The Sunday Hangman

10

Dr. Strydom was by now in something of a state. No fewer than four inquests, each indicating an excusable error of judgment, had come to light-and this wasn’t counting the observations he himself had made at Doringboom, of course.

His feelings of conflict were very natural. It seemed incredible that he should, within so short a time, and with the ungainly means at his disposal, pick out this number of cases for reappraisal. But then again, there just weren’t that many white suicides by hanging in Natal each year, and Alfred had obeyed his direction to ignore any obviously narrow ligatures; between them, they had called a halt in the late ’60s before three o’clock. It also seemed incredible that one of these likely oversights appeared to have been his own.

Incredible, but not impossible, because this time around he had known what to look for, and had not presumed a thing. The remains in question had been those of a white adult male, aged somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, discovered in a skeletal condition at the foot of a small krantz or ravine. One end of a rotten rope had been found around the neck-of which very little remained, due to decomposition and rodent life-and the other end had been tied to a broken branch. It had not taken him long, on that wet and chilly afternoon, to agree with the police that the branch, which came from an overhanging tree, told the whole story. The deceased had secured the rope to it, allowing himself virtually no slack because of the length involved, and had stepped over the cliff’s edge. The sudden weight had been just enough to snap the branch and send him plunging to his death-a death that could have been attributed to several causes, among them exposure brought on by the paralysis of a broken neck. Strydom’s only comfort was that he’d not been dogmatic in his summation, because, when looked at from another viewpoint, that broken branch could have come as a surprise only to the hangman, hurriedly ridding himself of a night’s work.

Having gone over it again in his mind briefly, he could see that his first assessment had probably been correct, but there were the two others. One was the product of slapdash, lamentably perfunctory work on the part of a district surgeon known for his high output and habit of dribbling cigarette ash into things: he had simply not made any real effort to ascertain anything about the white male, suspected of being a tramp, who’d committed suicide by hanging in an empty barn. Not even the hyoid bone had been examined. This was in direct contrast to the fourth DS involved, whose punctilious treatment of a witch doctor’s death deserved the highest praise. “An interesting case,” he had written, “in which the deceased did as neat a job as any state executioner. Note the low tree stump used as a platform, but the weight of animal skins, etc., he was wearing would presumably contribute to producing the minimal force necessary. Taylor reports one fracture-dislocation in 52 cases-this is my first in 109.” The man’s lack of experience had, however, led him to overlook a couple of things which Strydom spotted as soon as he saw the photographs. They showed a small contusion on the left jawline and the knot at the occiput-or back of the head-where all it would have achieved was mere strangulation.

“Alfred,” said Strydom, as the messenger returned with a wrapped sandwich for him, “we’ve got something really weird on the go here.”

“No cheese-n-tomato, master. I bring ee-ham.”

“Different DS, different magisterial district each time-have you noticed? There could be method in that.”

“Uh-uh,” corrected Alfred, with a firm shake of his wooden earplugs. “Ee-ham.”

Pursuing the Roberts angle with obtuse Detective Sergeant Prins in the Durban Murder and Robbery Squad office that afternoon was definitely a mistake, Kramer told himself, and wished he had gone straight up to the records section instead. Not only was Prins being as condescending as he dared about an out-of-town inquiry, but he kept breaking off to shout abuse at a suspect crouched in the corner, and several times he had got up to kick him.

“Where was I?” Prins asked.

“In your chair,” Kramer replied wearily, having lost the thread of the conversation once again.

Prins grinned-a quick show of very white, very narrow teeth in a deeply tanned face that seemed made up entirely of straight lines, like a brown paper bag still showing its packing folds. “And so, with Ringo being of age, and us having no warrant out for him,” he said, sitting down again, “the fact that-stay still, bliksem! — he went off into the wild blue yonder was of no bloody consequence to us. Adult persons can go where they like-correct? As I said to that crazy old woman myself, she’d best forget the bastard and start enjoying life. But no-still! — she has to go on and on. Even wanted us to make whites carry proper passes as well, so we would know their whereabouts at any given-stop that noise, you hear? Last time I really lost my rag and warned her-quite still! — er, and now she does the same to you. Man, I’m sorry about that, hey?”

“No consequence to you? What she says about him going straight is-”

“Ja, we scared the poop out of him that time, I can tell you. And if he had been in any more trouble, I’d have been among the first to know.”

“You weren’t suspicious about him going like that?”

Prins dragged his attention back from the corner. “In the first place, she didn’t report him missing for nearly a week in case he was mixed up in something. And in the second, Ringo was a nothing, Lieutenant; I’m even surprised Erasmus ever remembered them.”

“Them? Vasari was at Steenhuis, too?”

“Ach, of course! They started early together on the bag snatch.”

Kramer pulled out his notebook. “Did Vasari have a brother or anything?”

“Two sisters. But they’re not around here anymore.”

“Gone far?”

“Italy.”

“Uh huh?”

“Buried the bastard and went. The whole family.”

