The Sunday Hangman

7

The white stone to which Witklip owed its name was actually a giant boulder, balanced on top of a high, black hill overshadowing the settlement. It looked as though one push of a child’s hand would bring the thing crashing down the fire-scorched slopes, and yet, by some miracle of brute inertia, it remained there.

This was very different countryside from that found around Doringboom. A dung beetle entering a field plowed by oxen would not have encountered a greater variety of gradients, obstacles, and ragged skylines than had the Chevrolet over the past fifty minutes. The red soil showed like infantile eczema through the wispy blond grass, and supported a wide range of aloes and other hardy succulents, as well as dustings of wild flowers in oranges and purples. The sky, too, had a vivid quality, a deep varicose blueness, and Kramer was pleased that he had brought his sunglasses.

They were making the final dusty descent of the journey, with loose stones rattling loudly off the underneath of the car, and Zondi dodging the biggest potholes whenever possible. Witklip now lay before them in its eleven or so distinct parts: four of these-a trading store, butcher’s, garage-cum-smithy and another trading store, in that order-were lined up on the right; the small police station stood behind a hedge of Christ thorn on the left, its faded flag not quite at the top of the pole; and the rest of the buildings, all presumably residential, were visible as brush strokes of whitewash between the cool, dark-green daub of wattle trees up ahead. As for the hotel described by W/O Henk Wessels, it was represented by a large hoarding, nailed to a blue gum and streaked with bird droppings, that read: SPA-KLING WATERS-HAPPINESS RESORT-ONLY 800 METERS.

Kramer motioned for Zondi to ignore the arrow and to make the cop shop their first port of call. He had not, as he’d assured Wessels he would do, contacted Witklip about Erasmus after that little chat in his office. On second thought, it had occurred to him that too much hindsight on the sergeant’s part might introduce too many red herrings, and so, in the interests of an open mind, a small lapse of memory had seemed perfectly in order. This did mean, of course, that Frikkie Jonkers wasn’t expecting them.

The white constable on duty behind the charge office counter, who said his name was Boshoff and had a face like Elvis Presley’s, tried a stall when asked where the station commander could be found. Then he contrived to elbow some stolen property to the floor-to wit, a trussed chicken-and its owner added her own squawks to the lament. For just a few seconds there, it was all very noisy. While Zondi brought the prisoner back from the verandah, Kramer followed Boshoff to a door, had it knocked for him, and then went into the small office alone.

Tubby Frikkie Jonkers rose at once from his chair behind the desk, where he had been apparently checking the station inventory, and responded to Kramer’s introduction with jerky alertness. His smile, beneath a hairline mustache, was most welcoming, and the bright, wide-awake glint of his slightly poppy eyes impressive. What betrayed him was the impression of his tunic cuff button, as plain as a dimple, in his right cheek.

“Is this a social,” he asked, as they sat down, “or are you here in some way we can help you?”

“I’m trying the whole area for information about a bloke we found hanging from a tree. We can’t get hold of the next of kin because he didn’t leave any papers, and the car number plates are causing some problems. You know how it is these days with computers.”

Jonkers laughed, holding up his fingers. “That’s the only kind of computers we have got in Witklip, Lieutenant! For the really heavy stuff, we take off our socks as well.”

“Have a look at this description anyway, and see if it means anything to you.”

Kramer had heard somewhere that intelligence was curiosity mixed with an urge to join things together in patterns. If that was so, then Jonkers had just proved the other side of the argument, by grasping only what concerned him personally. It was fascinating to watch, but probably uneventful to live with.

“Almighty God,” said Jonkers. “This is Tommy!”

“You know him?”

“Certainly! He’s been staying at a pal of mine’s place right nearby here. I tell you, this is a real shock to me. Only this morning I phoned Henk for a check because I was worried about him-which reminds me, he hasn’t called back yet.”

“We’ll, here’s your answer,” said Kramer. “Will you be able to furnish the necessary particulars?”

“Not really; his name, his home address from the register, which I haven’t bothered to find out yet. He was a mercenary, you know.”

“Uh huh?”

