The Sunday Hangman

15

“Kidnapping?” Willie Boshoff said to Kramer, “is that the capital crime you have in mind, sir?” And he handed his glass back across the bar at Spa-kling Waters for a refill.

Ferreira took the glass and snorted. “Ach, come on, Willie! Who the hell’s going to pay two cents’ ransom for a bloody piccanin?” He poured the tot. “Here, you put your own ice in. I’m doing you another double, Lieutenant, okay?”

“Child-stealing,” said Kramer, before giving a nod.

The squirt of the soda-water siphon made an amusing sound effect to go with the sudden infusion of blood that turned Willie’s face crimson.

“Still got a lot to learn,” Ferreira stage-whispered wittily, passing Kramer his drink. “But he tries hard, Lieutenant, so you mustn’t be too tough on him, hey?”

“I–I forgot for a moment, sir,” Willie stammered. “There’s so many of them and-”

“Ja, enough to force old Jonkers into taking both his socks off,” Kramer said, then realized that not everyone might have heard of the Witklip computer. “You were just unlucky you didn’t join the force when I did, youngster. Then there were only the three: murder, rape, and treason-all straightforward.”

“When was that?” Ferreira asked.

“Mid-50’s or so.”

“Really?” said Willie, much impressed.

There the briefing lost impetus for the first time since Kramer had come bursting in, drenched by the last of the storm and tracking mud, about twenty minutes earlier. After an acrimonious start, caused by some indignity Ferreira felt he’d suffered, and remedied by a hearty slap on the back for initiative, it had seemed nothing would halt the reasoned flow. But now that the moment had arrived to actually make something of Zondi’s breakthrough, Kramer faltered. It wasn’t that he lacked material; his mind was sharp with new ideas, glittering theories, and a pricking of temporary oversights. It was simply that any attempt to think them into shape became like trying to arrange pins with a magnet-one move and the whole bloody lot leaped up in a willy-nilly clump, proving basic compatibility without achieving a sodding thing. Eventually, on the basis of things being easier said than done, Kramer decided to gibber on and see what came of it.

Willie was tapping ingenuously on the moldy, termite-ravaged hotel register that had so far been ignored as a remarkable piece of evidence, unearthed by sheer guts and determination.

“Ja, let’s have a look,” obliged Kramer, clearing a space on the counter before him. “Not that I doubt your word, of course, gentlemen. That one name was enough.”

amp; Master G. J. Vasari, Flat 27, 3 Bys St., Durban ignor A. C. F. Santelia, Via Civitavecchia 102, Milano

He read each line twice, solely for the pleasure of seeing it down in black and white, and then allowed the book to flop shut.

“Sorry the white ants ate the date and the room numbers off,” Ferreira apologized. “But coming first on the line, right by the edge, it was bound to happen, hey? Still, we’ve got an approximate date, I suppose.”

“Doesn’t matter that much, man.”

“What!” exclaimed Willie. “You’re not interested in these Italians anymore?”

Kramer smiled. “Not to the same extent, now we’ve found another road to Rome that isn’t so full of blind alleys and bloody pitfalls.”

“Christ, it makes your bloody head spin, doesn’t it?” remarked Ferreira, coming round to join them on the high stools. “Who could ever imagine such a thing? No wonder you first thought it was political!”

“Hey?” said Willie, frowning. Of his many lapses that evening, this was the most forgivable.

“Time we chuck out what’s irrelevant and see where we go from here,” Kramer suggested, as much to himself as to anyone else. “But before I do that, is there anything that strikes you immediately, gentlemen?”

“Ja; you could have saved yourself a lot of trouble by asking me about Izimu in the first place,” Ferreira answered with affected pique. “I did very good business out of that search, I can tell you! You should have been here, Willie, man; we all-”

“Was it reported in any newspapers?” Kramer asked, not wanting to have this thrust down his neck again, but needing the information to wind up the first part of his argument.

“Newspapers? Hell, no! They didn’t even put Tiens in, when he was crushed by his tractor.”