Prins began to fidget impatiently with an ebony ruler, rolling it between his lean, carefully kept hands.

“Ringo had no other known associates?”

“None,” Prins stated categorically, getting to his feet. “Looks like you’ve picked a lulu, hey, sir? No other leads you can try? I can’t see that yellow shit as your man in a million years, if I can be honest-it was him who panicked out there on the Bluff. Why not drop him and see who in that dorm was talking about Witklip?”

“Thanks,” grunted Kramer, knowing a dead end when he saw one, without needing to have it pointed out.

But he went on sitting there, doing his own bit of fiddling with the old woman’s pathetic circular, and wondering if he shouldn’t make at least some attempt to trace Roberts; a quick glance through the list of unidentified white males, kept in the inquest place back in Trekkersburg, might well be all the time it would take. The whole thing had that feeling to it. There was the backwash as well as sharks, and hands didn’t last long in the Indian Ocean-but with an approximate date and a description of stature and clothing, he just could save her the cost of the printing. He watched the ruler arc into the corner, and the man go to fetch it.

“Just a sec!” exclaimed Prins, twisting round with a squeak of his rubber heel. “I’ve seen a way to work this.”

“Oh, ja? With a pencil and paper, you mean?”

Prins laughed. “That comes later. No, this Witklip hideout idea, Lieutenant: would it be Tollie’s style to tell the female where he got it from exactly? He could never say anything without a bloody twist to it.”

“So what? Roberts has already proved wrong.”

“But before you go looking for the rest of them, Tollie was sure it was a big secret, right? Who keeps the best secrets? Doesn’t tell tales? Do you get it?”

“Vasari,” said Kramer, but did not thank him.

Instead he got the hell out of Durban.

Colonel Muller passed the sugar bowl to Doc Strydom, then popped two self-righteous small tablets into his own coffee with all the blatant stealth of a stage poisoner. He stirred, tapped his spoon on the lip of the cup, and placed it in its saucer.

Kramer, who had come straight up to the office from the car park, in response to a tip-off from Henk Wessels that something funny was going on, watched all this with one eyebrow raised. While he had expected some sort of reaction to his investigations in Durban, this prolonged and rather smug silence was baffling him.

“And so, Tromp,” the Colonel said at last, “so far as you are concerned, the reason for Erasmus choosing Witklip has now been satisfactorily explained away. Is that correct?”

“Right, sir. We’re back at square one again.”

“My grandma” murmured the Colonel, dunking a Marie biscuit and winking at Strydom, “used to have a saying, you know.”

“Oh, ja?”

“When I was a little boy, she would tell me that whenever one door closed, then another would open.”

“Colonel?”

“Are you prepared to accept that?”

Kramer shrugged. “What’s the game?” he asked irritably.

“I’m trying to clear your mind, Tromp. I’m trying to get you ready for a little shock that still has me shaking. In fact, now I’ve heard your story, too, I’m shaking even harder.”

Then he handed Kramer a file which contained inquest papers relating to the discovery of a body at the foot of a krantz.

The only shock Kramer experienced was that of having been preempted. “Who the hell thought of looking for this?” he said softly. “Did Mickey get in touch with you?”

Strydom shook his head.

“How well do those particulars match the ones on that form thing of yours?” the Colonel asked.

Kramer had no need to read Mrs. Roberts’s appeal again-it was part of him. “The date is almost spot on, sir; the hair coloring and length is the same as Ringo’s, allowing for sun-bleaching; five-foot nine is the right height. Does it say here one blue eye was found? That would be correct as well.”

“No; better disregard that for now,” Strydom said cautiously. “Eyes have been known to regress to blue after death.”

“Where’s the list of clothing, Doc?”

“That investigating officer will be getting his arse kicked,” the Colonel growled, making a note. “It’d rotted off, but he should have recorded buttons, zips, footwear. No fingerprints of course, as you can see from the picture.”

Then Kramer felt the shock pass and his natural distrust of the fortuitous take its place. “These four common factors don’t actually count for much, not when you see them against a fair percentage of the white male population, do they? How about these five extractions and two temporary fillings? I’ve got nothing on the teeth, but you must have sent round the dental chart.”

“No takers,” Strydom disclosed. “The fillings were on the crude side, like you’d get on a ship or any army camp-not done by a dentist, I’m pretty sure of it.”

“Ringo was never on a ship or in the army,” the Colonel added. “How do you feel about it now, Tromp?”

“Inconclusive. But what made you look at this suicide in the first place? I can see it’s one of Doc’s, only-”

They told him.

Then added the three other inquest files to make a chronologically arranged row across the Colonel’s desk, while Strydom provided a thumbnail sketch of each one as it was laid down.

“Have you gone mad?”

“I hoped you’d say that, Tromp. Those were my exact words when Chris first came rushing in here. It shows there was no ill will on my part, hey?”

Kramer sat down, stunned and unable to control the seethe of implications filling his head.

“Chris?” prompted the Colonel.