“Oh, ja; he could tell you all about it. Some of the things those coons do, you could hardly believe! He had memories that were terrible. I know because once there was a bloke in the room next to his, heard him whimper in his sleep at night-sort of like a dog that thinks someone is trying to catch it to beat it? Like that. My wife had the right word for him: she said he was haunted. But not according to Tommy; he laughed in that way of his, and asked if we’d never heard of malaria. He was always okay again after a few drinks.”

“Boozed a lot?”

“Hell! I’ve never met a bloke who was better company in that department.”

Then Tollie Erasmus must have been, Kramer reasoned to himself, either very rash or very relaxed, and the more Jonkers had to say, the more it would appear to have been the latter.

“And you all liked him?”

“Man, you can’t exactly say he was popular,” Jonkers admitted, with the proper hesitation that goes with speaking ill of the dead, “but you can say that every man respected him. It takes quite a nerve to go and fight Commies in the bush, ’specially when you’re working for bloody wogs who can’t be trusted-and although there’s good money in it, you can still see how all of us gain in the end.”

“So he’d done all right?” Kramer said enviously, offering Jonkers one of his Luckies.

“Unlike some he could tell you about. But he still had to make his pile, he used to say, and he was hoping to get something quite soon.”

“Angola hadn’t put him off? The firing squad?”

Jonkers snorted and replied, “Tommy? That’ll be the day! He was even trying to get me to go with him.”

“Uh huh?”

“That’s true,” Jonkers confirmed with unconcealed pride, while studying the back of his bear’s paw. “Said I would qualify for a top rank, maybe even colonel, at my age and with all my experience behind me. You know, the military training we get at college, and the attitudes I have formed. Could see I knew how to handle myself. Oh, ja, he really pestered me, Tommy did. You never know, it’s possible if.…”

How astute Erasmus had been in making the silly fat sod see himself as a gun-slinging glamor boy, and not as the plodding police sergeant he was paid to be. And of course, Jonkers had known all along that when it came to the crunch, he was going to say the wife wouldn’t wear it.

“Do you think his experiences could have led to his death?” Kramer suggested, preparing to begin on another tack. “There was no farewell note.”

“That’s Tommy’s style, all right. A hard man. You would have liked him.”

“But I was really querying the reason for-”

“Ach, I see, sir; sorry. You know, I’ve been wondering about that myself. It comes so sudden. Difficult, too, when a bloke has only talked in a bar, where others can listen. What I mean is, Tommy was never actually personal, if you follow. The wife says there was probably a divorce somewhere in the background.”

How right the good woman was; bigamy had also been one of Tollie’s little failings.

“There’s something that doesn’t add up here,” Kramer observed with polite curiosity. “How come he was thinking of joining up again, but had allowed himself to get so fat?”

“His leg,” Jonkers said, as if this were self-evident.

“Hey?”

“He’d taken a hell of a fracturing of the thighbone-not quite a compound, he explained, but the muscles got all ripped up. That was the reason he came to Spa-kling Waters-for the treatment. He’d been advised by a specialist in Jo’burg, apparently, and wasn’t to put too much weight on it till the insides had mended. There was nothing you could see on the outside, of course, even when he was in his swimming cozzy, and he didn’t always limp.”

The irony stunned Kramer. Then he rationalized, and saw that a fractured thigh would have been, after the story in the papers, the first injury to come to Erasmus’s mind. A thinking mind that might also have gauged that a coincidence is the first thing most people dismiss.

Something in his expression must have cued Jonkers for a divergent response of his own: “Hey, that’s it, isn’t it, sir? The leg made him do it! I’d noticed he wasn’t talking about it anymore-but it wasn’t getting better, it was getting worse!”

Kramer could only grunt to that.

“You mean the big irony involved, Lieutenant?”

“Which one?” said Kramer, surprised by an abstract.

“The irony that in the end those bloody black Commies got Tommy,” sighed Jonkers. “Oh, ja, it certainly makes a man think.”

Which was as fine a red herring as ever there was, and in Kramer’s opinion, his complete vindication.

The hotel was positioned on a wooden shelf in a steep-sided valley, all of one kilometer down a rutted track that expanded into a nothing designated FREE CAR PARK. Some black children squatted there, hoping to pit their strength against any incoming suitcases. A four-wheel-drive vehicle could continue on around the corner, go through an assault course, and end up near the kitchen entrance, trailing oddments of vegetation behind it. The hotelier’s own Land-Rover had a good-sized branch wilting on its roof rack, and a flat front tire.

