The Sunday Hangman (14 page)

Then Sergeant Klip Marais came in, yellow mustache bristling and gray eyes aglint, and barely nodded as Zondi stood up. He dumped some files on the Lieutenant’s desk, retrieved a memo pad from the wastebin, and gave the telephone a dirty look.

“Did your boss ring this number?” he asked.

“I do not know, Sergeant.”

“Huh! As if a bloke hasn’t enough to do. What the hell are you doing here, by the way? You got your orders.”

Zondi explained where he had been, and that there would be at least an hour’s delay before he could have his photographs for distribution.

Marais, who never talked to him in the ordinary way of things, but was always happy to grumble, said: “Trust you to get off so lightly. The witch doctor is an easy one; me, I’ve been landed with the real bastards.”

“They have no fathers?”

“Hey? Not bastards—ach, forget it. There’s nothing on this tramp, and there never was. When I rang up the local station, they didn’t even know what I was talking about for the first few bloody minutes.”

“Hau!” Zondi sympathized.

“And Pa Henk couldn’t assist either.”

“Hau, hau!”

“And since then,” Marais went on, taking the Lieutenant’s chair, “it’s got worse. Look at this.”

Zondi examined the dental chart that had been sent spinning through the air for him to catch. Five extractions and two fillings; a wisdom tooth impacted.

“That’s a thing to show the teeth in the krantz case—the teeth in the skull, understand? The two black dots are where fillings had been put not so long before, and the crosses are teeth that had been pulled out. I got straight on to the old—to a Mrs. Roberts, and asked her what her son’s dentist’s name had been. Guess?”

“I could not do such a thing, Sergeant.”

“I’m not bloody surprised! He hadn’t got one! She said he’d always been poop-scared of dentists, and she had given up trying to get him to go to one. His teeth stayed perfect? Oh, dear me, no; some had been neglected so badly they’d had to be pulled out. Which ones? How many? Peterkins hadn’t told her—he’d just sneaked off and had it done. Fillings? She starts up all over again about how nervous and sensitive her little boysie was, and always left his poor teeth until they were completely buggered. You see what I mean?”

“Too difficult, this one.”

“So I start ringing round all the dentists she could think of”—Marais sighed, rising wearily—”but the receptionists all say the same thing. They say they don’t keep records of casual emergencies, if that’s what I’m talking about. Cheeky bitches.”

Zondi had been staring down at the chart and thinking, with some wry amusement, how like his own mouth it looked; not that fear kept him from the doctors who took turns at being the dentist down at the black clinic, but because they did only extractions, whatever shape the tooth was in. His gaze shifted to the black dots.

“A filling is plenty painful, Sergeant?” he inquired, with genuine curiosity.

“I don’t mind them—but my brother does. Hates the drill. It scares a lot of people.”

“Hau! Then maybe this skeleton boss was forced to have this filling done to him.”

“What?”

“He was forced,” Zondi repeated respectfully. “This treatment was not a matter of his own free will.”

Marais turned in the doorway, laughed, and said: “Forced? Trust a coon to think of that! Nobody forces you to do things with your teeth you don’t like, man! Have some bloody sense.”

Zondi laughed, too, then put his leg back on the table. He was sure he had something there, somewhere.

T
HE BEST PERSON
to see about the unlamented railway foreman, everybody said, was good old Joep Terblanche. He’d hated the bastard. Hated him right down to his little blue socks, and then some. If, in fact, the good Lord hadn’t finally made Rossouw do the decent thing, then Joep would have seen him off personally. It had been as bad as that. And nobody could blame him.

Dear God, thought Kramer.

To find Joep, you had to try the bowls club, the jukskei pitch, the tennis club, and the fishing club’s stretch of trout water. Having run through all the amenities of the dorp of Olifantsvlei by then, there was just a chance he might be at home.

It started to rain heavily, so Kramer drove straight round.

The former station sergeant of Olifantsvlei, retired these three years on full pension, was living modestly in a tin-roofed bungalow overhung by tall pawpaw trees and their overripe fruit. The broad leaves shed by the Chinese fig tree lay undisturbed on the garden bench, and a pair of secateurs were rusting, forgotten, on a homemade sundial in the middle of the small, unkept lawn. It was also significant that the tracks down the clay driveway stopped at a point nearest to the front verandah, and that the garage, some ten yards farther on, had weed growing high against its dull green doors. Good old Joep, all this suggested, was a widower—and a
fairly recent one at that, who hadn’t grown accustomed to his solitude.

