The Sunday Hangman

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 rhinocerine 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 sawing 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?”

“Certainly. I welcomed your interest.”

Strydom moved across to stand over the gleam of the neck bones and, after a quick check, said: “If this were the body of Constable Van Heerden, then I’d say it had been calculated to a nicety. A perfect job, in fact. But, gentlemen, I feel sure that a drop of six feet would have torn this man’s head off.”

Kramer quite forgot the match in his fingers until it burned him.

“I’m sorry, can I have that again?” asked Myburgh, doing a slow blink. “Erasmus is only about thirty pounds above average, and you’re saying that could make such a difference?”

“In terms of striking force, because that is the crucial factor, nearly half a ton of difference,” Strydom replied, taking out his notebook.

“Now, listen here, Doc-”

“Patience, Tromp. Try judging it for yourself. The optimum striking force has been standardized at twenty-four hundred weight, or 2,688 pounds. Any more or any less, and you could find yourself in trouble. And I’m not going into neck characteristics here, because both examples are good and sound, but very different.”

“Twenty-four; I’ve got that.”

“Which would suit Van Heerden exactly, and remember he’s roughly ten pounds under average. However, give a six-foot drop to this bloke, and the striking force would be thirty-four hundred weights-or in the region of 1,120 pounds too many. I leave the rest to your imagination.”

Myburgh actually seemed to shudder.

“Okay, Doc-so how much did he get?”

“Three feet.”

“He couldn’t have jumped from the fork in the tree.”

“No.”

“Or from the-”

“No.”

This time the match made it to Kramer’s Lucky, which trembled behind the cup of his hands.

“Then I don’t see how he could have possibly done this by himself,” Myburgh said softly, lifting off Erasmus’s vault to look into his brain. “And yet.…”

“Doc, what are you saying? That I’ve got a murder on my plate?”

Strydom shrugged. “You might have, Tromp. Only-and please don’t laugh-it looks to me more like, well, a bloody state execution.”

That was only the beginning. Kramer left the mortuary to ring Colonel Muller, and was immediately accosted by a self-satisfied Sergeant Arnot, bearing an object wrapped in a yellow silk scarf.

“Not so fast, sir! Take a look at this.”

“From the car?”

The scarf was allowed to fall away, revealing a snub-nosed Colt Cobra.38 Special with walnut grips and six loaded chambers. The metal gleamed raw where the serial number had been filed off.

“Erasmus had it inside his driving door, where he could reach it through a slit he’d made in the leather.”

“Nice work, Sarge. Label it up and I’ll take it to Ballistics.”

“And now the other hand,” said Arnot, grinning like he was running a kids’ party. “From under the seat on the passenger’s side.”

It was a second and much nastier weapon: a 9mm Browning Hi-Power automatic with external hammer, fixed sights, pearl grips, and chromed finish-also missing its serial number. The 13-shot magazine was full.

“Fantastic. Any brandy bottles?”

“Sir?”

“In the Ford, or at the site this morning?”

“None here, and no booze of any description, except for some old beer cans, down that way. Do you think this is the thirty-eight he tried to use on you?”

“Could be, if he was too scared to make contact for a new one, or too stupid to throw it away.”

“Stupid’s the word for it,” agreed Arnot, pursing his broad upper lip. “Right here he had the means to bump himself off nineteen bloody times over, with none of that fooling about in the trees. Can you explain that to me, sir?”

Kramer, who didn’t know the English word for academic, and who doubted if Cecil would recognize the Afrikaans term, which had been fairly recently introduced, settled for patting him on the shoulder.

And there was more to come. Back in the mortuary, with Colonel Muller’s stunned silence still music in his ears, Kramer was informed of further discoveries by the team of Strydom and Myburgh, whose professional circumspection was having a hell of a time with their schoolboyish excitement.

“We have reason to believe,” announced Myburgh, quite soberly, “that this isn’t the same blinking rope!”

“No?”