Kramer followed Frikkie Jonkers along a crazy-paving path and out onto the scrubby lawn, further designated THE TERRACE. He was fast learning that if you found it difficult to believe your eyes at Spa-kling Waters, then a reassuring notice was bound to pop up. A deep verandah ran the full width of the farmhouse-it could never have been anything else-with access to both private and public rooms being provided by narrow French windows. The concrete pillars that held up the verandah’s molting thatch had been painted various fairground colors, and the rafters had been strung with colored electric light bulbs-which weren’t working, because at least one in the series had fallen out. On the verandah itself was an assortment of cane furniture, repainted so often the weave had almost been obscured, and in this cane furniture sat an assortment of guests.

Kramer felt pity prick his hide; plainly, for many of them, the place could be safely renamed the last resort. They were the not-so-rich sick, making do with frayed collars and goiters, crudely-made hospital boots and clubfeet, and daring him, with their eyes, to insult them with a stranger’s compassion.

“Good afternoon,” said an old duck with her legs in bandages. “Hasn’t it been nice today?”

“Good afternoon,” they all said.

“Hell,” said Kramer, looking hard at her legs, “you seem okay to me, lady-but what did you do to the poor bloody horse?”

How she laughed-they all did-and he was able to escape gratefully into the reception hall. There he barged straight into Piet Ferreira, the manager, and Jonkers made the introductions. Ferreira was, surprisingly, only a little over thirty, and meatily plump; he wore sunglasses in his overlong hair, a bleached shirt, dirty white shorts, slip-slop sandals, and carried a huge jangle of keys, mostly for small padlocks.

“Bar doesn’t open till six,” he said, “but if you’d-”

“No, hang on a tick-we’re here on business about Tommy,” Jonkers interrupted, very importantly. “This officer has informed me that his body has been found murdered.”

“Christ!”

“And so you see I was right and you were wrong, hey? But we’ll consider the matter dropped.”

“What’s this?” asked Kramer, all innocence.

“Nothing, sir. Now, if you’d like to see that register and the-”

“Later, Sarge; once me and Mr. Ferreira have had a little talk. Here, you take his keys. I’m sure you know which one it is. It’s on me.”

There was not much Frikkie Jonkers could do, except go off to the bar, and the swiftness of the transfer of the key ring had left Ferreira looking quite amenable himself. They went into his office, which was prettier with unpaid bills than the pillars outside, and Kramer invited him to sit down. A short, thoughtful pause followed, and then the man was about ready.

“I detected a conflict of opinion over Tommy, Mr. Ferreira.”

“Oh? Well, not exactly.”

“That he perhaps had tried to bilk you? And you had grounds for suspicions of this nature?”

“I–I wasn’t too sure.”

“Uh huh?”

“Just a casual check was a question of favors, really. I do Frikkie quite a few off and on, and when the occasion arises-”

“Forget that side of it. How long did Tommy McKenzie stay here?”

Ferreira relaxed a little, and took up a rubber band to play with. “He came just under three months ago. He’d been told by a Jo’burg specialist to rest up and find a hot spring for his leg-someone recommended us. He had this leg trouble; did Frikkie tell you? Got hammered when a land mine blew up his jeep in Biafra or Angola or some such place. I was never much interested.”

“Did he limp all the time?” Kramer asked.

“Most of the time,” Ferreira replied, with a faint smile just hinted. “Obviously, some days his leg was a lot better.”

“Come on, man! You didn’t say that like you meant it.”

“Well, I wasn’t too worried, put it that way. Frikkie said he was okay, and I’d had a mercenary here before, back in the days when the spa wasn’t developed. One of those organizers hiding from the others because the kaffirs hadn’t paid up what they’d promised.”

“And you thought Tommy might be one himself?”

“Sort of. The organizers never leave themselves short, and-well-I wasn’t really worried, like I say. He paid monthly in advance.”

“So what did worry you, finally?”

“The way he vanished, to begin with. But if you say he’s-”

“No; please explain your side first,” Kramer interrupted. “All of a sudden he was gone?”

“Ja, gone. Normally he never went out much, and when he did, he’d always have something to say about it. Then I looked in his room and found just a few cheap clothes and a case not worth taking. That’s when I began to wonder. He’d been putting a lot on tick in the bar recently, plus he’d been making long-distance calls from my office here, also on account.”

