The Sunday Hangman (29 page)

“Please, carry on with this business of the bars,” Kramer asked him, wondering if the wall was thin enough for Mickey to hear all this.

“That was a terrible mistake. He must have heard stories like young Willie was telling, because one night I went over and found him beaten up badly. He’d attacked some man. If you don’t mind, I’m not going into the details.”

“I get the point, Mr. de Bruin.”

“I don’t know whose idea it was to try and find out from books—perhaps it was his. His very first one was a Benjamin Bennett—you know the Cape crime reporter?—and he gave a very good account which set Gysbert’s mind at ease. The day they hanged the boy, he spent the whole time by himself in the veld. We had him home that night, and he told us he had seen it happen, just like in a vision. It had been quick and clean; the boy had walked to the gallows singing ‘Ave Maria.’ He was at peace with himself for months after that. Then he came across, in some secondhand bookshop in Durban, the smallest of those books you found in my truck. Night after night I sat and argued with him, while he chewed over the shocking things that were in it. He withdrew into himself and there wasn’t anything I could do. That Bennett book was an old one, you see, and by then Gysbert knew all the figures. He said he had begun to believe what a prison warder had told him, and blamed this on the 600 percent increase in hangings between 1947 and 1970. Suddenly, he went very silent on the subject, which worried me. I tried to get some account to contradict what he’d heard, but—huh!—we come back to the Prisons Act. It was
almost becoming an obsession with me, because all the time poor little Suzanne was suffering; weeks would pass and he’d hardly notice her. She so craved affection. Then Lettie had a letter back from a bookshop we’d written to months before, offering us the book you have on this desk here. We bought it on spec and it was one of the best things we ever did. Let me show you.”

De Bruin took up the book and turned to the preface, holding his finger against a paragraph he wanted Kramer to read:

“I operated, on behalf of the State, what I am convinced was the most humane and the most dignified method of meting out death to a delinquent—however justified or unjustified the allotment of death may be—and on behalf of humanity I trained other nations to adopt the British system of execution.”

“Got that.”

“And now, on page seventy-nine it should be—yes, just listen: ‘Travel today seems to imply only long journeys—to
South Africa
or the Mediterranean or the Riv-something—
and I have made all these trips in my time
.’ ”

“Which doesn’t necessarily mean—” Kramer began automatically, then stopped.

“Perhaps not, but the arguments are strongly in favor of it being the case, and Gysbert is able to take great comfort from the words of this man. They give him the authority to reject anything he finds unacceptable.”

Kramer was staring at the master hangman’s blurb on the back of the book, which De Bruin was still holding:

Suddenly, he’d had enough of books and of stories that didn’t quite match in all their details. There was some irony in
knowing that Swanepoel was guilty, without having any real evidence to prove it, but the final solution seemed only a hair’s-breadth away now. He stood up.

“Do you believe me? Do you see what I’m trying to get across?” asked de Bruin.

“I believe what you’ve allowed yourself to believe, Mr. de Bruin. You have certainly told me most of the truth.”

“What is that supposed to mean, damn you!” de Bruin exploded. “I’ve put all my cards on the table; now what about yours? Have I your assurance that, having heard the full story, you will not pursue any pointless inquiries in that direction?”

The temptation was too much for Kramer—and the truth would emerge soon enough; he palmed his small batch of photographs, just as that oaf had done back in the bar on Tuesday morning, and then dealt them out, one at a time, face upward on the desktop.

“Those are my cards,” he said, and went to call Willie to action stations.

But Mr. and Mrs. Haagner, just returned from the barbecue, having been the last to leave, said they’d only that minute looked in on his room and he hadn’t been there. Although, as a giggly Mrs. Haagner conceded, he might have been outside making a weewee. Kramer went to Willie’s room and found a small magazine propped up at the foot of the bed to show off an old-fashioned nude to advantage. He took the magazine and brushed passed the Haagners, not saying good night. He checked to see if the Chev was there, and it was. He broke into a run and went round to the yard, yanking open the stable door and finding the stall vacated. He heard a telephone ringing. He saw, through the barred window of the station commander’s office, de Bruin answer it. He sprinted to the window and heard the man groan.

