The Sunday Hangman Read Free Page A

other way, sir—which doesn’t mean that I think, for one minute, he did it.”
    “A feeling in your water?”
    “Other inconsistencies, beginning with—”
    “Hold it; point two coming up. Doc Strydom shares your respect for precedent, you see.”
    “Oh, ja?”
    “Hanging, he reminds us, is a form of violent death that’s different to all the rest, inasmuch as the forensic presumption is, for once, that death was self-inflicted. In his strange mind, even judicial hangings are self-inflicted, but we won’t waste our time going into—”
    “Ach, why not?” Kramer was niggled into saying.
    “Watch it. You should be asking why this presumption is made. Simply because self-inflicted hanging has millions ofprecedents—going right back to Judas, if you like—whereas homicidal hanging is a crime that’s virtually
unprecedented
. Follow? In fact, the only case Doc could cite offhand was one in Paris in 1881.”
    Kramer lit a Lucky Strike and rode out a few waves of doubt in that water of his. For a moment there, this talk of precedent had impressed him, then he’d realized that the Colonel’s whole argument depended solely upon the number of homicidal hangings that had been actually detected.
    “A handy presumption,” he remarked dryly. “Hell, if my love life ever gets too complicated, I might give it a whirl myself.”
    “You do that, Tromp—providing you’re picking on two-year-olds these days, or on junkies stoned from here to bloody Christmas. Because the DS will still be making his routine check, and is certain to note any signs of secondary violence, such as might be needed to control your victim. Erasmus was conscious at the time, and there was no evidence of recent bruising.”
    “Fully conscious? How could Myburgh tell?”
    “Ah,” said the Colonel, appearing shifty on purpose, “here is the unbelievable part of the story. It seems that Tollie had in his left hand a small, leather-bound copy of the Holy Bible. He must have been holding it hell of a tight, and then the fatal spasm kept it there.”
    Of course, Kramer could believe that: sudden and violent death was capable of many tricks. He had once spent ten minutes trying to free a hair drier from the grasp of a skinny typist electrocuted in her bath. He had found a brier pipe, not unlike the Colonel’s, clenched in the teeth of a steeplejack impaled on a parking meter. And if anyone was to turn to Jesus in extremis, then it was invariably the scum of the earth—see the prayers scratched on any cell wall.
    But he said with conviction: “Ach, somebody stuck it in afterwards.”
    The Colonel wagged a hairy finger.
    “Sir?”
    “The truth of the matter is, Trompie, that you wanted this Tollie Erasmus for yourself. And now you can’t get him, you want someone else to take the stick.”
    Kramer shrugged.
    “Furthermore, it’s no use you and me jumping to wild conclusions, and saying Tollie was too psycho to ever think of such an idea, because we aren’t qualified to make that kind of judgment—I would go so far as to say that nobody is. Let us keep to the facts, and both our feet on the ground. I don’t want you going to Doringboom and forcing a confession out of Dr. Myburgh, for instance; or some other bloody thing, equally typical of you in a frustrated state. The facts, the hard facts, and how they concern us as of now—understood?”
    “There’s the money, sir.”
    “Just what I had in—”
    “I meant: would you kill yourself if you had twenty thousand rand still to spend?”
    “God in heaven!” protested the Colonel. “Since when was that known to you as a fact?”
    “Ach, sir; we’d have at least heard as much, if Tollie had been giving it a tonk. It’s obvious that he was waiting for the pressure to come off first. Probably shacked up in a flat somewhere with a little goose to do the cooking and run errands for him.”
    “Ja? The same little goose who maybe ran away with his golden egg one night? After doctoring up the