James Mcclure - The Sunday Hangman

Colonel Muller cleared his throat. “The period, gentlemen, would appear to be one of five years, with one hanging occurring each year. But not, you will notice, in any particular month or season, so the timing may be more random than it seems.”

“How many years were looked through in all?” Kramer asked, lighting up a Lucky.

“Alfred and me did another five before that.”

“And?”

“Three fracture dislocations, none of them arousing suspicion of any kind. One involving a fall on a ladder.”

“Uh huh. And how many of these are really borderline?”

Strydom mopped again. He was beginning to look like a man who’d cast his bread upon the waters and had forgotten to let go.

“If you’re having a few doubts now,” the Colonel said slightly sarcastically, “then which of these cases, not counting Tollie’s, are you quite certain of?”

“The railway foreman couldn’t have died under the given circumstances in the manner indicated.”

“And the others? What order of certainty would you place them in?” Kramer asked, noting this down.

“On the scanty information I have?”

“Whichever way you like.”

“The witch doctor I’m 80 percent sure of; the tramp, about 65. Make the krantz case 50.”

“Fifty-fifty? Why’s that?”

“Well, there were more variables involved in that one.”

“Like yourself, for instance?”

That got its laugh and the tension eased, placing the discussion on a more objective level. Kramer made the routine check for a pattern.

“No real pattern,” he said, “although it could be significant that there’s only one black, that there’s three unknown persons out of five, and that the other two had police records.”

“The hangman is more likely white, then,” Strydom suggested, with a logic that wasn’t altogether sound if you thought about how certain blacks felt.

“I don’t think we should waste time on surmising until we’ve more information,” the Colonel said firmly. “Nor do we need to worry about anything under 100 percent-again, on the same basis.”

“Or what about treating them as separate cases, each on its own merits?” Kramer put forward, aware that his conflicts arose from trying to relate such disparate individuals. “If, by some bloody miracle, they start linking up, then we’ll rethink our approach.”

“I like it, Tromp. Two murder inquiries and three suspicious deaths?”

“That’s right, sir. Zondi can take the witch doctor and Marais can see what he can get out of the other two.”

“But,” said Strydom.

“Ja, Chris?” Muller replied.

“What about the hangman and his-”

“Look, man! I told you how many times? That’s a dangerous fixation you’ve got, and I don’t like the words you use. They only confuse the issue, which is bad enough as it is.”

Strydom reddened. “Would you like a second opinion, Hans? I could take these down to Gordon in Durban.”

“God in heaven! Nobody must hear about this until at least I’ve had time to talk to the brigadier. Of course I trust your judgment, Chris; it’s just you must leave the investigation side to us, hey?”

Kramer went over to the door, wary of what more talk might do to the brittle simplicity of his present outlook.

“I’ll get the sergeants going,” he said, “and seeing as the Erasmus case has reached a blank wall, I might as well have a crack at railwayman Rossouw.”

“Fine,” replied Colonel Muller. “Is it okay for us to share your biscuit?”

Zondi took the photograph of the unidentified umthakathi down to the street of the witch doctors in the lower part of town.

Several of them there had wholesale departments, stocked with everything from bulk packets of aphrodisiacs to entire desiccated baboons, and also supplied the fur trappings a black man was no longer permitted to hunt for himself. He went from store to store, from fancy glass counter to self-service emporium, from holes in the wall to sinister back rooms, and from one end of the street to the other.

None of the fat cats he questioned had any recollection of the face cupped in his hand, nor were they much interested. Yet the effort involved wasn’t entirely wasted: the dead man, they said, sniffing, was plainly an ignorant old peasant. Anyone with a smattering of the art would have secured his release with a handful of the right seeds-not that they sold them personally, of course. This confirmed in Zondi’s mind what had seemed a rather strange paradox.

He hijacked a pirate taxi for a lift back to headquarters, put in a requisition for a dozen more copies of the photograph, and went to the Lieutenant’s office to await their delivery. It was difficult to think of what else he might do.

After pushing pins into the wall map, to represent where the five bodies had been found, he sat down on his stool near the door and propped his leg on the table. The rat released its grip, wriggled a little, then lay comfortably on its belly.

Then Sergeant Klip Marais came in, yellow mustache bristling and gray eyes aglint, and barely nodded as Zondi stood up. He dumped some files on the Lieutenant’s desk, retrieved a memo pad from the wastebin, and gave the telephone a dirty look.

“Did your boss ring this number?” he asked.

“I do not know, Sergeant.”

“Huh! As if a bloke hasn’t enough to do. What the hell are you doing here, by the way? You got your orders.”

Zondi explained where he had been, and that there would be at least an hour’s delay before he could have his photographs for distribution.

Marais, who never talked to him in the ordinary way of things, but was always happy to grumble, said: “Trust you to get off so lightly. The witch doctor is an easy one; me, I’ve been landed with the real bastards.”

“They have no fathers?”

“Hey? Not bastards-ach, forget it. There’s nothing on this tramp, and there never was. When I rang up the local station, they didn’t even know what I was talking about for the first few bloody minutes.”

“Hau!” Zondi sympathized.

“And Pa Henk couldn’t assist either.”

“Hau, hau!”

“And since then,” Marais went on, taking the Lieutenant’s chair, “it’s got worse. Look at this.”

Zondi examined the dental chart that had been sent spinning through the air for him to catch. Five extractions and two fillings; a wisdom tooth impacted.

“That’s a thing to show the teeth in the krantz case-the teeth in the skull, understand? The two black dots are where fillings had been put not so long before, and the crosses are teeth that had been pulled out. I got straight on to the old-to a Mrs. Roberts, and asked her what her son’s dentist’s name had been. Guess?”

“I could not do such a thing, Sergeant.”

“I’m not bloody surprised! He hadn’t got one! She said he’d always been poop-scared of dentists, and she had given up trying to get him to go to one. His teeth stayed perfect? Oh, dear me, no; some had been neglected so badly they’d had to be pulled out. Which ones? How many? Peterkins hadn’t told her-he’d just sneaked off and had it done. Fillings? She starts up all over again about how nervous and sensitive her little boysie was, and always left his poor teeth until they were completely buggered. You see what I mean?”

“Too difficult, this one.”

“So I start ringing round all the dentists she could think of”-Marais sighed, rising wearily-”but the receptionists all say the same thing. They say they don’t keep records of casual emergencies, if that’s what I’m talking about. Cheeky bitches.”

Zondi had been staring down at the chart and thinking, with some wry amusement, how like his own mouth it looked; not that fear kept him from the doctors who took turns at being the dentist down at the black clinic, but because they did only extractions, whatever shape the tooth was in. His gaze shifted to the black dots.