“Really? You must tell me about it later. Meanwhile I want to catch up with-”
“Sir, this is a serious matter. Perhaps all I need say is that a very careful inspection of the site was made by me this morning. It was, after all, my duty to ensure that the umfaans had not in any way interfered with the body. I saw no indications to this effect; the grass beneath the deceased bore no signs of trampling, and there were no other marks of a suspicious nature either. Furthermore, I am quite certain that no vehicle had proceeded beyond the prescribed parking area-it took seven of us to move the tables aside for the ambulance to back up. A precaution I personally organized, as it allowed us to work behind a screen without any inconvenience to the passing public. To summarize, the scene of death was given every scrutiny, in accordance with the-”
“Cecil,” said Kramer, “I never doubted it.”
“Hey?”
Arnot’s ire missed the quick swerve, and came lumbering to a halt; you could almost hear the tail swishing behind the folds of his immense baggy trousers.
“You didn’t, Lieutenant?”
“No. So now your question must be: who did?”
Kramer left him with that to think over, a process certain to waste several more minutes, and hurried on in the good doctor’s wake. There was, of course, one thing you could always safely say about Sergeant Cecil P. Arnot, and that was, setting human nature aside, the man knew his job. If he claimed that the signs of disturbance had been minimal, quite unsuspicious, and in keeping with the situation as he saw it, then this just had to be so. Sod him.
For one wacky instant, as Kramer passed through the double doors of the old-fashioned post-mortem room, with its high ceiling and quaint skylight, he expected to hear lightning strike, and to see the prone form rise jerkily from the marble table. Then the tall, aristocratic figure on the left of the head, and the hunched, shaggy-haired dwarf on the right, dissolved back into two district surgeons, intent on examining a neck. The air still crackled, however, when Kramer stepped forward to introduce himself.
Myburgh looked up and nodded, tight-lipped; he was, as the Colonel had guessed, young and intelligent- seeming, with more than a resemblance to a celebrated Cape heart surgeon, which was bound-once he’d saved enough for a city practice-to stand him in good stead.
Mildly surprised by his reception, Kramer turned to Strydom and found him equally distant, as though withholding something you didn’t say in front of natives.
“Doc? What gives?”
“Er-I’m afraid you somewhat misled me, and that has-um-resulted in an embarrassment of a professional nature.”
“You called me a bloody fool,” Myburgh reminded him.
“For which I have already apologized, even though when I said ‘you fool,’ I was really referring to myself, Dr. Myburgh. But, Tromp, isn’t it true you said that scrawny bloody constable and the deceased were the same build?”
“No, I only said the same size, meaning height,” Kramer replied, taking his first look at the corpse and hearing his voice trail. “Because Erasmus was average, around the 150-to-160-pound mark.…”
“
“Around 180, 185. Christ, how did he get like that?”
“Not through being a nervous wreck,” Strydom said cynically.
“But.…”
“Ja, Tromp?”
“This means he must have been living very easy and drinking his bloody head off, night and day. Look at that tan, too, and the new haircut.… Hell, I don’t understand.”
“Nor do I,” murmured Myburgh.
“You don’t? This bastard was supposed to be on the run, Doc, with blokes in every-”
“I meant that I still don’t understand what Van Heerden has to do with this. Will you explain, sir?”
But a reply from Strydom wasn’t immediately forthcoming. He was engrossed in a calculation that he crossed out impatiently-and then returned to, repeating it twice over, with what appeared to be the same result. He slipped the notebook into his pocket, gave a cheery, meaningless smile, and suggested they begin the examination without further ado. His explanation could, if it was still required, be given later, he said.
Kramer, feeling acutely aware that the bluff held more than either he or Myburgh imagined, managed to contain his curiosity. He gave his attention instead to the equally placid, equally inscrutable features of the late Mr. Erasmus, and thought it a shame that he hadn’t been strangled a nice deep purple. Hanging, with its kindly attitude to the complexion, wouldn’t have been his choice at all. Two other things struck him, one snide and one ironical, which also helped to provide temporary distractions. The first was that Erasmus had an appendix scar exactly like the little white line on the Widow Fourie’s sweet, peach-fluff belly, and finding it here smattered of very poor taste on the thief’s part. And then there was the wince Kramer gave when the body, into which he’d dreamed of driving soft-nosed slugs, preferably at point-blank range, was slit open from chin to pubic arch.
Myburgh did all the heavy work, and, to judge by Strydom’s grunts of approval, he did it well. His cutters soon had the ribs and breastbone freed from the flayed chest, and he took out a dangle of organs in one. After a time, the old man started carrying bits and pieces across to the sink for him, and their relationship settled down.
“Methodical,” confided Strydom, noticing Kramer now at his elbow. “I could show you hundreds twice his age who would have gone straight for the neck.”
He turned on the tap to sluice the viscera.
“Anything interesting?” Myburgh inquired, proffering his long knife. “That heart was good for another twenty years, I reckon.”
“Liver was shot. No, man, you go ahead.”
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
“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
