Snake

by James McClure

  Zondi spoke in Zulu to Martha and then confirmed this had been the sequence of events—although she had nearly been seen by her employer.

  Marais got an attack of the old trouble and hastened off to the bog.

  Martha said something else.

  “She asks if she can now know what girl has made a complaint against her master,” Zondi explained. “She is not stupid, this one.”

  “What we need now,” said Kramer, rising to the surface, “is that husband of hers to testify about the time. Where does he live? Bloody Durban, I suppose?”

  “Hau, no, Lieutenant. He is the first one I catch.”

  “Hey? How come?”

  “The story Boss Wessels told about a man in her kia sounded strange in my ears, because I can see she is a churchwoman and would not give away her favors.”

  “Where was he, then? You had only—”

  “Right next door at number thirty-two. I said to him there would be no trouble about the permit offense this time if he was willing to be of assistance.”

  “Quite right,” said the colonel, and then noticed it was half-past four.

  Marais had been sent on his own to bring Shirley in for questioning, so Wessels shot over to the canteen to buy himself a quick Coke.

  He was drinking it in the doorway, glorying in what he knew and yet had to keep to himself for the moment, when Warrant Officer Gardiner waved him over; then, realizing Wessels was armed and couldn’t enter, actually made his way across to him.

  “How’s the case going?” Gardiner asked.

  “Not bad at all, sir.”

  “Then you’ve found the third guy?”

  “Oh, that one, you mean. We haven’t had time for that business today. When I left CID to come over, the lieutenant had just started getting brainwaves that the shooting was done by the one at the back door.”

  Gardiner’s eyebrows did their thing.

  “Ja, and then there was the problem of where did the passenger go, and Mickey said why not under the dashboard?”

  “I must be pissed,” said Gardiner.

  “No, even for a coon, that’s logical. They used old cars, which still had the high doors, and there are no pavements in Peacevale to give passers-by the extra elevation, no double stories either. And as Kramer says, you count the number of persons in a vehicle by counting the heads, and if one suddenly goes you think you must have missed looking that way for a moment.”

  “Let’s talk in the passage,” said Gardiner, pushing Wessels out with a friendly poke in the belly. “Now try and explain this better where I can hear you.”

  “It’s dead simple, the way he’s got it now. The one round the back in the bandages—maybe they are even hiding the gun—arrives at the scene independently and on foot. The other two roll up in front of the shops, and the passenger gets his head down. It’s the driver that keeps the lookout for when the pedestrian traffic drops, then he gives a honk like I heard him do, but the kaffirs are so used to their own kind doing noisy things like that they forget. And the shots have them—”

  “And the one with the gun?”

  “By that time, when the horn goes, he has found a shop that isn’t being guarded at the rear. He goes in, looks round to see there are no customers, shoots the storekeeper, grabs the money, and he’s out the back way while everyone is coming up off the grit watching the car tear away. Now even if that car hits a roadblock, the two in it have no money, no gun—nothing to worry them. And they meet up again later.”

  Gardiner shook his head.

  “It’s not all just imagination, sir. It seems that the lieutenant warned this Lucky bloke, for instance, and now he points out that Lucky was shot, not near his till, but up near the shopwindow, as if he’d seen the car and was watching it. Plus Doc Strydom said he’d been shot on the turn—the turn towards, not away, you see? And wouldn’t Lucky have backed towards his till if the man came in the front? Just think how many times that car may have stopped at different places and the back doors were shut. Or they could have got the record shop instead of the butcher—maybe that was their intention Pot luck, Kramer says!”

  “Sick!” Gardiner laughed Three prisoners were led between them down to the cells.

  “And another thing about Lucky—his shop is built so high off the ground it’s possible he could see the passenger was ducking down and felt no immediate danger. Then he hears a sound, turns, and the shot gives the car its signal—”

  “Okay, okay, I’ve got the picture,” Gardiner said, handing his glass to the small black helper. “But there’s a few things wrong with it. Fine as far as Peacevale goes, but there was no way that bugger could have attacked from the rear in the café. I drew the plans.”

  “They’ve got them out now. Kramer’s working on the theory he came in through the bog window and out through the gents’ door under those stairs. I admit that once the car was gone I didn’t think to seal off—Jesus!”

  “Aikona, he couldn’t have had time to grab even the small change and get back to the bog door before the coolie looked out of the kitchen.”

  “The lieut’s thought of that. He could have stood behind the kitchen door when it came open.”

  “And how long did you take to come in the front?”

  “Ach, these aren’t my ideas, you know! That Mickey is now suggesting they’d thought of a better plan and that’s why they came into town, to try it on an easy place first. He’s just copying one of Kramer’s old ideas, thinking it’s smart.”

  “Still, maybe he’s got a point there worth reminding.”

  Wessels sneaked a look at his watch, making it obvious.

  “I can take a hint, Wessels,” reproved Gardiner. “Only it’s you who has been doing all the talking and I came over to see if you’d save me a journey by telling Kramer something.”

  Wessels nodded, and shook the fizz out of his Coke so he could drink the rest quickly.

