Free The Gooseberry Fool by James Mcclure Page A

it, and why I didn’t really want to say anything.”
    “Just suppose you were right, though. What would his wife have done?”
    “Her? If that bitch had caught him up to something, she’d have—”
    “Thanks, Miss Weston.”
    It was best the girl should rush off to do her shopping without feeling her lunch hour had been wasted. There was no other justification for leading her into that final, contrived remark, cut short as it had been by shocked pseudo-realization.
    For Kramer knew damn well that Mrs. Paula Wallace could no sooner rig a fatal car accident than get a fairy to stand upright on her Christmas tree. When he had started on about triangles, he had been looking for a bloke in the other apex, not a phantom floozy. Some ingenious lover boy who wanted husband Mark out of the way. Of course there could always have been another triangle—Wallace, floozy and her lawful spouse.…
    “Ach, rubbish,” he said, inadvertently attracting the attention of a waiter.
    “Sub?”
    The point of it all eluded him. He went back to basics. Here was an ordinary accident to which he was giving the full treatment. He wanted to know something about the victim, so he had tried that fine source of office and home truths, the switchboard girl. What she had to say was vague and sentimental and probably half daydreams. Take that nonsense about Wallace changing as he stepped into his work place; it was a tired, sad little trick practiced daily by millions. All that her confidences established was that Wallace had been, in the more acceptable sense of the word, one of her gentlemen. And a dull henpecked hubby to boot. Which was, in all fairness, as much as you could expect out of a freak pileup.
    Yet Kramer felt a fret of frustration and the drag of disappointment. Hell, of course! Man, he was slipping. It was McDonald’s behavior, his blatant anxiety over Pat Weston, which had set a level of expectation for the interview. It had never been reached.
    He paid for his drink and sank it quickly. The logic of it was simple. Number one, as McDonald had claimed, and as Pat Weston had made plain, there was nothing between those two. Number two, this meant McDonald feared she would tell the police something about Wallace which he also knew but would keep to himself. Number three, McDonald had assumed incorrectly that Pat Weston was in possession of such information. Number four, all Kramer need do was pretend to McDonald that she had, in fact, spilled some beans, and see what happened next.
    As he had done his shopping, there was no time like the present.
    Zondi saw the blue Volkswagen again, quite by chance. He had traveled far into an undulating countryside, so eroded and barren it was like taking a close look at the dirt road itself. Any thorn trees had long since disappeared, and so had any grass that was good for cattle—goats were the only livestock capable of survival on the dry spikes that remained. Sure enough, he saw a few of them to begin with, and the huddles of huts from which they had wandered, but then no others beyond a forlorn trading store with a rusted hole in its rain-water tank. This was when the drive had become thoroughly monotonous, and his speed along the seldom-used byway proportionately greater. And so, through accident rather than design, he achieved what few men, however skillfully they strived, ever achieved—he hit a rising guinea fowl full-on with the nose of his car.
    It happened just around a tight bend on the shoulder of a hill and the impact was considerable. A loud thud, a splatter of blood, and another thud as it bounced off the roof. He slammed on his brakes and went into a zigzag skid, finishing up a good hundred yards farther on. Cursing at the delay, he jumped out and wiped the windshield, black feathers with white polka dots confirming his split-second diagnosis.
    Then he looked back up the road. The guinea fowl must have spun off into the boulders and aloes, for it was nowhere to be seen. A pity,