The Sunday Hangman (11 page)

“You stinking pig bastard!”

“Ach, no, be fair,” Kramer protested mildly, “because if you’re what you say you are, then I’m an amateur photographer.”

“You call that a lens?” she sneered, snuffling into a tissue.

“I get results.”

“Oh, really? You must try and show me sometime.”

“Now, if you like.”

She reached for her menthols. “For free? You must be joking! Just because you’re big and pissed doesn’t entitle you to anything.”

“For free,” said Kramer, handing over the mortuary photograph of Tollie Erasmus with a rope around his neck.

It made an impression.

“
No!
”

“We found him yesterday, near Doringboom.”

“But Tollie wouldn’t—”

“He didn’t. He was murdered.”

“Hey?”

Her surprise was so complete that she turned into a human being. The eyes which knew it all suddenly knew nothing, and at the drop of her jaw, the hard little face shattered, showing the soul-sick slack underneath.

Kramer took back the picture and said nothing. He watched her close her gown, drag off her wig, and bring her knees up to hug them. He stood there while she began rocking to and fro, her gaze fixed on the floor. Then he poured her a stiff gin and a straight lime and water for himself.

“You bastard,” she whispered, thanking him with a nod as she lifted the glass.

“Give me a chance next time, Cleo, and things will be different. Who else knew he was at Witklip?”

“Where?”

He straddled a chair opposite her, folding his arms over the back of it. “Don’t be that way,” he coaxed, and then pursued
the most perverse line possible: “Even if you deny setting up Tollie, I’ve still got you cold as accessory after the fact and harboring a known criminal.”

Cleo’s head jerked. “Setting him …?”

“Ja, his murder. Mind you, I think that one will stick.”

“Me? Are you crazy?”

“Logical, Miss Mulder. We have proof from the post office that he was in contact with you here on 49590, from which it follows that they must have worked through you to—”

“I told-told nobody!” she stammered.

Kramer sighed.

“No, that’s the God’s truth. I swear it!”

“Uh huh? Maybe the judge will believe you. Personally—”

“Just you listen! All right?”

Fear, shock, and gin soon had the facts tumbling out, and Kramer was kept busy rearranging them in chronological order. Erasmus had apparently found her number scrawled in a phone box on the day of the raid, and had asked her if she was willing to perform a “special” for R100 cash. Once inside her flat, he had offered another R100 a day for nothing but the use of her telephone and somewhere to lie up. He had been no trouble. Then on the fourth day he had made a further offer: R200 down and a lump payment of R500 later if she agreed to act as “middle man” in a transaction. All she had to do was relay on any messages she might take from a man called Max, who would be ringing her sometime in the near future. Max was, in fact, helping him to get out of the country, but there were complications caused by the number of black states now surrounding South Africa. This Max had rung her twice, both times to say it would take a little longer, and recently Erasmus had been becoming very restless and nervous. Instead of his weekly call on a Saturday night, he’d been in touch almost every other day. And that’s all there was to it, as Cleo de Leo saw no percentage in moral side issues.

“Max knew he was at Witklip?”

“Tollie said I shouldn’t tell him and he never asked,” she replied, putting her glass down. “How many more times?
Nobody
knew except me; it was meant to be secret. Tollie said Max was a good guy, but the fewer who knew made him safer.”

Kramer stood up and paced about a bit. The trollop was telling the truth, he felt sure of it, and yet this wasn’t making things any easier.

He snapped his fingers and spun round. “Why Witklip? What the hell put that into his head?”

“Oh, it was an old idea one of his friends once had. I can’t remember exactly. When he was in Steenhuis Reformatory and they used to talk after lights out. This bloke had been to it once with his folks, and said the store there didn’t even get a newspaper. Tollie checked while he was here and found it was still such a dump. They used to tease this guy—Robert? Ja, Robert or Roberts; that’s a name I remember. Nothing else, though.”

Then Cleo stiffened.

“You’re right!” said Kramer. “It wasn’t such a bloody secret after all, was it?”

S
OMEONE HAD LEFT
a fresh memo pad on his desk that rainy Thursday morning. Someone else had written the Widow Fourie’s home number on it, underlining the word Urgent five times. The next someone to poke his head into the office was liable to have it bitten off.

