by Tony Park
The cobra expectorated a stream of stinging venom at her, most of which went onto the sleeve of her shirt, though some splashed her cheek. Sannie knew that the stuff would blind a human or animal victim in minutes if it wasn’t washed off.
Bongani took a pair of reading glasses from his pocket, put them on and looked around. He found a broom and pushed past Sannie, also averting his eyes as he chased the now angry snake.
Sannie and Mia backed out into the yard.
‘Are you OK?’ Mia asked.
‘Ja, fine. Let’s go around the back.’
They ran down the side of the modest house.
‘Auf,’ Sean said to Benny.
The Malinois had the boy on the ground, the dog’s jaws clamped around his right shoulder. Benny let go and looked up at Sean, grinning.
‘Good boy, Benny, good boy.’ Sean pulled out a chew toy, a ball on the end of a short piece of rope, from the pocket of his cargo pants and tossed it a little way away. Benny raced for it.
Sannie took a pair of handcuffs from her belt pouch as she strode to the young man. ‘Face down, hands behind your back!’
‘That dog tried to kill me,’ the boy protested.
Mia peered over Sannie’s shoulder. ‘There’s not a mark on you.’
‘Benny’s trained to bite with the back of his mouth, so the teeth don’t break the skin,’ Sean said. He ruffled his dog’s fur as Benny trotted back over to him. ‘Good boy, Benny.’
‘What do you want with me? I’m innocent,’ the boy said.
With the cuffs locked on him, Sannie rolled him over and hauled him to his feet. ‘What’s your name?’
He looked at the ground, but Sannie put a finger under his chin and tilted his face up.
‘I am Sipho Nyarhi.’
‘Sipho – you’re the friend of the girls who disappeared, Lilly and Thandi, yes?’
He looked at her, then away, and shrugged.
‘Answer me.’
‘I know them, yes, but I don’t know what happened to them.’
He could not, she noticed, continue to meet her eyes. She was sure he knew more. ‘This lady here,’ she gestured to Mia, ‘says she saw you in the Sabi Sand Game Reserve this morning, and that you had a pangolin. Where is it?’
Sipho kept his head lowered. ‘I don’t know anything about a pangolin and I was never in the reserve.’
Sannie grabbed Sipho’s upper arm and marched him back inside the house, through the back door.
Bongani met them in the cluttered, cement-floored room that passed for a kitchen. ‘I caught the snake, put it back in one of the glass cases.’
Sannie wrinkled her nose as she walked through to the lounge area. All around her, stacked against the walls was an assortment of old bird cages, fish tanks with partially shattered glass and anything else that could contain a live creature. There were several snakes as well as a tank with mice crawling over each other – presumably food for the reptiles – and an assortment of lizards of various sizes.
Sannie glimpsed movement on the floor from under a battered old sofa, stuffing spilling from wounds in the fabric. She sidestepped quickly, but was marginally relieved when she saw a fat monitor lizard, nearly a metre long, waddle into the centre of the room and make its way languidly towards a single-bar electric heater, which it lay down next to.
‘Do you have permits for any of these?’ Sannie let go of the boy – he was cuffed and surrounded by all of them now in any case. Benny the dog snarled up at the cobra that had spat at Sannie; the snake struck back, its fangs tapping on the glass of its enclosure. Benny retreated to Sean’s side.
Mia walked along the rows of specimens. ‘Puff adder, rinkhals, house snake, large plated lizard, boomslang . . . sheesh,’ Mia crouched by the largest of the old fish tanks, ‘there’s even a juvenile rock python here – endangered.’
‘No paperwork?’ Sannie pressed.
The boy nodded to the far wall. ‘I am famous.’
Sannie walked over and studied a faded press clipping from The Lowvelder stuck to the wall with tape. ‘“Snake man of Killarney charms savage serpents”. That’s not a permit, Sipho.’
Bongani took a step closer to the shackled boy. ‘I’ve seen cars from out of town parked outside this house. Expensive – Range Rovers, late model Beemers, Mercedes – I thought you might have been dealing drugs. But snakes? Eish.’
