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premises! And if I’ve told you once, the Sunday News has the exclu—”
    “Kramer, Murder and Robbery Squad.”
    Gulp, went the silk cravat.
    “The lieutenant?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    Stevenson advanced hesitantly across the boards, his built-up shoes clicking loudly.
    “I do apologize, but I thought they were going to tell you not to bother after all. I let them use my phone in the office.”
    “Why’s that? Is this a hoax?”
    “Heavens, no! But your doctor said—”
    “The DS? Is he here?”
    “Er, yes. In the dressing room, the scene of the tragedy. Would you like me to show you the way?”
    “You’d better!” growled Kramer.
    He followed after him past a notice warning NO ADMITTANCE TO MEMBERS — STRICTLY PRIVATE and soon saw the reason why. The dim passage beyond the velvet hangings was a disgrace of squashed cockroaches and splintered floorboards. They clattered up a short flight of steps, took a left turn, and halted at a closed door with a paper star stuck to it.
    Stevenson raised a hand to knock, but Kramer pushed him aside.
    “That’s fine,” he said. “Now you get back to your office and see that if there’s a call for me from Peacevale, I get to hear about it.”
    “Gladly,” the manager said, and tip-tapped off.
    Then the door was opened from the inside and Dirk Gardiner, a warrant officer from Fingerprints, stuck his crew cut out to see what the noise was about.
    “Oh, sh—sugar,” he said.
    “So this is where you’ve been hiding, you bastard!”
    “Look, Lieutenant, I was on my way when I got called here. Haven’t even been to the mortuary yet.”
    “You’re boasting, or what?”
    “Be with you in a tick,” replied Gardiner, as good-naturedly as ever. He had enough muscle under his blue safari suit to treat the world in the way he expected it to treat him. And somehow it worked.
    “Guess who’s arrived?” chuckled Strydom from within. “But don’t start yelling at us, hey? We got a message for you not to come out to the duty officer soon as we could. You see him about it.”
    Kramer’s brow creased.
    “Ja, it’s just a fatal,” Gardiner explained, winding on another frame in his Pentax. “Stevenson, the stupid bastard, reported he’d found a girlie strangled. Didn’t explain properly, says he was in a hell of a state. All shocked and—”
    He stepped placidly aside to avoid being trampled underfoot.
    Strydom, as gnomelike as ever, was kneeling in his new plastic apron—from which his wife had cut the frilly bits— beside a python with its head bashed in, making careful use of his tape measure. At his elbow was a corpse with red eyeballs, speckled skin, and arms folded demurely on its chest under a dressing gown.
    “Oh, her,” said Kramer.
    “Sonja Bergstroom, alias Eve. Got careless and had an accident. Put up a hell of a fight, though. Should see the grazes she got from the concrete.”
    “Who’s in charge here?”
    “Sergeant Marais,” said Gardiner. “Gone to the bog a moment.”
    “And he’s happy?”
    “Should be by now.”
    “Hey?”
    “Sorry, sir. Yes, quite satisfied.”
    “Fascinating,” murmured Strydom, taking another prod at the broad marks on the corpse’s neck. “I must see if I can’t put a little paper together. Get the snake park in Durban to help me.”
    “Ja, must be a moral in it, too, Doc.”
    “Wam-bam,” suggested Kramer. The novelty had worn off.
    “What’s that, Trompie?”
    “Mr. Gardiner here has urgent business in Peacevale. Tell Marais I’ll see him later. Okay?”
    “Sounds ominous,” Strydom said, smiling somewhere in his Santa Claus beard, and beginning to coil the snake into a white plastic bag. “What a shambles today has been.”
    Which proved an understatement once Kramer got back to Lucky’s store. There two very distressed Bantu constables were obliged to inform him that while they had been keeping the onlookers at bay round the front, two youths had sneaked into the premises from the back.
    “It was