Snake by James McClure Page B

scaffold, just laughed politely.
    “Why don’t we leave him to it?” Kramer suggested, taking her arm. “Let’s go over and open up.”
    “Well.…” she said, watching over her shoulder as he led her to his car.
    They drove in silence all the way out to the far western side of town, passing the airfield and shooting range, and traveling into an area of gentle hills where some of the earliest settlers had built their homes. The grass was yellow, like her hair, and the dark green of the blue gum leaves and wattles came close to the uncommon color of her eyes.
    He could sense she was crying quietly when they stopped.
    There it was. The big house. With a veranda all the way round, and a rain-water tank at one corner to catch the flow off its low, corrugated-iron roof. And the big garden. Three acres of weeds and lawn and vegetable plots and trees with branches just right for platforms or monkey ropes. A messy, homely place. A dump.
    She was now smiling as she did when he came down on her.
    Kramer, who had been saving his salary over the years for the want of something better to do with it, had simply bought Blue Haze on sight and left it to her in his will. In the meantime, the Widow Fourie would continue to pay the same rent for it as the flat had cost her.
    “Control to Lieutenant Kramer, Control to Kramer,” the radio intruded suddenly. “Please come immediately to HQ. We repeat, please—”
    He snapped it off.
    Marais almost strutted as he followed Strydom out of the main building on the way to the car park.
    Where they met Gardiner, who immediately asked how come both of them were looking so smug.
    “Teamwork,” said Strydom, with a covert wink to convey he was being generous.
    “Ja, me and the doctor here have got Stevenson over a barrel. I’ve just put out a call for Kramer to forget his day off.”
    Then it had to be good.
    “ Ach , come on, you can tell uncle,” coaxed Gardiner, making his brows wag.
    “I didn’t sleep at all well last night,” Strydom said. “That sort of a day and then Kloppers having tantrums on top of it. I was being so restless my wife threw me out of bed about six and told me to doze in the study.”
    “Then—” Marais tried to say.
    “Naturally, sleep was quite impossible by that stage, so I started to write up my notes on yesterday’s little lady. I was filling in the section of external observations when something suddenly struck me.”
    “It’d struck me, too,” Marais got in. “But I was waiting to ring at breakfast.”
    “Oh, were you?” Strydom murmured, not quite hiding the doubt in his voice, then continuing briskly. “I was describing how the hands were still in position towards the extremes of the reptile—and by the way, I’ve had it on good authority this is the only way to handle constrictors: you have to stop them getting a grip on anything with their tail, and the head end gives a nasty bite. So she was doing the right thing, only—ironically—her panic probably gave the snake the purchase it needed. If you put yourself in her position, then you can under—”
    “That’s all beside the point,” Marais objected
    “So what, young man? Hey? Anyway, I was describing the state of the body, noting down that rigor mortis had already started to subside, when it struck me what that stupid man kept saying when we got there. Remember? How stiff she’d been to the touch? Her legs, yes, I wouldn’t quarrel—”
    “So the doctor phoned to see if I remembered, too, or was he imagining, and I said that’s right, he had. It’s even in his statement.”
    “Which you took?” Gardiner asked.
    “Hell, you expect people to say that, and I didn’t try her arms myself!” Marais dried up abruptly, having outwitted himself in his claim to have shared the discovery.
    “Beside the point,” Strydom said. “The fact is her arms were flaccid and I didn’t have to pull to get them on her chest. So either Mr. Stevenson didn’t touch her at all—or she was