Kramer made a dash for the verandah, and reached it with his hair plastered down. He gave the front door a rap. Something inside, either a ghost or a cat, set a dish clattering.

Then a battered Land-Rover chugged in at the gate and the whole feel of the place changed. Big and beaming, broad enough to wear a barrel without needing braces, Joep Terblanche came doubling across; two fish dangled from his left hand, and in his right he carried a six-pack.

“Caught in the act!” he said, tossing the fish aside onto a verandah table. “Lieutenant Kramer, here on business—am I right?”

The bush telegraph in Olifantsvlei was obviously not to be sniffed at. Kramer shook the outstretched hand, approved the firm grip, and told himself to come off guard. The man had a simple and tangible goodness as pronounced as freshly baked bread.

“I’m here to ask a few questions about one of your old cases,” he said.

“Ja, so I hear. Man, it’s a pity my sister has passed on, or she could really tell you a thing or two about Toons Rossouw! Like to come inside?”

They went through into a kitchen that had a strong under-smell of cockroach powder and very few signs of food. When Terblanche opened the cupboard to remove two glasses, only breakfast cereal packets were exposed, and it was reasonable to suppose that he now took his main meals with some family living nearby.

A sodden crash resounded loudly on the tin roof overhead, making Kramer glance up.

“Pawpaw.” Terblanche grinned. “The rain knocks them down.”

“Christ, I thought a bloody maternity stork had dropped its load.”

Terblanche frowned slightly, as though disapproving of that kind of humor—or perhaps it was that he just didn’t understand it. Then he smiled again, handing Kramer his beer and inviting him to be seated.

“Naturally, I’m curious to know why the interest in Toons Rossouw all of a sudden, Lieutenant.”

“You’re well rid of us now, man, so let’s make that ‘Tromp.’ ”

“I prefer ‘Joep’ myself.”

“Fine,” said Kramer, still stalling; his instincts were insisting that he play this one very cool. “Ever heard of Witklip?”

“Certainly. It’s that little place north of—y’know.”

“I’m involved in a murder inquiry there, and Rossouw’s name has cropped up in some of the past history. We don’t know exactly what it’s got to do with anything, so we hoped—by trying our luck this end—we might find out.”

“Witklip?” murmured Terblanche, twisting the tips of his graying moustache between thumb and finger. “I can’t see any connection either. Male or female involved?”

“Would you like to guess?”

“Huh! A woman, of course. But the railway doesn’t go anywhere near the place, and Toons stuck very much to this dorp, as far back as I can remember.”

“What was the story about him, Joep?”

“One you’ve heard before, that I’m sure of. He was a drunk, a fighter, a thief—when he got the chance—and a proper bad bastard all around. So who should agree to marry him? A little girlie he could crush the ribs of in one hand. Personally—and my sister Lettie also shared this opinion—the marriage was the minister’s fault.”

“Shotgun?”

“Hell, no!” said Terblanche, quite shocked. “Stefina came of a good family; poor like kaffirs, but good. He most probably thought she would reform him.”

This was indeed the old, old story. They clinked glasses and drank.

“Nobody can say that little girl didn’t try,” Terblanche went on. “Others in the community tried for them also. Oom Dawid let Toons rent a shack on his property, and Lettie went round collecting up old curtains and suchlike. The place wasn’t much, yet Stefina made it look as pretty as a picture from the catalogue. You could stop by there anytime, I’m telling you. The little black stove would be shining, there would be coffee in the pot, and always wild flowers in a jam bottle on the table given by the minister himself. I think you call it a card table, with folding legs; anyhow, it wasn’t fitting for his position.”

“And they lived miserably ever after?” Kramer asked.

“Ever after,” sighed his host, “until, of course, what happened came to pass. He was clever that one—oh, ja. The first time he took his belt to her, he was lucky and one of my men let him off with a warning. After that, when he came back drunk, or from his womanizing, he’d find ways of never leaving a mark. ‘Stefina,’ I would say—because Oom Dawid would always call me when he heard the screams—‘Stefina, you just make a charge and the doctor is sure to find marks.’ But she would shake her head. Not an ugly girl, you understand, although, in the eyes of some folk, a little on the plain side. It was her bones, man—bones like a little bird. To think of him beating her took you in the stomach. I tell you, when I got a chance, and had to have Toons in my lockup for the night, then he went in there off all four walls and the bloody ceiling. Mind you, like him, I had to be careful.”

