“Me for paper,” he muttered. “Want quick today.”
Danny handed it over with a flourish.
Then, as he pedaled on up the hill to make his last delivery, he looked back and noted that the curtains in the big house were still drawn across every window. When the servant had said the paper was wanted in a hurry, he thought it must be later than he imagined, but here was evidence to the contrary. Which posed the interesting question: Who had asked for the Trekkersburg Gazette so early and why?
He was freewheeling downhill past the big house again when a second question occurred to him: why had the dog, in such robust health two days before on the Saturday, died so suddenly?
Danny decided to have a word with the lad from the Central News Agency who delivered the Sunday papers.
Mungo had to take most of the credit for saving the situation, Kramer acknowledged generously-he himself had only made certain that a respectable citizen would not be protesting an infringement of rights.
“Because that’s bloody nearly what happened,” he told Zondi as they drove back into the center of Trekkersburg. “I was committed, you see. I was in the bloke’s house and he wanted to know the reason. You can’t go fooling with people like that even if they are polite face to face. The Colonel does not like that kind of trouble. He can tell them to get lost but he doesn’t like it.”
“Who could say you were in his house without asking first, boss?”
“This kid Mungo. He told them.”
“But you could have said you were just talking to him.”
“The trouble was I was stroppy with Nielsen when he came out. I came on hard-Phillip Sven Nielsen? You know.”
“Why, boss?”
“Because I’d already found blood on his jacket sleeves.”
That took ten miles an hour off the speedometer.
“Boss Nielsen’s?”
“Uhuh. That’s where Mungo stopped me making the all-time boo-boo. Thing was I said to Nielsen I wanted to ask him some questions and we’d better go somewhere and sit. He said he’d have to tell his wife what was happening because she’d got a fright, and put me in his study. In the meantime Mungo comes in and wants to look at my gun. I let him and ask if he knows what his father’s job is. Of course, he says-not like a normal kid at all, this Mungo; bloody microscopes, hell! His dad’s an ecologist and he catches things. Kills them, too. Rabbits, mainly, he tells me, just as his old man walks in.”
“And then?”
“He hears what the kid is saying and he adds, I need the blood, you know. Really, I say. He explains he uses it to catch meerkats, carries it around in one of those plastic bowls with a lid-like you put in the fridge. Splashes it all round his traps with a rag.”
“His jacket, too.”
“Yes, that’s about it. By now I’m getting the picture. I tell him we believe he was up in the plantation catching things for ecology, and he says you could put it that way. He is doing a study of one small section and learning all he can about how the food goes from one animal to another. Like what the shrews eat and what eats the shrews. That’s why he was working so late; shrews die if they are kept in a trap for too long and he has to empty them every eight hours.”
“For how long, boss?”
“He says he’s been doing it three years.”
“You believe him?”
“There’s a place in England, so he tells me, where the scientists have spent twenty-seven years in a forest nonstop.”
“White men!” Zondi chuckled.
“I feel the same, kaffir. Anyway, he asks me what my questions are. I say, as if I know already, Mr. Nielsen, you visit this plantation at eight o’clock in the morning, four o’clock in the afternoon and at midnight? Ja, he says. All right, then, I say, did you notice anyone in the trees at all yesterday? — and I tell him why. He thinks for a long time and then says there was nobody. But, I must remember, he just goes to a small part down near the dual highway. Thanks very much, I tell him, and take my gun back from Mungo.”
“So?”
“Then he says, Just a minute, is that all you want to know? He looks at me all suspicious. I don’t say anything. Because if it is all, then he wants to ask a question. Go ahead, I say.
“He’s no fool, this one. He says, It seems strange to me, Lieutenant, that you feel at liberty to walk into my house, unannounced, to ask a single question which, according to your theories on sex killers, could easily have waited an hour or so. You could have telephoned-or knocked on my door-at seven, when I generally get up.
“Man, I had to think fast. I said, It is urgent, man, because I wanted you to take a look at the murder scene for me before it rains or whatever. Why him? he wants to know. Well, because our forensic experts, ha ha, haven’t been able to find anything there of any use to us. He knows the plantation better than anyone; there was just a chance he would spot what we wouldn’t.
“But why hadn’t I said so in the first place? he wants to know. Look, it’s a favor I’m asking, I say. When you ask a favor, you try not to cause any inconvenience. I’m in a hurry, right? Surely it’s better I come round and see if he is already awake? And, if not, wait a while in the car outside? I arrive, I see the kid in the passage, I hear he’s awake, I ask to see him. Then, because it’s a favor, I dither about before asking him because it could be a big waste of time.”
Zondi gave the sort of grunt that implied he could not agree more. He picked up speed again.
“The main thing is to let Mr. Nielsen feel important and then send him away happy,” Kramer said, really trying to convince himself, rather than Zondi, it was worth all this to avoid a fuss.
“Maybe he will find something, boss.”
“True but unlikely. I’d thought of that; either way we can’t lose.”
They arrived at CID headquarters.
“I want the car for an hour, Zondi. See you here at eight and we’ll be up at the country club by the time he’s finished with his traps.”
“Where do you go then?”
“One more bit of unfinished business before I really get stuck into this case. Cheers.”
As Kramer drove off, he cursed himself loudly and viciously for having been so impulsive. From here on in, caution was the watchword. What a start to a sodding lousy morning-with the prospect of many more to come. This was definitely not his kind of case. Sod it.
The Widow Fourie presented her cheek to be kissed much as a bishop might his episcopal ring-there was no promise whatever of more intimate communion.
As Kramer never kissed women on the cheek, he ignored it. He pinched her instead.
“Trompie!”
Now that, too, was unlike her.
“What is it?” he asked. “Time of the month?”
“Yes,” she said.
“The curse?”
“That’s right.”
But which curse? A good question. Right from the moment he entered the flat, with just enough time for bed and breakfast, he sensed a definite change in her. It was as though she dreaded something dark she could not quite see over his shoulder.
“Where are the kids?”
“Out.”
“So early?”
“I asked Mr. Tomlinson down the passage to take them in the car-he passes the school on his way to varsity.”
