The Sunday Hangman (2 page)

“How do you mean?” asked Havenga, frowning.

“The leg went stiff, onto the accelerator, and we went into the front of this fruit shop—glass, grapes, cabbages everywhere. The owner was killed outright.”

Never, so it seemed, had the man heard anything funnier. Kramer smiled indulgently as he came up for air.

“Jesus Christ! C-c-cabbages everywhere!” Havenga gasped, rejoicing in such a vision. “Man, you’ll have to excuse me a sec.”

And he used the back of his inky hand to smear the tears from his eyes, before beckoning for the barman.

“Same again,” he ordered. “Only this time I pay.”

“Like hell,” said Kramer, and the matter rested there.

While the barman saw to their refills, a bright splash of reflected light began to flutter across the bottles and glasses on the shelves behind the counter.

“Who’s
doing
that?” muttered some old bugger irritably, following its progress back and forth.

Nobody could answer him, so he slid off his stool and went over to the mullioned windows behind them, which gave the bar its spurious look of a Tudor tavern. But the frosted panes defeated his attempts to peer through, and he went out onto the pavement to do some shouting.

“So go on,” Havenga invited Kramer, clinking glasses. “While your boy was making a damn fool of you in all those grapes and bloody mangoes, Tollie got clean away?”

“Uh huh.”

“This is the first time you’ve heard of him since?”

“The first. His home town was Durban, but he didn’t go back there. We’ve had a running check going in all the big
centers—Joey’s, Cape Town, P.E.—without any joy so far. What plates did he have on his car?”

But Havenga was distracted at that moment by the return of the old misery from the pavement.

“Who was it?” asked a visiting farmer, who’d apparently ordered them both fresh lagers in the meantime. “Some kid left in—”

“No, some insolent little black bastard, waggling his tobacco tin or something about over the other side, just grinned at me—you know the type. Dressed up like a dog’s dinner in a bloody suit he must have swiped. I don’t know. This for me? Very good of you, old chap.”

“If you like, I’ll go and kick his backside,” the farmer offered, being a much younger man.

“No, no; I’ve sent him packing! Best of health!”

Havenga grinned cynically and turned back to Kramer.

“Sorry, what was that?”

“I asked you about his sodding plates.”

“Ach, I never saw them. Don’t these bloody English kill you?”

The splash of light crossed Havenga’s face even as he spoke, slipping from it to move like a butterfly from the Oude Meester brandy over to the till.

“What’s he playing at?” exploded the old man, banging down his tankard. “Just who the devil does he think he is?”

Suddenly Kramer came to, and realized he knew the probable answers to both those questions. Not only this, but that he’d now made his adjustments, and the time had come to act.

“Duty calls?” asked Havenga, puzzled to see him rise so purposefully for no obvious reason.

“Duty, Sergeant? I came off duty officially at six o’clock this morning.”

“But I … you mean, Marais …?”

And the new man in Fingerprints looked at the glass in his hand, before coming the old comrade with a slightly uneasy laugh: “You aren’t going to report me, hey, sir?”

“Naturally,” said Kramer, just for the hell of it.

Over on the other side of the street, just as he’d supposed, leaned the jaunty figure of Bantu Detective Sergeant Mickey Zondi, still overcoming his problem of access to the bar with the aid of a spare 9mm magazine, angled to catch the sun. An instant later, however, this had stopped, and the fly little sod was on his way across.

“How goes it, Mickey?”

“Not so good, boss—and not so bad. I was two hours with Mama Makitini, but she swears to God she never had one drop of that vodka in her shebeen. Then, by chance, I find Yankee Boy Msomi round the back of Pillay’s place, and I get a tip for us to watch where the Mpendu brothers go tonight, because maybe there is a connection. I am sorry you had to wait so long.”

“That’s okay; just got a bloody gutsful of the office. I’ve been talking.”

“Who with? The old guy with the fine command of the Zulu language?” Zondi joked, waving a shaky fist. “Only it would be a kindness to explain to him the difference between bhema and bhepa. He crudely told me to go and smoke myself.”

“Hmmm.”

“Boss?” asked Zondi, quick to match moods.

“Forget the bloody vodka and the Mpendus. I’m going to have a word with the Colonel, while you get the car filled up. Be in the yard at one.”

