The Artful Egg Read Online Free PDF Page B

mortuary tray.
    At this point, Kramer, who never had much time for parties, did what he generally did at them, and took himself off into a quiet room, closing the door behind him.
    The room he chose for this was the one that had the typewriter in it and books filling the shelves on every wall, all the way up to the beamed ceiling. Seating himself in the large swivel chair at the desk, he lit a Lucky Strike, tucked the spent match into his breast pocket, and leaned back, delaying the moment when he would look to see what Naomi Stride’s last words had been. He had a feeling they’d come as something of a disappointment.
    Not that Kramer had any high literary expectations of the woman, still less had he ever read anything of hers before, having no interest in the much thumbed collection of banned works which the Vice Squad kept in its office. It was just that if working Murder and Robbery had taught him anything, then it was the dreary fact that most people died when they were least prepared for it, and very rarely with any style. The most he could hope for was that she’d just typed: “And then.…”
    He turned his attention instead to the room and its furnishings. They were curiously unsettling, and reminded him of something. He allowed his mind to go blank, while concentrating on the burning tip of his cigarette. Then he had it: Boy Joshua’s wheelbarrow.
    Boy Joshua was one of the best-known figures in Kwela Village, the vast black township of identical two-roomed,concrete-block houses where Zondi had once lived with his family. Each and every day, Boy Joshua could be seen trundling that cloth-covered wheelbarrow about, carrying in it, as the victim of a tropical disease that enlarges testes to monstrous proportions, his balls. People marvelled at their size, and even those well used to the sight seldom failed to accord Boy Joshua a certain veneration, which he found very pleasing—as did his three wives. Once a white doctor, working at the township’s tuberculosis clinic, had sent for Boy Joshua and promised to rid him of his remarkable condition almost overnight, as there happened to be a very simple cure for it. Boy Joshua, according to bystanders, had left that clinic very quickly indeed, pushing his wheelbarrow all the way to the top of the hill without once stopping, which was in itself a feat that won him further notoriety. One had only to glance at the barrow to gauge the considerable weight of it, even when the contrivance stood empty. Boy Joshua had been decorating it for years, twisting coathangers and other short lengths of wire to form a high arch across the front, and then attaching to this arch every interesting trifle that caught his eye. Among the more readily identifiable were old sparkplugs, keys, gear-wheels, used ballpoint pens, pieces of mirror, broken combs, wheel-nuts, chrome-plated petrol-caps, light-bulbs, copper tubing off-cuts, soft-drink cans, throwaway cigarette-lighters, piston rings and colourful circuit-boards.
    Kramer had thought he’d never see its like again, but here in this room, in what Naomi Stride had presumably called her study, was evidence of much the same thing. Without getting up, he could count three large bowls filled with beach pebbles, and in the copper vase on the mantelpiece was a handful of old feathers. Egg-shaped stones and pieces of wood lay dotted about everywhere; there were quite a few shiny white bones, oddments of driftwood, a baboon’s skull, yellowing greetingcards, three stuffed finches under a glass dome, small picture frames crammed with too many snapshots, old-fashioned green bottles in different shapes, bulrushes in one corner, and dozens of tortoises made of everything from porcelain to dough, occupying the front edge of the bookshelves. More greeting cards, postcards, letters and even a telegram or two protruded from between the books themselves, and into what space remained she had squeezed further collections of rubbish, such as strangely