‘Who are your customers, Sipho?’ Sannie asked.
He looked up and stared at her, defiance plain in his eyes and the set of his mouth.
Bongani’s hand shot out, faster than any striking cobra, and slapped the young man on the cheek. Sipho rocked on his feet.
‘Answer the captain,’ Bongani said.
Sannie did not condone brutality and certainly not torture, but three young girls were missing and she did not have the time or the resources to spend on this insolent young criminal, even though she probably had enough to open a docket and take him to Skukuza Police Station at Number 1 Leopard Street, at least overnight.
Sipho rubbed his jaw. ‘You can’t hit me.’
Bongani turned and walked across to the terrarium containing a puff adder. He took the glass lid off and carefully reached in, grabbing the snake behind the head. Sannie took an involuntarily step backwards.
‘You know why this is the most dangerous snake in Africa, boy?’ Bongani said as he came to Sipho.
The young man flinched. ‘Because it bites the most people. It waits, in ambush, for someone to step on it. It doesn’t try to escape, like other snakes would.’
Bongani nodded. ‘You have no escape, boy.’
Sannie held her breath as Bongani brought the snake, now wriggling in annoyance, up to Sipho’s face.
‘Bongani . . .’ Mia said.
He glared at her. ‘Not now. This boy has betrayed his people. You think you care for wildlife, by keeping these creatures here in unsanitary conditions, barely alive. You make me sick, boy. You know what this venom will do to you, when the snake bites you, how it will eat away the skin of that young face?’
Sipho gave a small nod. Bongani brought the puff adder closer. The fat reptile’s tongue was flicking in and out, the forked tip almost brushing Bongani’s cheek.
Sannie knew she could not let the boy be bitten.
‘Wait,’ Sipho said.
‘What is it?’ Sannie asked.
‘Some men came to me, from Johannesburg.’
Bongani moved the snake so that it was in front of Sipho’s eyes.
‘All right, all right,’ Sipho protested. ‘These men, they offered me money to find more snakes for them.’
‘So you were in the reserve this morning?’ Sannie said.
‘I knew it was him,’ Mia said.
Bongani eased the snake back into the terrarium. ‘You were with the poacher who shot the woman,’ Bongani said.
Sipho shook his head. ‘No. I heard the shots, but I was not with that man. I was not trying to kill a rhino.’
‘Taking a pangolin is just as bad,’ Mia said.
‘I’m going to take Benny to search out the back,’ Sean said.
‘Fine,’ Sannie said, then turned back to Sipho. ‘Who were the men who wanted you to find a pangolin?’
Sipho shrugged his shoulders.
‘Do you want me to ask Bongani to get the puff adder again?’
Sipho looked past her. Clearly he was afraid of Bongani, who glared at him. ‘No. I don’t know their names.’
‘Had you ever seen them before?’
He pursed his lips.
‘We can go to the police station, Sipho.’
‘All right. Yes. They have been a few times in the past, to buy snakes from me. Is that against the law?’
‘Probably, but I’ve got more important things on my mind right now. Why did they want snakes?’<
br />
‘For umuthi.’
‘Serious?’
He nodded. ‘Yes. They said a sangoma in Johannesburg wanted deadly snakes, a mamba in particular.’
‘What for? To kill someone?’
‘No, the opposite, to protect people. Some izangoma, they use pieces of snake,’ he held up his cuffed hands with one pinkie finger extended, ‘maybe this long, to sell to protect people from bullets.’
‘So, a few centimetres of dead snake will keep a hijacker safe from being shot?’
He nodded. ‘Yes. They say it is very strong umuthi.’
‘And you, the snake man of Killarney,’ she glanced over at the press clipping on the wall, ‘who supposedly “loves” snakes, will sell his friends the reptiles to be cut into little pieces to make umuthi.’
He sneered. ‘There are plenty of snakes around here, Captain.’
‘That’s what the rhino poachers say about rhinos, but if you keep killing them, then there will be none left.’