“Which he’d have to settle when paying his next month in advance? Due this coming Monday?”

“Exactly. It was nearly triple the amount before. Frikkie argued with me, said I was being too suspicious, but I said he’d left the clothes to make me-”

“These calls-do you have the numbers?”

“No, but it’s a farm line, so the exchange in Brandspruit-”

“I’ll contact them. Did he get any mail?”

“Never. Said he had no family, and that all his friends were either dead or in England and the States.”

Kramer offered Ferreira a Lucky Strike while thinking that little lot over. It vexed him to realize that he’d never know whether Erasmus had consciously exploited the acceptable shadiness of a soldier of fortune; whatever the intention, it had been a stroke of genius. The hotel manager had been able to quash his own doubts quite happily, much encouraged, of course, by a half-witted policeman and the demands of assorted creditors. Yet this perfect plan had obviously come unstuck somewhere down the line.

“Do you think the other mercs could have got him?” Ferreira asked, supplying their light. “From the stories he told us, they sounded a real bunch of madmen. He even admitted once shooting up a school of kaffir kids to teach them a lesson-he thought they were helping the rebels, but it was a mistake. Killed forty of them, he said. If he was holding out on his mates, they might not show much mercy. What do you think?”

Just for an instant, Kramer almost fell for Erasmus’s cover story himself. “Ach, no; I’m not sure this is connected,” he said. “But talking of other people, did he ever have visitors?”

“None I know of, and-like I told you-he hardly ever left the place, except to go to the bank. Our terms are strictly cash, of course.”

“Uh huh. What about guests?”

“Always kept clear of them. You could see he didn’t much like getting in the same pool as the cripples.”

“And the locals? Was there anyone he was particularly friendly with?”

“Apart from Frikkie?”

Kramer nodded.

“No, nobody special. The farmers all knew him from the bar, naturally, and a few of them liked his stories. They sort of respected Tommy, but they didn’t invite him out or anything, if that’s what you mean. He wasn’t all that social himself. We hold a barbecue here every Saturday night; he came to the first one, but didn’t really show for the rest. I can’t remember seeing him, anyway. Everybody around here comes, sort of a tradition, and-”

“What about women?” Kramer cut in. “From our knowledge of this man, he had to have it twice a day, practically.”

Ferreira shot the rubber band at his calendar. “Unless he was taking his chances with black velvet, not a hope-not around here.”

“Sure?”

“I should know! If it isn’t a bloody granny, then it isn’t white. Period. You must have been in this kind of country before?

The young ones can’t wait to get out of it, get themselves off to varsity or training college and stay there.”

“Best take a weekend off and come to Trekkersburg to collect yourself a wife,” Kramer half joked, having sensed something false in the man’s locker-room bravado.

“I was married,” replied Ferreira, his face a blank, “but she died.”

That could have led to an awkward pause, to all sorts of imaginings about what had led to this poor sod’s burying himself alive in the backveld, yet Kramer handled it smoothly, he thought, by saying; “Register.”

“It’s by your elbow. His address is ‘care of’ the YMCA, Hillbrow, Johannesburg.”

“Then I’ll not bother to look. Just a couple more questions.”

“Ja?” said Ferreira, trying to find his rubber band again among all the papers. “Keep talking.”

“I need to know if anyone contacted Tommy here on Monday. You say he didn’t get any mail, but what about phone calls?”

“None I know of, and I was working here in the office almost all day. He vanished while I was still in here, doing the bar receipts.”

“Any strangers in the bar that night?”

“No; I’ve already asked to see if they knew where he went. Just the usual crowd.”

“And has anyone been here since Monday? Any new guests?”

“Nobody.”

Kramer took a look at the register after all, noted the number of Erasmus’s room, and got to his feet.

“I’d like to see 14,” he said.

“Seems a bit pointless,” objected Ferreira, scratching under his sunglasses. “If you want his things, the boy will put them in your Land-Rover. Frikkie and I were in there this morning.”

“All the same, I’d better.”

It was true that Kramer hadn’t any idea of what he might be looking for. But then again, it was equally true that Ferreira and Jonkers had been expecting to find very little-and that men who found what they expected seldom looked further.