“Uh huh? So it was entirely a local affair?”

“Correct.”

“Which means that only somebody living locally would know of Izimu’s unpunished guilt?”

“Correct again.”

Kramer put down his glass and took out a crumpled sheet of foolscap which was covered in linked nooses. “Originally there seemed to be no pattern in this case,” he said, smoothing the paper, “but Izimu has provided the key factor by making Witklip the center of activity. Let’s take each of the three other cases I’ve outlined to you-forgetting the tramp, for whom we still have no information-and keeping in mind all the time that we’re not dealing with an ordinary murderer. This man sees himself as a hangman, carrying out impersonal executions which the law has been unable to conduct itself.”

“That’s the bit I-”

“Shhh, Willie! Give the Lieutenant a chance, hey?”

“You’ll notice, gentlemen, that the victims all fell within the area of this someone’s experience. Izimu is the most obvious example, and close behind him comes Rossouw, the railway foreman. You did say that people came back talking about him, Piet?”

This carefully timed flattery won an eager nod.

“From what you’ve told me, young Vasari made himself very memorable as well the night of the barbecue-that ‘little angel’ stuff, remember?”

“Ja, only I don’t get the paper except on Sundays if I’m in Brandspruit, so it never rang a bell.”

“A churchgoer-which ties in on Rossouw again-might have recognized the name, though. Agreed?”

“It’s very possible, Lieutenant. There’s another thing to bear in mind, too: I was only around seven myself at the time.”

“Point taken. Can you say what the talk would have been like in the bar if someone had noticed this trial and told the others?”

“Phaw! I reckon some could have been quite upset; they’d certainly have wondered about it, not knowing him like I did.”

“What the other one did would seem unfair anyway,” Willie got in, actually concentrating for once on what was being said. “The CID should never have allowed it, in my opinion. I can see those three now, but Tommy? He was here a hell of a time without anything happening and-”

“When did he come up with his story about the mission school?” asked Kramer, moving swiftly off thin ice.

“Mission school?” Ferreira repeated. “Oh, when he shot up those kids, you mean?”

“I didn’t hear about that,” said Willie.

“No, you wouldn’t have,” Kramer said with some cynicism. “That was one of Tommy’s big mistakes, so I don’t think Sarge Jonkers would want to impress you with it. He committed a mass murder for no reason at all.”

“You mean even though they were just-”

“Even though, Piet; the man we’re dealing with has a very literal mind, and murder is the taking of another human life.”

A small shudder shook Ferreira. “Then the chances are he must have been standing here, right in my bar!”

“Can you remember when?”

“When Tommy told us that one? It must have been-ja, I can tell you exactly: three barbecues ago, the same night it started to rain and the men left the womenfolk on the verandah and came in here. Tommy’d just got in from a walk.”

A sprint down from the Jonkers house, more likely, when rain had stopped play with a threat of the husband’s early return. A more interesting insight was to be had in the fact that this date coincided with Erasmus’s sudden nervousness.

“It’s logical,” Kramer reflected aloud, “that the hangman should see himself as a bit of a Supreme Court judge as well, and could have asked him some questions in private. I’ll get Mamabola to see if that servant girl was ever questioned by someone about Izimu’s identity, et cetera. Could give us an early lead.”

“What if it doesn’t, sir?”

“We’ve still got a lot else, Willie. Can I borrow your pen?”

Turning over the foolscap, he prepared to list the main factors as they emerged. “It’s too easy to just say this hangman bloke is cracked-we don’t know what started him on this, and there may be quite a few other cases, going much further back, we don’t know about. The man who put us on to this investigation was working under primitive circumstances. But certain things do seem self-explanatory or whatever, and they can help us track him down. Most importantly, he does not see himself as a murderer. By using all the ritual and the paraphernalia, he becomes as innocent as the state’s own executioner. In the same way, he exercises ultimate power without any responsibility for his actions, apart from seeing he does a good job.”

