The Artful Egg Read Free

am ringing at your bell and there was no immediate answer, I.…” Hehad just taken another peep at her, and now realised her eyes were closed. “Asleep?” he whispered, hardly believing his good fortune.
    Why, he need only sneak away as quickly as possible, and nobody would ever know he’d been there.
    Then he hesitated for a fateful fraction of a second.
    Long enough anyway to want a closer look at those splendidly rounded white limbs, at those womanly breasts, at the gently domed belly, and in that same blink of an eye another side to him took possession. This frightened Ramjut Pillay—in fact, it scared the wits out of him—but it also somehow excited him, and excited him enormously, if the situation behind his postbag was anything to go by.
    At first, he acted with cold calculation. He cleared his throat loudly, and when this failed to produce a reaction he gave a rap on the glass door. He did not rap a second time, however, having satisfied himself she was not merely dozing. And then he took his boots off, leaving them outside on the patio before setting off on tiptoe across the wooden floor of the sun-lounge.
    This was when a feverish, dizzying feeling overcame him. He would never have believed such a perfect pallor of exposed skin possible, not in a million trillion years, and wanted desperately to caress it, to feel its cool sheen soothe his brown fingertips like magnolia blossom. Nothing could stop him now, and if she awoke suddenly, too bad—he’d just have to do something drastic.
    There was a low buzzing in the room. He ignored it.
    He marvelled instead at the glittering bluey-green bikini, shimmering as though stitched over by thousands of iridescent sequins, and moved closer, his weak eyes greedy for strong detail. The bikini had some red in it, too, he noted. The blurry face was as he remembered it—rosebud lips and long sweeping eyelashes. The breasts seemed heavier than he had suspected, the mound between her thighs far more pronounced than hecould have dreamed. All of a sudden, he hated that bikini and wished it away, wanting to see beneath it.
    He got his wish.
    No sooner had his advancing shadow fallen across the female body lying languorously before him, than the bluey-green glitter disintegrated into a buzzing swirl of angry flies, rose up and disappeared over his shoulder.

2
    T UESDAY MORNING HAD started well for Lieutenant Tromp Kramer of the Trekkersburg Murder and Robbery Squad. At 5 A.M . exactly—the Widow Fourie’s body clock came complete with its own alarm—he’d been woken by her blowing gently in his left ear. “Trompie,” she had said, “it’s any moment now, hey?” He’d lit a Lucky Strike, wanting to stay awake long enough to mark the moment. “Is it over yet?” she’d whispered a few minutes later. Her timing was perfect, because even as she said this he had seen in his mind’s eye a trapdoor, five hundred miles away, fall with a crash and the hangman’s rope snap straight, before beginning its slow twirl.
    And Tuesday morning had progressed from there. When he’d been woken again, it had been by the Widow Fourie making secret love to him, which he had pretended not to know about; and then, when he’d woken for the third and final time, it had been to find his favourite breakfast waiting on the locker beside her bed. Two jam doughnuts and a bottle of ginger beer.
    Burping quietly—he found the burps that went with this breakfast one of its more attractive and lasting features—he had then taken himself out onto the veranda, there to scratch at the pelt on his chest in remarkably contented fashion.
    A note, sticky-taped to a veranda-post, had read: “Me and the kids have gone out for the day to Myra’s and I’ve toldJohannes to take the day off also so you can have peace and quiet for a change. XXX”
    Quite what he had done with the time between then and now, which had to be somewhere around eleven o’clock, he wasn’t at all certain, except that he’d