James McCure - The Steam Pig

“And then?”

“He asked us if we knew who to contact, you see,” Miss Henry continued, reliving a glorious hour. “I said-remember, dearie?-I said the name of her lawyer was on the lease thing. I went and got it and Dr Matthews rang him from the flat. The lawyer took a bit of time and then he told the doctor that Trixie had some sort of insurance for funerals and gave him the undertaker’s name.”

“Vultures were here in two-two’s,” Mrs Bezuidenhout muttered. “But they had to wait.”

“Oh?”

“The death certificate has to be witnessed by another doctor for a cremation,” Miss Henry explained kindly. “I think that’s very wise, don’t you?”

“Huh! Not when it’s Dr Matthews’s partner, two of a kind, if you ask me,” Mrs Bezuidenhout sneered.

“Who’s that then?”

“Dr Campbell. Terrible old soak.”

“Really, dearie!”

“He is. He didn’t even bother to come right into her bedroom. Stood there in the doorway moaning about being up all night.”

Kramer had overlooked the fact that a second opinion would have been compulsory, but that was a minor point and no doubt Strydom had thought so, too. Neither of the doctors seemed remotely capable of being party to an intelligent act of destruction.

“What about the flat?” he asked Mrs Bezuidenhout.

“Her lawyer’s promised to see to it and it’s paid up for the month so why should I care?”

“Untouched?”

“I’m not doing his work for him, sonny.”

Kramer rose.

“It is necessary that I have a look at it.”

“Now?”

“Yes, and we’ll probably have to trouble you again in the morning. Fingerprints, photographs.”

“Well, if you have to, you have to. But see you use the side gate. I’m too old for this sort of commotion.”

Something ugly shaded her bright eyes for an instant. Strange it had taken so long.

“Are we-are Miss Henry and I in any danger through what’s happened?”

“No, madam, we don’t think so.”

“Oh.”

Almost a hint of disappointment. Perhaps a less formidable son had thought the burglar guards advisable.

“I mean it’s a murder, isn’t it?” Miss Henry said. “These things are usually very personal.”

“Quite right,” Kramer agreed, and then cautioned them not to say a word about it. They joined the conspiracy with self-important nods.

Kramer wanted to take a second look at Miss Le Roux’s underwear. But he was finding Miss Henry’s presence most inhibiting. In fact she was beginning to get on his nerves badly. From the moment she unlocked the door to the flat, the avowed vegetarian had displayed an astonishing taste for gore. He was tired of grunting evasively as she sought to extract details of the Royal Hotel double-killing. And he was tired of being asked if he had given himself to Jesus. The time had come for his Jehovah’s Witness ploy.

“Oh, Christ!” he said, looking at his watch. “I’d better get a bloody move on or I’ll be late for Mass.”

Miss Henry shuddered away into the night.

And Kramer opened the wardrobe. Nine dresses hung from the rail, each demure and rather dull. There was also a raincoat in a severe military cut and a worn overcoat which had been altered. Nothing here to conflict with the picture the old girls had conjured up. Then he pulled out one of the drawers. In it was a large collection of what women’s magazines termed “romantic undies” while refraining from specifying under what circumstances they would appear so. The colours were strong and the lace a main ingredient rather than a trimming. He thumbed through them again with the idle notion he might have missed something men’s magazines called “exotic”. Some of them came damn close but that was all. It worried him. Bothered him because he could not reconcile the striking contrast between the inner and outer Theresa le Roux.

Bloody hell. Nothing in the place made sense once you thought about it. He shut the wardrobe, went out into the living-room for his cigarettes, and returned to lie back on the stripped mattress. The low ceiling was white and unblemished by cracks, providing a perfect surface on which to transcribe a confusion of mental jottings.

But his eyes wearied quickly of the glare and wandered to the print of Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral which hung on the wall beyond the foot of the bed. Its qualities as a best-seller were obvious; a nice, restful scene with a touch of the old spiritual uplift. Yet only two nights before the glass over it had held the reflection of a killer getting his kicks. Oh jesus, this case bent the mind and his had been going flat out since before sunrise.

Presently, he fell asleep.

The face above him was black. His right fist heaved up, missed, flopped back. Somebody laughed. He knew that laugh; he had heard it where children played, where women wept, where men died, always the same depth of detached amusement. Kramer closed his eyes without troubling to focus them and felt curiously content.

Bantu Detective Sergeant Mickey Zondi sat himself primly at the dressing table. Then he opened the large manila envelope he had brought with him and shook out its contents-a batch of photographs and two laboratory reports. As a child at a mission school in Zululand, he had adapted to making do without his own text books. He read fast, read once and remembered. He studied the pictures last of all, aware that Kramer was now watching him through barely parted lids.

An uncanny thing, that laugh of Zondi’s-it never seemed to come from him, it was too big a sound. But it fitted. The first time he had seen Zondi was outside the magistrate’s court on a Monday when it was thronged so solid with worried wives and families you had to force your way through them. Then the mob suddenly parted of its own volition and through it had come a kaffir version of Frank Sinatra making with the jaunty walk. The snapbrim hat, padded shoulders and zoot suit larded with glinting thread were all secondhand ideas from a secondhand shop. The walk was pure Chicago, yet no black was permitted to see a gangster film. No, here was an original, even if someone, somewhere else, had thought of it all before. Zondi walked that way because he thought that way. And if this was fantasy, reality was only one layer down: the Walther PPK in its shoulder holster, the two eight-inch knives held by the elastic trouser tabs on either side.

“Cheeky black bastard,” Kramer grunted.

Zondi tucked in the corners of a smile and went on with his illicit scrutiny of Miss Le Roux’s bromide image. Even dead a white woman had laws to protect her from primitive lust.

“You want to get me into trouble, hey?”

Zondi ignored him. The photographs were sharp and expertly printed, but the lighting had been too oblique and Miss Le Roux seemed to have ended up with a lot of her curves in the wrong places. Nevertheless, Zondi nodded his approval before tossing the envelope across.

“A good woman,” he said. “She could have given many sons.”

“Is that all you ever think about?” asked Kramer, and they both laughed. Zondi was an incorrigible pelvis man.

The laboratory reports were long, laborious and uninspiring. Contrary to popular belief, there was not a great deal you could say about a corpse which would circumvent the ordinary processes of investigation. That Miss Le Roux’s blood belonged to a rare group seemed wholly irrelevant now it had gone to waste. On top of which the technician concerned was a new man, fresh from the realms of pure science and given to being scrupulously vague in the face of variables. So Kramer ignored everything except the analysis of stomach contents.

“Digestion halted after approximately four hours,” Zondi quoted, noting where Kramer’s finger had stopped in the margin.