The Sunday Hangman (12 page)

Zondi liked Durban—it went with his sophisticated taste in neckties—and he murmured appreciatively as a bikini passed by, accentuating a fine, wide pelvis. If the girl had been topless, he wouldn’t have noticed.

“You’re not a detective; you’re a bloody obstetrician,” grumbled Kramer, who had taken the wheel and was searching the beachfront for the right side street.

“I’m also a damn fine navigator, boss.”

“Watch it.”

“Two blocks more.”

“Ask that churra over there.”

The Indian streetcleaner directed them two blocks north, one block west, and Kramer double-parked outside Rasnop Court soon afterward. By the look of it, the four-story building had just weathered a bad crossing from Singapore, but at least it was now in a white-zoned area.

“A few words?” Zondi suggested.

“Ideal. Don’t know a bloody thing about this bloke.”

So Zondi got out and went over to a pair of servant girls in grubby uniforms, who were gossiping at the entrance to the block. He flashed his shoulder holster at them. His jacket closed, their eyes opened wide, and none of those few words were wasted. He came back with his report.

“These females do not know of a Boss Roberts, but they say there is an old missus by that name. She stays on the top floor, flat number 4D, and her shopping time is eleven.”

Kramer checked his watch; ten forty-six. “Just make it. You talk nicely to the traffic cops, but don’t move if you can help it.”

Zondi caught the keys and took his place behind the wheel, tipping his hat forward for a short nap.

The lift was out of order, and as there wasn’t another for nonwhites, Kramer had to take the stairs. Some junior Michelangelo, living on or about the third floor, was all set to have an obscenities charge slapped on him for his murals. Kramer quite enjoyed the one depicting the depravities of kangaroos, though, and wondered what the old lady thought of them, as she came whizzing down the banisters each day at eleven.

Mrs. Wilfreda Roberts didn’t turn out to be that sort of old lady at all.

When she opened the door of 4D just a crack, it wasn’t really to hide behind—you could see practically all of her. She was so thin and so frail that her earlobes looked fat, and her pallor was like candle grease. But her empty eyes, much the same freckled gray as her dress and most tombstones, said she hadn’t been ill: it was just that life had sunk in its fangs and had a good suck.

“Lieutenant Kramer from the CID, madam,” he announced in English, smiling cheerfully.

She noticed this and became excited.

“Peter?” she asked. “You’ve come about my son?”

As she spoke the name, color came to her hollow cheeks, and she stepped back, drawing the door wide in invitation.

“Come in, please—do come in! But don’t say a word until I’m sitting down. Gracious, how sudden! You just can’t begin to imagine what this means to me!”

Kramer, who was in complete agreement with her, followed Mrs. Roberts with sudden reluctance across the small hallway, and then into a dim living room that was stifling with birds. There seemed close to fifty of them—parakeets, budgies, canaries, finches, and a parrot—in a dozen or so cages set on pedestals against the curtained windows. Even in the gloom, their plumage had a startling brilliance, and they immediately began a shrill clamor, as they fluttered against their silver bars, that was fairly startling in itself. Although the parrot, a molting African gray, merely blinked a bland eye at him, and went on picking its beak.

“Shoosh!” said Mrs. Roberts, and added, “Please excuse me for a moment while I get some lettuce.”

He glanced about to note what else she had managed to squeeze between the four cream walls. There was a fold-up writing desk, a drop-leaf dining table, a glass-fronted display
cabinet, a small table supporting a radio, and two easy chairs. One of these had a darning needle stuck in an arm, where she must have left it to answer the door. On the foam-rubber seat of the other chair, a modern affair in light wood, lay a copy of that morning’s newspaper, a carton of American toasted cigarettes, a six-pack of Lion lager, a can of peanuts, and a ten-rand note twisted into the shape of a flower. Maternal goodies, it could be assumed, for the flashy young bastard whose portrait adorned the display cabinet in a thin silver frame.

Craaaaaaak!
said the parrot.

“Who’s a pretty boy?” Kramer leered amiably.

That really set it off. Only its diction was terrible, and he felt sure the daft bugger kept saying
Where’s a pretty boy?
instead.

The task Strydom had set himself in a dusty corner of the court records office was fast getting out of hand.

