Private investigator Rex Carver accepts a mundane commission to recover a gold python arm bracelet and steps right into a spider’s web of intrigue involving the secret services. As the plot ricochets between Paris, Italy, Libya, Tunisia and Ibiza, with Carver dodging bullets from all sides, Canning justifies his reputation as one of the finest thriller writers in the world.
The Python Project
A REX CARVER MYSTERY
Victor Canning
THE PYTHON PROJECT Copyright © Victor Canning 1967
All rights reserved including the right of
reproduction in the whole or in part in any form
CHAPTER 1
Sunshine in a Shady Place
His name was Hawkins and I knew him very well. I’d worked for him—or his company, rather—on and off for the last five years. He was always embarrassed when he had a dubious client—as though it reflected somehow on the good name of his company, though I couldn’t think why because since they had been first established in 1870 they must have been gypped, swindled and cheated hundreds of times. After all, that’s what most people think insurance companies are there for.
‘I’m not saying there’s anything wrong about her,’ he said, ‘but I just get a feeling. If she’d been an old customer I wouldn’t be so sensitive, but she only switched her insurances to us about six months ago. Yes, I’ve a very definite feeling about her.’
Usually when he had that sort of feeling he was right, and he always came to me. It was handy to have someone do your dirty work for you.
He slid a glossy photograph across the desk to me and it skidded fast and fell to the floor. I reached down and retrieved it and felt my arm muscles stiff from my last session with Miggs. The bastard had enjoyed himself for half an hour teaching me new arm-holds and throwing me all over the gym. You couldn’t see more than a yard ahead for the dust from the mats when he had finished.
I looked at the photograph without interest.
‘I don’t want a job. I’ve made some big money lately and it’s put me off work.’ It always did. Besides, outside in Northumberland Avenue it was spring, the cock pigeons chasing the hens around, the cab drivers watching the mini-skirts go by, and an icy wind coming up the street canyon from the river. I thought of golden sands, golden girls, golden nights in casinos, and wondered if they would do anything for the tired feeling I had in the mornings or whether just a bottle of the old tonic from the doctor up the road from my flat wouldn’t be cheaper and more effective. Cheaper, certainly.
‘What I want,’ I said, watching Hawkins’s moist, pebble-grey eyes on me, ‘is a real lift. Salt in the blood. A different beat in the pulse. A sense of discovering a new man inside this weary old frame. Something you can’t get from Ovaltine or Metatone but maybe from the Mediterranean. Certainly not from work. Not from chasing around trying to find out if some woman is trying to cheat your company over a jewellery claim. The odds are high that she is.’
I tapped the photograph.
‘This is the most ghastly bit of Oriental bazaar work I’ve seen for some time.’
‘It’s Indian, seventeenth century, and it’s worth about five thousand pounds. The eyes are diamonds, somewhere around fifty carats each, and each coil is studded along the whole length with emeralds. And the body-work is pure gold.’
‘I still think it’s vulgar. I don’t want work. I want rejuvenation.’ I slid the photograph back to him.
He fielded it with one hand, neatly, and flipped another photograph across with the other. For a moment there was the suggestion of a twinkle in his watery eyes.
‘That’s the owner,’ he said. ‘I brought it along because Wilkins said it was going to be difficult to get you off the ground. She’s worried about you.’
‘She always is. There’s no pleasing her. Hard up or well off, she worries.’
I let the second photograph rest where it had skidded off the desk to the ground.
‘You’re lucky to have Wilkins,’ he said. ‘I’d give her a job any day at twice the salary you pay. I’ve written all the details of the owner on the back of the photograph. Incidentally, she’s a widow and worth about a quarter of a million—and she’s only twenty-seven.’
Just for a moment I felt a flicker of interest. But it died quickly. I just didn’t have the blood count to boost my imagination into orbit. Wilkins was right. Something was wrong with me and it was going to be difficult to get me off the ground. Wilkins was my secretary—and also a partner in Carver & Wilkins. She was thirty-five, spinster, and lived in Greenwich with her father, a retired ship’s steward. She had red hair, blue eyes, no dress sense, and mostly thought nothing of me. She was zero to look at and I don’t know what I would have done without her. She had a fiance, a Swede who was a Suez Canal pilot, and saw him about once a year. I didn’t think he represented any threat.
Hawkins said, ‘Have a look at it. Or haven’t you got the strength to pick it up?’
‘Just,’ I said. I reached down for the photograph. It was face down, the back covered with Hawkins’s notes. The chair tipped a bit and I nearly went over. I came back to a level keel with the photograph, the right way round, a foot from my nose.
I didn’t say anything. But somewhere inside me the motor turned over, fired, missed a few cycles, and then steadied to a quiet tick-over. I stared at the photograph, not hypnotized, but quietly, almost happily, absorbed. Somewhere inside me a thin trickle of adrenalin began to seep into the blood stream.
‘This,’ I said, ‘is not a woman of twenty-seven.’
‘Taken when she was nineteen. The year before she married. She
