Snake (15 page)

“The one on their gate?” Marais asked.

“Uh-huh. That gymkhana was last Sunday. In other words, Ma Stevenson wasn’t going to let anything get between little Jeremy and his moment of glory.”

“But this is hypothesis, man,” the colonel objected. “Or are you sure? Is this from Sam or something?”

“What I got from Sam was just a confirmation. You know him, sir;
you
try to break his bloody ethics. First I did ring him and what I learned was that Stevenson was a henpecked runt and that she really ran everything from the home, using the phone and expecting him to report any problems. No ethics in that—common hearsay, so I find out. I warn him to go easy. He rings back, says I did him a favor, and then a real shyster comes through wanting to slap charges on me. Seems Ma Stevenson is in his place, shouting for justice. So I tell him, too, and he—”

“And that was the last phone call? But what exactly was his story?”

“As soon as Stevenson found the body, he naturally rang her. She said leave everything and come home because she has to think this one over carefully. And when you think about it, that was more a female’s reaction to a dead popsy with boobs like that. A bloke on his own would see Eve—”

“Ja, ja, as a terrible waste; I know. One thing more: do I take it these legal proceedings against us are now being reconsidered?”

Kramer nodded, and then the colonel announced they would wait until the quarter hour for Dr. Strydom to fight his way out of the jungle.

Constable Hein Wessels was so good at his job that if he’d tried free-lancing in another town he would have been arrested.

He stood on the corner of Monument and Claasens Streets, at the top end of Trekkersburg, looking like a waiting-room ashtray. And in unbelievable contrast, he pondered contentedly, to the trim figure, glowing with inner and outer cleanliness, that he had presented on the parade ground six months earlier. On the morning, for example, when he had been asked to forsake appearing in the graduation parade, and to grow his hair hideously long instead.

Now his double life was drawing to an end, but it had been good while it had lasted. As the Bible said somewhere, the better you were, the shorter time you stayed. A number of successful raids by the Drugs Squad, each initiated by his gift for timing, had begun to make things more difficult and, in some quarters, his stranger’s face had begun to ring a bell. Soon it would be back into uniform for him, and the bottom rung to climb. Well, perhaps not quite the very bottom one, because his work had won him praise from above.

Plus warnings from those who had passed on, and who claimed to know the dangers as well as pleasures of belonging to an elite—or thinking you did. They would, for instance, occasionally remind him that he carried no firearm, and ask him to consider why this was true of no other white policeman. But that, surely, was a form of eliteness in itself, Wessels felt.

His mind wandered into arguments like these when there wasn’t anything specific happening. Right then he was just keeping an eye on a yellow car with two black males in it, parked forty yards down Monument Street beside an empty plot and opposite a row of run-down shops, most of which were closed anyway. These blacks weren’t doing anything, simply sitting there, and it was an area with a real mix-up of races during the day, being so near the station.

But Wessels was no fool. He tried to read the mud-splashed registration plate, and then shuffled, hawking and spitting, a little closer. This could easily be a new
dagga
drop-off point. And being Hein Wessels, you just never knew your luck; he might even try and approach them.

Marais put down the telephone and said, “Not at the mortuary, the hospital, or the prison.”

“And who was that on the other line?” asked Kramer.

“Shirley’s office. They say he’s out and they don’t know where to contact him; they’re leaving a message. He’s an interior designer, whatever that means.”

“I don’t think, gentlemen,” said the colonel, “that Mr. Shirley will have anything very useful to add, or Stevenson would have thought of him much earlier. His final statement is accepted.”

That had a ring to it that Kramer accorded a gracious nod. Marais nodded, too, vigorously.

“Furthermore, gentlemen, through an inquiry I myself arranged this morning, the night watchman at the shoe shop by the entrance to the alley states under oath that Stevenson, a known figure to him, went home as the city hall clock was chiming twelve-thirty. He keeps awake by listening for it, he says.”

“Hey, that’s a help,” said Marais, then blushed.