Theoretically, it shouldn’t have been difficult to pick out a fair sample of death-by-hanging cases from which to extract his statistics, but in practice it was like juggling fresh-caught flatfish. The papers from each inquest hearing were clipped together in an unwieldy, slithery mass—autopsy report, magistrate’s transcript, maps, plans, documentary exhibits, photographs—and stacked so that one clumsy move brought at least half a dozen flip-flopping out to spread over the floor.

And if this wasn’t enough to content with, he had just discovered a fracture dislocation of the neck that didn’t make sense.

The deceased, a railway foreman with a history of violence and aberrant behavior, had been found four years earlier hanging in a gangers’ portable rest cabin near a level crossing miles from anywhere. “Freakish misadventure sustained in pursuit of orgasmic enhancement,” the district surgeon had recorded, having noted the classic presence of lewd pinups on the wall and the corpse’s erection. He had also satisfied
himself that there had been a perfectly good platform for the man to have stepped from: to wit, a large wooden box used for storing shovels and pickaxes. But this was textbook thinking; an erection was common to all forms of hanging, whereas, for a man of Strydom’s experience, there could be no ambiguity about the fact that the ceiling of the cabin was far too low to have afforded the right drop.

This meant, of course, that the case did make sense—provided he was prepared to accept
positive
evidence in support of his hangman theory, when all any sane man could have anticipated was
negative
proof that fracture dislocations never occurred without precisely the right circumstances.

Cautious and sweating slightly, but with his fine mind whetted, Strydom wondered whether to pack it in temporarily, or to demand that he be given some assistance. He was given, because of the flu going round, which had incapacitated the records office like a tea break, a Zulu messenger called Alfred.

Just for a minute or two of speechless indignation, Strydom despaired. Alfred’s literacy ran to identifying public notices that affected his life directly, telling him where to go or where not to sit, and to matching the letters on a package against the letters on a solicitor’s brass plate—when he wasn’t delivering by ear, that was. Asking Alfred to pick out the words
suicide by hanging
, especially when most magistrates’ writing is so dreadful, was tantamount to having him write the key phrase himself.

Then Alfred, embarrassed by the delay in receiving his orders, twisted his head round to admire the picture on the front of the television-set brochure that Strydom had left lying about.

“You buy, master?”

“I buy.”

“Hau, plenty good picture, that one. I see by the shop.”

Strydom placed an avuncular arm across the man’s khaki-uniformed shoulders and led him to the huge pile of nonwhite
inquest papers. There he showed him what sort of photographs he was interested in, reinforced this with some mime, and told him to get going. In fact, it was such an expedient idea that he used it himself.

“So arrest me,” said Kramer, getting back into the Chev outside the block of flats where he had just finished his interview with Mrs. Roberts.

Zondi made a show of awakening slowly. He tipped his hat back, blinked, and turned toward him. “On what charge, boss?” he asked.

“Indecent exposure. I got caught with my pants down.”

“How was that?”

“She thought I’d come to say, Bring on the dancing girls, lady—your naughty little boy is back.”

“You are talking about the old lady?” Zondi queried.

“That’s right. Ma Roberts—but she hasn’t bloody seen him for five years!”

“Hau!”

“I tell you, it was rough, hey. You should have seen the look of disappointment on her face.”

Zondi shrugged. “But why should you blame yourself for this, Lieutenant? You only—”

“I could have checked with Henk Wessels first, and saved a lot of bloody time. What if I say that her son was better known as Ringo?”

Zondi frowned, searching that near-photographic memory of his, a legacy from his years in a mission school where the one textbook for each subject had to be shared. Then his face registered a hit.

“Hau, but that was long ago, boss! The Vasari case?”

“Not bad, my son. I couldn’t even get the wop’s name.”

“Anthony Michael Vasari,” Zondi said slowly, “who was convicted for killing a pensioner he robbed on the Bluff. Ringo
was his accomplice, but he turned state evidence after first pleading not guilty at the preliminary examination. But why didn’t Cleo tell us this?”

“Probably didn’t make the connection either. Ringo’s a Beatle name, came along much later than when they were in Steenhuis, and so Erasmus—ach, that isn’t a point that’s important. Our problem is where we’re going to find the bastard.”

“Can his mother not give any clues?”

“Take a look at this,” Kramer said by way of an answer.

