The Sunday Hangman kaz-5

by James McClure

  “Did he ask these kids if they’d seen the dead man’s car here before?” Kramer broke in. “Or anything about any other vehicle that was familiar to them?”

  The question put a worried frown on Ngidi’s face, and he whispered his reply apologetically.

  “He says, Lieutenant, that his only orders were to make sure that the children had stolen nothing from the deceased’s clothing, or from the motorcar, which had been left unlocked.”

  “And then?”

  “He was instructed to chase these children away. His superior waited here for him to return, and that is all. They then returned to Doringboom.”

  Kramer fell into a ponder.

  “You can bugger off now, Fats,” Van Heerden told Ngidi. “Be sure you’re ready with the tape when I come, because the boss has still a lot to do.”

  “No, first ask him where the kids live, Zondi.”

  “To hell and gone,” declared Van Heerden, “and there’s not a road anywhere near that I know of. Five kilometers, at least.”

  “Lieutenant,” Zondi said quietly. “Ngidi can show me the path they have made.”

  “Fine. Then you see you have a proper word with them. Hitch a lift in the constable’s van afterwards, or we’ll pick you up on the way back. Okay?”

  “Sir.”

  “Excuse me,” Strydom butted in, “but are you sure that sending him such a-”

  “The lazy bugger needs a walk,” said Kramer, making for the car.

  Zondi could have chosen which path to follow without any assistance from the Doringboom bumpkin: it was so obviously a children’s path. The veld was never as flat and featureless as it looked from the road, and a path made by adults’ feet, trudging through the same dry grassland day after day, would have taken the line of least resistance. A four-gallon tin of river water, balanced on the head, was far easier to bear up a slope if the incline was climbed crookedly, and an outcrop of rocks was tedious when your feet were heavy. Arid so, whereas a path worn away by grownups would have skirted and meandered and turned, the path he was following ran straight. Dead straight, and as uncompromising as the hunger that sent small bare feet, numbed fleet by the frost, scampering down it each morning. He cursed the children for the straightness of their path. There was, of course, nothing to prevent him from finding a less strenuous route, except his pride. Over the past three months, Zondi had learned many things about pride, and in particular, how much strength it took.

  But he could be weak and shameless, too. This was when he permitted himself to imagine all sorts of nonsense, just as he was doing right then. The thief Erasmus, his brain said, had fired a rat, not a bullet, through that car door and into his leg. By mistake, this rat had been sewn inside him at the hospital, trapping it there in the flesh and the dark, and making it very afraid. If left undisturbed, then the rat endured quietly, and all he felt was the sting of the urine it passed. All he had to do, however, was to take a single step, and the jolt would startle the rat, forcing it to twist and bite and then gnaw on the bone, until he stopped. Oh, yes, it was a clever rat, this frantic, burrowing pain in his thigh.

  Zondi limped on.

  Then stopped suddenly, aware of how foolish he was being. Why, this was what pride could do to a man! It could lead him to act without thinking, and not for a moment had he given the Lieutenant’s actual order any thought. He’d been far too busy proving to the doctor what a tough little kaffir he was.

  If I were a child, he thought, then I would have been greatly excited by what I saw today. It was a dead white man, and now I know that a white man can die, the same as my father. I have seen this frighten other white men, and I want to see why the police come here to do so much writing. There is no food at home until tonight, when perhaps my father brings a little, and I don’t have to go to school like the ones whose parents have the money-why should I go home? Let this big fool chase me, if he likes, for he will surely not come all the way. I will steal back, like I did the day I first saw the big snake, and perhaps I’ll even share in that pig meat. I will steal back, with the cunning of my uncle’s dog, lying low in the grass. It will be-but see, another man is coming this way. Come, let us follow! What strange things are happening.

  And sure enough, now Zondi had taken his eyes from the path, and had allowed them to pass casually over the long grass surrounding him, he was able to see three places where the seed tufts leaned against the press of the wind. His ears then snatched at a muffled giggle, and he knew himself for the bumbling idiot he must have looked. These had to be the children he sought-they could hardly be anyone else-and the rest was simple.

  No, it wasn’t; by slipping himself back into their skins again, he knew that, at the first sigh of the hiding places being spotted, they’d be up and off and running like spring hares, leaving him far behind. His next move would, in fact, have to be judged most carefully.

  With a strangled cry, Zondi pitched forward in his second-best suit and lay very still.

  The speedometer needle gave no hint of the loss of momentum that Kramer was experiencing. Doringboom lay within sight, and the copper steeple on the Dutch Reformed church grew taller by the second. But his own interest in reaching the town seemed to be diminishing proportionately, for he was not an unreasonable man, and the evidence, presented to hint at the picnic spot, had worked on his gut reaction like a dollop of milk of magnesia.

  “Speaking objectively,” he said, lighting another Lucky, “and forgetting about the drop for a moment, is there anything unusual about the case in your eyes?”

  “Only that such a high point of suspension was employed-but that’s part of the drop bit, anyway.”

  Then Strydom went on to explain that a surprisingly low point of suspension was very often the popular choice, as when a table leg or doorknob was used, involving less than a meter.