Willie scratched under an armpit. “You mean he likes hanging people, sir? Is that it?”

Kramer realized he’d slipped into pomposity and nodded. “Ja, although he might not be aware of it himself. Or then again, perhaps he was the victim of a terrible injustice and feels this compulsion-perhaps he thinks God is guiding him. We could make religiousness our first characteristic.”

1. “Good” Christian, he wrote.

“Secondly, we can assume that he has all the right trappings to go with his trade, gents. Not only would it be necessary for him mentally, but Doc Strydom says this standard of hanging isn’t what you could get with a washing line and a bar stool.”

2. Scaffold and gear.

“Of course, this stuff could be dismantled in between times, but certain conditions have to be met as regards the space available-could be in a barn or silo, for instance, if he hasn’t made it part of his house.”

“You can really see this guy, can’t you?” observed Ferreira, trying to hide a sneaking smile.

“It takes one to catch one,” Kramer said, giving the stock reply that the Widow Fourie had once suggested. “He won’t be a blatantly criminal type either, you’ll see.” Then he cut short the laugh by saying gruffly, “This stuff is crucial, as any other evidence may be hard to come by, and that’s why it stays among just the three of us for now. We’ll make skills our Point Three. The necessary information is not available to the general public, which is a really strong lead. Either he was once in the prisons department, or he has some means of access. Any ideas?”

“Hmmm.”

“Ja, Willie?”

“Well, I know a bit from when I was at police college and the blokes from Central used to come and play rugby. But I’ve never talked about it.”

“Piet?”

“Nothing offhand. Sorry.”

4. Assistant (one or more), wrote Kramer, twisting the paper round for them to read it.

“How can you know that?” Ferreira said, surprised.

“He dumped Tommy’s car when he dumped him, so someone must have helped with the other vehicle, the one he carries them around in. That’s on the evidence we have already. However, a hangman must have an assistant to be efficient, according to the Doc, and-”

“There are two of them?”

“How many killers were involved in the Vontsteen case? Or for something nearer to this, what about those mad bastards who buried all those kids in England? The Moors or whatever their name was? Conspiracy is nothing new, man, and the crazier the-”

“Why leave the bodies everywhere?” Willie demanded, driven by a conflict of reason to speak his mind, if a little slurrily.

“Gibbet,” said Kramer, only then slotting this into his hypothesis. “It’s what they used to do to hanged criminals to show the world what had happened to them. Highway robbers and pirates and suchlike. But the question you should be asking is: do you know two or more persons in this area that you automatically think of together? Strong ties, trust, old pals-have you got it?”

“Oom Jaap and Gladstone?” Ferreira murmured.

The pair of them guffawed, then explained that Gladstone was a wog foreman whom Oom Jaap Brenner allowed to sit beside him in the front of his lorry, instead of on the back.

“They’re always chatting together,” added Willie, “like Tarzan and the apes. We bluff you not.”

“But to be serious, Lieutenant,” Ferreira went on, “it isn’t easy to find a quick answer to that, not in a country setup where so many people are-well-you know?”

“Unfriendly?” grunted Willie.

Ferreira gave Kramer an old-fashioned our-young-friend-is-tipsy look.

“Willie, I’ve got a job for you,” he said, poking him in the chest. “On my desk at the station is a Telex, okay? Read it and make me a diagram of the minimum size this scaffold would have to be. Off you go, and I’ll come up when I’ve finished picking Piet’s brains.”

The kid went crimson, put his glass down, and hurried out. Kramer stared after him-scarcely hearing Ferreira’s suggestion of moving to his private closed verandah while Piet had a word with the chef about the diabetics-and stayed where he was for a time. There had been something very odd about the kid all the way through that. And then, at a touch, there’d been guilt written all over his face, with its heavy, sensual features.

“Dear God,” mourned Kramer, helping himself to another quick Scotch. “Not one of those when I’m undermanned enough already.”