“Where do we go?”

“Doringboom. A post-mortem in Doringboom.”

“
Hau!
This is a murder inquiry?”

“Well, at the moment,” Kramer said, “that seems to be a matter of opinion. Here, you tell me what you think.”

He handed over the photograph.

Zondi’s fleeting scowl was involuntary. He returned the picture, gave no sign of what was going through his head, and took a step away.

“I get the car, boss.”

“Fine.”

Kramer set off in the opposite direction, heading for the CID building, then side-stepped into the shadow of an offloading Coke truck. That limp wasn’t getting any better; in fact, when Zondi thought you weren’t looking, it tended to become a lot worse.

“I’ve heard,” said Colonel Hans Muller, without glancing up from his blotter, where he was making daisies with the juice tapped from his pipe stem. “I’ve also been having a word with Dr. Myburgh, the young DS handling the case at Doringboom. Putting him in the picture and so on.”

“Oh, ja? What does he have to say?” Kramer inquired, taking his usual seat on a corner of the big desk.

“Careful! No vibrations, please. This isn’t as easy as it looks. Anyway, as I was saying, Myburgh sounded an intelligent fellow. He gets a lot of hangings, of course, being in a rural area and the Bantu not having sleeping pills and all that rubbish to play around with. Quite a lot of experience for his age.”

“Uh huh.”

“Interested in what we had to tell him about the deceased. Said it would account for Erasmus carrying no identity—which shows he isn’t a fool.”

“And?” prompted Kramer, wary of the build-up.

“Well, he told me he’d visited the scene in person. No signs of violence, no strangulation prior to suspension, and a nice little fork in the tree to jump off. Nothing to make—”

“But, Colonel—”

“Ach! Look what you made me do! I don’t want bloody
sunflowers
, hey? If you’ll just let me finish.… The one slightly unusual feature was Tollie’s bust neck and his use of a drop—most suicides just sort of strangle.”

“Slightly unusual? Christ, I’d like to hear what our own DS has to say about that,” Kramer retorted, confident that his doubts would be shared by Dr. Christiaan Strydom, the gifted if eccentric garden gnome with whom he generally worked.

“Your wish, Trompie,” murmured the Colonel, good-humoredly, “is my whatsit. I checked with the very same not five minutes ago, and Chris agreed that a fracture was rare—although far from impossible, given the circumstances I described. He also made a couple of very sound observations, one of which Doc Myburgh had himself already noted.”

Instead of explaining what this was, the amateur artist gave his undivided attention to the spread of the next disgusting yellow stain.

“Do I have to just guess, Colonel?”

“Hmmm. You could try, if you like: what have—or had—Doc Strydom and Tollie Erasmus got in common?”

The answer he received was deservedly coarse.

“Then let me give you a clue: where have they both, in a manner of speaking, served a term?”

Kramer kept silent, regretting he’d ever bothered to pay the bastard the courtesy of a quick call. But his mind childishly insisted on solving the riddle: Strydom and Erasmus had both spent time in Central Prison, Pretoria, the site of the Republic’s gallows and, for this reason, one of the few places blacks were able to share the same amenities, however briefly.

“Full marks,” Colonel Muller continued, taking Kramer’s correct assumption for granted. “… where it would surely be impossible for a man to remain in ignorance of what takes place there on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Every warder has to witness at least one little send-off, and I’m sure he then feels
it his duty to pass on the deterrent effect to those maximum-security prisoners in for rehabilitation. Tollie must have heard their stories dozens of times during his last stretch—and maybe even the sound of the trap going down. And so, when he felt in need of an instantaneous death, guaranteed by the government itself, then—”

“Tollie? That’s crap!” snapped Kramer.

“Then I hesitate to ask you to bear it in mind, Lieutenant. Nonetheless, such an approach would be entirely rational on Tollie’s part, especially if he’d thrown away his gun and left himself just with a tow rope. Don’t let the statistics fool you: very few members of the ordinary public know anything about a drop or more would use it.”

“You’ll be saying he did it out of conscience next!”

The Colonel looked up. “Now who’s in the crap business?” He chuckled, leaning back. “That’s one kind of trouble our friend never got himself into, having a bad conscience. But you’ve got to admit that, in this context, there’s nothing inconsistent about the method used.”