Kramer had spent a surprisingly bad night in the austere room he rented as, his landlady insisted on calling him, a paying guest. Presumably, he had slept. If asked to describe his night, however, he would have compared it to a bout of malarial fever, while being cynically aware of how unimaginative that sounded. His impatience to trace the man Robert or Roberts had been a primary cause of his restlessness, and had meant that, at first light of dawn, he had risen, taken a shower, and gone for a long walk. But even on this walk, which had led him down to the muddy sloth of the Umgungundhlovu River, his mind had never freed itself from a garish, sunset glimpse of the girl with honey hair.

“Why not?” he muttered, dialing the Widow’s number. “I heard you wanted me? The kids all right?”

“Term ended yesterday, so you can guess for yourself! How’s the case going?”

“Progressing.”

“I had an idea, Trompie. You know this business of the hangman knowing all the skills? I suddenly remembered my
copy of
The Vontsteen Case
by that young chappie who was clerk of the court at the Palace of Justice. That had some details in it.”

“Nonsense; the law prohibits the publication of any matters pertaining to prisons unless—”

“Just listen, hey?” the Widow Fourie interrupted him. “Here’s the mention on page three which tells how they do it: ‘They are brought to the gallows at a quick trot, the measured rope is round the neck in a second, and at a push of the lever the floor opens beneath them. They tie a white cloth over the mouth because the blood tends to gush out.’ ”

Kramer lit a Lucky.

“Hello—are you still there?”

“You mean that’s all? It doesn’t tell you anything special—and that blood part sounds rubbishy to me. There wasn’t any blood coming out of Tollie.”

“I just wanted to help if—” she said, her voice catching. “Look, I want to talk to you about what I said about Mickey.”

“Hearsay,” said Kramer.

“Pardon?”

“That’s just something the writer picked up somewhere: The kind of information Doc’s all excited about would never be published in this country, and I can tell you that for a fact.”

There was a silence.

The Widow Fourie gave an uncertain laugh. “Man, to hear us you’d think we were an old married couple having a row!”

“Maybe that’s our problem,” Kramer remarked unkindly, surprising himself with his curious indifference. “So if there’s nothing else, I’d better get on, hey?”

She hung up on him. The memo pad went into the wastebin and the interdepartmental directory came out of its drawer. After a start like that, Kramer expected nothing to go right for the rest of the day. However, once he had convinced Steenhuis Reformatory that he wasn’t reporting an absconder,
but inquiring after an inmate who must have taken his lawful leave some twelve or so years earlier, things began to happen. According to the records, there had been nobody in Erasmus’s dormitory called Robert, yet he had shared with one Peter David Roberts, whose last known address was 4D Rasnop Court, Dewey Street, Durban. Kramer thanked the clerk, rang off, and, encouraged by such luck, took a whimsical look in the ordinary telephone directory.

“Man, oh, man,” he said, stopping his finger at the same name, initials, and address.

Zondi came in at that precise moment, his expression strangely sullen, and wished him good morning.

“Don’t just stand there, old son—can’t you see the keys?” Kramer asked. “We’re taking a quickie to Durbs.”

“A lead?”

“Uh huh, and a good one. Brandspruit came through with the number of Erasmus’s contact, and she was right here in Trekkersburg. I’ll explain on the way.”

The keys were picked up off the desk and held in a clenched fist.

“What’s the matter, Mickey? I’ve just cut us a few corners, so let’s not hang around. Or have you something better to do?”

“No, boss.”

“Let’s go, then.”

Kramer noticed a puffiness under the eyes, as they were going down the stairs together, and concluded that he hadn’t been the only one thrashing about in the night. This hollowed his belly a little, and he eased the pace on reaching the sidewalk.

Zondi paused while unlocking the car door, and said, “Lieutenant, is it all right to ask you?”

“Ask me what?”

“Your meaning when you said I should go and find a job in the laboratory.”

“Hell, who’s getting sensitive?” Kramer replied, very relieved to discover the pain had only been mental. “You know we don’t allow you thick kaffirs in there.”

And with that they left for Durban.

Dr. Strydom was standing where he’d least expected to be that morning: in the showroom of a brand-new store that specialized in the sale of television sets.

