“It isn’t raining, you know.”
“I know.”
“And so?”
“Nothing.”
A whimsy caught Kramer unexpectedly. In the good old days, this would have been his cue to bash her one with a club and drag her off by the hair. Hit her hard enough and temporary amnesia would take care of her troubles. But this was the twentieth century, Western civilization, and she was wearing a wig.
“I’m waiting,” she said.
“What for?”
“Did you get him? Or are my kids still-”
“ Ach! Don’t worry, we will.”
Strained silence.
“How did you get your hands so dirty?”
“I’ll wash.”
The Widow Fourie shuddered and went into the kitchen, pausing just inside the doorway until she heard the taps running. Her shadow was a dead giveaway.
It was shorter than she was, squat and broad and a little bowed; come to think of it, rather like the shade of some primitive ancestor apprehensive at the mouth of her cave.
Now a hunter sought admission but, having come from where the sounds of the night were made, his scent would lead the unthinkable right to her litter within.
Suddenly he saw it all.
“I’ve fried you a couple of eggs. There’s no bacon left.”
The plate stared balefully up at him with its two yellow eyes, waiting to be blinded by the knife.
“We know who the kid was. He-”
“I don’t want to hear.”
“But usually-”
“It’s repugnant to me.”
“Repugnant? Where did you get that one from? The crossword?”
“That’s what Mr. Tomlinson called it and he’s right. Repugnant.”
“Ah, yes, our English-speaking university intellectual.”
“He’s a very nice man.”
“Not repugnant.”
“No, but-”
“Go on. Were you going to say…?”
She responded eagerly to the kettle’s whistled summons.
And returned with his coffee to find the room empty. Kramer had got the message.
The fresh-water crabs must have thought themselves especially favored when enough food to last them through two generations landed in their irrigation ditch. It came sealed in a big brown wrapper. After a week of high excitement, they had just started to get this off when it vanished.
And wound up on the next slab along from Boetie Swanepoel in the Trekkersburg police mortuary.
“I’ll start on the Bantu male,” Strydom told the attendant, Sergeant Van Rensburg. “No sense in trying to concentrate with a stink like that hanging around.”
Van Rensburg had already made the preliminary incision from throat to crotch. All Strydom had to do was reel off enough routine observations to fill up the form. The plain fact of the matter was that a rural Bantu had died because he ate too little.
“Natural causes,” Strydom concluded, moving on to the other table.
Boetie lay awkwardly on the channeled porcelain; the headrest was chiefly to blame for this-like the headrest on a barber’s chair, it was not designed for the young. But his spare frame left plenty of working space all around him, which made a nice change.
Van Rensburg wheeled the light over and the examination began.
“Yes, someone definitely put their fingers in this lot,” Strydom murmured, indicating a smear running up the belly from the lacerated loins. “Yirra, and look at this mark in the leg, man!”
Strydom had spread the legs apart and exposed a bloody mark on the inner thigh.
“That’s the shape of the weapon we’re after-remind you of anything?”
“No, Doctor.”
“Well, it does me. Funny how the end is chopped off nearly at right angles like that.”
“Could be the point snapped.”
“Hmmm. Anyhow, I think I’ll just save this for closer examination before you wash down.”
Strydom flayed the area with his scalpel and laid the skin in a small dish. On a flat surface, the dominant characteristic of the weapon’s imprint was even more pronounced. They both peered at it closely.
“That thing had a real curve on it,” Van Rensburg said. “It wasn’t a sheath knife for sure. What about one of those Arab daggers?”
“Not very likely. The width of those blades gets smaller all the way down to the tip. This one stays the same. Also it seems the blade was very flat or it wouldn’t have made a clear mark like that. Finished?”
The blood was gone. The wounds were short, deep slashes that gaped like the mouths of smiling babes, each with a rim of subcutaneous fat to give an illusion of toothless gum within.
Strydom found them beguiling; he was sure they could tell him something. And would, given time.
Van Rensburg watched for a while and then helped his Bantu assistant remove the other corpse. A splintery coffin, made by a timber firm that also churned out fruit trays for farmers, was waiting for it in the refrigerator room.
As he measured and probed, Strydom could hear the widow being cursed for having come alone with her small son. So she had brought the coffin along on her head, Van Rensburg bawled, but how the hell did she think she would take it away again full? Still, that was her problem. No, he would not telephone for a taxi. The box scraped over the concrete floor, one bent nailhead screeching, and then the hot draft through the outer door ceased to blow. The fly screen beyond clattered.
“Damn fool,” Van Rensburg grunted, taking up his clipboard for notes.
“And a lot of damn noise,” Strydom rebuked him.
“Sorry, Doctor.”
His tone was so surly that Strydom looked up in surprise. Van Rensburg had always been unbearably sycophantic-this was indeed a welcome indication of personality inversion. The big bruise of a face, purpled by drink and normally sensitive to the slightest touch of criticism, was without expression.
“Something the matter, Sergeant?”
“No, Doctor.”
Strydom was sure then that in some way he had offended the great oaf. Exactly how was tantalizing, but best left unexplored if he was to make the most of the situation. Obviously Van Rensburg was desperately seeking a confrontation that would leave him the injured yet forgiving party. The hell with that. A diversion was indicated.
“Look at these wounds,” Strydom said, “and tell me if the pattern means anything to you.”
Van Rensburg shrugged.
The pattern had not meant a thing to Strydom either-until he started talking.
“Let’s start by assuming that the object was mutilation-and mutilation of the genitals. But it is immediately apparent that most of the blows fell on either side and just above. What does that suggest to you?”
“He kept missing?”
“Right. But why did he? You use that ballpoint of yours and try a stab-see? You got it spot on.”
“He could have been all excited.”
“Then why stop once the severing had taken place? Why not go on-mutilate some more? Now use my ruler and hit the plug hole here by the foot. Quick!”
Van Rensburg missed by a good inch-enough to make the difference between a wound in a child’s groin and one on the thigh. He tried again and hit his target.
