The Sunday Hangman (21 page)

Willie was tapping ingenuously on the moldy, termite-ravaged hotel register that had so far been ignored as a remarkable piece of evidence, unearthed by sheer guts and determination.

“Ja, let’s have a look,” obliged Kramer, clearing a space on the counter before him. “Not that I doubt your word, of course, gentlemen. That one name was enough.”

He read each line twice, solely for the pleasure of seeing it down in black and white, and then allowed the book to flop shut.

“Sorry the white ants ate the date and the room numbers off,” Ferreira apologized. “But coming first on the line, right by the edge, it was bound to happen, hey? Still, we’ve got an approximate date, I suppose.”

“Doesn’t matter that much, man.”

“What!” exclaimed Willie. “You’re not interested in these Italians anymore?”

Kramer smiled. “Not to the same extent, now we’ve found another road to Rome that isn’t so full of blind alleys and bloody pitfalls.”

“Christ, it makes your bloody head spin, doesn’t it?” remarked Ferreira, coming round to join them on the high stools. “Who could ever imagine such a thing? No wonder you first thought it was political!”

“Hey?” said Willie, frowning. Of his many lapses that evening, this was the most forgivable.

“Time we chuck out what’s irrelevant and see where we go from here,” Kramer suggested, as much to himself as to anyone else. “But before I do that, is there anything that strikes you immediately, gentlemen?”

“Ja; you could have saved yourself a lot of trouble by asking me about Izimu in the first place,” Ferreira answered with affected pique. “I did very good business out of that search, I can tell you! You should have been here, Willie, man; we all—”

“Was it reported in any newspapers?” Kramer asked, not wanting to have this thrust down his neck again, but needing the information to wind up the first part of his argument.

“Newspapers? Hell, no! They didn’t even put Tiens in, when he was crushed by his tractor.”

“Uh huh? So it was entirely a local affair?”

“Correct.”

“Which means that only somebody living locally would know of Izimu’s unpunished guilt?”

“Correct again.”

Kramer put down his glass and took out a crumpled sheet of foolscap which was covered in linked nooses. “Originally there seemed to be no pattern in this case,” he said, smoothing the paper, “but Izimu has provided the key factor by making
Witklip the center of activity. Let’s take each of the three other cases I’ve outlined to you—forgetting the tramp, for whom we still have no information—and keeping in mind all the time that we’re not dealing with an ordinary murderer. This man sees himself as a hangman, carrying out impersonal executions which the law has been unable to conduct itself.”

“That’s the bit I—”

“Shhh, Willie! Give the Lieutenant a chance, hey?”

“You’ll notice, gentlemen, that the victims all fell within the area of this someone’s experience. Izimu is the most obvious example, and close behind him comes Rossouw, the railway foreman. You did say that people came back talking about him, Piet?”

This carefully timed flattery won an eager nod.

“From what you’ve told me, young Vasari made himself very memorable as well the night of the barbecue—that ‘little angel’ stuff, remember?”

“Ja, only I don’t get the paper except on Sundays if I’m in Brandspruit, so it never rang a bell.”

“A churchgoer—which ties in on Rossouw again—might have recognized the name, though. Agreed?”

“It’s very possible, Lieutenant. There’s another thing to bear in mind, too: I was only around seven myself at the time.”

“Point taken. Can you say what the talk would have been like in the bar if someone had noticed this trial and told the others?”

“Phaw! I reckon some could have been quite upset; they’d certainly have wondered about it, not knowing him like I did.”

“What the other one did would seem unfair anyway,” Willie got in, actually concentrating for once on what was being said. “The CID should never have allowed it, in my opinion. I can see those three now, but Tommy? He was here a hell of a time without anything happening and—”

“When did he come up with his story about the mission school?” asked Kramer, moving swiftly off thin ice.

“Mission school?” Ferreira repeated. “Oh, when he shot up those kids, you mean?”

“I didn’t hear about that,” said Willie.

“No, you wouldn’t have,” Kramer said with some cynicism. “That was one of Tommy’s big mistakes, so I don’t think Sarge Jonkers would want to impress you with it. He committed a mass murder for no reason at all.”

“You mean even though they were just—”

“Even though, Piet; the man we’re dealing with has a very literal mind, and murder is the taking of another human life.”