His presence there owed nothing to rash impulse, however, but was the result of a long night spent worrying about poor Anneline and the time she was having to waste in front of the neighbors’ screen. As a study of the programs printed in the paper showed all too clearly, only seventy minutes of air time could possibly be of any interest to her on any one evening, and yet, having been asked over, she could hardly get up and leave, at the start of another documentary on Bushmen, without implying a severe, almost theological criticism of their investment. It wasn’t right that she should sacrifice so many precious hours in this way, simply because she had the manners of a true lady, and so he had finally found a solution to this problem—which was, of course, to invest in a set himself, while applying certain sensible rules concerning its usage. In fact, according to his calculations, fifty minutes a night would probably be more than she could happily assimilate.

But now he was finding he had other sums to do.

“That’s a price and a half!” he exclaimed.

“May I inquire, sir,” asked the pleasantly-spoken young salesman, “your profession? You certainly give the
impression
of a professional man, sir, if you don’t mind my saying.”

“I’m a surgeon,” said Strydom, wagging his stethoscope even more vigorously at the color set before him. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t express an opinion about highway robbery! It hasn’t even got proper legs for a thing that size.”

“I knew it, Doctor! I’ve always said that you can’t bamboozle a professional man into buying the first thing you show him,
whether it’s a TV set or a swimming bath or a little runabout for his good lady. It isn’t the cost that matters to a man such as yourself, it’s the—”

“Legs,” snapped Strydom. “Do you seriously call those spindly things ‘legs’?”

The salesman smiled foolishly.

Strydom stared at the next set along and an idea occurred to him that put everything into a different perspective. If you pretended that the price tag was on a small car, just supposing that Anneline had learned to drive, then the cost came to about the same and seemed far less of a shock. Warming to this business of high-level decision-making, he decided on a sly compromise.

“How much is a black-and-white?” he asked.

“Ah, a black-and-white,” the salesman repeated. “A monochrome? I could have one brought up from the back, if you like. Monochromes do tend to be more a specialty of our nonwhite customers, so I’m afraid we.…”

He turned to call someone, but Strydom caught his sleeve.

“Just the price for comparison, hey? The wife said to ask—it’s her who likes to see the flowers.”

“There’s a coincidence for you, Doctor,” said the salesman, losing his look of embarrassment at being caught out. “Only yesterday we had a judge’s wife in here, and she wanted a panochrome for flowers, too! Let me see … the monos are about 50 percent cheaper, depending on this and that.”

“Interesting. Now, what about aerials and so forth?”

“We see to everything, and it’s same-day delivery, all-inclusive. Oops, that’s the volume control—no need to apologize. Would you like to be left to take your time browsing?”

“Ach, no,” Strydom replied casually, digging for his checkbook. “I’ve got a lot on this morning, and a television set is just a television set after all. Personally, I couldn’t care less if the Americans had never invented it!”

A feeling of heady well-being, puffed up by a sudden pride of ownership, and given an edge by the dread that always went with spending more than ten rand of his money at a time, then took Strydom round to the court records office with a decided optimism. It was exactly the moment to check on the incidence of neck fractures in hanging, and to prove how right he’d been in his original assessment.

“I want to look up suicides,” he said. “White, colored, Asiatic, and black.”

Being in Durban, the country’s major port and the playground of a nation, did nothing for Kramer. From the shark nets protecting the bathers off its whites-only beaches, to the suburban anthill of the Berea, its humid and lush sprawl caused him an unease that could be remedied solely by getting the hell out again, as quickly as possible. The snag was that he’d only just arrived.

Durban seemed soft to him, somehow alien; this wasn’t simply because there were so many Indians about or so much English spoken—Trekkersburg had, on a reduced scale, similar drawbacks. No, it had to do with the sea, and with the way you were exposed on the brink, facing God knows what insanities beyond the horizon. Any one of the waves, for example, could have creamed from the bows of a Chink battle cruiser to come all the way across to splash over a man’s kids. Just like the waves that had thrown up other people’s rubbish along the shoreline, all those Miami apartment blocks and English beach hotels and Spanish ranch houses. If you flew high enough, Kramer had noticed, then Durban looked like a high-water mark, with all sorts of tiny, nasty things crawling about among the pastel shells and the glitter.