“Quick! Who is it?”

An eternity later, Karl de Bruin clattered the receiver into its cradle, and stumbled over to hold onto the bars in a state of near-collapse.

“Suzanne. Pa came home, found her door unlocked. She said must’ve been servant girl. Hit her, wouldn’t believe her. She said policeman had been there. Hit her. Swore it. Hit her, went looking. Found Willie. Hit Willie. Hit her. Only got to phone now, bleeding. Willie gone. Game truck. Said he was going to—going to … Willie.”

“Ambulance!” Kramer shouted over his shoulder.

As he raced to the front, the Chev’s lights came on and it roared toward him, slewing round, the passenger door swinging open.

“Let’s go, boss,” said Zondi.

L
IKE A SKULL
on a dunghill, the great white stone shone in the moonlight, becoming smaller every minute behind them. The Chev howled and slithered and clawed its way up to the pass. No dust showed in its headlights.

“Ten-minute start,” said Kramer.

“Five, more like.”

“Never make it.”

“Before?”

“The fork down the other side.”

Bracing himself against the movement of the car, Kramer lit two cigarettes and stuck one of them in Zondi’s mouth. Then he flicked on the map-reading light and held the magazine beneath it.

“Dear God,” he murmured. “This is so old she could be his bloody mother.”

“Sorry, boss?”

“Sick.”

“Not your fault, Lieutenant,” grunted Zondi, missing the point and a sheer drop simultaneously. “You must take it easy, or you will do a foolish thing. What is the procedure when we overtake this vehicle?”

“Huh!”

“It is a good road for a puncture.”

“Trust a kaffir!”

“Every time,” added Zondi.

And they laughed.

It was the release Kramer had needed. “The procedure,” he said, “is simple. If he won’t pull up, then I’ll do as you suggest and take his tires out.” He placed his Smith & Wesson .38 on the map shelf in readiness.

“From the back or side?”

“Either. Willie will be all right—the doors and walls on that thing are so thick they’ll stop any spare slugs.”

He didn’t go into what might happen if the truck, losing a tire at high speed, left the road; that smattered of trying to think too far ahead.

“Let us hope that his gallows place is far from here,” said Zondi, making careful use of the ashtray. “The longer he drives, the better our chance will be.”

“While you’re at it, let’s hope I’m somewhere near right with my bloody theory.”

“That he must do the deed properly?”

“Uh huh. It depends on how far off the rails he’s gone, I realize that, but I’m certain all the fiddling about is essential to him. He’s got to weigh—”

“But what charge, boss?

“I’ll let you guess,” said Kramer, and outlined what had happened after the visit to Swartboom.

They were nearing the crest of the pass by the time he had finished. There was still no dust suspended in the beam of the headlights, and unless they reached the fork on the far side in time to see some telltale sign of his passage, their chances of ever catching up would be halved.

“Well, Mickey?”

“Can the fire be blamed?” Zondi replied enigmatically.

Then he gunned the Chev into the final S-bend before the top and the plunge into the long descent.

Willie Boshoff lay on his back, cold sober and terrified, the floor beneath him bounced, tilted sideways, and rolled him over again, smashing his face against something hard in the dark. Bound hand and foot, he could do nothing to save himself, and back he rolled again, tasting the blood and mucus from his broken nose. He retched.

The truck changed up. It began to move faster, more smoothly.

He should never have done it. The transfer would have been his without any extras. He should have told the Lieutenant instead of pretending to go off to bed.

His mind was repeating things. Playing over the way Swanepoel had questioned him when the Lieutenant and de Bruin had left. Making him see and hear again those little giveaways which had given him his idea. The Lieutenant can nail the hangman, he had thought, but I’ll be the one who gets the credit for his assistant. All I have to do is ask his daughter a few questions.

The truck—it sounded like a Bedford—slipped back into a lower gear, and Willie rolled again, the victim of his own inertia.

He had never got near her.