“You have not spoken out of turn, Sergeant, so at ease, man. It
is
a big help. This watchman further states that nobody left the alley from twelve-thirty onwards.”

“What about before then?” asked Kramer.

“Ah, there you spot the weakness. He did his last patrol inside the premises from midnight and reached the pavement only as the clock struck. He remained there until morning.”

Kramer lit a Lucky and waited for the colonel to find his place again among Marais’s notes. God, every conference was the same.

“Right, gentlemen. Miss Bergstroom was last seen alive at midnight and last heard alive slightly before twenty past. Between then and twenty-five past, when she was found by the manager, she had died.”

“And an unidentified male was with her at the time,” Kramer said, unchivalrously cutting across the preamble to steal the colonel’s punch line.

“Oh, ja? So you’ve been doing some thinking, too?”

“Sorry, sir, but it made a difference having it all written down here, and the time to read it.”

Marais put the newspaper down.

“Then you take it from there,” the colonel said petulantly.

Then broke the silence by himself carrying on. “From the evidence before us, it would appear that a male was present. Warrant Gardiner reports that the drinking vessels had been cleaned of any prints, and the wash basin—which is only one reason I want the DS here—had been given a thorough rub-over. Which means, why should any guest—
Ach
, no; let’s do this another way.”

Kramer kept his eyes on the tip of his cigarette.

“This male is with Bergstroom,” said the colonel, “and she gets killed by the snake. It’s a private show maybe. Who knows? Anyhow, she is dead and because he’s high-class—and here we have a fancy button to support that—this gives rise to social fears. He does not want it known that he was in the room of such a person, and at such a time as will cause him embarrassment following the publication of the inquest proceedings.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So he attempts to disguise his presence there. He cleans the glasses, but overlooks in his hurry—he had only seconds—that he put them down in the jam, which the girl would never do. He then wipes over the basin. The place is in such a hell of a mess, he doesn’t notice the button.”

“Or it isn’t his,” said Kramer unhelpfully.

“If Stevenson approaches at this time, there is nobody in the second dressing room, so he can hide there,” the colonel said, not liking being interrupted. “Or he can get out before that, and just pull the front door closed behind him. He faces no real problems.”

“I don’t know, sir. It could have been more than a social fear, as you call it. Who takes prints after an accident?”

The colonel began to fiddle with the pieces of his broken ruler. “Go on, Tromp.”

“Well, there is that chance, because the posters outside all said how dangerous it was, and because what happened seemed so—”

“Strydom?” the colonel said

“One or two little slips in the past, although his examination of the body
in situ
was thorough, and I saw enough of the P.M. to realize that any bruises on the neck could only have been made by—”

“And you think…?”

“He’s been paying too much attention to the bloody snake from the beginning.”

“But I want that snake to get attention, Tromp. I want every detail of the case looked over. I want all the staff interviewed for statements. I want semen from today’s deceased, too, while we’re on the subject. Enough has come to light now to change our whole attitude to the—”

“What about other causes?” Kramer asked. “That blow to the back of the head—was it proved to be from her falling?”

“And poison?” Marais suggested. “I mean, the glasses were cleaned and—”

“
Ach
, no, Marais. He’d be bloody mad to leave them, and that would involve premeditation.”

“Mulberry bushes, Kramer, mulberry bushes.”

“You reject the idea of a blow, sir?”

“Not altogether, but I want everything gone over first. The snake marks are what worry me, in this respect.”

“Why not after it was in its own death throes? Put there to fool us? He probably hit it on the head before touching it.”

“The murderer, you mean?”

Kramer saw the broken edges of the ruler fitted together in a conscious gesture that made his eyes meet the colonel’s and hold their gaze steadily.

It was left to Marais to notice Strydom listening and gloating in the doorway.

9

A
SPACE HAD
been cleared on the colonel’s desk, and shortly afterward an attendant from the museum arrived and placed on it a large enamel tray covered with a variety of colorful bits and pieces.

“But it’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard of,” the colonel said, recoiling at the snake stink of ammonia. “You can’t even imagine someone doing a thing like that!”