A small shudder shook Ferreira. “Then the chances are he must have been standing here, right in my bar!”

“Can you remember when?”

“When Tommy told us that one? It must have been—ja, I can tell you exactly: three barbecues ago, the same night it started to rain and the men left the womenfolk on the verandah and came in here. Tommy’d just got in from a walk.”

A sprint down from the Jonkers house, more likely, when rain had stopped play with a threat of the husband’s early return. A more interesting insight was to be had in the fact that this date coincided with Erasmus’s sudden nervousness.

“It’s logical,” Kramer reflected aloud, “that the hangman should see himself as a bit of a Supreme Court judge as well, and could have asked him some questions in private. I’ll get Mamabola to see if that servant girl was ever questioned by someone about Izimu’s identity, et cetera. Could give us an early lead.”

“What if it doesn’t, sir?”

“We’ve still got a lot else, Willie. Can I borrow your pen?”

Turning over the foolscap, he prepared to list the main factors as they emerged. “It’s too easy to just say this hangman bloke is cracked—we don’t know what started him on this, and there may be quite a few other cases, going much further back, we don’t know about. The man who put us on to this
investigation was working under primitive circumstances. But certain things do seem self-explanatory or whatever, and they can help us track him down. Most importantly, he does not see himself as a murderer. By using all the ritual and the paraphernalia, he becomes as innocent as the state’s own executioner. In the same way, he exercises ultimate power without any responsibility for his actions, apart from seeing he does a good job.”

Willie scratched under an armpit. “You mean he likes hanging people, sir? Is that it?”

Kramer realized he’d slipped into pomposity and nodded. “Ja, although he might not be aware of it himself. Or then again, perhaps he was the victim of a terrible injustice and feels this compulsion—perhaps he thinks God is guiding him. We could make religiousness our first characteristic.”

1. “Good” Christian
, he wrote.

“Secondly, we can assume that he has all the right trappings to go with his trade, gents. Not only would it be necessary for him mentally, but Doc Strydom says this standard of hanging isn’t what you could get with a washing line and a bar stool.”

2. Scaffold and gear
.

“Of course, this stuff could be dismantled in between times, but certain conditions have to be met as regards the space available—could be in a barn or silo, for instance, if he hasn’t made it part of his house.”

“You can really see this guy, can’t you?” observed Ferreira, trying to hide a sneaking smile.

“It takes one to catch one,” Kramer said, giving the stock reply that the Widow Fourie had once suggested. “He won’t be a blatantly criminal type either, you’ll see.” Then he cut short the laugh by saying gruffly, “This stuff is crucial, as any other evidence may be hard to come by, and that’s why it stays among just the three of us for now. We’ll make skills our Point Three. The necessary information is not available to the general public,
which is a really strong lead. Either he was once in the prisons department, or he has some means of access. Any ideas?”

“Hmmm.”

“Ja, Willie?”

“Well, I know a bit from when I was at police college and the blokes from Central used to come and play rugby. But I’ve never talked about it.”

“Piet?”

“Nothing offhand. Sorry.”

4. Assistant (one or more)
, wrote Kramer, twisting the paper round for them to read it.

“How can you know that?” Ferreira said, surprised.

“He dumped Tommy’s car when he dumped him, so someone must have helped with the other vehicle, the one he carries them around in. That’s on the evidence we have already. However, a hangman must have an assistant to be efficient, according to the Doc, and—”

“There are
two
of them?”

“How many killers were involved in the Vontsteen case? Or for something nearer to this, what about those mad bastards who buried all those kids in England? The Moors or whatever their name was? Conspiracy is nothing new, man, and the crazier the—”

“Why leave the bodies everywhere?” Willie demanded, driven by a conflict of reason to speak his mind, if a little slurrily.

“Gibbet,” said Kramer, only then slotting this into his hypothesis. “It’s what they used to do to hanged criminals to show the world what had happened to them. Highway robbers and pirates and suchlike. But the question you should be asking is: do you know two or more persons in this area that you automatically think of together? Strong ties, trust, old pals—have you got it?”

“Oom Jaap and Gladstone?” Ferreira murmured.

The pair of them guffawed, then explained that Gladstone was a wog foreman whom Oom Jaap Brenner allowed to sit beside him in the front of his lorry, instead of on the back.

