The Sunday Hangman

by James McClure

  “Don’t worry, Lieutenant! I don’t want to go on anybody’s black list!”

  “Ach, when did you ever kill someone and get away Scot-free?” Kramer reassured him jokingly and, with a mock salute, took his leave by jumping down into the garden.

  A look on Ferreira’s face, glimpsed just as he turned from the verandah, made him regret very much having said that.

  That was the start of a dark mood which became darker and darker until, deciding he was achieving nothing by sitting up alone in the station commander’s office, Kramer took the pathway to Jonkers’s bungalow, passing close to the hut where Zondi was quartered. Although there was no light showing, he paused and listened for a while, hearing not a sound.

  Kramer moved on, lethargic with a sense of absurdity. Exactly what he found absurd, he wasn’t sure; perhaps it was the idea of having an early night. Or it could have been the fault of the Widow Fourie, who’d just accused him on the telephone of having had another woman; a more absurd conversation, based on a wild assumption made over a range of three hundred kilometers, was difficult to imagine.

  The bungalow stank of floor polish, stale beer, and mail-order perfume. He pushed the door shut behind him, left the lights off, and followed the passage down to the end; on the right, the maid had said, was the guest room and his bed. A weak moon, shining in through the burglar-proofed window, dimly outlined a lot else: an ironing board, a sewing machine, a dressmaker’s dummy on a stand, rows of melon preserve, cardboard boxes. He picked his way across, stripped to his underpants, and lay back on the coverlet. It was, in fact, a long time since he’d slept in a strange bed, let alone one with a stranger in it. Silly bitch.

  He closed his eyes and his thoughts drifted, swirled, and became caught up in an eddy of too much drink and no food. He saw tiers of prisoners in brightly colored uniforms behind silver bars upsetting their water dishes.

  He opened his eyes and took a fix on the far wall. The giddiness left him; he began to feel floppy, warm, and drunk. It was a good feeling, and eased away his anxiety over what might happen to poor bloody Zondi. It couldn’t be ending.…

  That was a pretty little dress on the dummy. Short sleeves but a high-buttoned front; a teaser if ever there was one. He rolled onto his feet and bent to look at it. There was a scrap of paper, scribbled over with measurements that didn’t make sense, pinned to the collar; Suzanne was the name across the top of it. Little Suzanne Swanepoel, who hadn’t a mother to make her a pretty party dress, so kind Mrs. Jonkers helped out. Between tumbles with Tollie and frolicking with Frikkie, the woman had a heart of gold. Trouble was, with a dress like that, you could never be sure of what lay underneath. Not unless you undid the round buttons, starting at the neck, one by one. All the way down to the waist and then drew back the two sides and had a look. Like that. Too dark, much too dark to see a thing. Feel, then. Run the fingertips up over the patent adjustable form and fill your palm with such a pleasing small shape. Linger. Think about the search tomorrow. Yawn, button up, and go to bed. Trying to be filled with self-disgust, but failing.

  16

  MR. RAT DIED that night. By Saturday morning, he no longer gnawed on the bone, nor did he squirm, twist, and scrabble. Instead, giving off heat and bloating rapidly, Mr. Rat decayed. Zondi could just feel the swelling.

  But uppermost in his mind, as he drove through the early morning mist toward the farm where Dorothy Jele worked, was the story of Mama Buza’s baby. It had seemed a perfectly good story when told by a virtuous man like Absalom Mkuzi, and yet, within minutes of Zondi’s leaving the headman’s kraal, his instincts had taken him on that long trek to talk to Mama Buza’s former neighbors. They had said nothing to alter the crucial fact that all of Witklip believed in Izimu’s guilt as a child-stealer; they had, however, enlarged on one or two details that troubled an outsider unused to God’s taking part in police work. Details such as the baby’s miraculous condition—which could, as one old hag had observed, have been attributed to Izimu’s foul designs, along the lines of the fatter the better. Then again, Zondi had seen his own infants restored to bouncy well-being overnight at the end of a lean week on staple rations. Notwithstanding any of this, it still seemed to him rather peculiar, and he was eager to hear what Dorothy Jele might be able to tell him.