  “Talking of which, Tromp,” the DS added, going off on one of his tangents, “it bloody amazes me how stupid some coons can be! When I borrowed that tape just now, the one Van Heerden was complaining about being in inches, I found it had meters marked on the underneath side. You would have thought his boys would have looked!”

  “Perhaps they had, Doc,” Kramer answered with a slight smile; he’d suspected as much from the start.

  “Hey? I don’t get that. Anyway, where was I?”

  “Getting the Nobel Prize for bullshit.”

  “Ach, no; that isn’t a nice attitude when a bloke’s doing his best. You can’t have seen as many as I have, and it’s quite true what I’m saying.”

  People who played at hanging-sex deviants and so forth, even kids copying from banned comics-were often caught out by how quick and easy hanging was. It took a pull of only 4.4 pounds to close off the jugular veins, for example. At 11 pounds the carotids closed, too, and at 33 pounds the windpipe was buggered. Now, when you knew that the same 33 pounds approximated the weight of the head and shoulders of a 140-pound man, then it didn’t take a genius to work out what could be achieved simply by sitting on the floor and leaning back a bit. Unconsciousness would be almost instantaneous, and death, whether you liked it or not, could take its time.

  Nor did it take a genius, Kramer conceded a little angrily to himself, to work out that only Tollie Erasmus would have had a compelling interest in going, as it were, according to the book. Anyone else could have achieved the same result with a minimum of fuss, effort, and imagination-and have been back in their car before the next lot of lights caught their reflectors.

  WELKOM! — WELCOME! said the Doringboom boundary board.

  “Get stuffed,” said Kramer, hoping that Mickey wasn’t going to a lot of trouble for nothing.

  4

  Constable Van Heerden must have radioed ahead some dire warning or other, because when Kramer and Doc Strydom drove round the back and into the Doringboom vehicle yard, at least half of the station’s white complement just happened to be there. Five of them were crawling on, under, and through a green Ford, while the remaining three sixteenths, in the r
hinocerine person of Sergeant Cecil Arnot, stood directing operations.

  “Hello, gentlemen,” he said, begrudging the obligatory smile that went with it. “As you will see, I have not been letting the grass grow under my feet.”

  “I don’t think the car’s where you’ll find the money,” Kramer replied, puzzled by that strange emphasis, “but it’s certainly worthwhile having a look. Hell; Johannesburg number plates? Nobody bothered to bloody mention that to me. Have you-”

  “I’m checking with Johannesburg, sir, and they’ll be reporting back shortly. The plates themselves seem genuine.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Is Dr. Myburgh here yet?” Strydom asked in English, as a courtesy.

  “Ready and waiting, Doc! I passed on your telephone message at lunchtime, and he said there was no need to ring back; he’d be honored.”

  Funny, thought Kramer, watching the DS toddle off to where the mortuary, a Victorian relic, stood quietly on its own in the far corner. If Myburgh had known all along that he was having a visitor, then.… But there wasn’t time to take this any further.

  “Sir,” Arnot was saying, his heavy head lowered, “although I cannot explain how I sense this, I’ve reason to believe that someone has been casting aspersions.”

  He made it sound as horrible as anything an incontinent dog did, and then waited for his answer, little eyes aglint.

  “Really? You must tell me about it later. Meanwhile I want to catch up with-”

  “Sir, this is a serious matter. Perhaps all I need say is that a very careful inspection of the site was made by me this morning. It was, after all, my duty to ensure that the umfaans had not in any way interfered with the body. I saw no indications to this effect; the grass beneath the deceased bore no signs of trampling, and there were no other marks of a suspicious nature either. Furthermore, I am quite certain that no vehicle had proceeded beyond the prescribed parking area-it took seven of us to move the tables aside for the ambulance to back up. A precaution I personally organized, as it allowed us to work behind a screen without any inconvenience to the passing public. To summarize, the scene of death was given every scrutiny, in accordance with the-”

  “Cecil,” said Kramer, “I never doubted it.”

  “Hey?”

  Arnot’s ire missed the quick swerve, and came lumbering to a halt; you could almost hear the tail swishing behind the folds of his immense baggy trousers.

  “You didn’t, Lieutenant?”

  “No. So now your question must be: who did?”

  Kramer left him with that to think over, a process certain to waste several more minutes, and hurried on in the good doctor’s wake. There was, of course, one thing you could always safely say about Sergeant Cecil P. Arnot, and that was, setting human nature aside, the man knew his job. If he claimed that the signs of disturbance had been minimal, quite unsuspicious, and in keeping with the situation as he saw it, then this just had to be so. Sod him.

  For one wacky instant, as Kramer passed through the double doors of the old-fashioned post-mortem room, with its high ceiling and quaint skylight, he expected to hear lightning strike, and to see the prone form rise jerkily from the marble table. Then the tall, aristocratic figure on the left of the head, and the hunched, shaggy-haired dwarf on the right, dissolved back into two district surgeons, intent on examining a neck. The air still crackled, however, when Kramer stepped forward to introduce himself.