“They’re always chatting together,” added Willie, “like Tarzan and the apes. We bluff you not.”

“But to be serious, Lieutenant,” Ferreira went on, “it isn’t easy to find a quick answer to that, not in a country setup where so many people are—well—you know?”

“Unfriendly?” grunted Willie.

Ferreira gave Kramer an old-fashioned our-young-friend-is-tipsy look.

“Willie, I’ve got a job for you,” he said, poking him in the chest. “On my desk at the station is a Telex, okay? Read it and make me a diagram of the
minimum
size this scaffold would have to be. Off you go, and I’ll come up when I’ve finished picking Piet’s brains.”

The kid went crimson, put his glass down, and hurried out. Kramer stared after him—scarcely hearing Ferreira’s suggestion of moving to his private closed verandah while Piet had a word with the chef about the diabetics—and stayed where he was for a time. There had been something very odd about the kid all the way through that. And then, at a touch, there’d been guilt written all over his face, with its heavy, sensual features.

“Dear God,” mourned Kramer, helping himself to another quick Scotch. “Not one of those when I’m undermanned enough already.”

Willie found a puddle guarding each door to the cab of the Land-Rover, so he crawled in through the back way. Flopping into the driving seat, he took several long, deep breaths, yet his heart went on thumping like a borehole drill. If every thief, he thought, had reactions like these, then police work would become a bit of old tacky.

“You’re mad,” he said distinctly. “Bloody mad.”

Then he winced, uttering an involuntary whimper, as his mind recalled vividly that horrendous moment when the Lieutenant had poked him right in the chest.

This set Willie’s fingers fumbling at his tunic buttons, which had parted as though they weren’t there back in the storeroom, but now seemed too big for their buttonholes. Finally, however, he dragged out the
Lilliput
he’d hidden so effortlessly from sight.

His ears glowed hot. Christ, his brain had heartburn; it’d just done a searing repeat of the Lieutenant’s mention of stealing—child-stealing, admittedly, but it had still made him blush like a bugger and fall about. The brandy hadn’t helped him to concentrate either; quite the opposite. It had been pitiful.

He gazed at the thing in his hands. That’s all it was: a thing. Yet it had already turned Constable Willem Pretorius Boshoff SAP 13408 into a thief for ever and ever, amen. From now on, every thief he caught could say, “Hyprocrite!”—and he’d have to let them go. Even the coons. He’d have to quit the force.

“Put it back, man—simple!” said Willie, and immediately felt easier. “What do you want this old rubbish for?”

He sighed at himself in exasperation and opened his tunic; he could smuggle the magazine back into the storeroom as easily as anything; no problems. He could say his cigs had fallen into the crate and he’d gone to look for them. Fifty to one he wouldn’t even need to do that.

Wondering at his inexplicable folly, Willie flipped open the pages for one last cold and indifferent glance at the photograph of the lady with no clothes on. She filled him. Again a dizzy compulsion obliterated any thought or scruple; he hid the magazine with great cunning, winked in its direction, and saw his hand twist the ignition key.

Being so scared and excited was really quite nice, in fact—especially when no actual harm could possibly come of it.

There ought to have been a sign saying
KLOZED-IN VERANDER
or something. Kramer had found what seemed to be private territory—a screened-off section on one side of the hotel, which was equipped with four decent wrought-iron chairs and a table—but nothing vaguely resembling the apparatus of enclosure. The exposed red cement floor was covered with blisters of rainwater, and there wasn’t even a piece of string between the pillars to prevent you falling over the edge into the flower bed.

“All seen to,” said Ferreira, coming out through the French windows, followed by a wizened Zulu. “The boy’s got dry cushions and he’ll give the table a wipe. How do you like my spectacular view?”

Kramer turned about cautiously. He liked the view; the last glare of the upstaged sun was highlighting the great white stone, while throwing the rest of the landscape into deep, interesting shadow. The storm-clean air, heavy with the odor of wet earth and broken vegetation, was tuned to a shortwave sucksboo of twitterings, zingings, and pingings, chirrups, clickings, and croaks, dominated by the morse-chattering mynahs. So he liked what he smelled and heard, too. It was invigorating.