  The Chevrolet rattled over the cattle grid and followed the drive around to the front steps of the huge white house, which had very small, narrow windows. Two lion dogs rushed out, barking savagely, to be followed by Mr. Jackson, the farmer.

  He was a big man with a red wobble under his sharp chin like a turkey. His bluey-gray eyes were the color of a dead sheep’s and his nose was pointed, making him resemble the sort of white man a child would crayon at school, yet his voice was low, deep, and almost friendly.

  “Yes, boy?” he said, noting the official look of the car. “What is it you want here?”

  Zondi replied in respectfully murmured Zulu: “I wish to speak a little with your servant Dorothy Jele, master.”

  “Dorothy is helping the madam with her hair,” Mr. Jackson told him, switching to Zulu himself. “You’d better go round and wait in the yard for a while—but first I will have to know what this is all about.”

  It was a pity he was bilingual; often a fluent burst of gibberish and a few clicks of the tongue would deflect an awkward question such as this without further ado.

  “There is a new ordinance, sir,” Zondi lied earnestly, building on a truth, “similar to the one which makes all Xhosa people into citizens of the new nation of the Transkei, irrespective of their place of birth. It requires registration of those—”

  “Whoa! You’re not trying to take her away from us, are you?” interrupted Mr. Jackson, returning sternly to English. “We’ve had Dorothy for thirty years, you know—she’s one of the family. Never been parted from us for more than a week.”

  “On the contrary,” Zondi replied, using English himself now out of politeness. “The ordinance is concerned with the maid’s domicile at the termination of her employment only.”

  “But we’ve promised her she can build a hut here and we’ll see she never starves or anything. Can’t she do that?”

  “It is not for me to say, sir. But has the boss considered nominal employment?”

  “So that’s how it’s done?” Mr. Jackson chuckled, then went back into Zulu. “A man never knows what they will think of next! All right, off you go. She will be about ten minutes.”

  Zondi waited until the dogs had followed the farmer into the house, then he hobbled down the drive leading to the garages and the servants’ quarters. The five domestics in the walled yard, seated on wine boxes and upturned buckets, spooning up mealie meal porridge, greeted him with reserve. He declined their offer of a seat and a share of their breakfast, and leaned against the trunk of an avocado tree, thinking over what he had just learned. So Dorothy Jele had chosen to work for the Jackson family for a full generation without, it appeared, having ever requested more than a week at a time in which to turn her back on them. This deepened his interest in the case of Mama Buza’s baby—although that wasn’t, of course, what he was there for. At a guess, the Lieutenant would want to know if any had cross-examined her about the identity of the man in the forest.

  Kramer overslept, to be awakened by the maid bearing a breakfast tray of fried bread and tomato. Intensely annoyed with himself, he leaped up, ate the bread while he shaved, and then dressed hurriedly, muttering recriminations. He left the bungalow shortly after eight and jog-trotted along the path, noting to his satisfaction that the door of Zondi’s hut was closed and that all was as quiet as it had been the night before. But as he drew nearer to the police station, he saw that his car had gone, and this made him run the rest of the way.

  “Where the hell’s Sergeant Zondi?” he demanded on reaching the charge office.

  Goodluck Luthuli stamped to attention. “He go by Jackson farm, suh!”

  “Is that so? What’s that you’ve got there?”

  Goodlu
ck handed over an envelope marked PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL, which Kramer tore open where he stood.

  Dear Lt. Kramer, the note inside said. Hardly anybody pitched up last night because of the roads and the trouble when the vet crashed. See you later. In haste, Piet F. (I’ve gone to get a new tire from Brandspruit, don’t know how long I’ll be.)

  The note—and the fact it was a note—somehow bothered him. But not half so much as the discovery that Zondi had helped himself to the Chev and buggered off. No doubt the cheeky sod was checking to see if anyone had tried to make Dorothy Jele swear to having spotted Izimu among the trees—only those hadn’t been his orders, and things in that department were coming to a head.