He’d never know what had made him mad enough to risk what he had done; never. Never know why it had been something he didn’t want to share. But to keep to himself, as he acted compulsively, slyly, stealing away on the horse and climbing in through the open bedroom window. To lose all sense of time when he discovered, left lying around quite openly, a leather demonstration carrying case of the kind that traveling salesmen use. A case packed neatly with all the tools of a terrible trade—the very same case and contents as described by Dr. Strydom in his Telex: the rope, with metal eye and rubber washer; a wrist strap and leg strap, unused; the black cap; fine copper wire; packthread; tape measure; two-foot rule; pliers; spare shackle.

The truck was slowing down. And down. And coming to a stop.

Pray God, a roadblock. Willie, who had recovered consciousness only momentarily, felt a greater darkness overwhelm him before he could find out.

Zondi snapped off the Chev’s headlights.

“Why the—”

“Down there, boss! At one o’clock!”

Kramer looked and saw, far below them on the valley floor, a pair of stationary headlights. An instant later, they were switched off. No other lights shone anywhere.

“But that’s bloody miles before the fork, man!”

“It must be where he has his place.”

“Rubbish! How could he build on reserve land?”

“Some building that is there already?”

“That isn’t used?”

Zondi gave all his attention to the road. His speed had dropped considerably, for the moonlight tended to play optical tricks with the sharp bends.

“Use full lights and just belt it,” ordered Kramer.

“So he can see we follow him?”

“Wouldn’t know it was us. No, wait.”

The Chev crunched to a halt on the verge, held in check by the handbrake until they could resolve their dilemma: on the one hand, to continue in hot pursuit might be to precipitate events, while on the other, a more cautious approach might get them there too late.

“I think he must have seen Willie off already,” Kramer said softly. “He’s stopped now to set up his side show. We’ve no idea of how long ago he left the barbecue party.”

“Or he has already seen our lights,” Zondi suggested.

“Not a chance. He was facing the wrong way to get anything this high in his rear-view mirrors. Bugger,
why
has he stopped?”

Now that they had been in the dark for a minute or so, their night vision was improving; the valley was beginning to roughen up as areas of different tone became more distinct. There was a crescent of fairly pronounced shadow about two hundred yards to the right of where the truck’s lights had gone out.

“Hau, pillbox!” said Zondi, using English.

“And ‘pillbox’ to you, my son.”

“No, boss! That is what throws the shadow. The pillbox the English soldiers poked their guns from—round, with small windows.”

“Of course! Ja, I can see it now.”

The ubiquitous bloody pillbox; so much a part of the landscape in parts of Natal, you never noticed them.

“Which is where he’s got his scaffold, Mickey!”

“Maybe he just wants to hide on the side road.”

“No, man; that’s got to be where it is! Can you think of a better spot?”

Everything was making sense again. For a time, Kramer’s theory of a cool, impersonal hangman had been irreconcilable with the bitter, impulsively violent character of Gysbert Swanepoel. One of the chief reasons for this being the actual evidence they’d had of a humane, carefully conducted ritualism, which didn’t go at all with what Swanepoel was alleged to be capable of when crossed. And yet, in this very conflict of opposites, lay the knowledge that Willie was still very much alive.

“There’s no hurry,” said Kramer, lighting another couple of Luckies. “We’re not dealing with one man here, but two. The way he knocked Willie down was his straightforward, surface reaction to a problem—he avenged himself in a way not uncommon among country folk. Now his obsession with capital punishment has taken over—there can be no doubt he caught Willie in the act—and he cannot imagine a policeman being made to pay the ultimate penalty for such a crime. So he
has decided to execute him, deluding himself there is nothing personal involved in the matter. You follow?”

Zondi’s grunt was noncommittal. He put his hand back on the handbrake handle.

“I know what you’re thinking, man—that he’s just a bloody killer—but if he saw himself that way, then why all this complicated fuss? Because he needs to delude himself he’s no more a killer than the state executioner! And for the delusion to work, he has to kill without murdering. What’s the only way you can do that?”

“Legitimately? But his—”

“By not using a murder weapon, for Christ’s sake! He can’t use a gun or a knife or his hands—it has
got
to be the gallows. It doesn’t stop there either, because to sustain the delusion, the deed has to be taken very seriously, with the proper attention being paid to every detail, just like the real thing. And every time he succeeds in carrying out a perfect execution, he feels more certain in his mind about what happened to Vasari. That’s really what lies behind all this.”