’ Perhaps he is thinking he has never before seen an Indian gent so light-skinned as yourself, sir, and—”
“Wazzat? He thinks I’m a
coolie?
I’m not having thash!” said the man, staggering to his feet. “Hey, you! Four-eyes! Just who d’you thinksh you’re insulting, hey?”
And he lumbered off, gathering terrifying momentum, in the direction of this singularly innocent bystander, leaving Ramjut Pillay to flee in the opposite direction, abandoning his bag but clutching the sock to him very tightly.
Up the steps of the railway station he skipped, through the booking-hall and out onto the platform. Where, behind a porter’s trolley piled with suitcases, he finally got the knot undone. “By jingo!” he chuckled, plunging his hand into the sock. “How cleverly was a great catastrophe avoided by the one and only ours truly! Cape Town stand by, please,
for the privilege of Ramjut Pillay!” But an instant later his ebullience evaporated.
This wasn’t a small wad of rand notes he had just taken from his sock. It was a handful of similarly sized scraps of paper.
The telephone rang, making Zondi look first to see what time it was. Four o’clock! He had started to read Naomi Stride’s unfinished typescript, supposing that it might well deal with themes which would hint at contemporary problems in her personal life, and had become so completely engrossed he’d not noticed the hours slip by.
“Mickey?”
“The very same, Lieutenant. How are things with Major Willem Martinus Zuidmeyer?”
There was a pause. “Christ, who told you, hey? It’s all supposed to be top—”
Zondi laughed. “The name is all that I know.”
“Ach, now I get it,” said Kramer, laughing, too. “You’ve been chatting up some poor unsuspecting female again, hey? Don’t worry, I’ll tell you the lot later when I get the chance. Meet you back at the office tonight.”
“Boss, the blue letters are not here.”
“Surprise me. OK, pack it in at Woodhollow when you like, and then wait at CID for Hopeful Dumela to pitch up with those servants. The Colonel wants you to be the one who interviews them.”
“And you, Lieutenant?”
“Later, old son, like I said.”
Zondi heard the line go dead as he dropped the receiver back into its cradle. He took another look at his watch, estimated that he had time for two or three more chapters at least, and settled back with the typescript. It was quite a story, this tale of a young black student in love with the daughter of his father’s white employer. Switch the sexes of the illicit lovers round,
make the employer an intelligent middle-class woman instead of a bearded university professor, and it seemed fairly obvious how Naomi Stride might herself have felt in just such a situation. That a son of hers should be breaking the law would have little to do with it; rather, her preoccupation would be with to what extent he was exploiting the vast social gap that lay between him and his lover, making himself appear the chief’s son to her peasant girl.
“Tromp,” said Colonel Muller, sighing as he came out of the lounge at 146 Acacia Drive, “a private word with you.”
Kramer nodded and stepped out into the garden with him. A dog, he noticed, had visited the property and cocked a leg over one of the stacks of
Popular Mechanics
, which only went to prove the crime prevention campaign had been right about never leaving garage doors open.
“Why the smile?” asked Colonel Muller. “God in Heaven, I know of nothing to smile about! My mind is in a total state of muddle and confusion. I can’t seem to think.”
“But there’s a reason for that, Colonel.”
“Oh ja?”
“You can’t think because you’re stopping yourself from thinking.”
“
Me
, stopping myself?”
“Or at least from thinking along the lines all your experience over the years as a policeman has taught you to do.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Then, let me try putting it this way, Colonel,” suggested Kramer, perching on a wing of the red Datsun. “Say, for argument’s sake, this call had been to the house of a certain reverend gentleman with fingers like pork sausages. Do you know the bastard I mean?”
“Hell, I should hope so! The animal who keeps doing indecent things to little kiddies.”
“
Alleged
indecent things,” Kramer corrected him. “There’s been a dozen or more complaints, but have we ever got him to court yet?”
“Ja, but that’s because of his position, man. Because it’s always been his word against some three-year-old, and he’s been careful not to leave any forensic evidence. Only, what this has to do with—”
“Just say,” went on Kramer, “we got a call to his house right now, and there was a kiddie there who said he’d been putting his hand in her panties. Would you believe her?”
“Why, naturally, man!”
“Because?”
“Because of what we know of him already!”
“So you’d let yourself think that, Colonel? You would let it colour what you—”
“Hey, Tromp,” said Colonel Muller, wagging his pipe-stem. “I see what you’re driving at now, and I don’t want any more of that talk. Nothing has ever been proved in connection with the allegations against Willem Zuidmeyer. I have never liked the man, I admit that, but you have to be fair in these matters.”
“Ach, Colonel, you know as well as I do—”
“I know this, Lieutenant Kramer. I know that if what you’re hinting is that Zuidmeyer has repeated—what shall we call it, an expedience used in his past?—then that doesn’t make sense in the slightest. Why would he do something that’d attract immediate suspicion?”
“Ah, so you’re admitting that—”
“I’m admitting nothing. I’m asking you a question.”
“Well,” said Kramer, glancing at the garage, “could it be because you can’t expect an old dog to learn new tricks?”
There was a prolonged silence, which Colonel Muller spent digging carefully about in his new briar with a match, and tamping down the tobacco again. “I had hoped,” he said eventually, “that you’d be able to help me in forming a nice,
clear, unbiased picture of the situation. It’s what I need most, Tromp, if I’m to handle matters with the discretion expected of me as the head of CID in Trekkersburg and district.” And he sounded very lonely.
Kramer slid off the Datsun, chastened to see an old friend reduced to being almost human. “You’re right, Colonel,” he said. “We mustn’t prejudge, we must stick to the known facts. Who knows? This could all have been another of God’s little jokes. Now, there’s a bloke with a bloody sick sense of humour.”
“And the known facts are?” asked Colonel Muller, getting his smile back.
“That father and son repeatedly give contradictory accounts. One says the deceased was alive when roughly manhandled from the shower; the other that she was dead upon removal and there was no manhandling to have caused bruising, which suggests it must have occurred earlier. We now have to turn to the District Surgeon in the hope he can confirm one or other of these two stories, and he has invited us to attend his postmortem one hour from now. When we know whose story to believe, the father’s or the son’s, then we will know how this case should be regarded. Either as a simple accident enquiry, or as a full-blown murder investi—”
Colonel Muller shuddered. “Enough, Tromp! That’s all I wanted. Now, let me see, if we go down to the mortuary a little early, do you think Doc Strydom might start sooner than five o’clock?”
“I think,” said Kramer, “it’ll depend more on how the afternoon has treated its resident ghoul, the charming Sergeant Van Rensburg.”
With the smell of hot horsehair mattress thick in his nostrils, Gagonk Mbopa took out his snuff-horn and dosed himself with two large pinches. He also put a little snuff behind his lower lip.
“Now, that,” muttered Jones, poking about between the
joists and the corrugated-iron roof of Ramjut Pillay’s lean- to bedroom, “is what I call a truly disgusting habit.”
“Ermph.”
“What did you say?”
“Ermph, Lieutenant.”
“That’s better! What do you think he needed this bottle of stuff for?”
Mbopa took the small brown bottle and cautiously unscrewed its top before taking a quick sniff at its contents. “Lemon juice, Lieutenant.”
“Fresh, is it?”
Mbopa tasted a little and nodded. “Maybe it is some kind of churra medicine,” he suggested.
“There’s also a pen up here he’s been stirring it with. God, have you ever seen such an assortment?”