Free The Artful Egg by James McClure

what I was suggesting, so if you’ll—”
    “
Right
out, if you’ve no objection,” said Kennedy, so pale now he looked on the point of collapse. “I don’t think I can take this house another minute.”
    For a moment, Kramer stood undecided, uncertain whether he ought to make the most of this moment, while Kennedy was at his weakest, or to act as his instincts dictated. “I’ll run you home,” he said.
    “Thanks, but there’s no need. I can drive myself quite—”
    “Bullshit, man! You can’t even bloody stand properly!”
    The trouble was, decided Ramjut Pillay, it was very difficult to feel like a private investigator, dressed up in your plastic raincoat, when just about everybody else on the streets of central Trekkersburg was also wearing a raincoat. The worst of the storm had passed, but now a steady downpour had set in.
    Still, he did have something few other people had—a gold badge
(Issued Free with Every Diploma)
pinned to the underside of his jacket lapel—and that at least set him apart from the common herd. Turning his collar up even higher, he moved like a shadow along the inside of the pavement, pondering where to begin probing into the foul murder of Naomi Stride.
    “Ats-zoo!” sneezed Ramjut Pillay. “God’s blessing me and dammit!”
    A head cold was the last thing he needed, right at the start ofhis first major case. Muttering about the changeable weather in Trekkersburg, he put his hand through the slit in the right-hand side of his raincoat and into his trouser pocket, groping for a handkerchief. He felt instead a wad of crumpled envelopes, and realised with a sickening lurch that not only had he forgotten to change out of his Post Office trousers, but he’d also somehow absconded with some of the mail.
    The seriousness of his situation weighed so heavily on him that he was forced to find a place to sit down, and went into the public lavatory reserved for males of his race behind the city hall. There, bolted into the last cubicle in the line of four, he gingerly withdrew the mail from his pocket and looked to see what names and addresses were on it.
    He should have guessed: every item had been destined for Woodhollow—and there was the new English stamp he had coveted.
    “Oh, dearie me,” sighed Ramjut Pillay, now with a faint recollection of stuffing the envelopes into his pocket as he fled from the house in wild panic. “We are in a considerable pickling, are we not?”
    And he shuddered as he pictured what would happen if he took these items of mail round to his superior at the Post Office. From the outset, Mr. Jarman had made it very clear that the worst,
the very worst
crime any postman could commit—no matter what his excuse—was pocketing mail instead of leaving it at the given address. Instant dismissal would be automatic, with instant arrest on a criminal charge of tampering to follow, Mr. Jarman had warned.
    “Ah!” exclaimed Ramjut Pillay, having a sudden bright idea. “There is no difficulty here. I am delivering these tomorrow, just as if—”
    But how could he, now he was under suspension? A prickle of icy sweat broke out on Ramjut Pillay’s brow. He was trapped, forced into a corner from which there could be no escape. Unless.…
    He counted the envelopes—six were missing, if he remembered correctly. Six letters and a circular he must have dropped in the room where he’d discovered the deceased lady. Good, then those would account for why he had called at the house, and the rest he could destroy, claiming he’d never seen them. None was registered, none had been recorded in any way.
    And he was about to begin tearing them up into very tiny pieces, for flushing down the contrivance upon which he sat, when he had another sudden bright idea. What if a vital clue to the murder lay in one of the letters he held in his hand? Shouldn’t he first take a look before destroying possible evidence? After all, he had been trying to think of a good place to begin his