“Zondi?”
“The same, my beauty. Are things going well with you?”
“Can’t you see? I am a staff nurse.”
“But you wanted to be a teacher.”
“They do not pay you in the holidays.”
“True, true.”
“There is not much choice for an educated girl. It was this or work in the prison. Here we have nice rooms- even a tennis court.”
“How do you like it, though?”
She made no reply, pointing instead at Argyle.
“He is strong, that one.”
“He’ll be all right?”
“If he…”
“Yes?”
A shrug, that was all.
If she had been any less of a bitch, she might have thought of something comforting to say in Zulu.
Lisbet had not, as she pretended, just finished preparing her own supper when Kramer arrived. The whole flat was filled with the smell of food that had been in the warming oven overlong. However, it still smelled extremely good, and the demijohn of Cape wine on the table looked even better.
“Was the letter any good to you?” she asked, heaping his plate with mutton curry. “I was so excited at the time, but afterwards I wondered why.”
“Call it feminine intuition,” he replied gallantly.
“What did you learn, then?”
By the time the last banana fritter disappeared and the coffee was poured, he had brought her up to date on the investigation.
“Mind if I say something, Trompie?”
“Hell, no.”
“Then I don’t think your explanation of why Boetie left the coded papers with Hennie is very convincing.”
“You have a better one?”
“Maybe, although it’s along the same lines. I think he was going to show off with them when it was all over; give Hennie and the others the wrappers and let them see for themselves what a smart guy he was. You hear it every day in the classroom, especially on Mondays. Someone says he spent the weekend hunting buck with a rifle and all the rest say, ‘ Ach, we don’t believe that! ’ There would naturally be a gap before the papers say anything and that’s when he’d have shown them.”
Kramer half-closed his eyes.
“You sound as if you’ve gone off Boetie a bit.”
“Well, am I right?”
“Nearer the truth than myself? Probably. This is all guesswork. But what is it about Boetie that’s changed your attitude?”
“I was looking through his compositions today. He was very self-assured, you know, and almost frighteningly correct in his outlook. You should see the one he did on his beach holiday-a long complaint about litter and girls indecently dressed. He even quoted the regulation they have in the Free State for keeping sunbathers at least eighteen inches apart around swimming baths.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes. All in favor of it. And then he-”
“What?”
“Had the cheek to do this-to carry on his own investigation. That card the club issued him with stressed cooperation with the police, but he didn’t seem to take too much notice of that.”
“Everyone twists the law a little at times.”
“But he had no right to! He was a child.”
“Quite right. Boetie was a bad boy but you can’t blame him altogether. He was provoked by the station commander.”
“The last time you were almost defending the man!”
How galling it was to discover that even Lisbet argued like a woman.
“Well, that’s the sergeant off the hook now-nobody to write in with his name, rank, and number.”
Lisbet smiled wryly.
“Jan has already seen to that. In fact, they all spent their free period composing flowery tributes for the letter section.”
“Christ! The Colonel doesn’t want the club to become involved in this stupid incident.”
“Don’t worry. I offered to post them all in one big envelope-it’s behind you on the telephone table.”
“That’s my girl!”
“Oh, thank you, Lieutenant, I thought you would never say it. More coffee?”
It was virtually impossible to gauge how jocular that remark had been intended to sound. Kramer recognized its potential in terms of the elusive signals exchanged by the more modest mammals during mating season, but decided to dwell on work a little longer until he was certain of pleasure.
“How about taking a look at what Boetie actually said in the coded message?”
“I wouldn’t mind.”
He slid the slip over and brought back his refilled cup on the return trip. The light from the two red candles gave her a glow that warmed his eyes. And, to be entirely honest, his heart.
For he had suddenly grasped she was the genuine article: the haystack girl for whom he had searched much of his life. Right from when he was ten and saw the archetype on a calendar in a garage workshop; a cheerful, tomboyish, smooth-limbed girl sprawled smiling an invitation to an energetic game. Part of his response had been envy-there was not enough grass on his father’s farm to make even a small pile for jumping on-and part the curious precognition of a child who sees a Cadillac and declares it will ride in one someday. As he had grown older, however, compromise had smudged the image, like the greasy thumbs of the mechanics tearing off the months. The years. The long trail of discarded nylon trivialities leading only to the fear she would never appear in her checked shirt, freckles, and blue jeans.
Lisbet had freckles and wore blue jeans to relax in. Her blouse might be plain pink but the tablecloth was a bright red- and-white gingham.
Christ, she was frowning.
“What’s up?” Kramer asked anxiously.
“You told me there was nothing in these to connect the cases. Personally, I don’t see how Boetie could have made it any clearer than this, using the joke.”
“Show me!”
She turned the slip around his way.
“The word before ‘sitting on him,’ Trompie-that’s ‘bath,’ isn’t it?”
Of course it was-in Afrikaans.
“Damn that bloody fool Zondi! It was his idea all this was in English and we never thought of it any other way. He said so even before we got the code.”
“What gave him the idea, though?”
“The c ’s.”
“But that’s clever, you’ve got to admit.”
“Zondi’s too bloody clever half the time.”
“ Ach, Trompie, don’t get so angry. You should have realized that Boetie would probably have to use every language he could to make anything of such a small selection of words. You’ve got the connection now-it would be too big a coincidence to mean anything else-and that proves you’re on the right track.”
Kramer rose and went over to the telephone.
“I’ve got to put a trunk call through to Pembrook in Jo’burg before anything else happens,” he said.
“What do you mean by that, Trompie?”
