The Sunday Hangman Read Free

handling the case at Doringboom. Putting him in the picture and so on.”
    “Oh, ja? What does he have to say?” Kramer inquired, taking his usual seat on a corner of the big desk.
    “Careful! No vibrations, please. This isn’t as easy as it looks. Anyway, as I was saying, Myburgh sounded an intelligent fellow. He gets a lot of hangings, of course, being in a rural area and the Bantu not having sleeping pills and all that rubbish to play around with. Quite a lot of experience for his age.”
    “Uh huh.”
    “Interested in what we had to tell him about the deceased. Said it would account for Erasmus carrying no identity—which shows he isn’t a fool.”
    “And?” prompted Kramer, wary of the build-up.
    “Well, he told me he’d visited the scene in person. No signs of violence, no strangulation prior to suspension, and a nice little fork in the tree to jump off. Nothing to make—”
    “But, Colonel—”
    “Ach! Look what you made me do! I don’t want bloody
sunflowers
, hey? If you’ll just let me finish.… The one slightly unusual feature was Tollie’s bust neck and his use of a drop—most suicides just sort of strangle.”
    “Slightly unusual? Christ, I’d like to hear what our own DS has to say about that,” Kramer retorted, confident that his doubts would be shared by Dr. Christiaan Strydom, the gifted if eccentric garden gnome with whom he generally worked.
    “Your wish, Trompie,” murmured the Colonel, good-humoredly, “is my whatsit. I checked with the very same not five minutes ago, and Chris agreed that a fracture was rare—although far from impossible, given the circumstances I described. He also made a couple of very sound observations, one of which Doc Myburgh had himself already noted.”
    Instead of explaining what this was, the amateur artist gave his undivided attention to the spread of the next disgusting yellow stain.
    “Do I have to just guess, Colonel?”
    “Hmmm. You could try, if you like: what have—or had—Doc Strydom and Tollie Erasmus got in common?”
    The answer he received was deservedly coarse.
    “Then let me give you a clue: where have they both, in a manner of speaking, served a term?”
    Kramer kept silent, regretting he’d ever bothered to pay the bastard the courtesy of a quick call. But his mind childishly insisted on solving the riddle: Strydom and Erasmus had both spent time in Central Prison, Pretoria, the site of the Republic’s gallows and, for this reason, one of the few places blacks were able to share the same amenities, however briefly.
    “Full marks,” Colonel Muller continued, taking Kramer’s correct assumption for granted. “… where it would surely be impossible for a man to remain in ignorance of what takes place there on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Every warder has to witness at least one little send-off, and I’m sure he then feelsit his duty to pass on the deterrent effect to those maximum-security prisoners in for rehabilitation. Tollie must have heard their stories dozens of times during his last stretch—and maybe even the sound of the trap going down. And so, when he felt in need of an instantaneous death, guaranteed by the government itself, then—”
    “Tollie? That’s crap!” snapped Kramer.
    “Then I hesitate to ask you to bear it in mind, Lieutenant. Nonetheless, such an approach would be entirely rational on Tollie’s part, especially if he’d thrown away his gun and left himself just with a tow rope. Don’t let the statistics fool you: very few members of the ordinary public know anything about a drop or more would use it.”
    “You’ll be saying he did it out of conscience next!”
    The Colonel looked up. “Now who’s in the crap business?” He chuckled, leaning back. “That’s one kind of trouble our friend never got himself into, having a bad conscience. But you’ve got to admit that, in this context, there’s nothing inconsistent about the method used.”
    “I’d be surprised if he hanged himself any