He slipped a hand into his jacket and produced a mimeo copy of
PLEASE HAVE YOU SEEN MY ONE AND ONLY SON
? It gave a full physical description of Peter David Roberts, also known as Peterkins, and then listed his endearing habits, considerable gifts, and sophisticated tastes in food, drink, and clothing, as only a mother could know them. At the end it implored: “Amnesia (Forgetting One’s Memory) Can Happen to Anyone—Help Peter and Me (Widow & Pensioner) Like You would Want to Help
YOURSELF
.”

“Mangalisayo,” murmured Zondi, skimming through it. “This is very sad, boss. The woman has a great heart.”

“Whenever she can save up enough, she gets a few more run off and posts them to shipping offices, new dam projects, hospitals, loony bins, et cetera.”

“But what is your own reading? That this small-time fellow went to try for big time in Jo’burg?”

“Could’ve done,” Kramer agreed, but his heart wasn’t in it; there was more, which he’d been trying not to think about. “On the other hand, his ma alleges he was a changed character after the trial, having nearly taken a one-way to Pretoria. He got himself a job in an electrical-goods store, worked hard there, and found himself a steady girlfriend, whose brother was going to let him have a share in a ski boat. All set up. Got a phone put in, started saving for an MG—next thing he was gone.”

“Like—?” Zondi flipped a hand.

“Uh huh. One Saturday afternoon he walked out, saying he was going swimming, and never came back. Underneath all this, you can see she thinks a shark might have got him. He always said the beach was too crowded where the nets were; liked to go to deserted areas.”

“Then maybe she is right, boss. He took no case or anything?”

“Just a towel,” said Kramer, and felt as flat as he sounded.

Zondi started the car up. “So this is why you think we waste time, Lieutenant? Yet Ringo could have planned for a fresh start more cleverly than she suspected.”

“Ja. I’d better check with the locals—but let’s get some grub first.”

The Chev moved off slowly.

“Oh, and another thing,” Kramer added, finally facing the futility of his morning. “Ma Roberts had never heard of bloody Witklip.”

D
R
. S
TRYDOM WAS
by now in something of a state. No fewer than four inquests, each indicating an excusable error of judgment, had come to light—and this wasn’t counting the observations he himself had made at Doringboom, of course.

His feelings of conflict were very natural. It seemed incredible that he should, within so short a time, and with the ungainly means at his disposal, pick out this number of cases for reappraisal. But then again, there just weren’t that many white suicides by hanging in Natal each year, and Alfred had obeyed his direction to ignore any obviously narrow ligatures; between them, they had called a halt in the late ’60s before three o’clock. It also seemed incredible that one of these likely oversights appeared to have been his own.

Incredible, but not impossible, because this time around he had known what to look for, and had not presumed a thing. The remains in question had been those of a white adult male, aged somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, discovered in a skeletal condition at the foot of a small krantz or ravine. One end of a rotten rope had been found around the neck—of which very little remained, due to decomposition and rodent life—and the other end had been tied to a broken branch. It had not taken him long, on that wet and chilly afternoon, to agree with the police that the branch, which came from an overhanging tree, told
the whole story. The deceased had secured the rope to it, allowing himself virtually no slack because of the length involved, and had stepped over the cliff’s edge. The sudden weight had been just enough to snap the branch and send him plunging to his death—a death that could have been attributed to several causes, among them exposure brought on by the paralysis of a broken neck. Strydom’s only comfort was that he’d not been dogmatic in his summation, because, when looked at from another viewpoint, that broken branch could have come as a surprise only to the hangman, hurriedly ridding himself of a night’s work.

Having gone over it again in his mind briefly, he could see that his first assessment had probably been correct, but there were the two others. One was the product of slapdash, lamentably perfunctory work on the part of a district surgeon known for his high output and habit of dribbling cigarette ash into things: he had simply not made any real effort to ascertain anything about the white male, suspected of being a tramp, who’d committed suicide by hanging in an empty barn. Not even the hyoid bone had been examined. This was in direct contrast to the fourth DS involved, whose punctilious treatment of a witch doctor’s death deserved the highest praise. “An interesting case,” he had written, “in which the deceased did as neat a job as any state executioner. Note the low tree stump used as a platform, but the weight of animal skins, etc., he was wearing would presumably contribute to producing the minimal force necessary. Taylor reports one fracture-dislocation in 52 cases—this is my first in 109.” The man’s lack of experience had, however, led him to overlook a couple of things which Strydom spotted as soon as he saw the photographs. They showed a small contusion on the left jawline and the knot at the occiput—or back of the head—where all it would have achieved was mere strangulation.