“Which is why, Tromp, we’d like you to have a squint at the plaited impression on the cuticle of the neck-the weal, man. You see where it’s starting to go brownish, like parchment? Your patient, Dr. Myburgh.”

“Thank you, sir. Well, when I checked the pattern there, mainly to observe the ecchymosis, I noticed there was a sort of repetition-caused, I assumed, by the deceased’s removal from the tree. Then it was suggested to me that we examine the upper points of the V mark, where the strain is lifting off the throat, and two dissimilar rope patterns were just discernible. Our conclusion was that the angle had changed marginally after the initial suspension, due in part to the two inches or so of stretch. We’d like to put all this under a microscope, of course.”

“The uncanny thing,” said Doc Strydom, as if that point needed to be made at all, “is that the second rope-or, as we see it, the first-shows identical characteristics to the officially favored variety: five-strand in three-quarter-inch thickness, covered in wash-leather. I saw more than seventy in my years, so I should know.”

“Don’t forget the bruise,” Myburgh said generously.

“Oh, that. I hope you don’t think we are unaware of the dangers of reading too much into the evidence, Tromp.”

“Fire away, man. This is crazy enough to take it.”

“Whoever did the estimate for the drop must have known that the knot of the noose, so to speak, must be placed at the angle of the left jaw-which allows for the quarter turn clockwise, snapping the head back. Put it the other side, and he just suffocates.”

“Uh huh. You found a graze running round?”

“More than that: a bruise no rope could have made on its own. I would hazard a guess and say that a metal eye had been spliced into the end-again, in the approved fashion.”

“Uh huh?”

“That’s the very point I’m making: few people know what a proper noose is like-most think of the so-called hangman’s knot the Yanks favor. They may be advanced in many respects, but as executioners they’re terrible. A standard five-foot drop, for instance! The electric-”

“What,” Kramer interrupted, “does this metal eye do, precisely?”

“It facilitates exact positioning and instantaneous, friction-free constriction, which means-ideally-as you can see here, the odontoid peg breaks the odontoid ligament and drives into the medulla, destroying the vital centers.”

“An old wives’-” began Myburgh, then thought better of it.

“Same as a bullet, only you’d have to aim hell of a straight and it’d be messy. As well as that, there’s.…”

Van Heerden and some of the car-search party came tiptoeing in, hopeful of being allowed to share in the leftovers. They stopped at the foot of the table and nodded, with varying degrees of self-confidence, at Kramer.

“Got my plan yet, Van?” he asked.

“On Sarge Arnot’s desk, Lieutenant. But your boy hadn’t pitched up when we left, so I didn’t bring him.”

“Quick thinking,” Kramer said, and turned back to the two district surgeons. “By the way, this lot found two firearms hidden in the deceased’s car.”

Strydom nudged Myburgh and half whispered, “Did you hear that? I told you this wouldn’t have escaped you in the end!”

“I’m not so sure about that, but thanks, sir.”

“Oh, Lieutenant, the sarge says he’s got something for you on that number plate of yours,” Van Heerden added, dragging his eyes from Erasmus’s paunch fat, which was as thick as four fingers.

“I’ll go and see him now. Well, gentlemen, anything more that’s new?”

Myburgh looked into the sink. “Bladder had been voided, but we knew that already from the state of his pants. Fresh hair clippings in the ears. No, I don’t think so.”

“Me neither,” concurred Strydom. “We’ll get this little lot stuffed back in and stitched up, then I will be ready to leave when you are.”

Kramer neglected to respond. Something Myburgh had just said-to do with either the pants or the hair-had sounded very wrong somehow. It was awakening obscure echoes of some previous investigation, and making him feel pretty certain that, right at the start, he’d overlooked an obvious incongruity.

With a grunt, he left for the main building, resigned to the fact that bad news must await him there. If it had been anything else, then the duty sergeant would doubtlessly have been across the yard in a great cloud of dung and dust.