Willie found a puddle guarding each door to the cab of the Land-Rover, so he crawled in through the back way. Flopping into the driving seat, he took several long, deep breaths, yet his heart went on thumping like a borehole drill. If every thief, he thought, had reactions like these, then police work would become a bit of old tacky.

“You’re mad,” he said distinctly. “Bloody mad.”

Then he winced, uttering an involuntary whimper, as his mind recalled vividly that horrendous moment when the Lieutenant had poked him right in the chest.

This set Willie’s fingers fumbling at his tunic buttons, which had parted as though they weren’t there back in the storeroom, but now seemed too big for their buttonholes. Finally, however, he dragged out the Lilliput he’d hidden so effortlessly from sight.

His ears glowed hot. Christ, his brain had heartburn; it’d just done a searing repeat of the Lieutenant’s mention of stealing-child-stealing, admittedly, but it had still made him blush like a bugger and fall about. The brandy hadn’t helped him to concentrate either; quite the opposite. It had been pitiful.

He gazed at the thing in his hands. That’s all it was: a thing. Yet it had already turned Constable Willem Pretorius Boshoff SAP 13408 into a thief for ever and ever, amen. From now on, every thief he caught could say, “Hyprocrite!”-and he’d have to let them go. Even the coons. He’d have to quit the force.

“Put it back, man-simple!” said Willie, and immediately felt easier. “What do you want this old rubbish for?”

He sighed at himself in exasperation and opened his tunic; he could smuggle the magazine back into the storeroom as easily as anything; no problems. He could say his cigs had fallen into the crate and he’d gone to look for them. Fifty to one he wouldn’t even need to do that.

Wondering at his inexplicable folly, Willie flipped open the pages for one last cold and indifferent glance at the photograph of the lady with no clothes on. She filled him. Again a dizzy compulsion obliterated any thought or scruple; he hid the magazine with great cunning, winked in its direction, and saw his hand twist the ignition key.

Being so scared and excited was really quite nice, in fact-especially when no actual harm could possibly come of it.

There ought to have been a sign saying KLOZED-IN VERANDER or something. Kramer had found what seemed to be private territory-a screened-off section on one side of the hotel, which was equipped with four decent wrought-iron chairs and a table-but nothing vaguely resembling the apparatus of enclosure. The exposed red cement floor was covered with blisters of rainwater, and there wasn’t even a piece of string between the pillars to prevent you falling over the edge into the flower bed.

“All seen to,” said Ferreira, coming out through the French windows, followed by a wizened Zulu. “The boy’s got dry cushions and he’ll give the table a wipe. How do you like my spectacular view?”

Kramer turned about cautiously. He liked the view; the last glare of the upstaged sun was highlighting the great white stone, while throwing the rest of the landscape into deep, interesting shadow. The storm-clean air, heavy with the odor of wet earth and broken vegetation, was tuned to a shortwave sucksboo of twitterings, zingings, and pingings, chirrups, clickings, and croaks, dominated by the morse-chattering mynahs. So he liked what he smelled and heard, too. It was invigorating.

“The bar’s beginning to fill up now-it’s after six. Would you like to take a look at some of them?”

“What’s that, Piet?”

“They’ve heard about you being here.”

“And?”

“I said you were baby-sitting for Willie. Old Gysbert nearly bust a gut-he’s one you can knock off your list right away.”

“Why? Has he got one arm?”

“Ach, what I meant was you’ve never known a wild man like Gys! Here, you sit where the floor isn’t so wet. A huge bloody thing, he is-big black beard; you’ll know him. Farms about eight kilos out and drives a truck like a madman. Every time he goes into Brandspruit the traffic cop gives him another ticket.”

Kramer’s gut twinged. “Has he-is he married?”

“Widower,” replied Ferreira, motioning the barman to put the tray of drinks down on the table. “Took up with Annie Louw after Tiens was killed, then she got TB and he was left with just the one daughter. Nice kiddie, blond the same as her mum. Goes to the government boarding school in ’Spruit during the week, comes home weekends and holidays. Hell, he’s strict with her, though, and she’s only-what? Maybe fourteen, fifteen? Like another?”

