WHEN IT WAS FIRST INSTALLED T CONDEMNED MAN UPON ENTERING T CHAMBER STOOD UPON A SMALL TRAP IN T FLOOR. HIS WT RELEASED A QUANTITY OF BUCKSHOT WH ROLLED SLOWLY DOWN A SLIGHT INCLINE UNTIL THEIR WT RELEASED T TRIGGER WH HELD T WEIGHT. IT WAS DECIDED, HOWEVER, TT THIS METHOD O EXECUTION WAS ILLEGAL, AS IT VIRTUALLY COMPELLED T PRISONER TO COMMIT SUICIDE, AND IT WAS ABANDONED FOR T PRESENT APPARATUS. FIFTEEN SECONDS AFTER CHAPMAN ENTERED T ROOM THERE WAS A SUDDEN CLICK AS T TRIGGER RELEASED T WEIGHT AND HIS BODY SHOT UPWARD. SAVE FOR T CLICK THERE WAS NOT A SOUND. T BODY HUNG SUSPENDED AT A HT OF 12FT. T NECK VERTEBRAE HAD SNAPPED AND DEATH HD BEEN PRACTICALLY INSTANTANEOUS.
(IN WHAT WAY IS THIS DIFFERENT TO A MAN WHO TAKES T FIRST STEP TOWARD MURDERING HIS FELLOW BEING ANYWHERE? DOES NOT BUCKSHOT START TO ROLL FOR HIM TOO? I PUT THIS IN SO YOU CAN TELL HANS WHAT YOU THINK. C.S.)
What Kramer thought as he finished the last page would not have pleased either of them, and came nowhere near touching on the philosophical point which Strydom had raised. Yet once his indignation had passed, and he’d rescued the crumpled sheets from the wastebin, he realized that the Doc had, however inadvertently, given him a nudge in a new direction. This brief description of an execution had evoked in him a sense of the cold, impersonal part played by the man with his foot on the plunger. He began to visualize a hangman, to dismiss the notion of revenge, and see that the role might be a form of fascination with power.
Willie Boshoff looked up from the crate in the old storeroom and watched Ferreira returning in an apparent fury from the hotel across the yard.
“What did I tell you?” the hotel manager stormed. “It was him! Him making bloody snide allegations. I’ll sue the bastard if he ever tries that again!”
“Lieutenant Kramer?”
“Who else? Didn’t I say he’d gone all po-faced when I told him about the wops this morning? Didn’t I say that the next thing would be him accusing me of bloody lying?”
“Take it easy, hey?” soothed Willie, lifting out a stack of old 78’s in their paper covers. “Sarge Jonkers let it slip that this investigation, whatever it’s about, is pretty big.”
“Then why the hell pick on me?” Ferreira demanded.
“True, he must be getting a little desperate,” Willie joked-and then checked anxiously to see if he’d pushed his new-found friendship too far.
But Ferreira was already intent on hurling everything out of a dusty washstand slumped in the corner. Metal mousetraps, light fittings, shoe boxes filled with brownish snapshots, two lampshades, a cigarette-card album, and a pile of piano music-half-eaten by termites-hit the floor.
“I am going to find that register,” Ferreira muttered, tugging savagely at a pile of moldy rugs, trying to get at the squashed cardboard cartons beneath them. “I’m going to find it and stuff it right in his gob.”
“Did you tell him we’d been looking for it?”
“Why should I’ve?”
“Well, I mean.…”
“Huh! Then he’d have thought that he really had me on the bloody run! No, let him sweat a bit,”
“Then maybe I-”
“So you only came down here to rook a free lunch out of me?” cut in Ferreira, very sarcastically. “I’ll not forget that in a hurry the next time you offer to lend me a helping hand.”
Then he gestured with two fingers, to show he didn’t mean what he’d just said, and calmed down. It was difficult, once you had got to know him better, to understand why he and Jonkers were such big pals: not only could he be quite witty, but he was a nice, generous bloke as well.
Willie gave him a menthol king-size and they lit up.
“What did the Lieutenant actually say, Piet?”
“I didn’t give him much of a chance to say anything, my friend. All he got out was some crack about me doing favors for him ‘and who else?’ by remembering the woman. How do you like that?”
“Ah,” said Willie. “I see. Still, he’s got to check every point, I suppose. You mustn’t take it personal.”
They continued the search. When you had a suitable excuse for it, there were few things more interesting than rummaging about among other people’s belongings, and the ones they’d forgotten all about made the best goodie mines of the lot. There was also a sense of history and heritage to be found amid the cobwebs and mildew that made you envious of anyone with a heap of rubbish in their yard. Willie’s sole relic of his own past was an elastic belt with a twisted-snake clasp, now barely big enough to fit round his thigh, never mind his waist, with which he’d been presented one Christmas at Underbrook Boys’ Home.
“I think I’ve got it!” Ferreira announced triumphantly, upsetting a box of dented Ping-Pong balls as he pulled at something on top of the tool cupboard. “It’s in with all the old invoices in this sodding ruddy case under this pile of crap here.” He heaved at the case’s handle and it snapped off.
“Need some help, Piet?”
“Ta, but I’ll manage, thanks.”
Willie reached back into the bottom of the crate and took another look at the small magazines he had just uncovered there. They were called
“Come on, Willie, I’ve got the book open,” Ferreira called to him. “Let’s see what their names were, and show that clever bugger how to investigate.”
So beautiful it scared him so that he trembled. Then Constable Willie Boshoff did a terrible thing.
Distracted by the suddenness and ferocity of the storm lashing Witklip, Kramer abandoned his ruminations, rose from the desk, and went through into the charge office to borrow a match-a pretext, he knew, for asking again if there was any news of Zondi. Perhaps he should have sent someone out to look for him, yet it had seemed a course of action fraught with unpleasant possibilities, whether or not the little idiot had got himself into trouble.
“Sergeant Zondi is coming,” Mamabola informed him, turning from a window steamed up by the fug of police, public, and a goat.
“About bloody time! Is the young boss with him?”
Mamabola flinched as lightning struck close by. “No, sir. Goodluck suggests he may be at the hotel and has been captured there by the floodwaters. Hau, this is happening so quickly!”
“Ja, at least God doesn’t bugger around,” said Kramer, all too aware of the time that had been wasted that day.
He opened the door and stepped out onto the verandah, goose-pimpling in the hail-chilled air, and catching his breath as another fork of lightning blazed and banged. The raindrops were falling so hard they misted the lawn with splashes and the dirt pathway danced pink. Anything more than twenty yards away was lost in a luminous, swaying grayness, while water sheeted from the glutted gutter overhead, obscuring his view of the gate.
Walking through all this, really taking his time and soaked to the skin, came Zondi.
“Run, you fool!” bellowed Kramer.
Then, having moved to where he could see better, the truth of the situation came home to him. Mickey was dragging that leg a pace at a time, shuddering uncontrollably as his weight came upon it, clenching his fists tighter, and coming on. He staggered.
Kramer flicked his cigarette aside. “Wait, Mickey!”
“No, boss; men would see.”
As faint as these words were, a hiss in the hissing of the rain, they halted Kramer like a shout.
He backed away from the verandah’s edge. Zondi veered to the left, cutting across the grass beneath the flagpole, missing the path to the steps by miles. Then his faltering course made sense: he was trying to avoid the window.
His collapse came just as he reached to pull himself up by one of the posts supporting the verandah roof. But he didn’t fall: Kramer grabbed the outstretched hands and swung him up, let go and altered his hold, cradling the