‘How else must I eat? There is no work here.’
Sannie did not have time to address the fundamental problems of the South African economy. ‘The old man you were with, in the game reserve –’
‘I was alone,’ Sipho interrupted.
‘The others say you were a decoy, that you were in the park, without a weapon, as bait. The plan was that you would run, the rangers would chase you, while the other poacher, an older man, would kill a rhino and escape with the horn. Who is he?’
‘I don’t know.’
Sannie held his eye. ‘I don’t believe you, Sipho. I can arrange a polygraph, a lie detector test. You will fail.’
He shrugged. ‘You can do whatever you want to me, even bring back Bongani with my puff adder, and I will tell you that I was in the reserve alone. I was looking for snakes, but I found a pangolin instead.’
‘Worth more.’ Sannie tried to read him. She sensed that he was not going to say anything else, and that he was lying, because he was afraid. What or who he feared was more dangerous than any snake.
‘I have been bitten by snakes before,’ he said, as if to confirm what she was thinking. She doubted he had been bitten in the face, but Sannie was not about to allow Bongani to make good her terrible threat.
‘Sipho, it’s the girls I’m worried about. There are now three. Another has gone missing.’
There was a flinch, the ever-so-slight raising of his eyebrows.
‘I know nothing about that,’ he said quietly.
Sannie heard barking from outside.
‘Good boy, Benny,’ she heard Sean call from the rear of the house. ‘Captain!’
Sannie turned Sipho around and grabbed the handcuffs and propelled him ahead of her, out the back door. ‘What is it, Sean?’
‘A dead body.’
‘Keep an eye on Sipho,’ Sannie said to Mia, and rushed out.
*
‘Bongani,’ Mia looked to her partner, ‘please go outside and see if the captain needs help.’
Bongani hesitated for a second, then nodded and walked out.
‘Sipho,’ Mia said in Xitsonga, ‘listen to me. The police captain wants the missing girls. If you cooperate I am sure we can find a way to keep you out of prison. You know me, don’t you trust me?’
He eyed her warily. Bongani had scared him, but Mia now had to quickly win his trust. He said nothing.
‘Sipho, you know me,’ she repeated. ‘Now, you must help them. The pangolin will die if they take you away.’
He looked into her eyes. ‘Can you protect me?’
‘I swear I will try.’ She knew this village. It was more than likely that the local people would deliver Sipho a beating, but the boy seemed worried about something more sinister. ‘Help us. Help the girls . . .’
He hesitated, then said: ‘I will tell you where it is, if you help me.’
‘Where?’ Mia asked. She sensed that if she could get him to show her the pangolin then she would have breached his defences and he might tell her more.
‘In the cupboard, in my bedroom.’
She followed Sipho. Mia had to sidestep to avoid the monitor lizard, which scurried out of her way and under the sofa. God knew what else was crawling or slithering around this place. She went into Sipho’s bedroom, which was furnished with a rusty old metal bedframe and a stained mattress partially visible under a yellowed sheet. In the corner, however, was a flat-screen TV with a DSTV satellite decoder; young Sipho was making reasonable money from his part in the muthi trade.
Mia went to the chipboard wardrobe in the corner and, tentatively, opened it, not knowing what might spring out at her. In the bottom was a hessian sack. She dragged it out and opened it.
The pangolin, a hefty sample, was rolled up to the size of a basketball. Mia gently caressed its armoured scales. The pangolin was engaging his primary means of defence, curling himself into a ball and doing nothing. It was what made the creatures so laughably easy for poachers to pick up and transport. The meat was prized in Asia as a delicacy and the scales were worth a fortune in Chinese traditional medicine – the pangolin was doubly doomed. The jury was out on whether the market in pangolins would die off because of their reported links to coronavirus, or if the temporary halt in trade would just increase their value once international borders were open again and bans on Chinese wet markets lifted.
‘There isn’t even any water in here for it.’
