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To his distress he saw that the unveiled face was set in a frown.

“I have never suspected you, Larisa,” he quickly assured her. “In fact, right now I need your assistance.” He grabbed her hand – he could hardly believe he had done so – and hurried her back down the hill.

“There may be another trap around here,” Larisa worried. “Be careful. Dima might have put some more out. I wish you’d tell me what you’re looking for.”

So far she and the inspector, searching around the back of the hangar with the aid of a fading torch, had located perhaps a dozen traps, finding only one sprung, and that holding an unfortunate rat. Dorj merely insisted they continue looking. She swung the feeble yellow light across the ground until it lit upon a metal stake. The flickering beam slid down the stake’s attached chain to reveal another trap, and beside it a semi-comatose snake.

“It belongs to the circus, doesn’t it?” said Dorj.

“Yes. It’s Nikita. How do you know?”

“I grew up in the city, but I don’t think boa constrictors are native to the Gobi. Not even ones as small as this.”

“He’s just a baby,” Larisa pointed out. “Zubov traded our big python for it. He eats less. Ivana didn’t say anything about him being missing.”

“There were pictures of snakes on the animal trailer, but I didn’t notice any inside. At least one aquarium was empty, though. When you wondered whether I suspected you’d managed to wriggle into the trailer caravan, it reminded me.”

Sluggish from ingesting whatever it had found in the trap, the snake was quickly popped into the empty feed sack Dorj had brought with him. “We’ll need this for evidence,” he commented.

“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?”

Wingless Pegasus by Gillian Linscott

Gillian Linscott (b. 1944), a former reporter and Parliamentary journalist, is the author of the Nell Bray series of suffragette mysteries that began with Sister Beneath the Sheet (1991) and includes the award-winning Absent Friends (1999). Gillian has a fascination for intricate mysteries. She began a series set in the 19th century featuring journalist Thomas Ludlow and the less – than – reputable horse-dealer Harry Leather, but only completed two stories. I reprinted one of them, “Poisoned with Politeness” in The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits (Third New Collection). Here’s the other one.

***

There 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.