“The beauty of it,” murmured Kramer, moving in to watch the demonstration.

“In the heat of the moment, Tromp?”

“Could’ve been, sir—or the bugger knew his snakes.”

“You wanted to see, so I’m showing you,” said Strydom.

“And I can assure you the facts speak for themselves,” added Bose.

It was difficult at times to work out which of them was playing the straight man.

“What happened was that Mr. Bose here said the deceased must have had very strong arms to effect a break in the spinal cord,” said Strydom. “And I had to explain to him that she was of slight to medium build, and that her hands had been found in place toward the ends of the reptile. We then discovered—”

“By empirical means,” Bose interposed.

“Ja, by trying it ourselves with a bit of rope, we found that once you were holding a snake the same length by each end, you didn’t have much power in your arms.”

“The critical moment being when your arms begin to make an obtuse angle at the elbow and the leverage factor diminishes,” Bose further explained. “Hence the difficulty of using a pair of chest expanders to their full width.”

“Ta,” said the colonel, who was good with the general public.

“But for safety reasons she’d keep holding the ends?” asked Kramer.

“Quite,” agreed Bose. “She had to control both head and tail in an effort to—”

“Then we found slight tissue damage where her hands had gripped the python,” went on Strydom, “not so much at the tail end, where the pressure was with the run of the scales, but certainly behind the head, once we’d wiped away surplus bleeding.”

“And considerable damage at two other points much closer to the central loop of the body—and here we refer you to this section from the right lung, which shows severe bruising and even signs of having been torn.”

“This is the liver, also showing contusion,” said Strydom.

“And note, if you will,” said Bose, “the deplorable state of the esophagus.”

Marais tut-tutted.

“And a lot of force was used?” the colonel asked.

“A very considerable degree of it,” Strydom replied, “as we established with the help of another snake when it had thawed—that’s what took us so long. Man, you had to really hammer that thing to get the same amount of damage, squeeze till your whole bloody arm shook. Either the killer was a big bloke, or he was half out of his mind at the time—like when you don’t know your own strength.”

“That’s a point,” said Kramer. “He couldn’t have been just trying to pull it off her?”

“
Ach
, what about the other evidence, Tromp?”

“I don’t know about that,” said Strydom, “but do you try and get a tie off by pulling hard on either side? Never! And besides, he was pulling it this way because, as we said before, the spinal—”

“We’d also like to draw your attention to this sample of skin taken from a point where severe bruising occurred.”

“Ja, Mr. Bose?”

“You’ll observe that the fingertips dug in very deeply.”

“And if that had been the deceased, then her nails—which were long and pointy—would have gone right through,” Strydom declared triumphantly, looking around.

Then Bose slipped out of the room, called the attendant to remove the tray, and made his own quiet farewell.

“Let’s go,” said Kramer.

While nine blocks to the east, a yellow car drew away and turned into Claasens Street.

Wessels, hidden in the narrow entrance to a derelict barbershop, shrugged. He could not win them all. It had just occurred to him that a pickup might have been timed to take place around the corner, when he found himself boxed in by a swaying figure.

“Morning, my baasie! Is my baasie enjoying the sunshine?” It was the colored pusher Rex du Plooi, already with the staggers at that hour, and holding up an empty bottle to his ear as if listening for the sea. Many whites believed coloreds were a mixture of the worst characteristics of all the races whose blood ran in their veins; more often than not, Wessels had discovered, this was gross slander. But in Rex’s case it seemed true, and it needed only some cheap wine to turn him into a Molotov cocktail that might, at any moment, explode.

“Ja, you’ve got it in one, Rex—enjoying the sunshine.” “That’s nice, my baasie, that’s wonderful, I say.”

He must have had a profitable night, and some devious questioning, Wessels knew, could have its rewards. But one foot wrongly placed, with Rex in that condition, could be a foot in one or the other’s grave.

Fear fizzled pleasantly inside him, heightening his perception.

“Seems like you’ve been on a
lekker
trip also—hey, Rex?”

“My baasie?”

“I just said things looked good with you.”