'Well, if they do, nobody seems to hang them,' said Els. 'Perhaps they shoot them.' On the whole he much preferred shooting. It was quicker and involved a lot less effort on his part.
'No, no,' said the Bishop hurriedly. 'They definitely have to be hanged.' He thought for a moment. 'What does it say is the drop for a man weighing two hundred pounds?' he asked.
Els consulted his little compendium. 'Six feet,' he said at last.
'Then three feet should be just about right,' said the Bishop.
'Why?' Els didn't like the sound of a shortened drop at all. It smacked too much of an attempt to avoid death.
'Double the weight and halve the drop,' the Bishop explained.
Els wasn't fool enough to fall into that trap. 'Double the weight and double the drop, you mean.'
The Bishop tried to explain. 'The heavier someone is the shorter the fall needed to break his neck. The light man needs a much longer drop to achieve the necessary momentum.'
Els tried to work it out. He found it very difficult.
'Why is a momentum necessary?' he asked. 'Nobody told me to get one.'
'Momentum is the product of a moving body's mass by its velocity.'
'I thought death was,' said Els.
'Yes, but you won't get death without momentum. It's not possible.'
'Oh, isn't it?' said Els. 'Well, I'll have a bloody good shot at it, don't you worry.'
Alarmed by the constant reference to shots, the Bishop tried again.
'When a man is hanged, how does he die?' he asked.
Els thought about it. 'By hanging,' he said finally.
'And hanging means doing what to him?'
'Dropping him down a hole with a rope round his neck.'
'And what happens then?'
'He dies.'
'Yes,' said the Bishop patiently, 'but what does the rope do?'
'Holds him up.'
'No, no. It breaks his neck.'
Els knew better than that. 'Oh no, it doesn't,' he said. 'I've been practising with sacks and it doesn't break their necks. Their bottoms drop out. It makes no end of a mess.'
The Bishop shuddered. 'I'm sure it must,' he said. 'Now we don't want that to happen to me, do we? That's why we've got to get the length of the drop right.'
'Oh, it wouldn't happen to you,' Els assured him. 'The old warder says it's the other way round with you. He says your head would…'
The Bishop didn't want to know what the old warder had said. He had had enough of his morbid interest in anatomy already.
'Look, if you're really so keen to get a permanent job as a hangman, you'll have to make a success of this execution. Nobody is going to employ you if you don't make a go of your first hanging.'
Els looked pathetically at the Bishop. 'I know that,' he said, 'but what can I do if your weight isn't in the handbook?'
'You could make me lighter,' the Bishop suggested looking at his manacles and chains.
'Done,' said Els delighted. 'I'll have you put on a nil diet at once.'
'I didn't mean that,' said the Bishop who couldn't imagine anything niller than the diet he was already on. 'What I had in mind was taking all these chains off and weighing me without them. I think you might find me a lot lighter.'
'I doubt if I'd find you at all,' said Els.
'Well, if you won't take these chains off I don't see how I can help you,' said the Bishop wearily.
'If I were to take them off, I'm damned sure you would not help me either,' said Els.
'In that case I don't know what to suggest. You're not going to find my proper weight with the chains on and if you won't take them off…' He paused as he remembered another scene in the chapel window. 'You don't surely intend to hang me in chains?' he asked.
'No,' said Els, 'there's a special set of leather straps and a cloth bag for your head.'
'Dear God what a way to go,' murmured the Bishop.
'I've put boot polish on the straps and shone them up. They look quite smart,' Els went on. The Bishop wasn't listening to him. He had suddenly thought of a way round the problem of weight.
'I know what we can do,' he said. 'You go and get another set of chains and manacles and bring them here, and we'll weigh them by themselves.'
'I don't see how that's going to help,' said Els. 'I've just told you we won't be using chains on the day. You don't think I've been polishing those straps for nothing, do you?'
The Bishop was beginning to think that he would never be able to get Els to understand anything.
'Once we know how much the chains weigh by themselves we can subtract their weight from three hundred and ninety-eight pounds and then we'll know how much I weigh by myself.'
Els considered the proposal for a moment, but in the end he shook his head.
'It wouldn't work,' he said.
'Why on earth not?'
'I could never do subtraction at school,' Els confessed finally.
'Never mind,' said the Bishop. 'I was very good at it and I'll do the sum myself.'
'How do I know you won't cheat?'
'My dear Hangman Els,' said the Bishop. 'I can think of two good reasons why I am as anxious as you are that this hanging should go with a swing. Possibly three. One is that if you make the drop too short, I shall strangle to death and I really don't want to. Two is that if you make it too long you'll probably decapitate me.'
'I won't,' said Els. 'Your head will come off.'
'Quite,' said the Bishop hurriedly. 'Nothing like calling a spade a bloody shovel, is there?'
'What's three?' asked Els, who didn't care what a bloody shovel was called.
'Oh yes, three. I had almost forgotten three. Well three is that you are obviously a born executioner and while you've got a lot to learn about hanging, I like to see a man make use of the gifts he's been given. Yes, I know about the cloth bag,' the Bishop continued, as Els tried to interrupt with the news that he wouldn't see anything on the scaffold, 'but I am speaking metaphorically, and speaking metaphorically I hope you'll go on to greater things, one might almost say to the top of your profession.'
'You really think I'll make a good hangman?' Els asked eagerly.
'I'm sure of it,' said the Bishop. 'I can feel it in my bones that you will make a name for yourself among executioners the world over,' and having given the hangman the reassurance Els so desperately needed the Bishop went back to his cell while Els went off to fetch another set of chains and manacles. In the end they discovered that Jonathan Hazelstone weighed one hundred and eighty pounds and needed a seven-foot drop.
If the Bishop was having difficulty persuading Els to kill him properly, Kommandant van Heerden was finding it almost as difficult to persuade the surgeons at Piemburg Hospital to undertake the operation he needed to save his life. They seemed to insist on raising quite irrelevant objections, and the Kommandant found particularly irritating their insistence that there was nothing wrong with his heart. When he had disposed of that difficulty by threatening to charge them with attempted murder if they didn't agree with his diagnosis, they spent another hour discussing the ethical problems involved in transferring the heart of a murderer into the body of a man, who, as they pointed out, was so manifestly non-homicidal. The Kommandant soon set their minds at rest on that score, and it was only when they raised the technical problems of tissue typing and rejection and tried to explain how unlikely it was that the condemned man's tissues would match those of a purebred Afrikaaner, like Kommandant van Heerden, that he lost his temper.
'Are you telling me that I'm not a human being?' the Kommandant yelled at Dr Erasmus who led the transplant team. 'Are you telling me I'm a bloody baboon?'
'I'm not saying anything of the sort,' Dr Erasmus protested. 'You don't seem to understand. Each human being has a different type of tissue and yours may not be the same type as that of the donor.'