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about it. They joined the conspiracy with self-important nods.
    Kramer wanted to take a second look at Miss Le Roux’s underwear. But he was finding Miss Henry’s presence most inhibiting. In fact she was beginning to get on his nerves badly. From the moment she unlocked the door to the flat, the avowed vegetarian had displayed an astonishing taste for gore. He was tired of grunting evasively as she sought to extract details of the Royal Hotel double-killing. And he was tired of being asked if he had given himself to Jesus. The time had come for his Jehovah’s Witness ploy.
    â€œOh, Christ!” he said, looking at his watch. “I’d better get a bloody move on or I’ll be late for Mass.”
    Miss Henry shuddered away into the night.
    And Kramer opened the wardrobe. Nine dresses hung from the rail, each demure and rather dull. There was also a raincoat in a severe military cut and a worn overcoat which had been altered. Nothing here to conflict with the picture the old girls had conjured up. Then he pulled out one of the drawers. In it was a large collection of what women’s magazines termed “romantic undies” while refraining from specifying under what circumstances they would appear so. The colours were strong and the lace a main ingredient rather than a trimming. He thumbed through them again with the idle notion he might have missed something men’s magazines called “exotic”. Some of them came damn close but that was all. It worried him. Bothered him because he could not reconcile the striking contrast between the inner and outer Theresa le Roux.
    Bloody hell. Nothing in the place made sense once you thought about it. He shut the wardrobe, went out into the living-room for his cigarettes, and returned to lie back on the stripped mattress. The low ceiling was white and unblemished by cracks, providing a perfect surface on which to transcribe a confusion of mental jottings.
    But his eyes wearied quickly of the glare and wandered to the print of Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral which hung on the wall beyond the foot of the bed. Its qualities as a best-seller were obvious; a nice, restful scene with a touch of the old spiritual uplift. Yet only two nights before the glass over it had held the reflection of a killer getting his kicks. Oh jesus, this case bent the mind and his had been going flat out since before sunrise.
    Presently, he fell asleep.
    The face above him was black. His right fist heaved up, missed, flopped back. Somebody laughed. He knew that laugh; he had heard it where children played, where women wept, where men died, always the same depth of detached amusement. Kramer closed his eyes without troubling to focus them and felt curiously content.
    Bantu Detective Sergeant Mickey Zondi sat himself primly at the dressing table. Then he opened the large manila envelope he had brought with him and shook out its contents—a batch of photographs and two laboratory reports. As a child at a mission school in Zululand, he had adapted to making do without his own text books. He read fast, read once and remembered. He studied the pictures last of all, aware that Kramer was now watching him through barely parted lids.
    An uncanny thing, that laugh of Zondi’s—it never seemed to come from him, it was too big a sound. But it fitted. The first time he had seen Zondi was outside the magistrate’s court on a Monday when it was thronged so solid with worried wives and families you had to force your way through them. Then the mob suddenly parted of its own volition and through it had come a kaffir version of Frank Sinatra making with the jaunty walk. The snapbrim hat, padded shoulders and zoot suit larded with glinting thread were all secondhand ideas from a secondhand shop. The walk was pure Chicago, yet no black was permitted to see a gangster film. No, here was an original, even if someone, somewhere else, had thought of it all before. Zondi walked that