“Uh huh.”

“Just lately he’s stopped her coming to the barbecue because the Jackson boy took her into the old barn one night. It was nothing, only kids’ stuff, bit of a fumble, but Gysbert nearly took off! Karl de Bruin-a nice old bugger-he had to talk reason to him before we had bloodshed. The Jackson boy was yelling-Gysbert had his hair, you see? — and saying he’d tell his father, and Karl was saying that kids would be kids and the boy had just been boasting. What a schlamozzle! Gysbert will knock any man down who crosses him, as Frikkie knows only too well, and that would include hard cases even like Tommy, who was there as well. About two years ago, he very nearly went on a charge over what he did to a guest who got fresh. But I mustn’t give you the impression his heart is in the wrong place.”

Ferreira, well-oiled himself, continued to talk about the man while making a production of pouring two more Scotches without a tot glass. Gysbert Swanepoel hadn’t always been such a wild man, it appeared, but had undergone a personality change after the death of his wife. For some months he had remained his old, quiet self, then one night he’d arrived half-tanked already and had never looked back. But Kramer wasn’t taking much of this in. It all added up: Wednesday had been the end of the school term in Natal, the description of the man and his driving matched, and the incident had taken place within nine kilometers of Witklip. Only by an outrageous coincidence could it have been anyone but the Swanepoels. And to think that, in his half-awake state, he’d superimposed his dream hussy over a fleeting glimpse of a giggling schoolgirl. Far worse, to think that he’d been on the brink of challenging Ferreira’s claim there were no beddable females around-God, that would have sounded like an allegation of a statutory offense! He felt as though he’d just passed an ice cube.

“And so, you see,” Ferreira was saying earnestly, “I think that should qualify him automatic.”

“Who?”

“The Reverend Kotse.”

Then Ferreira grinned to show he knew that Kramer hadn’t been attending. He was not altogether correct, however.

“De Bruin acted as peacemaker?”

“Karl always does. He hates to see any trouble.”

“What age is he?”

“Around fifty, the same as Gysbert, although you’d never guess it. A bloody good farmer-in fact, maybe our best. Him and his son have made pots of it, but they’re not the kind of people to let it show. Hell, I see what you’re driving at.…”

Kramer looked at the white stone through the facets of his whisky glass, making it bulk and shrink as he turned the thing slowly in his hand. His stomach was expanding and contracting in much the same way: a sure sign of breakthrough fever in the intuitive male. He switched his gaze suddenly to Ferreira.

“I can’t imagine it, Lieutenant. A more law-abiding-”

“Interesting, Piet, very interesting. Tell me, did he take on Gysbert Swanepoel all by himself, or was his son also present?”

Ferreira shrugged. “They’ve always been on good terms, despite the differences now between them, so it wasn’t really-”

“He’s a churchgoer?” Kramer asked.

“Er-ja. Nearly all the Afrikaner ones are. You know how-”

“Prisons? Connections with warders?”

“Not that I know of,” replied Ferreira, frowning a little.

Kramer began to tread, toe to heel, along the edge of the verandah between the two pillars. One false move would have him in mud up to the ankles-one false move and he’d be in something similar, although a lot nastier, up to his nose, for Karl de Bruin was obviously a highly respected member of the community.

“I’m going to start with the search,” Kramer said, returning to the table to finish his drink. “That way I stay winning whether we find anything or not. The subtle stuff can come later.”

“Start searching right now?” Ferreira gasped.

“I’d prefer it to be in daylight while he’s away from home,” admitted Kramer. “Does de Bruin play bowls or do anything like that at the weekends?”

“Um-no. Tell you what, though: the barbecue committee will all be here tomorrow afternoon, fixing up the kids’ holiday special. He’s the chairman.”

Such a long delay had little appeal for Kramer, then he remembered Zondi’s condition and decided he might need the time for other things. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll be in touch again in the morning. Meantime, don’t say a word about any of this, but keep your ears open.”

“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.