A short one today, because the Inspector's file for this clue is short. Don't let that fool you.
The weather station at the Jonkershoek forestry office recorded rain on the afternoon of 30 September starting at 16:30 and continuing, steady and cold, until about 19:30. Three hours of proper Cape spring rain, the kind that finds its way into your socks through your boots.
Eduard came in from his walk through the vineyards at five o'clock, drenched, muddy to the knee, and complaining about it. Stefaans, who had just got back with the Professor, remembers the puddle on the hall floor, because he mopped it.
Meanwhile in the garden. It rained again on Thursday, and the Inspector, trapped on the stoep with Oom Lourens, heard the whole story of the great Marico flood of 1981, when a man called Gysbert tried to row to church in a zinc bath and arrived, eventually, at the wrong church. "And the point, Oom?" she asked when he finally stopped. Oom Lourens looked out at the rain. "The point, Inspector, is that in weather like this a person gets wet. Everybody. Even the ones who say they don't."
Later, when the rain cleared, the Inspector saw Oom Lourens in the garden of his cottage with a tape measure, pacing out the vegetable beds and the stoep and the lemon tree he planted in 1986. He wrote the numbers in a little book. When she asked what he was measuring, he said, "What a man has, Inspector. So he knows."
PS: When Bartolomeu Dias rounded the tip of Africa in 1488, the story goes that he named it the Cape of Storms, and that King John II of Portugal, hoping for better publicity, renamed it the Cape of Good Hope. Anyone who has been caught out in a Jonkershoek downpour will tell you both names are accurate.