  Myburgh looked up and nodded, tight-lipped; he was, as the Colonel had guessed, young and intelligent-seeming, with more than a resemblance to a celebrated Cape heart surgeon, which was bound-once he’d saved enough for a city practice-to stand him in good stead.

  Mildly surprised by his reception, Kramer turned to Strydom and found him equally distant, as though withholding something you didn’t say in front of natives.

  “Doc? What gives?”

  “Er-I’m afraid you somewhat misled me, and that has-um-resulted in an embarrassment of a professional nature.”

  “You called me a bloody fool,” Myburgh reminded him.

  “For which I have already apologized, even though when I said ‘you fool,’ I was really referring to myself, Dr. Myburgh. But, Tromp, isn’t it true you said that scrawny bloody constable and the deceased were the same build?”

  “No, I only said the same size, meaning height,” Kramer replied, taking his first look at the corpse and hearing his voice trail. “Because Erasmus was average, around the 150-to-160-pound mark.…”

  “Was,” echoed Strydom, prodding the dead paunch. “Was being the operative word. What would you care to place his weight at now? Another fifteen? Another twenty, perhaps? Maybe more?”

  “Around 180, 185. Christ, how did he get like that?”

  “Not through being a nervous wreck,” Strydom said cynically.

  “But.…”

  “Ja, Tromp?”

  “This means he must have been living very easy and drinking his bloody head off, night and day. Look at that tan, too, and the new haircut.… Hell, I don’t understand.”

  “Nor do I,” murmured Myburgh.

  “You don’t? This bastard was supposed to be on the run, Doc, with blokes in every-”

  “I meant that I still don’t understand what Van Heerden has to do with this. Will you explain, sir?”

  But a reply from Strydom wasn’t immediately forthcoming. He was engrossed in a calculation that he crossed out impatiently-and then returned to, repeating it twice over, with what appeared to be the same result. He slipped the notebook into his pocket, gave a cheery, meaningless smile, and suggested they begin the examination without further ado. His explanation could, if it was still required, be given later, he said.

  Kramer, feeling acutely aware that the bluff held more than either he or Myburgh imagined, managed to contain his curiosity. He gave his attention instead to the equally placid, equally inscrutable features of the late Mr. Erasmus, and thought it a shame that he hadn’t been strangled a nice deep purple. Hanging, with its kindly attitude to the complexion, wouldn’t have been his choice at all. Two other things struck him, one snide and one ironical, which also helped to provide temporary distractions. The first was that Erasmus had an appendix scar exactly like the little white line on the Widow Fourie’s sweet, peach-fluff belly, and finding it here smattered of very poor taste on the thief’s part. And then there was the wince Kramer gave when the body, into which he’d dreamed of driving soft-nosed slugs, preferably at point-blank range, was slit open from chin to pubic arch.

  Myburgh did all the heavy work, and, to judge by Strydom’s grunts of approval, he did it well. His cutters soon had the ribs and breastbone freed from the flayed chest, and he took out a dangle of organs in one. After a time, the old man started carrying bits and pieces across to the sink for him, and their relationship settled down.

  “Methodical,” confided Strydom, noticing Kramer now at his elbow. “I could show you hundreds twice his age who would have gone straight for the neck.”

  He turned on the tap to sluice the viscera.

  “Anything interesting?” Myburgh inquired, proffering his long knife. “That heart was good for another twenty years, I reckon.”

  “Liver was shot. No, man, you go ahead.”

  Myburgh opened the stomach: the smell was, if you’d encountered it often enough under those conditions, unmistakable.

  “Brandy,” said the district surgeons together.

  “Ingested,” added Myburgh, “as far as I can tell, just before death. I’ll have the blood tested.”

  Strydom, with a return of his cagey expression, made no comment. He was, in a way, like a man suffering an attack of deja vu, and his gaze turned blank for five drips of the blood into the bucket under the table.

  “Come on now,” Kramer urged, suddenly losing patience. “I know there’s something weird on the go here. For a start, nobody’s said anything about a brandy bottle being found.”

  “That’s true,” said Myburgh, who had gone back to sawin
g around the skull. “And I was there when Sergeant Arnot had the refuse bin-”

  “All right, let’s skip the brain for a moment, if you don’t mind,” Strydom requested him, but stayed where he was.

  “Fine. I’ve been wanting to dive in at the back myself. Lieutenant? Could you give me a hand in getting the gent sunny side up?”

  Erasmus, his face covered by a flap of scalp, was placed on his front, and Myburgh cut down to expose the spine.

  “Third and fourth vertebrae,” he reported. “Fracture-dislocation with the spinal cord ruptured a little over half its thickness.”

  “General state of surrounding tissues?”

  “Good, considering. No severe tearing or other damage.”

  “Have you ever seen anything similar?”

  “Only once,” replied Myburgh, beginning to show some bewilderment over the way his senior was behaving. “When I was a medical student, and they let us in on a P.M. at Pretoria Central. It was a study in the rate of digestion.”

  “Did they tell you anything about the length of the drop?”

  “No, but I’ve read about it in Taylor’s. The drop is usually six to seven feet, unquote.”

  “Dr. Myburgh, you’ll forgive me if I speak as a man of experience?”