Kramer drank to the irony of that.

“I wanted to slap charges on him—any bloody charges, so long as he’d be put away inside. But Lettie asked what would happen to Stefina then, out in the shack alone, with kaffirs all around, and the magistrate followed a similar line, giving him long lectures. They all wanted this dream of theirs—
ach
,
I don’t know what to call it—to work out as it was planned and make them all happy. Never mind Stefina in the meantime! I watched her turning to a shadow of the happy kid I had known. The round cheeks and big dimples and—hell, it was terrible. She’d sit in the church on Sunday, reading her Bible like it would put blood back in her veins. Then she became pregnant.”

“He resented the …?”

“No; for once he settled down. That was actually when the railway job came up—you know how they look after poor whites—and the first was born. A girl.”

“Ah,” said Kramer.

“And the second, also a girl. The third, Stefina told us, was a miscarriage.”

At this point, Terblanche rose and went off to fetch his fish from the front verandah. The rain drubbed harder on the roof and two more pawpaws burst and slid. Kramer switched on the kitchen light when he saw his host take out a gutting knife.

“There was a nagmaal,” the old man continued, talking now as much to himself as to anyone. “Folk came from every direction, from places you never even heard of. When we hold communion in Olifantsvlei, the minister likes to make a big thing of it—bigger than most ministers do, and I’m not sure it’s right. Anyhow, there were hundreds camping here, around the church and down by the river. You can imagine how many kids that added up to! They were the ones who began the talk.”

His knife slid into the fish’s belly rather too deep. He drew it out a little way and tried again, slitting up toward the head. He scraped the innards away.

“They told their parents and soon everyone was whispering and pointing behind Stefina’s back. Naturally, it wasn’t long before the story reached my ears, and when it did, I went straight to her. ‘Stefina, I want you to charge him,’ I said. ‘Your children are saying that their pa kneed their ma in the stomach,
and this made her sit on the potty and do a baby there. Stefina,’ I said, ‘they think it was a joke, Stefina.’ ‘Leave my man alone,’ was all she said. I caught Toons not two minutes later, and he said, ‘That’s not true—why not ask my wife?’ So I looked for the kids, but Stefina had taken them away. Not a word would they say when I finally had them to myself. Nothing! You have never seen kids—or a woman—so terrified. And what could I do about it? Also nothing! Not with the minister and the magistrate and every other bugger on the opposite side!”

The fish had begun to bleed.

“They didn’t mean any harm, Tromp. They said it just couldn’t be, they didn’t believe it. Not after Toons had been making such wonderful progress! But us bloody old sinners weren’t nearly so certain, and we made sure he knew it. We told Toons to his face. We said he was lucky it was nagmaal. Huh! So life goes. Don’t tell me you haven’t heard the rest?”

“How much later was he found in the gangers’ hut?”

“About a fortnight. The magistrate kept all this out of the inquest for Stefina’s sake; he said it wasn’t material.”

“Suicide, Joep?” murmured Kramer, emptying the last of his beer can into the glass before him.

Terblanche crossed over to the sink and carelessly inspected the cut in his palm. The tainted water eddied pink round the plug hole, not becoming any lighter.

“Now you’re asking, my friend. When she got over the shock, Lettie always used to put it best, I think. She used to say that no man is ever safe from the higher law, and this was what Toons Rossouw had forgotten.”

“Divine justice?”

“Call it what you like,” replied Joep Terblanche. “The man was a murderer.”

The color-control knob on Dr. Strydom’s new television set had his primitive employees in fits of laughter in the living
room that evening. This was as well, because the cookboy, the gardener, and the maid had slightly annoyed him by taking his magnificent acquisition almost for granted, and by being less than astounded when the screen first lit up. It had been as disappointing as showing a conjuring trick to very small children, who simply accepted the magic as genuine and failed to appreciate the human ingenuity which lay behind it. Then it had occurred to him that they were probably unaware of the skill involved in getting a lifelike picture, and he’d given the knob a twist to the right. And now, as he exercised his power to transform the news reader from flesh pink to almost any shade of the rainbow, he was being rewarded by delighted giggles and guffaws that signified a proper degree of amazement.