That could have led to an awkward pause, to all sorts of imaginings about what had led to this poor sod’s burying himself alive in the backveld, yet Kramer handled it smoothly, he thought, by saying; “Register.”
“It’s by your elbow. His address is ‘care of’ the YMCA, Hillbrow, Johannesburg.”
“Then I’ll not bother to look. Just a couple more questions.”
“Ja?” said Ferreira, trying to find his rubber band again among all the papers. “Keep talking.”
“I need to know if anyone contacted Tommy here on Monday. You say he didn’t get any mail, but what about phone calls?”
“None I know of, and I was working here in the office almost all day. He vanished while I was still in here, doing the bar receipts.”
“Any strangers in the bar that night?”
“No; I’ve already asked to see if they knew where he went. Just the usual crowd.”
“And has anyone been here since Monday? Any new guests?”
“Nobody.”
Kramer took a look at the register after all, noted the number of Erasmus’s room, and got to his feet.
“I’d like to see 14,” he said.
“Seems a bit pointless,” objected Ferreira, scratching under his sunglasses. “If you want his things, the boy will put them in your Land-Rover. Frikkie and I were in there this morning.”
“All the same, I’d better.”
It was true that Kramer hadn’t any idea of what he might be looking for. But then again, it was equally true that Ferreira and Jonkers had been expecting to find very little-and that men who found what they expected seldom looked further.
8
There was a decided contrast between the weekly tariff pinned behind the door of Room 14 and the standard of amenities to be found therein. The floor was red concrete, softened and warmed over one square yard by locally made grass matting, and the four unevenly plastered walls were sloshed over with lime that came off on your hand. The plumbing to and from the cracked washbasin was the gray plastic stuff trained baboons can screw together, and both taps said cold on the top. The wardrobe and dressing table were so flimsy they moved bodily toward you at the tug of a knob, and the bed, a knee-high divan, seemed to have prolapse problems. Without question, the only furniture worth a second glance-not excluding the two blotchy mirrors-was an armchair of vast proportions in front of the French windows.
These windows, Kramer discovered, opened into an enclosed courtyard once used as a KIDDIES KORNER. He turned away with a slight shudder and applied himself to searching the room very thoroughly, scoring a great big fat zero. So he began on the armchair again, and Ferreira lost interest, mumbled something, and went off to have the leper’s bell rung for tea, leaving him alone.
Zondi slunk in then, raised an eyebrow, and said, “The very object of my intentions, boss.”
“This chair? Why? Have you picked up something?”
“Maybe. The bedroom boy has been telling me what a strange boss this was. He says that every morning, when he came to do the room, Boss McKenzie would be sitting in the big chair and wouldn’t move. This made his task very difficult, and so he reported it to Boss Ferreira, but he said it didn’t matter.”
“How about that?” Kramer said, tipping the chair back.
“There was another strange thing about him as well-he would wash his underwear instead of leaving it for the girls to do.”
“Uh huh? Or are you pulling my leg?”
Grinning, Zondi went on: “Honest to God, boss. He would leave it in the basin to soak, then hang it up in that courtyard out there. The bedroom boy was very cross about this because it meant he had to go into the next room to damp his cleaning cloth.”
Kramer laughed and tried the chair for comfort. “He just sat like this? How? Like a dummy?”
“Reading a book or a newspaper, the bedroom boy says. Never has he known another person in this place to behave in such a fashion.”
Back went the chair again. “Come on, you’ve got the skinny arms,” Kramer ordered. “Let’s see what you can 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.
“Siphon!”
“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.”