The Artful Egg Read Online Free PDF Page A

relieved to see Miss Simson being coaxed away, with several backward glances, a minute or so later, leaving him free to interrogate the postman as he saw fit.
    “Well, well,” he said, handing Ramjut Pillay back the letter, “who was that old fool calling an idiot? Anyone can see that you are indeed a very educated man—and it isn’t often we detectives get a chance to speak with such a scholar, so this is for me a great privilege.”
    “It is?” said Ramjut Pillay, sitting up and polishing his glasses.
    The body lay quite naturally, thought Kramer. So often the limbs had an ugly twist to them, an arm bent at an impossible angle, or a leg turned in underneath, but here it suggested simple repose, relaxation.
    “I think she was probably lying just like this when it happened,” remarked Dr. Christiaan Strydom, the diminutive District Surgeon, scratching at the back of his shock of grey hair. “But why she was nude at the time, don’t ask me.”
    “Ach, I don’t think I have to,” said Kramer. “There’s her clothes over there, and right here, by the couch, is her wet swimming-costume. I reckon she had just taken the cozzie off, and felt like a bit of a lie-down. Y’know, a couple of minutes to get her breath back after twenty lengths—then
choonk
.” And he made a downward stabbing motion.
    “H’m,” said Strydom, probing deeper into her side and altering the angle of his penlight torch. “Ja, that would fitthe facts as we see them, only what was she doing swimming at about one in the morning? You saw what her temperature was—she can’t have died any earlier.”
    “She was a writer, hey? Maybe she liked to work late, only she decided on a swim to freshen her up again. I see she left a page in the typewriter next door, so she could have been going back to it.”
    “And what if a servant had seen her?”
    “You don’t expect servants in the house at one in the morning, do you? Besides, no servants seem to have been on the property, although Uniform is still checking.”
    “You’re very full of guesses today, Tromp,” grunted Strydom, taking up his magnifying glass. “Try to guess what she was stabbed with.”
    But Kramer remained where he was for the moment, several feet away towards the sliding window. This was the last chance he’d have of seeing Naomi Stride looking reasonably human, and he wanted to build up a picture of her, something personal he could hold in his memory when everything else about her was coming to him secondhand.
    She was basically what the buxom Widow Fourie would describe as petite, being five-one at the most and as light, in all probability, as the average well-filled golfbag. The Widow Fourie often resorted to this comparison with golfbags, which was consistent with the irrational, poorly disguised envy that such women aroused in her. As for the shape of Naomi Stride’s body, it wasn’t at all bad for someone middle-aged, once proper allowance had been made for the fact that the belly had begun to distend with death a little, it being a day well up into the nineties. Perhaps the thighs were slightly plumper than they might have been, yet the cushioning effect this gave to the area around her dark triangle was undoubtedly attractive; and, as for her breasts, they were surprisingly youthful, suggesting that if she’d had children she had certainly fed them with bottles. Itwas a pity that blood, pouring from the hole in her upper left side, had streamed down over the nipples, congealing into an unconscious attempt at posthumous modesty. Even so, a little of the textured areola on either side was still visible, defining a neat circumference the size of a cent, and reinforcing that youthful illusion. Her heart-shaped face had a touch of innocence in it, too, but was wholly without laughter-lines, rather surprisingly. Such a mouth, small and perfectly formed for planting light, fondly amused kisses, should have had a bracketing of fine wrinkles, and the intense blue eyes