“Most grateful,” said Strydom, now not giving a fig for the time either.
Pedro, the giant tortoise at the Trekkersburg Bird Sanctuary, was said to have shared Napoleon’s exile on the island of St. Helena. He looked as if he’d had a hell of a life. There were splashes of egret dropping almost half an inch thick on his black shell, and his mouth had a permanent downward twist to it.
Kramer knew how he felt. He empathized.
But decided to wake Zondi all the same. So he got out of the Chev, where he had been dozing uneasily, shook down his trousers to ankle length again, and went across to the bench. It was amazing how the little bugger did it- slept like that, out cold, at the drop of his cocky straw hat, even though the new road system had destroyed the value of the place as a quiet retreat during daylight hours.
Kramer picked up the hat and let the sudden blaze of direct sun burn into the eyelids.
“The bench was comfy, boss,” Zondi said, his old self again.
“Uh-huh. And the new car smelled like you said it did.”
“You’re not so good, then?”
“Worse than you think.”
Zondi opened his eyes and sat up. “In what way?” he asked.
“I switched on the radio just now to see if there was anything on the go in Peacevale.”
“ Aikona, no!”
“Relax, all’s quiet. But you know that case Sergeant Marais was handling? With the snake? Prisoner’s gone and killed himself.”
The vertebrae were exposed.
“Neat, hey?” enthused Strydom.
“Complex ball-and-socket joints, articulation at no fewer than five points.”
“No wonder they can twist about.”
“Ah, but within limits,” said Bose, dissecting cautiously. “Each joint can bend through roughly twenty-five degrees from side to side, but only a few degrees vertically. That’s why there are so many of them, like drawing a circle using lots of tiny straight lines. On the vertical axis, it can take only so much of a curve before snapping. Spinal cord gets pinched, spasm follows… Hmmm.”
Strydom craned forward to see better.
“Just a moment, Doctor. We mustn’t nick ourselves.”
Bose excised a section of the spine and placed it under the special light he used for painting-which had the same color temperature, whatever that meant, as the neon strips in the cases.
“Now use the glass yourself,” he said to Strydom, handing it over. “You’ll see the cord has actually been torn apart; not pinched but-”
“Ja, I see-the same as a banger in a Christmas cracker.”
“So that’s your boy exonerated. I had thought, when you said you were hard pushed for space, that he might have overdone things and effected a fracture in that way. But I doubt very much he would have played tug o’ war with it.”
“Oh, no. Not him. He’s a good worker, never fools around.”
“Then we’re back to the unfortunate young woman. She must have had an exceptional pair on her.”
“Hey?”
“To pull-or counterpull-like that. Quite a lengthy battle it must have been, but I think I can provide you with a respectable explanation for your forensic colleagues.”
“Oh, ja?”
“Do point out to them that snakes are incapable of their legendary capacity for swift cross-country sorties in pursuit of game rangers,” Bose said. “The truth is they easily tire, due to their blood’s slow rate of oxygenation. Terribly sluggish, if I may use the term. As to top speeds, I would put a mamba’s best sprint at somewhere around the four-miles-an-hour mark, but that’s rather a tangent.”
“I get you! Bergstroom’s pulling one way, to bring it round and get it off, but it’s pulling the other way in panic and just for one second it starts to go flop and boomph!”
Bose nodded slowly after due consideration, and then replied, “Would you like me to draft out a more detailed exposition, for inclusion, say, as a footnote?”
“Man, would I appreciate that? Please. But for how long would this have gone on? A minute?”
His mentor politely hid a smile but the big gray eyes leaked it.
“The metabolism of Python regius is not altogether quite as…” Bose paused and rephrased: “The process of suffocation by constriction is always fairly prompt, and yes, as you say, three or four minutes would or could be sufficient. But I’d imagine, with regard to a struggle, it would take at least five times as long to exhaust him.”
Strydom did the sum, then saw the dressing room quite vividly in his mind’s eye: while it was messy and untidy and nothing was in its proper place, it certainly showed no sign of a prolonged struggle. Why, there was the stool, right beside the body, and still upright. The mirror wasn’t straight, but seemed to have been put up that way.
Then somehow he was led on to think the unthinkable.
The colonel had broken his plastic ruler. He placed the halves of it on either side of his blotter and took up the note.
“Where did he get pencil and paper?” he asked Kramer.
“Off Ben, who was acting for him.”
“This was last night? Late?”
“Uh-huh, in the cell.”
“What was the nature of their conversation?”
“Stevenson hoped Ben could get him off the charges. Says he kept asking for it to be settled out of court, like a civil case or something. Ben explained the difference, said he’d have to appear in court today to be remanded, but it wouldn’t take long and he’d get bail. Asked Ben if the press boys would be there, and Ben told him you could never tell-and it wasn’t any good trying to bribe them.”
“You would not have opposed bail?”
“By this time, Marais was in possession of fresh information. Did you know-”
“Later, Tromp; this first. I’ve got to ring Ben Goldstein myself. Already the widow is onto us for ‘unlawful harassment’ of her husband. What the hell did you do at his place yesterday? Now the maid there says she overheard you threatening him with a broomstick!”
“Fairy stories. And as for his wife, she despises his guts.”
“She doesn’t have to anymore, Kramer. She can just cherish a dear, sweet memory of him. That’s trouble you’ve been in before.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Pleased with yourself, hey? Then you take another look-here!”
Colonel Muller dropped the note into Kramer’s lap as he stalked across to the window.
On one side the thing read in neat, but progressively heavier writing:
I am sick of who you think you are. I will NOT take orders to stand up in court and face that kind of publicity. Why should I? I’ll show you I can still be a free man. I’m only sorry for Jeremy.
And, on the reverse side, in thin, hasty loops:
Why not ask Shirley, Lt. Kramer? Maybe it’s too late for me to remember that now though!!! M.S.
So Stevenson had seen that the pen was a sword that cuts both ways, Kramer noted with a smile.
“Now it’s a laughing matter!” the colonel exploded. “You’ve got him crapping himself so hard that the last thing he does is try and bloody cooperate! He scribbles that on the back and then what? He takes his stinking socks and ties knots in them and stuffs them down his throat! They tell me he must have pushed them as far as his finger could reach. God in heaven!”
“Ja, but I think it was him puking up behind them that made the wool seal off tight,” Kramer muttered, staring at the last line again.
“Where’s the district surgeon? That’s his job!”
“Nobody knows, sir. Wife says he had a bad night.”
“Huh! My heart bleeds. Whatever happens, see he knows about the conference at eleven. I want you, the DS, and Marais all here on the dot!”
