The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes & Impossible Mysteries (12 page)

“You’re saying the snake killed Zubov?”

Dorj hefted the sack, hoping the snake would not emerge too quickly from its post-prandial lethargy.

“I should have realized that manual strangulation would leave finger marks on Zubov’s neck, not a continuous welt all around it,” he explained. “If nothing else, the bloody handprint in the caravan should have reminded me.

“It got there during the struggle. What I surmise happened is that Zubov, having drunk heavily, fell asleep.” Dorj continued quickly, wanting to finish without distressing the woman too much. “The snake, having escaped, got into the caravan. Snakes are attracted to warmth and the only warm thing in the cold caravan was the slumbering Zubov.”

“The first and last time anything was attracted by Zubov’s warmth,” the woman said wryly.

“Then he was suddenly woken up by the boa tightening around his neck. He couldn’t call for aid. Trying to get it off him, he crashed around, and in doing so knocked the corpse off the bed.”

He paused momentarily. “That would explain the blood on the floor and the lavatory door.”

Larisa shuddered. “It must be true. Boas that feel threatened instinctively tighten their coils, so I hear.”

“Once Zubov was dead,” Dorj continued, “he was too big to ingest. Or perhaps the snake was scared away by Batu’s pounding on the door. It crawled off through one of those badly patched holes in the caravan wall, in search of other prey. It was probably hungry. In fact, I don’t doubt hunger also contributed to the lion attacking Cheslav.”

“You don’t think it’s what Ivana said – not enough tranquilizer?”

They had arrived at the unlocked animal trailer. Dorj looked around for the empty aquarium. The bag he was holding shifted alarmingly.

“I’m not certain about the lion. Perhaps it was just as Ivana said, an accident with the tranquilizer. Or possibly she saw her chance.”

“So both deaths were nothing more than accidents. How very strange.”

“Yes. Strange indeed. Too strange. Unless . . .” Dorj frowned. He stared into the dimness. “What if Nikita didn’t escape? In the confusion, after her husband was killed, Ivana could have returned to this trailer and tranquilized the boa. It isn’t a large boa and easily concealed under that billowy outfit she was wearing. Under the circumstances we would never have noticed. And when she threw herself so dramatically onto the corpse-well, he was a big man and there was plenty of room inside that wound for a smallish boa. It would have awakened in a cooling corpse, in a cold caravan, and gone for Zubov.”

Larisa blanched.

The sack Dorj had all but forgotten jerked suddenly open. The head of the snake whipped into view. Another convulsive twist of its body and it had knocked the sack from Dorj’s hands. The freed boa slithered across the floor. But in the wrong direction. A leonine paw flashed out from between cage bars, and then Raisa was rumbling contentedly as she ate the unfortunate killer.

So accidents did come in threes, as Fabayan had said, Dorj thought.

Larisa and Dorj left the trailer and stood gazing up at the impossibly enormous moon sitting on the edge of the horizon. Its bright light, flooding down from the dark sky, painted the world silver. Ebony shadows pooled here and there. Inside the trailer the lion was devouring the only credible evidence for Dorj’s unlikely story.

The strange bearded creature he had met only hours earlier, now transformed into a beautiful woman, leaned nearer to brush a magical kiss onto his cheek. Dorj felt certain he must have fallen into some Shakespearean enchantment.

“I am sorry,” whispered Larisa. “But in a way I am not. We circus people stick together. And only Ivana knows what really happened. There is no proof of anything, really.”

Dorj wondered what his superiors would say about the report he would be submitting in due course. His reputation would certainly suffer, and he suspected that over the next few months he would be finding rubber snakes hidden in his office desk with monotonous regularity.

But at least he could state the murderer’s identity with certainty. How the boa had got into the caravan would be difficult to ascertain, and indeed he was beginning to doubt the fantastic tale he had spun. Perhaps the snake had arrived in the caravan by its own efforts, without anyone’s assistance. That part he would leave to his superior’s imagination.

“Larisa,” he said softly, “Did you know Shakespeare mentions a snake around someone’s neck? A beautiful gold and green snake. And there’s a lioness in the same scene. In fact, now I think about it, the original Hercules strangled the Nemean lion. What happened here almost makes some sort of sense.”

The woman smiled. “Though it is the wrong season, do you mean it almost makes sense in a dream-like midsummer night’s sort of way, Inspector Dorj?”

T
here was a terrace behind the house with swags of cream and apricot roses, steps leading down to a broad lawn with a cedar tree. The lawn sloped away to a deep ditch, separating the garden from a meadow where cattle grazed. At the boundary of lawn and meadowland was a small lake a couple of acres in extent. The island was not quite in the centre of the lake, nearer the shore on the meadow side, about the size of a large drawing room, with a marble statue of Venus, half-draped, rising from a tangle of rushes and meadowsweet. Nothing else to see at all except, early on that June morning, a horse. A white horse, standing up to the hocks in meadowsweet and early morning mist from the lake, looking itself like a statue, except when you got closer you’d have seen that it was shivering and its nostrils flaring, not being the sort of horse used to spending its nights in the open, even in an English summer. No ordinary horse either. If half-draped Venus had grown tired of English country life and summoned the gods’ horse Pegasus to carry her back up to Olympus, this was what might have arrived in answer. Only Venus couldn’t fly away after all because the instant his Olympian hooves touched the damp soil of Berkshire, Pegasus had lost his wings and became, like her, marooned in 1866 on a small island on the moderate-sized estate of a man who had made his fortune from railways.

