Kramer stirred.
He sat upright behind the wheel of the Chev and opened his window a little. The night smelled as fresh and clean and inviting as Miss Lisbet Louw. A few minutes more and the downpour would ease off enough for him to dash across into Aloe Mansions. It was a great pity he had not been able to park any closer to the flats any sooner.
But the storm had forced him to rest and that was, perhaps, a good thing. He had been on the go for nearly forty-eight hours, counting the time spent half-dozing in court the day before. And really a man owed it to himself to keep enough energy in reserve to cope with the unexpected challenge. Miss Louw, for instance.
The rain belted down.
Kramer shifted his knee to avoid a drip that had found its way in under the rubber seal around the windscreen. The water was astonishingly cold. He found another leak in the same place on the other side. That was the trouble with police vehicles: you never knew where they had been.
The rain tried even harder.
Kramer watched it glut the gutters and then overflow over the road, creating huge, splash-pitted mirrors that tried vainly to reflect an orderly pattern of warm lights from the flats above.
The rain was remorseless.
The hell with having no coat. Kramer leaped out and ran.
To arrive at No. 36 soaked through-although it was not until after he rang the bell that he realized this. His thin suit had put up as much of a fight as a cigarette end in a urinal.
The door swung inward.
Miss Louw was also sopping wet. She had a towel round her body and another round her head.
“Oh, you poor man,” she said and pulled him inside.
“But, miss-” he began.
“Quick, through there before you ruin the hall carpet.”
Kramer found himself shut in a steam-filled bathroom, blinking rapidly, and unable to examine his expression in the misted looking glass. He was certain, however, it was a winner.
“I’m going to dress now,” Miss Louw called out. “The lady next door has a tumble dryer so you put your clothes outside and I’ll take them round. That’s everything, mind. It won’t take long.”
“Hey?”
“Come on, Lieutenant. Be sensible.”
She clattered off in her wooden sandals.
Well, well, that was the first of his three wishes granted-in her flat five seconds and she was yelling for him to get them off. The trouble with wishes was you had to be so specific or they sometimes misfired. Not that this was physically possible with the other two he had in mind.
The suit jacket was easy enough to remove but the trousers and shirt had Kramer grunting and hopping about. If only he had worn underpants that day he would have felt much happier. As it was, she might think he was withholding some ghastly secret. So he added his shoulder holster to the soggy pile as a distraction.
And pushed it all out into the passage.
“Won’t be two minutes,” Miss Louw told him as he sat on the edge of the bath warming his feet in her water.
She was back even sooner.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but Mrs. Turner’s just put in a load of nappies she must have. She’ll do yours straightaway after. Why not come out and have some coffee meantime?”
The Smith amp; Wesson. 38 made one hell of a fig leaf.
“In what, miss?”
“Oh, damn, all the towels are damp. Isn’t there something behind the door?”
Kramer looked at it and shuddered.
“Maybe you could lend me a coat?”
“Not one that would come near to fitting you. You’d tear them.”
“You live alone?”
“Of course.”
That was promising anyway.
“Okay, but no laughing, hey?”
Miss Louw looked most beautiful when she laughed. The pupils of her blue eyes were like eclipses of the moon with a sparkle of stars all around. Her teeth were narrow and neat and just right for the wide, sensuous mouth. Only the tip-tilted nose stayed serious, although the nostrils dilated a fraction.
He had to laugh, too. It was not every day a senior CID officer made his entrance clutching the voluminous folds of a nylon negligee about him.
Then their laughter halted abruptly.
Kramer experienced a different sense of embarrassment and so, apparently, did she. There had been an uncanny exchange of something intimate between them, too subtle for him to catch.
“Nice place you’ve got,” said Kramer, finding an excuse to take his eyes off her.
“Thank you, Lieutenant. Shall I get the coffee now?”
He sat down, crossed his legs firmly, and watched her pour two cups in the kitchenette alcove. Zondi would have given his full approval to such a rump. What a perfect complement it made to the full bosom. That was better.
“Did you come to see me about Hennie?”
“No, Boetie Swanepoel. You’ve heard by now, I suppose.”
“Yes.”
“And…?”
“I think it’s horrible. An innocent child like that.”
“Is that how he struck you?”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“Just that: what did you think of Boetie?”
Miss Louw frowned. She handed Kramer his coffee and stirred her own slowly.
“Then the paper isn’t giving all the details?”
“We are having to be very careful. This could happen again.”
“To whom?”
“Hennie.”
“My God!”
“Or to any of his classmates, probably.”
She went on stirring, staring at Kramer.
“Can I know why?” she asked finally.
“Miss Louw, you answer my questions first and then I’ll tell you. If we do it the other way around, what you say could be affected, if you know what I mean.”
“All right. Go ahead.”
“First, describe Boetie to me as you knew him.”
The coffee was just the way he liked it.
“He-was a nice kid. A bit on the serious side with definite ideas about right and wrong. If, for example, some child was cheating in a test, Boetie would tell me right then and there. This is what made him different to any other boy I’ve come across in five years of teaching.”
“Why did you stress ‘boy’ and not say ‘kid’?”
“Because girls sometimes are like that, although in their case it’s generally spitefulness.”
“Was he perhaps…?”
“I’d say not! Whatever gave you such an idea? Anyway, he’s got a girl friend he dotes on. Little Hester Swart.”
“Sorry.”
“This is worse than filling in reports; you can’t get a proper idea of Boetie from all this.”
“What are his best subjects?”
“Mathematics, English, and art.”
“English?”
“Unusual, isn’t it? He’s got a thing about English, speaks it better than me. He says-said, I mean-it was essential if you want to do well because all the big business in this country was run by English-speakers.”
“He sounds a very bright lad.”
“Only in some ways. In others he was naive.”
“For example?”
“I know the others teased him about dirty jokes because he hardly ever got the point. This wasn’t his being serious so much as ignorant.”
“Or innocent, like you said.”
“Yes.”
“The strong church background.”
“Everything very sacred-marriage and all that. The Ten Commandments.”
“I notice you speak a bit impatiently, Miss Louw?”
“You would if your father had been a minister-and a damned hypocrite at that. Dirty old man.”
The bell rang. Miss Louw closed the living-room door behind her before answering it. Kramer really liked her for that. In fact, he liked her for many reasons.
“But what about your job?” he asked, when she returned with his clothes. “Aren’t you expected under Christian National Education to be a practicing one yourself?”
“What about you, Lieutenant?”
“At weddings and funerals.”
“Huh! And yet who swears on the Bible in court that everything he says is true?”
“Touche. You must scare blokes away with a brain like that.”
“Of course. I like to pick and choose. But this isn’t anything to do with Boetie.”