The Sunday Hangman (27 page)

A move quite so radical as this hadn’t occurred to Willie, but suddenly he saw how just that would be. “Uh huh. It’s just a shame we didn’t get together before, Piet. I want you to know that.”

“All the best,” said Ferreira, clinking glasses. “I’m sorry, too, but—like they say—opportunity only knocks once.”

“Very true,” said Willie.

Then he raised his glass and drank. As he did so, his eye caught sight of an invoice tucked into the pocket of Ferreira’s white nylon shirt.
, he read through the thin fabric.

Karl de Bruin sat as invited on the chair in front of the desk in the station commander’s office. He watched Kramer close the door, lock it, and return to sit opposite him, arms folded. He gave the appearance of being bewildered.

“Tonight in the bar at Spa-kling Waters hotel, you saw fit to contradict certain remarks made by my colleague. I think you will know which remarks I refer to, Mr. de Bruin.”

“Ja; so what? Surely you haven’t brought me in here to say that’s an offense!” De Bruin laughed uneasily, taking his hat off to twist it by the brim. “The lad had got his head full of cock-and-bull stories.”

“How would you know? What are your sources of information?”

“Usual place: newspapers, magazines, things I’ve read.”

“Published in this country?”

“I don’t buy papers from—”

“That is a lie!”

De Bruin made to get up.

“Sit down, farmer. Stay down until I’ve asked my questions. Why did you see fit to make these contradictions?”

“I don’t like to hear talk like that, Lieutenant Kramer.”

Kramer decided to sneer. “Oh, really? Too gruesome for you, is it?”

The pupils of the man’s eyes were like flies caught in chips of amber. His lips—smiling so winningly a moment before—were tightly pressed together. A pulse ticked in his left temple.

“It
was
too gruesome for me. His comments could also have upset people who might think his account was accurate. Upset them very much.”

“Ach, I see: sort of part of your duty as a leader in the community?”

“If you like,” said de Bruin, tensed against the next move.

“How do you know Constable Boshoff was wrong? What are your sources of information?”

The hat revolved faster in the stubby fingers. “I just know it isn’t like that. The state wouldn’t allow it. To talk like that is close to treason.”

“Treason? You interest me, Mr. de Bruin. What made you say that, may I ask?”

“What? It’s nothing—a figure of speech. We all use it.”

“Uh huh?”

“That’s all. Are you finished?”

“So the state wouldn’t allow it,” Kramer repeated with deliberate sarcasm; acknowledging the fact that nothing need ever be wasted by adding: “All the state asks is that a condemned prisoner is hanged by the neck until dead.”

“In one sense, but the people who do it
are
trained.”

“When, where, and how, Mr. de Bruin? From your vast knowledge, you must be able to tell me that!”

With calculated suddenness, Kramer rose and went round to stand over the unhappy man in the chair. De Bruin tried to smile again, blinking against the light overhead, and licking his lips before answering.

“Well, it would have been some time ago, I suppose. Perhaps things have changed, perhaps there have been retirements. I may even be wrong, in which case I’d be happy to apologize to young Willie in private.”

“
Apologize?
”

“Look, I’ve stood all—”

“Apologize? Kiss and make up, you mean? Then walk out of here? You’re under bloody arrest, Mr. de Bruin, as you damn well know!”

De Bruin got slowly to his feet, dropping the hat on the chair behind him. “No, I don’t damn well know. You asked for a lift and then started making this fuss. I think it’s time you gave me an explanation, young man, or—”

“An explanation? That’s your job, Karl.”

“I’ll not say another word until I’m informed as to what the devil you’re playing at, and that’s final.”

The tawny eyes stayed steady, the big fists bunched; there was no fear in him, and, very obviously, he was tough. Filled with a righteous indignation that only the innocent or the insane would feel their right.

Someone knocked on the door.

“Go away,” said Kramer, without looking round.

“It’s me, Lieutenant! I’ve got a report that’s urgent!”

De Bruin glanced at the door, giving Kramer an instant in which to lift his truck keys from the desk.

“Wait, I’ll be back,” he said, and left him standing there. Once in the charge office, Kramer gave his orders. “Nyembezi, by this door. Mamabola and Luthuli, get outside and search that truck. I want everything from it—tools, tow rope, sacks, maps, the lot. And now your problem, my friend?”

Willie pointed at the office door and made I-can’t-talk-here signs. He looked fairly canned and rocky on his feet—ready for bed, in fact. But there was something in his expression that made Kramer hasten after him into the garden.

“Piet told a lie and I caught him,” he said breathlessly. “Said he’d been down the road while all the time he was in Brandspruit, scared of seeing you until it was over. He wasn’t sure if he hadn’t buggered it all up. Stayed away as long as he could. You know what?”

“He tipped off de Bruin?”

“Hell, how did you—”

“Guessed, just this instant. The house this afternoon, the way the bugger’s been taking it. Last night was it?”

“After you’d gone, sir,” said Willie, getting his thumb caught in the Land-Rover’s key ring. “Bloody hell—stupid, isn’t it? Ja, he said he hadn’t meant to, but you’d given him a—”

“What did he say to de Bruin?”

“He swears he only asked a few questions of a general nature, but hanging did come into one of them. This seemed to catch de Bruin’s ear and—well—it’s a bit of a muddle what came after that. The point is that de Bruin must have had warning. I thought I’d better tell you right away in case you were having trouble.”

“What’s Ferreira doing now?”

“He’s running the party. He wants to say he’s very sorry and will make sure nothing else goes wrong. He couldn’t help himself. I’m just on my way back there, so if there’s a message, I can take it for you. Yee-aaagh, that’s better.”

Kramer patted him on the shoulder. “A bloody fine job, Willie! I’m going to make special mention of this in my report. But there’s a question I should ask.”