That, at any rate, is how it might have looked to a fanciful observer with a rudimentary knowledge of classical mythology who happened to be looking out from the terrace early that morning. In fact it was a housemaid glancing from her window in the attic who first saw it and she-knowing nothing of Pegasus or Venus-went downstairs and informed the undercook that one of the carriage horses must have got let out of its stable and there’d be the devil to pay when the head groom found out about it. From there the news went out to the stables where a hasty check of heads found that all six equine members of Sir Percy Whitton’s establishment were present and correct in their boxes. A delegation of stable staff, along with some of the gardeners picked up on the way, hurried across the lawn to the edge of the lake, and realised at once that this was no ordinary horse. Where it came from and how it had arrived overnight, saddled and bridled, on Sir Percy’s little island, was a cause of universal puzzlement overtaken by the necessity of getting it to more solid land. This presented problems because the small rowing boat that was usually kept on the lawn side of the lake for the amusement of Sir Percy’s guests had been reduced to splinters in an accident with a garden roller the week before and its replacement had not yet arrived. After some discussion several grooms and gardeners took off their boots, waistcoats, and jackets and waded into the lake. At its deepest it came up to chest height but they went on firmly, encouraged by shouts from their friends on the bank and, possibly, the prospect of some substantial sign of gratitude from whoever turned out to be the owner of the animal which was watching them apprehensively, showing every sign of wanting to bolt but, of course, with nowhere but the lake to go. I would guess that at this point, in spite of the difficulties, the rescuers were lighthearted. It was a diversion from the work of the morning and there was no reason to think that they were engaged in anything more sinister than the recovery of a fine animal. A groom was the first to step ashore. I suspect that the ardour of the gardeners decreased as they came closer to the dancing, snorting object of their quest. He put hand on the rein, made calming noises. Then he gave a shout and the horse reared up, almost dragging the rein from his hand.

“There’s a man here, a man hurt. I think it’s Sir Percy.” But long before the swaddled form was carried on a hurdle up the lawn and under the cedar with silent gardeners and grooms around it, the whole household knew that the groom had been only half right. The man on the island was indeed their employer, Sir Percy, but he wasn’t hurt – he was dead.

The bare outline of Sir Percy’s death reached me on a June evening in London. I read it on a damp galley proof in my place of work, a subeditors’ room in inky Fleet Street.

I hardly knew the man personally, having been in the same room as him on a couple of public occasions, and my first thought was what a sad loss this would be for the lawyers. Sir Percy and his neighbour Charles Clawson of the Wiltshire and Berkshire Railway were at daggers drawn. The Wiltshire and Berkshire had got an Act of Parliament to drive their new branch line along the hill opposite Sir Percy’s house. He said it was an abomination, and if a gentleman couldn’t live in his own home without steam engines scaring his cattle and blowing smuts all over his guests, it was all up with the rights and liberties of old England. This in spite of the fact that his own money came from railways. The resulting court case, due to open in a week’s time, had been anticipated as one of the great events of the legal season. Sir Percy was expected to win, if only because his purse was longer than Clawson’s and he’d take it all the way to the House of Lords if necessary. There was extra spice in the fact that the combatants were related by marriage. Clawson had given the hand of his only daughter, Emily, to Sir Percy at a time several years earlier when the two men were business partners, before they fell out.

It’s an unfortunate fact of working for a newspaper that all the most interesting things you get to know are those that law or society won’t allow you to print. I collect such stories as other men collect ferns or butterflies. I sniffed one here and, by grace of those same railways that began the battle, I was in the little market town of Maybridge before lunchtime next morning. I already had a direct line into the gossip of the area through my old and disreputable friend, Harry Leather. Harry is a groom, jockey, livery keeper, dealer, in fact, in anything you please as long as it has a lot to do with horses and as little as possible to do with the law. He’s as small and agile as a street urchin but I suppose is a man in middle years, although from the wrinkles on his weatherbeaten face he looks old enough to have traded horses with the Pharaohs – probably to their disadvantage. At that time he was managing a livery stables at Maybridge, so when I got there I made straight for his establishment on one side of the market square, knowing that nothing that moved on four legs and precious little on two escaped his network. I found him in the saddle room, cleaning tack, and after an exchange of civilities asked him the time of the inquest.

“You’ve missed it, Mr Ludlow. They opened it at nine o’clock and it was all over by eleven.”

“What was the verdict?”

“Misadventure.”

“Much interest in it locally?”

He hooked up a stirrup leather and ran a cloth slowly down it. The meaty smell of neat’s – foot oil hung in the warm air, along with whiffs of horse from the loose boxes.

“What do you think?”

“Was he well-liked?”

“Well enough by those as liked him.”

With Harry, this kind of game could go on all day. But I knew he was hugging information of some kind as closely as a child hugs a puppy. I watched while he oiled a few more leathers then asked him what he knew about the riding accident. It was then that I got most of the details about the island, the shivering white horse, and the man lying dead, with Harry going on with his work all the while, watching me sidelong to see what I was making of it.

“Do you want to see him?”

The sudden question jolted me. I thought at first that he was talking about Sir Percy’s corpse, surely now in the hands of the undertaker.

“See who?”

“The horse.”

He got up unhurriedly and led the way across the yard. We went past the lines of worthy hacks and dependable carriage horses, round the corner to the few isolated boxes that he keeps for invalids or mares close to foaling. As we turned the corner a high whinnying came from one of the boxes. A head as white as new milk came over the half door, large wild eyes, wide pink nostrils.