  “It’s just this: he’d better nail that other bloody psychopath quick so this lot can get some sleep.”

  “Who, sir?”

  “There’s no less than five Portues in with us tonight, all asking questions about the Munchausen. They were put on to me to hear about the car crash and the print and all the rest, but they keep on like they’re not so sure we’re just bulling them. You know—giving each other looks. It’s not making them popular with the blokes, and it’d be a pity if we have to ban outsiders if this goes on.”

  It did not sound like a message that Kramer would receive sympathetically, but Wessels promised to relay every word. Then he ran back to the CID building in time to see Marais leading a very cool-looking young man about town up the stairs.

  14

  ON THE STOOL where Martha Mabile had sat, Peter Andrew Shirley now reposed, languid and unmoved by all that had been said to him over the past six hours.

  Kramer had never seen a man conceal his feelings of guilt so completely. Even the innocent always showed some signs of tension as they began to attach wild fears to trifles. And yet that unconscious act of his with the underpants had shown beyond a doubt that the smooth-talking bastard suffered a bad conscience.

  Prick it hard enough and the rest would explode in a gruesome mess of sobbed confession. But so far every dart of fact had bounced off.

  Kramer, working on his own now, tried again. “You advanced your mother’s clock before waking her, you advanced the girl’s clock outside her kia door—you did this to regain the twenty-five minutes you lost while causing the death of Sonja Bergstroom by strangulation!”

  He might as well have said by giving her whooping cough.

  “You had the opportunity to retard both timepieces—and so nobody would notice you were twenty-five minutes behind the proper time, you made a long journey that swallowed it up in alleged stops. The truth is you drove hard all the way.”

  “Timepieces is quite a word coming from you,” said Shirley. “I must tell my father that. He will be amused.”

  “What else will amuse him? The idea
his son is a killer? That he used his mother to take the edge off suspicion by being late for a framed interview?”

  “He will certainly rather take to the idea that anyone could suggest I’d do such a thing as you allege and then take no precautions of my own—beyond fiddling the timepieces—to cover my tracks. Nobody interested in self-preservation could be such a fool.”

  “I see them every day.”

  “Oh, do tell me—where, Lieutenant Kramer?”

  “On the road, in sports cars. Driving at speeds which are excessive without due care and attention, relying for their own safety on other road-users obeying the law and doing the right thing.”

  “You’re quite a philosopher!”

  “Uh-huh. It does seem to sum up the philosophy of a poop who kills a girl and then expects everyone else will do the right thing—only Monty Stevenson didn’t bloody do the right thing, did he?”

  “What?”

  “It was his own lawlessness that first drew this matter to our attention, although it would have happened anyway in the course of time.”

  “How much more have we in common, poor Monty and I?” Shirley asked, once again as cool as ever.

  “Not your semen group, for a start!”

  That was badly timed. Shirley shut up and made no further responses of any kind until nearly midnight.

  When Kramer remembered he was dealing with a possible liberal.

  “What is your attitude to the Bantu?” he asked.

  “They’re people.”

  “I see. With feelings and all that, same as you and me?”

  “So they say.”

  You could not expect much more than that in a police station.

  “What if I now disclose to you that a Bantu is willing to give evidence that confirms the tricks you played with the clocks?”

  Shirley laughed, making it loud and mocking.

  “You think he’s a stooge, then?”

  “Of course, and I’m sorry for him; perjury is—”

  “You don’t suck up to the Bantu because of a bad conscience about what you did to one of them?”

  “You’re ideas are very primitive, if I may say so.”

  “The Bantu’s name is Aaron.”

  “He can’t be Jewish as well, surely! A Sammy Davis in Trekkersburg?”

  “Would you like to meet him?”

  “Love to.”

  Kramer rang down to Zondi and told him to bring the man up. They arrived so quickly it seemed that only seconds later the door of the interrogation room was swung open to reveal the pair of them under the passage’s hard light.

  “There he is,” said Kramer. “There’s Aaron.”

  Shirley swung around on the stool and stared without interest at the solemn figure in a cook boy’s suit. Then his eyes narrowed slowly before opening wide.

  “Him!” he gasped.

  And turned to Kramer as if he had just seen an apparition and not a baffled old wog.

  “I’ve never heard anything like it, sir,” said Wessels, following Kramer back to his office. “He just fell apart!”

  “I knew he had a bloody conscience, man. It was just finding the right way of breaking through to it.”

  “He seemed more poop-scared than sorry to—” “Ach, leave that now. Tell me what all this is about psychopaths; that’s more my kettle of fish.”

  Wessels repeated Gardiner’s message, ending it in the office itself.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Warrant Gardiner also made a point about the gunman having enough time to take the small change.”

  “Which he didn’t do at Lucky’s,” Kramer said, dumping himself wearily down in his chair and yawning.

  “No, sir?”

  “Got—sorry—pinched by some mini skabengas.”

  The yawn went across to Zondi, waiting for a lift in his corner, and then to Wessels.

  “This was the first time they take the change,” Zondi muttered, forgetful of the formalities. “Is it not strange? What was of no use to them—the small coin—was of use to us, however.”

