If I were a child, he thought, then I would have been greatly excited by what I saw today. It was a dead white man, and now I know that a white man can die, the same as my father. I have seen this frighten other white men, and I want to see why the police come here to do so much writing. There is no food at home until tonight, when perhaps my father brings a little, and I don’t have to go to school like the ones whose parents have the money-why should I go home? Let this big fool chase me, if he likes, for he will surely not come all the way. I will steal back, like I did the day I first saw the big snake, and perhaps I’ll even share in that pig meat. I will steal back, with the cunning of my uncle’s dog, lying low in the grass. It will be-but see, another man is coming this way. Come, let us follow! What strange things are happening.
And sure enough, now Zondi had taken his eyes from the path, and had allowed them to pass casually over the long grass surrounding him, he was able to see three places where the seed tufts leaned against the press of the wind. His ears then snatched at a muffled giggle, and he knew himself for the bumbling idiot he must have looked. These had to be the children he sought-they could hardly be anyone else-and the rest was simple.
No, it wasn’t; by slipping himself back into their skins again, he knew that, at the first sigh of the hiding places being spotted, they’d be up and off and running like spring hares, leaving him far behind. His next move would, in fact, have to be judged most carefully.
With a strangled cry, Zondi pitched forward in his second-best suit and lay very still.
The speedometer needle gave no hint of the loss of momentum that Kramer was experiencing. Doringboom lay within sight, and the copper steeple on the Dutch Reformed church grew taller by the second. But his own interest in reaching the town seemed to be diminishing proportionately, for he was not an unreasonable man, and the evidence, presented to hint at the picnic spot, had worked on his gut reaction like a dollop of milk of magnesia.
“Speaking objectively,” he said, lighting another Lucky, “and forgetting about the drop for a moment, is there anything unusual about the case in your eyes?”
“Only that such a high point of suspension was employed-but that’s part of the drop bit, anyway.”
Then Strydom went on to explain that a surprisingly low point of suspension was very often the popular choice, as when a table leg or doorknob was used, involving less than a meter.
“Talking of which, Tromp,” the DS added, going off on one of his tangents, “it bloody amazes me how stupid some coons can be! When I borrowed that tape just now, the one Van Heerden was complaining about being in inches, I found it had meters marked on the underneath side. You would have thought his boys would have looked!”
“Perhaps they had, Doc,” Kramer answered with a slight smile; he’d suspected as much from the start.
“Hey? I don’t get that. Anyway, where was I?”
“Getting the Nobel Prize for bullshit.”
“Ach, no; that isn’t a nice attitude when a bloke’s doing his best. You can’t have seen as many as I have, and it’s quite true what I’m saying.”
People who played at hanging-sex deviants and so forth, even kids copying from banned comics-were often caught out by how quick and easy hanging was. It took a pull of only 4.4 pounds to close off the jugular veins, for example. At 11 pounds the carotids closed, too, and at 33 pounds the windpipe was buggered. Now, when you knew that the same 33 pounds approximated the weight of the head and shoulders of a 140-pound man, then it didn’t take a genius to work out what could be achieved simply by sitting on the floor and leaning back a bit. Unconsciousness would be almost instantaneous, and death, whether you liked it or not, could take its time.
Nor did it take a genius, Kramer conceded a little angrily to himself, to work out that only Tollie Erasmus would have had a compelling interest in going, as it were, according to the book. Anyone else could have achieved the same result with a minimum of fuss, effort, and imagination-and have been back in their car before the next lot of lights caught their reflectors.
WELKOM! — WELCOME! said the Doringboom boundary board.
“Get stuffed,” said Kramer, hoping that Mickey wasn’t going to a lot of trouble for nothing.
4
Constable Van Heerden must have radioed ahead some dire warning or other, because when Kramer and Doc Strydom drove round the back and into the Doringboom vehicle yard, at least half of the station’s white complement just happened to be there. Five of them were crawling on, under, and through a green Ford, while the remaining three sixteenths, in the rhinocerine person of Sergeant Cecil Arnot, stood directing operations.
“Hello, gentlemen,” he said, begrudging the obligatory smile that went with it. “As you will see, I have not been letting the grass grow under my feet.”
“I don’t think the car’s where you’ll find the money,” Kramer replied, puzzled by that strange emphasis, “but it’s certainly worthwhile having a look. Hell; Johannesburg number plates? Nobody bothered to bloody mention that to me. Have you-”
“I’m checking with Johannesburg, sir, and they’ll be reporting back shortly. The plates themselves seem genuine.”
“Uh huh.”
“Is Dr. Myburgh here yet?” Strydom asked in English, as a courtesy.
“Ready and waiting, Doc! I passed on your telephone message at lunchtime, and he said there was no need to ring back; he’d be honored.”
Funny, thought Kramer, watching the DS toddle off to where the mortuary, a Victorian relic, stood quietly on its own in the far corner. If Myburgh had known all along that he was having a visitor, then.… But there wasn’t time to take this any further.
“Sir,” Arnot was saying, his heavy head lowered, “although I cannot explain how I sense this, I’ve reason to believe that someone has been casting aspersions.”
He made it sound as horrible as anything an incontinent dog did, and then waited for his answer, little eyes aglint.
“Really? You must tell me about it later. Meanwhile I want to catch up with-”
“Sir, this is a serious matter. Perhaps all I need say is that a very careful inspection of the site was made by me this morning. It was, after all, my duty to ensure that the umfaans had not in any way interfered with the body. I saw no indications to this effect; the grass beneath the deceased bore no signs of trampling, and there were no other marks of a suspicious nature either. Furthermore, I am quite certain that no vehicle had proceeded beyond the prescribed parking area-it took seven of us to move the tables aside for the ambulance to back up. A precaution I personally organized, as it allowed us to work behind a screen without any inconvenience to the passing public. To summarize, the scene of death was given every scrutiny, in accordance with the-”
“Cecil,” said Kramer, “I never doubted it.”
“Hey?”
Arnot’s ire missed the quick swerve, and came lumbering to a halt; you could almost hear the tail swishing behind the folds of his immense baggy trousers.
“You didn’t, Lieutenant?”
“No. So now your question must be: who did?”
Kramer left him with that to think over, a process certain to waste several more minutes, and hurried on in the good doctor’s wake. There was, of course, one thing you could always safely say about Sergeant Cecil P. Arnot, and that was, setting human nature aside, the man knew his job. If he claimed that the signs of disturbance had been minimal, quite unsuspicious, and in keeping with the situation as he saw it, then this just had to be so. Sod him.
For one wacky instant, as Kramer passed through the double doors of the old-fashioned post-mortem room, with its high ceiling and quaint skylight, he expected to hear lightning strike, and to see the prone form rise jerkily from the marble table. Then the tall, aristocratic figure on the left of the head, and the hunched, shaggy-haired dwarf on the right, dissolved back into two district surgeons, intent on examining a neck. The air still crackled, however, when Kramer stepped forward to introduce himself.