Mia had read that many trafficked pangolins died because the poachers who took them did not know what to feed them or how to care for them. She had at least expected slightly better from the ‘snake boy’ of Killarney.
‘Sipho, the captain just wants to find the girls, and I think you want to help them as well. If you agree to talk to her, I will speak up for you.’
He licked his lips. His nervousness was palpable and Mia sensed he was not just scared about going to the Skukuza cells.
‘I want to help, but I need the police to protect me.’
‘Come,’ Mia said, ‘we will go see the captain.’
*
Sannie, Bongani, Sean and Benny were standing over the body of a man.
‘Male, aged about forty, I’d say,’ Sean said. ‘Shot, though I didn’t hear anything.’
‘Forty-two, same age as me,’ Bongani said.
‘You know him?’ Sannie asked.
Bongani nodded. ‘Richard Baloyi. I went to school with him. I knew him, but he was not a friend. He was always in trouble.’
Sean clipped Benny’s tracking lead on him and pulled him away. Sannie appreciated Sean’s thinking – Benny was getting too close to the body and risked contaminating the crime scene.
‘It’s the second time his name has come up,’ Sannie said. ‘In trouble with the police?’
‘With everyone,’ Bongani said. ‘Women, other men. He stole, and more than once the community took matters into their own hands.’
Sannie knelt by the body. ‘I saw this man today. He ran from me, so that fits with what you say of his background, Bongani.’
‘He had been working at the community project,’ Bongani said, ‘volunteering.’
Sannie thought Bongani said the last word with some disdain.
‘Him and a man named Solly,’ Sannie said. ‘You don’t think Richard was the type to volunteer?’
Bongani shrugged. ‘I suppose anyone can find redemption, eventually, and there is not a lot else for people to do. He was a skelm, a criminal.’
Sannie called her crime scene investigation team in the Sabi Sand reserve and asked them to come to Killarney when they finished there. It was going to be a long night for the technicians.
Mia came out of the house, took one glance at the body then looked back at Sannie. In her arms she carried a pangolin. Sipho walked behind her.
Sannie couldn’t resist having a look
at the creature. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘in all my life of living near the bush and going to the Kruger Park and working there, I’ve never seen one of these things.’
‘That’s part of the problem,’ Mia said. ‘They’re not as well known as rhinos or elephants, so they don’t get the same level of media coverage or public interest. I’ll get it some water, at least, for the ride.’
‘The ride?’
‘Sipho’s agreed to talk, Captain,’ Mia said, ‘but maybe it would be better at the station.’
Sannie looked to the boy, who nodded. She saw the fear in his eyes. ‘All right. Let’s get moving then.’ Sannie led the way back through Sipho’s house and out the front door.
As Sannie took out her car keys there was a series of bangs, something hitting the metal panels of Sannie’s Fortuner, and a side window shattered.
Sannie grabbed Sipho’s shoulder and shoved him forward so that he landed hard on the road. She knelt next to him, one hand holding him down, the other reaching for her pistol.
The others were all taking cover, though Sean, down on one knee behind Sannie’s car, was looking for source of the gunfire.
Another round slammed into the vehicle and Sannie was able to get a rough fix on where the gunman was. ‘Silenced rifle, fifty metres down the road, Sean, past the house with the green door.’ It wasn’t unusual for poachers to have suppressors fitted to their rifles when sneaking around the game reserves. Sannie fired two shots at a window next to the door.
‘Seen!’ Sean squeezed off four rounds. Benny lay obediently next to his master. With his high-powered rifle, Sean had a better chance of hitting the shooter, or at least keeping his head down. The other weapon opened up, two rounds in quick succession, forcing Sannie to duck behind the cover of her vehicle.
‘Sipho!’ Mia cried.
The boy had managed to roll away from Sannie and struggle his way up onto his knees, then feet. He sprinted down the street.
‘Get down!’ Sannie yelled at him.
Sipho kept running, away from them and the incoming fire, legs pounding. At one point his toe clipped a rock and he started to pitch forward. In the weak glow of a lonely streetlight it looked like he was going to get away.
