The Sunday Hangman Read online

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 déjà 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.

  5

  THE BAD NEWS read as follows:

  TO SAP DORINGBOOM: LICENSE PLATES STOLEN FM TRACTOR ON SMALLHOLDING MOUNTAIN OUTLOOK, LICENSEE REPORTS NO KNOWLEDGE THEFT AS TRACTOR ABANDONED IN FIELD AFTER TOTAL BREAKDOWN. THEFT CD HV OCCURRED ANYTIME SIX MONTH PERIOD. FORD SEDAN STOLEN FM JHB CAR HIRE FIRM YEAR AGO. ORIGINAL COLOR BLUE. BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME. ENDS.

  “I must say I’ve always preferred a blue myself,” said Strydom, folding the Telex message and handing it back. “But where would this bloke find mountains to stare at?”

  “Probably the bloody mine dumps,” answered Kramer, giving the Chev the gun as Doringboom petered out.

  “You’re a bit upset?”

  Hearing it put this way, Kramer had to smile. “Ach, not really, Doc. At least it backs up what we collected on Tollie: he’d never have bought himself a motor that was warmer than a sodding Easter egg.”

  “I suppose it’s over to Jo’burg now?”

  “That side of it. Christ, it was lucky you were around today.”

  They covered a silent kilometer.

  “No, I meant what I said to young Myburgh, Tromp; he’d not have missed the brandy, nor would he have left matters after the firearms find. He could have received the same help from several sources besides myself—Prinsloo, for instance. The basic trouble was our dependency, to a degree, on textbooks from England.”

  “Oh, ja?”

  “The English are not, you see, taken on average, a very big race. Or at least this appears to be true of their criminal classes, and so these misunderstandings occur when generalizations are made. Now, don’t mistake me; the English had hanging down to a fine art before they chickened out, but all that doesn’t go into a forensic handbook. Myburgh reacted as I would have done under similar circumstances.”

  “All the same,” said Kramer, accepting his light, “I still say it was one hell of a coincidence.”

  Strydom looked away. “Okay, so I admit it.”

  “What?”

  “That this trip wasn’t so coincidental. It didn’t even have anything to do with Erasmus, except maybe indirectly. You could say it sort of triggered off an idea.”

  “I’m not with you, Doc.”

  “Er—this really ought to have come up naturally. You know? I just thought it would be a good opportunity for you and me to have a little chat. Man, you don’t know how impossible it is normally to get you alone in one place for more than two minutes. However, you brought Zondi to do the driving and—”

  “Ach, I see!”

  “No, Tromp, I don’t think so,” Strydom replied grimly.

  Kramer, whose thoughts had been trying to fit around the idea of an execution, which was harder than grabbing wet soap with boxing gloves on, realized abruptly what was being said. While he couldn’t read the innuendo, some kind of trouble lay very plainly between the lines. This baffled him because, whatever they might say behind each other’s back, he and Strydom got on well together, being always careful whom they said it to. And when it came down to sorting out a stiff, the Doc seldom let you down. Yet morgue work was only a single aspect of the DS’s duties, Kramer remembered now, and felt himself tensing up. Strydom was also required to attend corporal punishment at the triangle, to investigate complaints by political detainees, to give yellow fever shots to air travelers, and to care for the health of all police personnel and their dependents, under the force’s free medical scheme. Being rather dull by comparison, this latter function wasn’t one that sprang readily to mind—as it certainly should have done.

  “Doctor, what the hell are you trying to say?” Kramer demanded. “It’s about Zondi, am I right?”

  Strydom sighed, turning the sound into a low chuckle of respect. Then he took off his glasses to clean them—an old ploy of his when he wanted to appear defenseless—and began speaking again in an entirely different tone. At a guess, it was intended to be soothing, but its effect rivaled the scrape of fingernails down a whitewashed wall.

  “I know you’re a bit touchy in this regard,” Strydom said. “You even proved as much this afternoon, by making him walk five kilometers just to impress me.”

  “Rubbish.”

  “You had no special need for the information at that stage, Tromp. I know it was my presence that influenced—”

  “Ach, kak! You had nothing to do with it!”

  “Then why did you, Tromp? Even Van Heerden looked a bit surprised.”

  “It was a job he could do best.”

  “So you might believe, but—”

  “No, in his bloody opinion!” Kramer chopped across. “It was also his idea.”

  Strydom put his glasses back on and stared for a while.

  “Can you explain that some more to me?”

  This wasn’t a topic Kramer liked in the least, and he wished he’d not responded at all, but the damage was done, and he had to go on.

  “It would have been hard on the man to say no. Zondi has never done less than his best.”

  “Nobody’s arguing. But you know that it’s my duty to report on the fitness of all CID staff, and t
hat I depend on all senior officers for help with my assessments. Not once have I had anything from you, and that is making my position with Colonel Muller very difficult. I can’t keep writing ‘Progress as expected’ week after week without him wondering when all this progress is going to stop, and he has an A-l Bantu again. You do know that he insists on every member of CID being 100 percent fit, hey?”

  “I heard it was 100 percent efficient.”

  With an uneasy laugh, Strydom said, “And I’d always understood that the two went together.”

  “So what do you want me to say? Chuck him on the scrap-pile?”

  “We didn’t say that when you got yourself shot up in that Portuguese café, Tromp. Please don’t get unreasonable.”

  It was on the tip of Kramer’s tongue to point out how unreasonable a comparison that was, and to do this very forcibly, when a much simpler solution occurred to him.

  “Doc, just listen,” he said gruffly, like a man baring his soul. “I’ve had that boy for how many years now? Do you know how many hours I’ve spent training him? You should know what slow learners some of them are, man, even if you’ve never had to work with them. But I tell you, and others would say exactly the same, that when you get a good boy, then you want to hold on to him. You must know as well as I do what could happen if mine was—”

  “Say no more,” Strydom interrupted. “I’ve got the same thing with Nxumalo down at my morgue. And besides, you sound like my wife, when the cookboy wants to give in his notice! But seeing as we are talking like friends again, the way we ought always to talk, then please take some friendly advice. Your noncooperation in this matter could have far-reaching effects, and I wouldn’t want to be party to that.”

  “Up to you, Doc.”

  “Damn and blast, Tromp! You don’t seem to appreciate what I’m trying to do for you off the record. Very well; I make out my next report on him this coming Monday. You send me a memo anytime before that you like. But if I don’t get your memo, then you and the Colonel can argue the toss over what it is he requires. And I don’t envy you trying to prove your version either!”

  Kramer felt he’d gone some small way towards providing that proof when Zondi, looking very chipper, if in need of a good dry-clean, flagged them down at the picnic spot. He clearly had something useful to impart—which, as it turned out, far exceeded any expectations.