“Forget the bloody vodka and the Mpendus. I’m going to have a word with the Colonel, while you get the car filled up. Be in the yard at one.”
“Where do we go?”
“Doringboom. A post-mortem in Doringboom.”
“
“Well, at the moment,” Kramer said, “that seems to be a matter of opinion. Here, you tell me what you think.”
He handed over the photograph.
Zondi’s fleeting scowl was involuntary. He returned the picture, gave no sign of what was going through his head, and took a step away.
“I get the car, boss.”
“Fine.”
Kramer set off in the opposite direction, heading for the CID building, then side-stepped into the shadow of an offloading Coke truck. That limp wasn’t getting any better; in fact, when Zondi thought you weren’t looking, it tended to become a lot worse.
“I’ve heard,” said Colonel Hans Muller, without glancing up from his blotter, where he was making daisies with the juice tapped from his pipe stem. “I’ve also been having a word with Dr. Myburgh, the young DS handling the case at Doringboom. Putting him in the picture and so on.”
“Oh, ja? What does he have to say?” Kramer inquired, taking his usual seat on a corner of the big desk.
“Careful! No vibrations, please. This isn’t as easy as it looks. Anyway, as I was saying, Myburgh sounded an intelligent fellow. He gets a lot of hangings, of course, being in a rural area and the Bantu not having sleeping pills and all that rubbish to play around with. Quite a lot of experience for his age.”
“Uh huh.”
“Interested in what we had to tell him about the deceased. Said it would account for Erasmus carrying no identity-which shows he isn’t a fool.”
“And?” prompted Kramer, wary of the build-up.
“Well, he told me he’d visited the scene in person. No signs of violence, no strangulation prior to suspension, and a nice little fork in the tree to jump off. Nothing to make-”
“But, Colonel-”
“Ach! Look what you made me do! I don’t want bloody
“Slightly unusual? Christ, I’d like to hear what our own DS has to say about that,” Kramer retorted, confident that his doubts would be shared by Dr. Christiaan Strydom, the gifted if eccentric garden gnome with whom he generally worked.
“Your wish, Trompie,” murmured the Colonel, good-humoredly, “is my whatsit. I checked with the very same not five minutes ago, and Chris agreed that a fracture was rare-although far from impossible, given the circumstances I described. He also made a couple of very sound observations, one of which Doc Myburgh had himself already noted.”
Instead of explaining what this was, the amateur artist gave his undivided attention to the spread of the next disgusting yellow stain.
“Do I have to just guess, Colonel?”
“Hmmm. You could try, if you like: what have-or had-Doc Strydom and Tollie Erasmus got in common?”
The answer he received was deservedly coarse.
“Then let me give you a clue: where have they both, in a manner of speaking, served a term?”
Kramer kept silent, regretting he’d ever bothered to pay the bastard the courtesy of a quick call. But his mind childishly insisted on solving the riddle: Strydom and Erasmus had both spent time in Central Prison, Pretoria, the site of the Republic’s gallows and, for this reason, one of the few places blacks were able to share the same amenities, however briefly.
“Full marks,” Colonel Muller continued, taking Kramer’s correct assumption for granted. “… where it would surely be impossible for a man to remain in ignorance of what takes place there on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Every warder has to witness at least one little send-off, and I’m sure he then feels it his duty to pass on the deterrent effect to those maximum-security prisoners in for rehabilitation. Tollie must have heard their stories dozens of times during his last stretch-and maybe even the sound of the trap going down. And so, when he felt in need of an instantaneous death, guaranteed by the government itself, then-”
“Tollie? That’s crap!” snapped Kramer.
“Then I hesitate to ask you to bear it in mind, Lieutenant. Nonetheless, such an approach would be entirely rational on Tollie’s part, especially if he’d thrown away his gun and left himself just with a tow rope. Don’t let the statistics fool you: very few members of the ordinary public know anything about a drop or more would use it.”
“You’ll be saying he did it out of conscience next!”
The Colonel looked up. “Now who’s in the crap business?” He chuckled, leaning back. “That’s one kind of trouble our friend never got himself into, having a bad conscience. But you’ve got to admit that, in this context, there’s nothing inconsistent about the method used.”
“I’d be surprised if he hanged himself any other way, sir-which doesn’t mean that I think, for one minute, he did it.”
“A feeling in your water?”
“Other inconsistencies, beginning with-”
“Hold it; point two coming up. Doc Strydom shares your respect for precedent, you see.”
“Oh, ja?”
“Hanging, he reminds us, is a form of violent death that’s different to all the rest, inasmuch as the forensic presumption is, for once, that death was self-inflicted. In his strange mind, even judicial hangings are self-inflicted, but we won’t waste our time going into-”
“Ach, why not?” Kramer was niggled into saying.
“Watch it. You should be asking why this presumption is made. Simply because self-inflicted hanging has millions of precedents-going right back to Judas, if you like-whereas homicidal hanging is a crime that’s virtually
Kramer lit a Lucky Strike and rode out a few waves of doubt in that water of his. For a moment there, this talk of precedent had impressed him, then he’d realized that the Colonel’s whole argument depended solely upon the number of homicidal hangings that had been actually detected.
“A handy presumption,” he remarked dryly. “Hell, if my love life ever gets too complicated, I might give it a whirl myself.”
“You do that, Tromp-providing you’re picking on two-year-olds these days, or on junkies stoned from here to bloody Christmas. Because the DS will still be making his routine check, and is certain to note any signs of secondary violence, such as might be needed to control your victim. Erasmus was conscious at the time, and there was no evidence of recent bruising.”
“Fully conscious? How could Myburgh tell?”
“Ah,” said the Colonel, appearing shifty on purpose, “here is the unbelievable part of the story. It seems that Tollie had in his left hand a small, leather-bound copy of the Holy Bible. He must have been holding it hell of a tight, and then the fatal spasm kept it there.”
Of course, Kramer could believe that: sudden and violent death was capable of many tricks. He had once spent ten minutes trying to free a hair drier from the grasp of a skinny typist electrocuted in her bath. He had found a brier pipe, not unlike the Colonel’s, clenched in the teeth of a steeplejack impaled on a parking meter. And if anyone was to turn to Jesus in extremis, then it was invariably the scum of the earth-see the prayers scratched on any cell wall.
But he said with conviction: “Ach, somebody stuck it in afterwards.”
The Colonel wagged a hairy finger.
“Sir?”