  “Morning, sir!” said Willie, strolling in smelling of horse. “I’ve got that diagram ready like you asked for.”

  That was slightly cheering; Kramer ordered him through into the office to see how it looked. Willie produced a sheet of white card—the shape belied its origin as the stiffener from inside a new shirt—and handed him a scale drawing that was remarkably good. Even the grain of the wood in the platform was there, and the lower figure—outlined in dots—had toes that pointed realistically downward.

  “Not bad. But how’s the arithmetic of this? Last night you were sitting here moaning like a stuck pig.”

  Willie hesitated. “Before you chucked me out, didn’t you say I could go and do it in feet and inches?”

  “Uh huh. But explain this figure of twelve-eight—that’s a bloody sight less than I expected.”

  “Still higher than an ordinary room, Lieutenant.”

  Kramer sat down behind the desk, lit a Lucky, for breakfast, and motioned Willie to get on with it.

  “Well, sir, I started by making the scaffold platform my fixed point. Then I proceeded to find the victim who had the longest drop—or, in other words, the one who took up the most room below that point in the ‘after’ position, so marked.”

  “Izimu: he was the lightest, according to his P.M. report.”

  “Ja, only he had a scrawny neck with no muscle tone. Although the tramp was heavier, he had shoulders like a buffalo, so Dr. Strydom reckons he took a six-foot drop. To that I added three inches for neck stretch, supposing the body was left hanging for twenty minutes for the heart to stop, plus another inch for clearance—both minimum amounts. So you could say that the bottom line of the sum is six-four.”

  “From the floor up to the platform?”

  “Correct, sir. Then for the ‘before’ position, or the space required above the trap door, I simply took the tallest person—the railway ganger—and added on his height of six-one.”

  “Plus what?” Kramer asked.

  “Three inches for the shackle attaching the rope to the adjusting chain.”

  “But what if the hangman stands higher than six-four?”

  “He’d have to bloody stoop, sir.”

  Kramer was surprised into a short laugh. “You’re a typical example of what Doc’s expertise can do to a man, but I must say I’m impressed. Where did you learn to draw like this?”

  “Ach, at the orphanage.”

  “Uh huh?”

  “That’s all there ever was a lot of—paper and pencils; sometimes crayons as well. A man used to bring us the old rolls from the newspaper and Matron cut them up.”

  This was a guilelessness quite different from that shown by the knobbly-kneed abortion at Doringboom, and Kramer looked Willie over carefully, wondering if he had got him wrong. The scrutiny was misinterpreted.

  “I—I didn’t mean to be rude just now, sir it’s just.…”

  “Go on, man,” Kramer murmured.

  “I appreciate we’re only trying for a minimum here, and that the gallows must be higher. It’s not that. And obviously Dr. Strydom knows a lot about the theory, only—”

  “He also did the P.M. at about seventy executions.”

  “Oh, I see,” mumbled Willie, becoming confused. “Then it doesn’t matter.”

  But the obvious conflict in the kid intrigued Kramer. He called out for Luthuli to bring them some coffee, and invited Willie to take a chair. “You know something about the practical side? Something he’s overlooked?”

  Willie cracked his knuckles. “Did you also mix with the warders when you were at police college, sir?”

  “Occasionally.” Voortrekkerhoogte’s proximity to Pretoria made this inevitable.

  “Then you know how they boast about the hangings. How they think it he-man stuff to watch those kaffirs getting the chop. Granted, it isn’t a sight I would want to witness. With a white or a colored it must be even worse.”

  “Although they usually do them one at a time.”

  “That’s true. But what I’m saying is that this expert advice here—ach, it seems somehow too posh.”

  “In what way?” Kramer asked, glancing at the Telex slips.

  “For instance, one Saturday night after a Rugby match, we were in the bar at the Van Riebeeck when the prison blokes started having sport with this little chap—I think his name was Kriel. He was down for his first execution on the Tuesday and the others were trying to put him off. It was no use him saying it was only a black bitch who’d smothered her ‘bambino’ to keep her job. Hell, they were the worst, these others told him; not only had you got to strap her up between the legs, but to a bloody stretcher as well. There was no other way of getting her there. Jesus, those were the buggers who really fought.”