Strydom did a very old-fashioned thing and mopped his brow. “Perhaps I should explain a little. You see, most DS’s are busy family doctors with no special interest in forensic work per se, and they don’t-um-come into contact with each-”

“I meant the facts, man! That’s what Tromp wants to hear about,” Muller said.

“It’s a fact that Natal’s bigger than a lot of tin-pot countries,” Strydom dared defensively. “Instead of blaming us, you might see that in dotting them around, his executions are-”

“Murders are,” snapped Colonel Muller.

“Query murders,” corrected Kramer, recognizing an urgent need in himself to treat the situation as routinely as possible. “Tollie’s is the only one we’re sure of.” Having said that, a calm settled on him, just as it might on a drunk who decides that the only important thing in his whirling world is to soberly select the right key for the right keyhole.

His quiet observation seemed to steady the others as well-God knew what wild imaginings they’d been through before his arrival.

Colonel Muller cleared his throat. “The period, gentlemen, would appear to be one of five years, with one hanging occurring each year. But not, you will notice, in any particular month or season, so the timing may be more random than it seems.”

“How many years were looked through in all?” Kramer asked, lighting up a Lucky.

“Alfred and me did another five before that.”

“And?”

“Three fracture dislocations, none of them arousing suspicion of any kind. One involving a fall on a ladder.”

“Uh huh. And how many of these are really borderline?”

Strydom mopped again. He was beginning to look like a man who’d cast his bread upon the waters and had forgotten to let go.

“If you’re having a few doubts now,” the Colonel said slightly sarcastically, “then which of these cases, not counting Tollie’s, are you quite certain of?”

“The railway foreman couldn’t have died under the given circumstances in the manner indicated.”

“And the others? What order of certainty would you place them in?” Kramer asked, noting this down.

“On the scanty information I have?”

“Whichever way you like.”

“The witch doctor I’m 80 percent sure of; the tramp, about 65. Make the krantz case 50.”

“Fifty-fifty? Why’s that?”

“Well, there were more variables involved in that one.”

“Like yourself, for instance?”

That got its laugh and the tension eased, placing the discussion on a more objective level. Kramer made the routine check for a pattern.

“No real pattern,” he said, “although it could be significant that there’s only one black, that there’s three unknown persons out of five, and that the other two had police records.”

“The hangman is more likely white, then,” Strydom suggested, with a logic that wasn’t altogether sound if you thought about how certain blacks felt.

“I don’t think we should waste time on surmising until we’ve more information,” the Colonel said firmly. “Nor do we need to worry about anything under 100 percent-again, on the same basis.”

“Or what about treating them as separate cases, each on its own merits?” Kramer put forward, aware that his conflicts arose from trying to relate such disparate individuals. “If, by some bloody miracle, they start linking up, then we’ll rethink our approach.”

“I like it, Tromp. Two murder inquiries and three suspicious deaths?”

“That’s right, sir. Zondi can take the witch doctor and Marais can see what he can get out of the other two.”

“But,” said Strydom.

“Ja, Chris?” Muller replied.

“What about the hangman and his-”

“Look, man! I told you how many times? That’s a dangerous fixation you’ve got, and I don’t like the words you use. They only confuse the issue, which is bad enough as it is.”

Strydom reddened. “Would you like a second opinion, Hans? I could take these down to Gordon in Durban.”

“God in heaven! Nobody must hear about this until at least I’ve had time to talk to the brigadier. Of course I trust your judgment, Chris; it’s just you must leave the investigation side to us, hey?”

Kramer went over to the door, wary of what more talk might do to the brittle simplicity of his present outlook.

“I’ll get the sergeants going,” he said, “and seeing as the Erasmus case has reached a blank wall, I might as well have a crack at railwayman Rossouw.”

“Fine,” replied Colonel Muller. “Is it okay for us to share your biscuit?”

Zondi took the photograph of the unidentified umthakathi down to the street of the witch doctors in the lower part of town.

Several of them there had wholesale departments, stocked with everything from bulk packets of aphrodisiacs to entire desiccated baboons, and also supplied the fur trappings a black man was no longer permitted to hunt for himself. He went from store to store, from fancy glass counter to self-service emporium, from holes in the wall to sinister back rooms, and from one end of the street to the other.

None of the fat cats he questioned had any recollection of the face cupped in his hand, nor were they much interested. Yet the effort involved wasn’t entirely wasted: the dead man, they said, sniffing, was plainly an ignorant old peasant. Anyone with a smattering of the art would have secured his release with a handful of the right seeds-not that they sold them personally, of course. This confirmed in Zondi’s mind what had seemed a rather strange paradox.

He hijacked a pirate taxi for a lift back to headquarters, put in a requisition for a dozen more copies of the photograph, and went to the Lieutenant’s office to await their delivery. It was difficult to think of what else he might do.

After pushing pins into the wall map, to represent where the five bodies had been found, he sat down on his stool near the door and propped his leg on the table. The rat released its grip, wriggled a little, then lay comfortably on its belly.

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.