bloody find.”
They spent twenty minutes on the stuffed armchair in Room 14, littered the floor with tufts of horsehair, and found nothing but a mouse’s nest, long vacated.
“Bugger,” said Kramer. “I’m damned sure he must have been up to something-agreed? But if he wasn’t sitting tight on it, what was he doing?”
“Perhaps just watching the boy, boss.”
“Do what?”
Zondi opened the French windows. “When the boy had gone, he would come out here to hang up his washing.”
“Hmmm. Doesn’t grab me. How many other doors open onto it?”
“Three.”
“We’ll take a look, anyway,” Kramer suggested, following him out. “You have a go at that sandpit, while I poke around the toys.”
What was left of the toys, to be pedantic, because the hotel must once have catered to a particularly destructive bunch of little bastards-just the sort, in fact, who’d have parents capable of breaking in wild mustangs. The rocking horse was legless, rockerless, and eyeless, the pedal car was a write-off, and the playhouse had been trampled flat; only a few items in stout plastic and a scattering of big wooden blocks had survived intact, or almost.
“Nothing buried here,” Zondi said presently, dusting off his hands.
“See what you make of this, then.”
Kramer had just come across a blue hula hoop with a longish piece missing from it; one end had separated at the join, but the other seemed to have been severed by a sharp penknife or razor blade. The cut marks were fairly recent, too.
“Ah, there is the rest,” said Zondi, going over to where he’d spotted a length of blue tubing sticking out of a small plastic watering can with lamb decals on it. “Hau, it is very clean.”
“Ja, that’s true,” Kramer murmured, taking the tube from him to examine. “What the hell can you do with a thing like this?” He tried a bugle call.
Zondi shook the can and listened.
“Hear anything?”
“Rain water.”
“Time you got that job in the lab, man. That’s brilliant.”
“Huh! You do not believe me?” snorted Zondi, spilling a little into his left palm and licking it. “Correction, boss. Soapy water.”
He grimaced and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
“This way!” Kramer said, plunging back into Room 14 and confronting the washbasin. “He always had his underpants in there, right? So we put in the plug. We add water, soap, and …?”
“We put the pipe in.…”
There seemed no point to that. Zondi lifted out the tube and held it vertically, bringing the watering can up underneath it. He began lowering the two things together.
The idea struck them simultaneously.
“
“So the water will not-”
“-go down the outlet pipe!” Kramer rounded off, bending to sniff at the plug hole.
“Drugs, boss?”
“Drains. Push the chair back, and let’s pull this whole bloody thing apart.”
The hotel manager and his friendly neighborhood police chief returned to the room at that moment, but went totally ignored. Very sensibly, they said nothing.
A blank was drawn with the U-tube, although it was bone dry, and the same went for the first short section down to the elbow joint. But when the main length of plastic piping was eased away from the wall, improvised stoppers could be seen protruding slightly at either end. One of these was tugged out, the piping held upright, and the best part of twenty thousand rand, bound tightly in fat cylinders of used bank notes, bounced on the grass matting and rolled under the bed.
Piet Ferreira looked as sick as any man might who discovers a little too late that, by simply turning on one of his own cold-water taps, he could have struck oil. As for Frikkie Jonkers, he just gaped.
“This is a security matter,” Kramer stated briskly, recovering to break the prolonged silence. “It would be unwise for either of you to ask any questions, or to mention this to anyone.”
He saw Zondi blink.
“What-er-what do I say if someone here asks?” Ferreira asked anxiously, his avarice having died of frostbite. “Asks where Tommy is, I mean.”
“Just say that he ought to be back soon. Any problems on your side, Sergeant?”
“None, sir!” replied Jonkers, coming to attention.
“Then let me give you one. This guest was making long-distance telephone calls recently; I want you to contact the Brandspruit exchange and tell them I need those numbers chop chop.”
“Immediately, sir. Anything else?”
“Ja, your friend here can see if he’s got a nice metal strongbox for me to stash this stuff in. Go.”
Both men hurried from the room, closing the door very gently behind them. Zondi’s low, puzzled laugh followed as the thud of their footfalls died away.
“Boss? There are times when you do things I do not fully understand.”
Kramer grinned. “If you knew how I’d been misleading them this afternoon, maybe you’d appreciate how much explaining I’ve just saved myself. Besides, it’s nice to see a bit of action.”
“So you do not suspect-”
“Ach, of course not! Which isn’t to say this case has got any less peculiar. What’s your view?”
“Hau, hau, hau,” sighed Zondi, kneeling on the mat. “This money was not my expectation.”
They began to gather up the rolls.
“Could be that we fell into the old trap of presuming too much,” Kramer said, sitting back on his heels, “because, from one angle, it still being here does make sense.”
“How is that?”
“Well, everything they’ve told me makes Monday night sound as if it came as a nasty shock to him. He had his bum in the butter and could easily have stayed another three months, I reckon. Out he goes, expecting to be so short a time he doesn’t bother to make his usual lying excuses to Ferreira, and they nail the bastard. He won’t tell them where the moola is, takes the drop, and they’re left scratching their arses. Now all you’ve got to do is explain why, if they knew where to contact him, they didn’t come here and turn the place over.”
Zondi pursed his lips.
“What’s the problem?”
“I am a kick-start kaffir, boss, as you well know.”
“Oh, ja?”
“I would first like to hear about these telephone numbers.”
“Can’t help you there, man,” Kramer said, smiling as he recognized the same pattern of thought that had him in a tangle. “But I do know one thing: whoever was on the receiving end would know from the operator where the call originated, even if he didn’t tell them himself. ‘We’ve got Witklip on the line,’ and all that. He’d know this, too, and the chances are that only persons he really trusted would-”
“A big mistake?” Zondi broke across. “He chose unwisely?”
“Either that or one of his contacts was got at. The timing of all this does suggest nobody knew where he was until he began the calls.”
“Hmmm.”
“Tollie would recognize the risks himself?”
“Yebo, and this does not tell us why the telephone became necessary to him.”
“Boredom? He’d begun to hit the bottle a lot harder. Might have been checking to see if we were still so