  “You’re losing me, Willie.”

  “That’s how it started, you see, sir. Then they began to talk about the gory things, especially when the executioner gave too much drop. There was always blood all over, they said, which was why he’d seen sawdust near the coffin room. Yet according to these notes, such things shouldn’t happen.”

  “I’m lost.”

  Willie cracked another knuckle. “One warder said—it sounded true and he was drunk, so it made him cry a bit—he said that he’d seen the rope slip up and pull half this boy’s face off. The noose got stuck under his nose, which meant his neck broke okay, but all this part was scraped clean. Where was the rubber ring? Dr. Strydom says there’s a patent rubber ring that’s supposed to hold the noose tight until you can pull out the pin and push the lever.”

  “If they were doing a big batch, then—”

  “Not according to these notes, Lieutenant. Even with six on the trap there should be no difference. Then there’s all this velocity times mass squared over acceleration. And the elastic module of the rope they’re using.”

  “Hey? It sounds more like a bloody space launching!”

  “Ja, you could call it that,” Willie said, grinning. “Actually, it is part of the sums you’ve got to do if you want the drop to be right. But do you remember John Harris, the bastard who put a bomb on Jo’burg station? Their coach said they’d given him ‘an extra-long drop,’ just to make sure. They’re still talking about Harris, said he’d gone well and—”

  “Gone well? Hell, I remember that expression now. Nice and quick, Luthuli.”

  Kramer reached for his coffee and took a sip.

  “The point is, Lieutenant, that you don’t give ‘extra-long drops’ if you’re using the correct tables—or so Dr. Strydom says. A good hangman gets the drop correct to half an inch, no blood and no mess.”

  “You’re saying what?”

  “I’m saying,” replied Willie, searching for the right words, “well, we’re working from an ideal here.”

  “But they’ve been ideal hangings, my boy—that’s the point. Furthermore, I never heard stories like yours in my time. They must have seen you coming.”

  Willie was someone who colored easily: he turned a stubborn red. “With respect, they weren’t even looking at us while this was going on! They could also have made up much worse stories—not so?”

  Kramer had to concede that. “Uh huh.”

  “And when I saw Kriel, about two weeks later, and asked him how it’d been, he said she hadn’t gone well. Or at least she had started goin
g well, which had made them forget about the allowance they had made for the stretcher or strait jacket—I can’t exactly remember. The drop ended up too short, she wasn’t heavy enough, and so she had only strangled. Above floor level, Kriel said, so you could watch the hood as it turned slowly round and round. That was all he told me—he didn’t say anything about blood. It would have been easy for him to come up with a really gruesome story, but you could see he wasn’t in the mood.”

  Willie became absorbed in this recollection and lifted up his coffee cup without looking at it. He drank in noisy gulps, his eyes on the dagga sacks.

  “Come to think of it,” said Kramer, who was finding his own drink too hot, “I heard somewhere recently that the hangman was using a pick handle to finish off his botched jobs.”

  “Ach, that’s nonsense!” Willie protested.

  “How do you know? What means have you of finding out?”

  “Because, sir, that’s really stupid to get things so wrong! These blokes said the hangman was really good with the condemneds. Some of the kaffirs like to kick their slippers off and run all the way, and he lets them. Harris was singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ and nobody minded. It isn’t he makes mistakes on purpose, only all this textbook stuff—”

  “Books aren’t allowed about prison procedures. Doc is speaking from experience and his specialist’s study of the subject. Other medicos send him clippings and that.”

  “Ja, I know, but—”

  “Certainly not in such detail. At most, all you ever get is pure hearsay. Are we agreed on that?”

  Willie nodded.

  “Then where has our hangman obtained his technical know-how, if it wasn’t via Pretoria Central by some means or other? You answer me that!”

  Kramer didn’t wait for Willie’s reply before reaching for the telephone. It had just occurred to him to begin his day with a call to the commandant of Pretoria Central; the odds of anyone local being the state hangman were terrible, but there was always the chance.