“I’d be surprised if he hanged himself any other way, sir—which doesn’t mean that I think, for one minute, he did it.”

“A feeling in your water?”

“Other inconsistencies, beginning with—”

“Hold it; point two coming up. Doc Strydom shares your respect for precedent, you see.”

“Oh, ja?”

“Hanging, he reminds us, is a form of violent death that’s different to all the rest, inasmuch as the forensic presumption is, for once, that death was self-inflicted. In his strange mind, even judicial hangings are self-inflicted, but we won’t waste our time going into—”

“Ach, why not?” Kramer was niggled into saying.

“Watch it. You should be asking why this presumption is made. Simply because self-inflicted hanging has millions of
precedents—going right back to Judas, if you like—whereas homicidal hanging is a crime that’s virtually
unprecedented
. Follow? In fact, the only case Doc could cite offhand was one in Paris in 1881.”

Kramer lit a Lucky Strike and rode out a few waves of doubt in that water of his. For a moment there, this talk of precedent had impressed him, then he’d realized that the Colonel’s whole argument depended solely upon the number of homicidal hangings that had been actually detected.

“A handy presumption,” he remarked dryly. “Hell, if my love life ever gets too complicated, I might give it a whirl myself.”

“You do that, Tromp—providing you’re picking on two-year-olds these days, or on junkies stoned from here to bloody Christmas. Because the DS will still be making his routine check, and is certain to note any signs of secondary violence, such as might be needed to control your victim. Erasmus was conscious at the time, and there was no evidence of recent bruising.”

“Fully conscious? How could Myburgh tell?”

“Ah,” said the Colonel, appearing shifty on purpose, “here is the unbelievable part of the story. It seems that Tollie had in his left hand a small, leather-bound copy of the Holy Bible. He must have been holding it hell of a tight, and then the fatal spasm kept it there.”

Of course, Kramer could believe that: sudden and violent death was capable of many tricks. He had once spent ten minutes trying to free a hair drier from the grasp of a skinny typist electrocuted in her bath. He had found a brier pipe, not unlike the Colonel’s, clenched in the teeth of a steeplejack impaled on a parking meter. And if anyone was to turn to Jesus in extremis, then it was invariably the scum of the earth—see the prayers scratched on any cell wall.

But he said with conviction: “Ach, somebody stuck it in afterwards.”

The Colonel wagged a hairy finger.

“Sir?”

“The truth of the matter is, Trompie, that you wanted this Tollie Erasmus for yourself. And now you can’t get him, you want someone else to take the stick.”

Kramer shrugged.

“Furthermore, it’s no use you and me jumping to wild conclusions, and saying Tollie was too psycho to ever think of such an idea, because we aren’t qualified to make that kind of judgment—I would go so far as to say that nobody is. Let us keep to the facts, and both our feet on the ground. I don’t want you going to Doringboom and forcing a confession out of Dr. Myburgh, for instance; or some other bloody thing, equally typical of you in a frustrated state. The facts, the hard facts, and how they concern us as of now—understood?”

“There’s the money, sir.”

“Just what I had in—”

“I meant: would you kill yourself if you had twenty thousand rand still to spend?”

“God in heaven!” protested the Colonel. “Since when was that known to you as a fact?”

“Ach, sir; we’d have at least heard as much, if Tollie had been giving it a tonk. It’s obvious that he was waiting for the pressure to come off first. Probably shacked up in a flat somewhere with a little goose to do the cooking and run errands for him.”

“Ja? The same little goose who maybe ran away with his golden egg one night? After doctoring up the curry? That has happened before—and it can leave a man very depressed.”

Much to the Colonel’s evident satisfaction, the telephone rang at that moment, creating the right sort of pause.

Or so he thought.

“Hey, when are you going up to Doringboom?” the Colonel asked a few moments later, cupping a hand over the mouthpiece. “Your old pal’s on the line, wondering if there’s a lift for him
available. I thought it wouldn’t be long before he wanted to get his nose in there! You know how Doc is about these matters.”

Kramer frowned; he also knew that Strydom had an official car of his own, which made the request seem rather odd, and that he didn’t like the idea of being tied down to bringing the silly sod back again.

“Tell him I’m sorry, Colonel, but I’m not even waiting for lunch. We’re leaving straight away at one o’clock.”