James Mcclure - Snake

Smith opened a door for Strydom at the top of three flights of stairs and excused himself.

The room had a very high ceiling and enormous windows which filled it with the cold light of the rain clouds. The furnishings were awesomely Victorian, and Strydom felt as though he had stepped back through time to his medical school. Some of the smells were familiar, too.

“Good afternoon. I’m Strydom, the DS,” he said to a large man with white hair working at a table. “You’re Mr. Bose?”

The expert turned round and stared vaguely, as if he wasn’t prepared to say anything until this vision had fully materialized. Then his manner changed.

“The python?” he asked softly.

“That’s right. Here-you take it and tell me what you can do for me, what the chances are.”

Strydom drifted over to the table and saw that Bose had been engaged in painting a perfect plaster cast of a puff adder, applying his colors a scale at a time. So that was how it was done.

“Not what I expected,” said Bose.

Strydom looked round. The python had been laid out along the edge of a bench and Bose was gently feeling its middle.

“Well, I did describe the circumstances.”

“That’s just it. Or did you break its back?”

When the full post-mortem report on Sonja Bergst-room arrived by messenger from the district surgeon’s office, Kramer took Marais aside and handed him a page.

“What’s all that boil down to?” he asked

Marais read carefully and then said, “Instantaneous?”

“Uh-huh, near enough. But there’s no need to go shouting about it.”

“Why? Don’t you think he’s telling the whole truth yet, sir?”

“Man, I’m not sure. It sounds okay-but I think you should first worry him a bit more. You never know. Here-look at this.”

And he handed Marais another page.

“Hell, a semen stain!”

“External. No sign of sexual interference or recent intercourse, Doc notes. He’s just put it down for the record, query analysis. Could be older than Saturday night and we don’t know the young woman’s bathing habits. With her kind, that’s show business, Marais.”

“But it’ll give us a group?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And if it’s the same as…”

“Not much relevance in court, but the idea will fry the bastard nicely all the same. She took a break between acts-get what I mean?”

Marais got. He reddened, being young for his age.

“But how do we…?”

“I’ll think of something,” said Kramer, beginning to stroll back to his office. “She had a divan in there, right? And an ashtray? Waste bin? What kind does he smoke?”

“Small cheroots. But with all due respect, sir, I mean-is this really necess-er?”

“Ask her next of kin when you see them again, old son. That’s who I work for.”

She had none, but Marais seemed to get the point all the better for that.

Zondi tried three informants, and lost each in a cloud of dust at the mention of Chainpuller Mabatso. As the lieutenant said on these occasions, it was like trying to interest virgins in a rape course. Whatever that meant exactly.

But as far as Chainpuller himself was concerned, Zondi now felt there was little doubt involved.

The how and why were another matter.

Chainpuller put a shudder through most men. Not because he was big-he was five foot one; or because he was enormously strong-he used two hands to shell a peanut. But because he was tangibly evil.

Whereas Zondi would throw himself on a man half again as big as himself, prepared to gouge and bite and take as much in return, the thought of touching Chainpuller lightly with one finger was more than he considered the call of duty. It was like being expected to handle one of those flat scorpions, the dull gray kind that skitter in the corner of rooms where dead tramps are found, somehow very wise and aware of your fear of them.

There was more to Mabatso than that. After his ten years in a penal colony, to which he had been sent, as a robust youth, on the word of his brother, Chainpuller had created for himself a reputation for obsessive privacy. Even the brother had moved away from their hut-nobody was ever sure where to.

While Chainpuller lived on alone, high on a slope overlooking Peacevale, sitting with his back against the porch upright and watching. Ostensibly he had become a witch doctor, and wore inflated pig bladders in his plaited spikes of hair, but as no one seemed ever to visit him, at least during daylight hours, word got around that he was really a wizard.

Word also got around-more times than Zondi could remember-that whenever there was a mysterious death in the township, Chainpuller was behind it. The wizard did nothing to discourage these rumors, and when challenged by a relative made reckless through grief, would simply make a fresh mark in the mud wall beside him.

Yet no police investigation had ever been able to link him in any other way to what had happened.

Once, another black sergeant had tried to prove that the gifts of cash left near the hut were not given in charity but as blood money-payments made to have the donor relieved of a burdensome wife or mother-in-law. This sergeant had died in his sleep before bringing any charges

Such stories made the lieutenant laugh, and call Zondi a superstitious kaffir, yet even he stood back when a visit to the hut was demanded of them. Just as the arrival of certain people can make you suddenly in a party mood, in the same way Chainpuller’s presence was like having shadow put in your blood.

So a common denominator between Chainpuller and the robberies could be found in the uncanny. This was, however, at the level of pure gossip and rumor, and Yankee Boy Msomi operated some way above that.

Making the idea at once less acceptable and twice as much worth looking into.

Zondi’s wait was rewarded. He snatched the passer-by from the street and handcuffed him to a drainpipe.

“I will leave you there for Chainpuller,” he snapped, “unless you and me have a good talk together.”

This one was not going to get away.

Kramer splashed up through the puddles to the door of the Wigwam and found Joseph Ngcobo hunched there on his haunches, using the drizzle to soften his half loaf of stale bread.

“Come to clean, hey?”

Ngcobo sprang up beaming, quickly swallowing his last mouthful, showing all the painful eagerness of a poor man paid by the day. Then his face fell.

“Boss not coming this morning,” Kramer explained, flipping him a coin for his trouble, glad that Zondi wasn’t there to make him feel a fool.

“ Hau, thanks!” said Ngcobo, getting the hell out before lightning hit him next.

Untrue. The boss was coming. It was just that Marais had been unable to find a parking place, and the now pathetically cooperative Stevenson had offered up his personal bay in a multistory one short block away.

Kramer tried the Yale key, stepped inside, and left the door unlatched. Then he saw a new show card propped on a child’s easel that had been covered in glitter. The card announced:

YOU KNEW HER-YOU LOVED HER-SEE THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED-MEMBERS ONLY-NOTHING HAS BEEN TOUCHED!

It made him proud to be a pig.

A note had been left in the eagle’s beak in the phony totem pole disguising a coat stand. The message was that someone signing himself Mohammed had finished work at 4 A.M. and respectfully requested prompt payment-in cash-of the sum agreed.

That sent Kramer clattering down the steps and across the stage. The warning notice had gone and the passage was carpeted in blue and had striped wallpaper over the cracks. Even the little stairs had been covered.

He took them at a bound, examined the key ring, chose a chunky old-fashioned one, and hurried down the passage.