“Fire away, Lieutenant!”

“With all the drawing you did last night, how much sleep did you get? We’ve an early start at daybreak looking for the evidence in this case; it really would be a help if one of us could be right on the ball in the morning. I can’t tell you what to do with your off-duty hours, but.…”

Acute disappointment showed first in Willie’s face, then he made some adjustment and shrugged. “Say no more, sir! Boshoff is on his way. Will you be wanting these in the meantime?”

“Ta,” said Kramer, taking the Land-Rover keys. “There could be a Bantu incident, I suppose. See you at sunup, Willie. Don’t worry; this is being noted as well.”

Willie grinned, waved, and set off across the road toward the Haagner household. He walked with his hands in his pockets and whistled off-key. Very briefly, Kramer was ashamed of treating him like a wad of gum that had lost its flavor, and then admitted how much less bother it would be with him safely tucked away. The mean-minded part of himself that did these things was always right.

“Hau, sir, look at this we have found,” Mamabola said, hurrying over from de Bruin’s truck. “Wrapped in newspaper under the front seat. Still very clean.”

It was a loosely wrapped parcel of what felt like books. Kramer took the parcel, gave them orders to continue the search, and walked back into the light cast from the verandah. He paused and checked the date on the paper: it had been sold that morning. Gingerly, he uncovered the contents; as he’d thought, three books. The top one was black and as thick as a hymnal. There was no title on its outside, so he flipped two pages:

A New Handbook on Hanging
.

Under which he read:

Next page: Published in 1954 by Andrew Melrose, Ltd., of London, New York, Toronto, Melbourne, Sydney, Cape Town. Next page:

DEDICATED RESPECTFULLY
to
THE HANGMEN OF ENGLAND
and to similar
CONSTITUTIONAL BULWARKS
everywhere

Preface.

Then a wave of realization reared up out of the sea of alien print, curled over, and crashed down on him. “Jesus, the buggers who taught us,” he said.

Z
ONDI AND
K
RAMER
were reading in the storeroom. The 25-watt bulb in the ceiling gave a poor light, but neither of them remarked on the fact. They had said nothing at all for a very long time.

“Listen to this, boss,” murmured Zondi, making himself more comfortable on the mattress. “It is a section specially marked, and it goes: ‘The jury system had been abolished two years before, a victim of its own inadequacy. The jury box had become a relic, now occupied by fashionable women spectators who had cajoled me into giving them a good place. Juries have proved to be a time-wasting luxury and their decisions were often shamefully biased.’ Why should this interest him also?”

Kramer, who’d had eyes for nothing but the astonishing
Handbook
, looked up from a detailed description of the scaffold. “Which one says that?”

“
The Vontsteen Case
, by the lawyer who was the judge’s—”

“Christ, give me that.”

He ruffled through its pages, found underlined a press report on the new block at Central, and then, near the beginning, the very piece which the Widow Fourie had read out to him over the telephone. The sentence about the bandage and gushing blood had been deleted, and
See AP 184
was written in the margin.

“Ah! AP 184?” inquired Zondi, rather smugly. “That is a cross-reference to this one,
Executioner: Pierrepoint
, which is by Boss Albert Pierrepoint, for many years England’s master hangman. He is answering questions under oath at a royal inquiry, and his words are: ‘I’ve never seen any blood.’ He was truly a great man, this, and very kind.”

“Anything else marked in it?”

“Many, many things. His father called the work a ‘highly skilled mystery.’ It is impossible to hang more than two at once properly. There was ‘no movement on the body,’ he says, in the many hundreds of people—”

“It looks new,” interrupted Kramer, reaching out. “When was it published?”

The date given was 1974—a little late in the scheme of things.

“And yours, boss?”

“You mean is it any use? Certainly! Gets a bit jokey at times, like you’d expect from those eccentric bastards, but the facts are all there. Here, look at this thing at the back.”

There was a table of thirteen columns of figures; all you had to do was pick the one giving the weight of the prisoner, and read off the appropriate drop—which you then modified according to build, helped by such information as that a scrofulous neck (one having TB of the lymphatic glands) was apt to tear easily.

“Hau, that is mad to print so much!” Zondi exclaimed, taking the book from him. “What kind of people are these?”

“Read it and see if you can find out,” said Kramer, getting up off the ammunition box.

“Lieutenant?”

“I want to make a quick call and then get back to de Bruin. Easier he tells us the rest than we try to work it out. Makes the mind bloody boggle, doesn’t it?”

Feeling very detached, Kramer went out into the charge office and found there a man bleeding from a superficial
spear wound. The three Bantu constables were grouped around him.

“This man reports a fight at a beer party, sir,” Mamabola said, coming to attention. “Big one?”

“Thirty to forty persons involved.”

“How far away? Any firearms?”

“Five kilometers—no firearms.”

“You want any issued?”

Mamabola glanced at Luthuli, who was testing the weight of his knobkerrie in the palm of his left hand. “No, thank you, sir. Goodluck says that could make the people all turn on us. It would be better with just the club.”

“Off you go, then,” Kramer said, tossing over the Land-Rover keys. “Take the walkie-talkie in case there are more than that by now, and you can’t put a lid on it. Sergeant Zondi will be listening this end.”

Luthuli, the veteran of such affairs, gave a casual order and they trooped out, taking the injured man with them. After making a scribbled entry in the Occurrence Book, Kramer put through his call to Trekkersburg.

“It’s Tromp, Doc,” he said. “What’s news?”

“Ach, you wouldn’t believe it, man!” Strydom said. “This television business is no joke. You remember how they used to say it would turn everyone antisocial? Not a bloody hope! I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many cups of coffee made in a whole year before, and it hasn’t been even a week yet. And yours? Anything come up yet?”