The Artful Egg Read Free Page A

enjoyed himself. There had been the long, deep bath, which had lasted until the water had lost its heat, and then the change into fresh clothes, his first in over a week. After that, he had wandered round the old farmhouse, visited the pumpkin patch, and had eventually settled down in a crude hammock that her children had rigged between two peach-trees.
    He lit another Lucky Strike, noticing that the match flame was almost invisible in the brilliance of the blazing sun. There would be a storm later on, there always was when the weather turned as hot as this, but for the moment it was as near to a perfect day as anyone with nothing to do, and absolutely no intention of doing anything, could wish.
    A butcher bird came to sit on a branch above him. It had a fledgling in its beak, still struggling feebly. After a while, the fledgling hung limp, but the butcher bird remained where it was.
    Kramer looked down and away. The coarse lawn was burned almost the colour of the tinder-dry veld beyond the barbed-wire fence surrounding the property; and far off, murky-grey at this distance, Trekkersburg lay in its wide bowl, brimmed by rocky outcrops. Nothing was distinct: the scraps of bright colour, the metallic glints, the little white shapes were like ants’ eggs, bits of beetle, gaudy scraps of butterfly wing and other insect debris caught at the centre of a cocooning spider web. Poke it with a twig, and God knows what might come crawling out.
    The butcher bird had its head cocked, watching him.
    He twisted round in the hammock, facing downwards through its wide mesh, finding a hole through which his bluntnose fitted comfortably. Below him, in the fine red dust, were two conical depressions made by a couple of ant lions. The ant lions were buried out of sight at the bottom of each depression, waiting for an unwary ant to come slithering down the treacherous walls of the pits they’d dug. A tiny moth, dizzy in the daylight, rang the changes by becoming a victim, and he turned away as the ant lion closed its pincers.
    The butcher bird had gone.
    He tried to doze. He left the hammock and went indoors, where he strapped on his shoulder holster. A minute later, having made sure all was secured and locked, he climbed into his Chevrolet, started it up, and drove off.
    “Naomi Stride?” said Colonel Hans Muller, pausing to blow hard into his pipe-stem. “Damn, the bloody thing’s properly blocked this time. I best send out for some cleaners.”
    “Ja, Naomi Stride,” repeated Lieutenant Jacob Jones. “Do you know who that is, Colonel, sir?”
    “Is her dad that Jewish tailor on the corner opposite the prison?”
    Jones, an Afrikaner to the core, despite such a ridiculous name, gave one of his tight little smiles and said: “Let me give you a clue, sir.… Books.”
    “Just a minute,” growled Colonel Muller, setting his pipe aside and glowering up from his desk. “This is the CID, hey? The Criminal Investigation Department! I haven’t got time to bugger around with bloody clues!”
    “Sorry, Colonel, I just—”
    “So spit it out, man! Let me hear what is so important that it’s OK for you to come running in here, just banging open the door like that, making me break off the match I’m using to—”
    “She’s dead, Colonel—murdered.”
    As accustomed as he was to receiving reports of sudden death, Colonel Muller needed a moment or two to adjust tothis information. He spent the time wondering why Lieutenant Jacob Jones had such a pale, bloodless complexion, and why Mrs. Muller had confided to him, during the last police ball at the city hall, that the detective’s brooding eyes and sensuous lips gave her the creeps.
    “Oh ja? Where?”
    “Here in Morningside. There’s just been a report from a Uniform van. It seems they got a tip-off from some neighbours, went round to the house and there she was. She’d been stabbed.”
    “I see,” said Colonel Muller, choosing the sharpest of his two dozen 2B pencils, and making