  “Ja, that’s true,” Wessels agreed. “At least somebody has gained something worthwhile from all this.”

  With another yawn, he said good night and slopped off.

  “Zondi!” Kramer said.

  Like black lightning it had hit him.

  The store up near the station, which sold cigarettes under bright lights until all hours, was empty of customers.

  A car carrying two men screeched to a halt outside it and one man jumped out.

  Kramer was lucky not to be shot crossing the threshold.

  “Put it away, Fred, and come here!” he ordered the squat, currently unjolly man in the apron who held a .25 Beretta in both hands.

  “Mother of God, don’t do such a thing again, Mr. Kramer! This floor I just wipe!”

  “Here! Move it!”

  Fred, short for Fernando and then some, hurried across, while his family, who had been listening to the radio in the back room, peered out.

  “Is there something you wish Fred to do for you?”

  “Yes, tell me two things. I rang Sister Maria today—y’know, Mr. Funchal’s daughter?—and she said Da Gama was running the family business now. On what sort of basis?”

  “Basis? My English.…”

  A lanky teenager, with a downy mustache, came over and gave his father a long, urgent sentence in Portuguese.

  “You know what basis means now?”

  “I tell my father not to talk,” the youth said.

  “Then you’ll do,” Kramer replied, snatching him by the scruff of the neck and running him out to the car.

  In which his attitude changed as Zondi circled the other end of town.

  “So Funchal’s death made them suspicious, hey?”

  “They say if it had been any kind of accident or a sudden sickness or anything like that, then they would have come straight to the police.”

  “And told us what?”

  “But when they read that these blacks have already done the same in the township, and that a policeman saw them outside the café, they have to believe it. Then they read that the blacks are dead and no more investigation will be done, and that starts them talking again.”

  “Who said it had stopped? It would have if we’d not got on to there being a third—which was thanks to a proper print job, that’s all.”

  Zondi, alone on the front seat, looked into his rear-view, which was adjusted to reflect the youth’s strained face.

  “You don’t answer questions you don’t like, do you?” Kramer said, lighting a cigarette.

  “I answer all of them, mister.”

  “Who are they, then?”

  “The men of our community.”

  “And Da Gama’s the one they’d be suspicious of?”

  The Chev cruised another block, passing the mosque.

  “Let me tell you what I’ve got to admit,” said Kramer, earning a quick turn of the head from Zondi. “To us in this country, a Portuguese man sells milk shakes and biltong. But Moçambique wasn’t one bloody big café, was it? Hey? What are you studying for?”

  The India-ink stains on the fingertips showed up even in the streetlights.

  “Engineer.”

  “Then you understand what I’m saying, don’t you?”

  “Da Gama—”

  “Yes, what was he before, back in LM?”

  “When was that?”

  “Before Frelimo took over—Christ, you mustn’t play games with me!”

  “Frelimo,” the youth repeated, as though tasting some irony in the word. “One day very soon after the refugees come down through the Transvaal from the border, Mr. Funchal brings this man to my father’s tearoom and says he is the son of an old friend. He asks us to welcome him among us, for he has lost everything in the takeover. We are all very sorry for him and he seems a nice fellow. But then we are South African citizens, and so it is not until other men come from Moçambique that the stories begin.”

  �
�They knew Da Gama?”

  “No; that is the very reason for suspicion.”

  “He was from somewhere else? Or are you saying that, in his way, he had a job like.…”

  The youth looked at Kramer and said, “But here the people know you. There are initials for them I cannot remember now.”

  Zondi was coasting in neutral, trying to catch every word and make sense of it.

  “Secret police,” said Kramer, and yawned again.

  As the Chev picked up speed.

  Sister Maria, in a pretty dressing gown, tightly belted, opened the Funchal front door to their knocking.

  “I’m sorry to wake you, Sister, but my boy here has just made a report to me that Mr. Da Gama should know about. It concerns—”

  “I am sorry, too, but Mr. Da Gama is still in Durban. He is spending the night there.”

  “Ach, really?”

  “Is a Sister’s word not enough for you?” she asked, with the same gentle humor she had used on the phone.

  “It’s just—”

  “He telephoned only an hour ago—no, less than that; I’m so sleepy, I’m getting confused—yes, about thirty-five minutes ago, and said I was to go ahead with the funeral arrangements, while he organized it so all the managers could be there on Monday.”

  “God bless you,” said Kramer and raced Zondi to the car.

  “The Munchausen and step on it. If it wasn’t through the gents’, then it’s something Gardiner missed.”

  “But, boss, that is many men he killed for this plan.”

  “Got eyes like a vet’s. No problem.”

  “I mean, what we do now is maybe foolish. We run, run— when do we think?”

  “About…?”

  “It does not all tie in a string. Dubulamanzi and Mpeta— how does he know them?”

  “Those answers he can supply.”

  “Are you going to arrest him on suspicion?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Zondi brought the Chev down to a crawl half a block from the Munchausen, then switched off the engine and braked where it stopped.

  “What’s all this, then?”

  “The drunk kaffir checks first,” said Zondi, getting out and doing his swaying, lurching walk, kept carefully from parody, down the pavement.