And if this wasn’t enough to content with, he had just discovered a fracture dislocation of the neck that didn’t make sense.
The deceased, a railway foreman with a history of violence and aberrant behavior, had been found four years earlier hanging in a gangers’ portable rest cabin near a level crossing miles from anywhere. “Freakish misadventure sustained in pursuit of orgasmic enhancement,” the district surgeon had recorded, having noted the classic presence of lewd pinups on the wall and the corpse’s erection. He had also satisfied himself that there had been a perfectly good platform for the man to have stepped from: to wit, a large wooden box used for storing shovels and pickaxes. But this was textbook thinking; an erection was common to all forms of hanging, whereas, for a man of Strydom’s experience, there could be no ambiguity about the fact that the ceiling of the cabin was far too low to have afforded the right drop.
This meant, of course, that the case did make sense-provided he was prepared to accept positive evidence in support of his hangman theory, when all any sane man could have anticipated was negative proof that fracture dislocations never occurred without precisely the right circumstances.
Cautious and sweating slightly, but with his fine mind whetted, Strydom wondered whether to pack it in temporarily, or to demand that he be given some assistance. He was given, because of the flu going round, which had incapacitated the records office like a tea break, a Zulu messenger called Alfred.
Just for a minute or two of speechless indignation, Strydom despaired. Alfred’s literacy ran to identifying public notices that affected his life directly, telling him where to go or where not to sit, and to matching the letters on a package against the letters on a solicitor’s brass plate-when he wasn’t delivering by ear, that was. Asking Alfred to pick out the words suicide by hanging, especially when most magistrates’ writing is so dreadful, was tantamount to having him write the key phrase himself.
Then Alfred, embarrassed by the delay in receiving his orders, twisted his head round to admire the picture on the front of the television-set brochure that Strydom had left lying about.
“You buy, master?”
“I buy.”
“Hau, plenty good picture, that one. I see by the shop.”
Strydom placed an avuncular arm across the man’s khaki-uniformed shoulders and led him to the huge pile of nonwhite inquest papers. There he showed him what sort of photographs he was interested in, reinforced this with some mime, and told him to get going. In fact, it was such an expedient idea that he used it himself.
“So arrest me,” said Kramer, getting back into the Chev outside the block of flats where he had just finished his interview with Mrs. Roberts.
Zondi made a show of awakening slowly. He tipped his hat back, blinked, and turned toward him. “On what charge, boss?” he asked.
“Indecent exposure. I got caught with my pants down.”
“How was that?”
“She thought I’d come to say, Bring on the dancing girls, lady-your naughty little boy is back.”
“You are talking about the old lady?” Zondi queried.
“That’s right. Ma Roberts-but she hasn’t bloody seen him for five years!”
“Hau!”
“I tell you, it was rough, hey. You should have seen the look of disappointment on her face.”
Zondi shrugged. “But why should you blame yourself for this, Lieutenant? You only-”
“I could have checked with Henk Wessels first, and saved a lot of bloody time. What if I say that her son was better known as Ringo?”
Zondi frowned, searching that near-photographic memory of his, a legacy from his years in a mission school where the one textbook for each subject had to be shared. Then his face registered a hit.
“Hau, but that was long ago, boss! The Vasari case?”
“Not bad, my son. I couldn’t even get the wop’s name.”
“Anthony Michael Vasari,” Zondi said slowly, “who was convicted for killing a pensioner he robbed on the Bluff. Ringo was his accomplice, but he turned state evidence after first pleading not guilty at the preliminary examination. But why didn’t Cleo tell us this?”
“Probably didn’t make the connection either. Ringo’s a Beatle name, came along much later than when they were in Steenhuis, and so Erasmus-ach, that isn’t a point that’s important. Our problem is where we’re going to find the bastard.”
“Can his mother not give any clues?”
“Take a look at this,” Kramer said by way of an answer.
He slipped a hand into his jacket and produced a mimeo copy of PLEASE HAVE YOU SEEN MY ONE AND ONLY SON? It gave a full physical description of Peter David Roberts, also known as Peterkins, and then listed his endearing habits, considerable gifts, and sophisticated tastes in food, drink, and clothing, as only a mother could know them. At the end it implored: “Amnesia (Forgetting One’s Memory) Can Happen to Anyone-Help Peter and Me (Widow amp; Pensioner) Like You would Want to Help YOURSELF.”
“Mangalisayo,” murmured Zondi, skimming through it. “This is very sad, boss. The woman has a great heart.”
“Whenever she can save up enough, she gets a few more run off and posts them to shipping offices, new dam projects, hospitals, loony bins, et cetera.”
“But what is your own reading? That this small-time fellow went to try for big time in Jo’burg?”
“Could’ve done,” Kramer agreed, but his heart wasn’t in it; there was more, which he’d been trying not to think about. “On the other hand, his ma alleges he was a changed character after the trial, having nearly taken a one-way to Pretoria. He got himself a job in an electrical-goods store, worked hard there, and found himself a steady girlfriend, whose brother was going to let him have a share in a ski boat. All set up. Got a phone put in, started saving for an MG-next thing he was gone.”
“Like-?” Zondi flipped a hand.
“Uh huh. One Saturday afternoon he walked out, saying he was going swimming, and never came back. Underneath all this, you can see she thinks a shark might have got him. He always said the beach was too crowded where the nets were; liked to go to deserted areas.”
“Then maybe she is right, boss. He took no case or anything?”
“Just a towel,” said Kramer, and felt as flat as he sounded.
Zondi started the car up. “So this is why you think we waste time, Lieutenant? Yet Ringo could have planned for a fresh start more cleverly than she suspected.”
“Ja. I’d better check with the locals-but let’s get some grub first.”
The Chev moved off slowly.
“Oh, and another thing,” Kramer added, finally facing the futility of his morning. “Ma Roberts had never heard of bloody Witklip.”
10
Dr. Strydom was by now in something of a state. No fewer than four inquests, each indicating an excusable error of judgment, had come to light-and this wasn’t counting the observations he himself had made at Doringboom, of course.
His feelings of conflict were very natural. It seemed incredible that he should, within so short a time, and with the ungainly means at his disposal, pick out this number of cases for reappraisal. But then again, there just weren’t that many white suicides by hanging in Natal each year, and Alfred had obeyed his direction to ignore any obviously narrow ligatures; between them, they had called a halt in the late ’60s before three o’clock. It also seemed incredible that one of these likely oversights appeared to have been his own.
Incredible, but not impossible, because this time around he had known what to look for, and had not presumed a thing. The remains in question had been those of a white adult male, aged somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, discovered in a skeletal condition at the foot of a small krantz or ravine. One end of a rotten rope had been found around the neck-of which very little remained, due to decomposition and rodent life-and the other end had been tied to a broken branch. It had not taken him long, on that wet and chilly afternoon, to agree with the police that the branch, which came from an overhanging tree, told the whole story. The deceased had secured the rope to it, allowing himself virtually no slack because of the length involved, and had stepped over the cliff’s edge. The sudden weight had been just enough to snap the branch and send him plunging to his death-a death that could have been attributed to several causes, among them exposure brought on by the paralysis of a broken neck. Strydom’s only comfort was that he’d not been dogmatic in his summation, because, when looked at from another viewpoint, that broken branch could have come as a surprise only to the hangman, hurriedly ridding himself of a night’s work.