and with the way you were exposed on the brink, facing God knows what insanities beyond the horizon. Any one of the waves, for example, could have creamed from the bows of a Chink battle cruiser to come all the way across to splash over a man’s kids. Just like the waves that had thrown up other people’s rubbish along the shoreline, all those Miami apartment blocks and English beach hotels and Spanish ranch houses. If you flew high enough, Kramer had noticed, then Durban looked like a high-water mark, with all sorts of tiny, nasty things crawling about among the pastel shells and the glitter.
Zondi liked Durban-it went with his sophisticated taste in neckties-and he murmured appreciatively as a bikini passed by, accentuating a fine, wide pelvis. If the girl had been topless, he wouldn’t have noticed.
“You’re not a detective; you’re a bloody obstetrician,” grumbled Kramer, who had taken the wheel and was searching the beachfront for the right side street.
“I’m also a damn fine navigator, boss.”
“Watch it.”
“Two blocks more.”
“Ask that churra over there.”
The Indian streetcleaner directed them two blocks north, one block west, and Kramer double-parked outside Rasnop Court soon afterward. By the look of it, the four-story building had just weathered a bad crossing from Singapore, but at least it was now in a white-zoned area.
“A few words?” Zondi suggested.
“Ideal. Don’t know a bloody thing about this bloke.”
So Zondi got out and went over to a pair of servant girls in grubby uniforms, who were gossiping at the entrance to the block. He flashed his shoulder holster at them. His jacket closed, their eyes opened wide, and none of those few words were wasted. He came back with his report.
“These females do not know of a Boss Roberts, but they say there is an old missus by that name. She stays on the top floor, flat number 4D, and her shopping time is eleven.”
Kramer checked his watch; ten forty-six. “Just make it. You talk nicely to the traffic cops, but don’t move if you can help it.”
Zondi caught the keys and took his place behind the wheel, tipping his hat forward for a short nap.
The lift was out of order, and as there wasn’t another for nonwhites, Kramer had to take the stairs. Some junior Michelangelo, living on or about the third floor, was all set to have an obscenities charge slapped on him for his murals. Kramer quite enjoyed the one depicting the depravities of kangaroos, though, and wondered what the old lady thought of them, as she came whizzing down the banisters each day at eleven.
Mrs. Wilfreda Roberts didn’t turn out to be that sort of old lady at all.
When she opened the door of 4D just a crack, it wasn’t really to hide behind-you could see practically all of her. She was so thin and so frail that her earlobes looked fat, and her pallor was like candle grease. But her empty eyes, much the same freckled gray as her dress and most tombstones, said she hadn’t been ill: it was just that life had sunk in its fangs and had a good suck.
“Lieutenant Kramer from the CID, madam,” he announced in English, smiling cheerfully.
She noticed this and became excited.
“Peter?” she asked. “You’ve come about my son?”
As she spoke the name, color came to her hollow cheeks, and she stepped back, drawing the door wide in invitation.
“Come in, please-do come in! But don’t say a word until I’m sitting down. Gracious, how sudden! You just can’t begin to imagine what this means to me!”
Kramer, who was in complete agreement with her, followed Mrs. Roberts with sudden reluctance across the small hallway, and then into a dim living room that was stifling with birds. There seemed close to fifty of them- parakeets, budgies, canaries, finches, and a parrot-in a dozen or so cages set on pedestals against the curtained windows. Even in the gloom, their plumage had a startling brilliance, and they immediately began a shrill clamor, as they fluttered against their silver bars, that was fairly startling in itself. Although the parrot, a molting African gray, merely blinked a bland eye at him, and went on picking its beak.
“Shoosh!” said Mrs. Roberts, and added, “Please excuse me for a moment while I get some lettuce.”
He glanced about to note what else she had managed to squeeze between the four cream walls. There was a fold-up writing desk, a drop-leaf dining table, a glass-fronted display cabinet, a small table supporting a radio, and two easy chairs. One of these had a darning needle stuck in an arm, where she must have left it to answer the door. On the foam-rubber seat of the other chair, a modern affair in light wood, lay a copy of that morning’s newspaper, a carton of American toasted cigarettes, a six-pack of Lion lager, a can of peanuts, and a ten-rand note twisted into the shape of a flower. Maternal goodies, it could be assumed, for the flashy young bastard whose portrait adorned the display cabinet in a thin silver frame.
“Who’s a pretty boy?” Kramer leered amiably.
That really set it off. Only its diction was terrible, and he felt sure the daft bugger kept saying
The task Strydom had set himself in a dusty corner of the court records office was fast getting out of hand.
Theoretically, it shouldn’t have been difficult to pick out a fair sample of death-by-hanging cases from which to extract his statistics, but in practice it was like juggling fresh-caught flatfish. The papers from each inquest hearing were clipped together in an unwieldy, slithery mass-autopsy report, magistrate’s transcript, maps, plans, documentary exhibits, photographs-and stacked so that one clumsy move brought at least half a dozen flip-flopping out to spread over the floor.
And if this wasn’t enough to content with, he had just discovered a fracture dislocation of the neck that didn’t make sense.
The deceased, a railway foreman with a history of violence and aberrant behavior, had been found four years earlier hanging in a gangers’ portable rest cabin near a level crossing miles from anywhere. “Freakish misadventure sustained in pursuit of orgasmic enhancement,” the district surgeon had recorded, having noted the classic presence of lewd pinups on the wall and the corpse’s erection. He had also satisfied himself that there had been a perfectly good platform for the man to have stepped from: to wit, a large wooden box used for storing shovels and pickaxes. But this was textbook thinking; an erection was common to all forms of hanging, whereas, for a man of Strydom’s experience, there could be no ambiguity about the fact that the ceiling of the cabin was far too low to have afforded the right drop.
This meant, of course, that the case did make sense-provided he was prepared to accept
Cautious and sweating slightly, but with his fine mind whetted, Strydom wondered whether to pack it in temporarily, or to demand that he be given some assistance. He was given, because of the flu going round, which had incapacitated the records office like a tea break, a Zulu messenger called Alfred.
Just for a minute or two of speechless indignation, Strydom despaired. Alfred’s literacy ran to identifying public notices that affected his life directly, telling him where to go or where not to sit, and to matching the letters on a package against the letters on a solicitor’s brass plate-when he wasn’t delivering by ear, that was. Asking Alfred to pick out the words
Then Alfred, embarrassed by the delay in receiving his orders, twisted his head round to admire the picture on the front of the television-set brochure that Strydom had left lying about.
“You buy, master?”
“I buy.”
“Hau, plenty good picture, that one. I see by the shop.”
Strydom placed an avuncular arm across the man’s khaki-uniformed shoulders and led him to the huge pile of nonwhite inquest papers. There he showed him what sort of photographs he was interested in, reinforced this with some mime, and told him to get going. In fact, it was such an expedient idea that he used it himself.
