The Sunday Hangman

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.

19

Zondi and Kramer 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?”

“Ever heard,” said Kramer, turning the book over to read the title, “of Albert Pierrepoint?”

“Now, there was an expert!” enthused Strydom. “A man after my own heart! You should read what he says about the Americans and their standard five-foot drop and four-coil cowboy knot. Twenty- six minutes one poor bugger had to strangle. His own lowest time was nine seconds from entering the cell to the snap of the rope. The only annoying thing is that he never goes far enough into the detail.”

“You’ve read his book, then?”

“Ja, I got it from the library some time ago. As a matter of fact, I noticed it was out only yesterday, when I was getting a note on the machine hanging to you on the Telex. That piece from the paper, remember? What were your own reactions to that?”

Kramer’s detachment detached itself. “That wasn’t a cutting sent to you?” he growled. “You might have-”

“In 1926?” Strydom laughed. “What kind of teenager do you think I was? It comes from a collection called By the Neck.”

“You didn’t consider, though, that the existence of these books might be relevant?” Kramer said, dismissing his oversight.

“Hey?” There was a pause. “Ach, never. The examples they give are inadequate. Er-have you found someone who has read them?”

“Uh huh. And another book, too, by a barrister called Duff.”

“Duff’s Handbook? Man, isn’t that a hoot?”

“It’s meant to be funny?”

“Of course! My favorite part is where he suggests that there should be an exam for-”

“Funny? A lot of bloody nonsense?”

“What would be the point of that?” Strydom said in some bemusement. “If the facts he gives weren’t accurate, then his whole-”

“Almighty God, Doc!”

“-sarcasm would be for nothing.”

Kramer found himself actually speechless. He tried to articulate a home truth, but the sound wouldn’t come.

“Ohhhh, I see what’s got your Tampax in a knot,” Strydom said with a chuckle. “You’ve found somebody with Duff and you think it might be him? Before you make a fool of yourself, Trompie, let me tell you something you must have overlooked.”

“Ja?”

“That’s a bloody abolitionists’ book, man!”

Kramer gave Zondi the walkie-talkie set and a curt instruction, and went back into the station commander’s office. He slammed the Pierrepoint autobiography down on the desk in front of de Bruin. The fanner turned white.

“Jesus, you silly bugger,” Kramer said cheerfully, sitting down in the chair behind the desk and putting his feet up. “Look what I’ve found in your truck! You shouldn’t have worried these books were banned, because they’re