Myburgh looked up and nodded, tight-lipped; he was, as the Colonel had guessed, young and intelligent-seeming, with more than a resemblance to a celebrated Cape heart surgeon, which was bound-once he’d saved enough for a city practice-to stand him in good stead.
Mildly surprised by his reception, Kramer turned to Strydom and found him equally distant, as though withholding something you didn’t say in front of natives.
“Doc? What gives?”
“Er-I’m afraid you somewhat misled me, and that has-um-resulted in an embarrassment of a professional nature.”
“You called me a bloody fool,” Myburgh reminded him.
“For which I have already apologized, even though when I said ‘you fool,’ I was really referring to myself, Dr. Myburgh. But, Tromp, isn’t it true you said that scrawny bloody constable and the deceased were the same build?”
“No, I only said the same size, meaning height,” Kramer replied, taking his first look at the corpse and hearing his voice trail. “Because Erasmus was average, around the 150-to-160-pound mark.…”
“Was,” echoed Strydom, prodding the dead paunch. “Was being the operative word. What would you care to place his weight at now? Another fifteen? Another twenty, perhaps? Maybe more?”
“Around 180, 185. Christ, how did he get like that?”
“Not through being a nervous wreck,” Strydom said cynically.
“But.…”
“Ja, Tromp?”
“This means he must have been living very easy and drinking his bloody head off, night and day. Look at that tan, too, and the new haircut.… Hell, I don’t understand.”
“Nor do I,” murmured Myburgh.
“You don’t? This bastard was supposed to be on the run, Doc, with blokes in every-”
“I meant that I still don’t understand what Van Heerden has to do with this. Will you explain, sir?”
But a reply from Strydom wasn’t immediately forthcoming. He was engrossed in a calculation that he crossed out impatiently-and then returned to, repeating it twice over, with what appeared to be the same result. He slipped the notebook into his pocket, gave a cheery, meaningless smile, and suggested they begin the examination without further ado. His explanation could, if it was still required, be given later, he said.
Kramer, feeling acutely aware that the bluff held more than either he or Myburgh imagined, managed to contain his curiosity. He gave his attention instead to the equally placid, equally inscrutable features of the late Mr. Erasmus, and thought it a shame that he hadn’t been strangled a nice deep purple. Hanging, with its kindly attitude to the complexion, wouldn’t have been his choice at all. Two other things struck him, one snide and one ironical, which also helped to provide temporary distractions. The first was that Erasmus had an appendix scar exactly like the little white line on the Widow Fourie’s sweet, peach-fluff belly, and finding it here smattered of very poor taste on the thief’s part. And then there was the wince Kramer gave when the body, into which he’d dreamed of driving soft-nosed slugs, preferably at point-blank range, was slit open from chin to pubic arch.
Myburgh did all the heavy work, and, to judge by Strydom’s grunts of approval, he did it well. His cutters soon had the ribs and breastbone freed from the flayed chest, and he took out a dangle of organs in one. After a time, the old man started carrying bits and pieces across to the sink for him, and their relationship settled down.
“Methodical,” confided Strydom, noticing Kramer now at his elbow. “I could show you hundreds twice his age who would have gone straight for the neck.”
He turned on the tap to sluice the viscera.
“Anything interesting?” Myburgh inquired, proffering his long knife. “That heart was good for another twenty years, I reckon.”
“Liver was shot. No, man, you go ahead.”
Myburgh opened the stomach: the smell was, if you’d encountered it often enough under those conditions, unmistakable.
“Brandy,” said the district surgeons together.
“Ingested,” added Myburgh, “as far as I can tell, just before death. I’ll have the blood tested.”
Strydom, with a return of his cagey expression, made no comment. He was, in a way, like a man suffering an attack of deja vu, and his gaze turned blank for five drips of the blood into the bucket under the table.
“Come on now,” Kramer urged, suddenly losing patience. “I know there’s something weird on the go here. For a start, nobody’s said anything about a brandy bottle being found.”
“That’s true,” said Myburgh, who had gone back to sawing around the skull. “And I was there when Sergeant Arnot had the refuse bin-”
“All right, let’s skip the brain for a moment, if you don’t mind,” Strydom requested him, but stayed where he was.
“Fine. I’ve been wanting to dive in at the back myself. Lieutenant? Could you give me a hand in getting the gent sunny side up?”
Erasmus, his face covered by a flap of scalp, was placed on his front, and Myburgh cut down to expose the spine.
“Third and fourth vertebrae,” he reported. “Fracture-dislocation with the spinal cord ruptured a little over half its thickness.”
“General state of surrounding tissues?”
“Good, considering. No severe tearing or other damage.”
“Have you ever seen anything similar?”
“Only once,” replied Myburgh, beginning to show some bewilderment over the way his senior was behaving. “When I was a medical student, and they let us in on a P.M. at Pretoria Central. It was a study in the rate of digestion.”
“Did they tell you anything about the length of the drop?”
“No, but I’ve read about it in Taylor’s. The drop is usually six to seven feet, unquote.”
“Dr. Myburgh, you’ll forgive me if I speak as a man of experience?”
“Certainly. I welcomed your interest.”
Strydom moved across to stand over the gleam of the neck bones and, after a quick check, said: “If this were the body of Constable Van Heerden, then I’d say it had been calculated to a nicety. A perfect job, in fact. But, gentlemen, I feel sure that a drop of six feet would have torn this man’s head off.”
Kramer quite forgot the match in his fingers until it burned him.
“I’m sorry, can I have that again?” asked Myburgh, doing a slow blink. “Erasmus is only about thirty pounds above average, and you’re saying that could make such a difference?”
“In terms of striking force, because that is the crucial factor, nearly half a ton of difference,” Strydom replied, taking out his notebook.
“Now, listen here, Doc-”
“Patience, Tromp. Try judging it for yourself. The optimum striking force has been standardized at twenty-four hundred weight, or 2,688 pounds. Any more or any less, and you could find yourself in trouble. And I’m not going into neck characteristics here, because both examples are good and sound, but very different.”
“Twenty-four; I’ve got that.”
“Which would suit Van Heerden exactly, and remember he’s roughly ten pounds under average. However, give a six-foot drop to this bloke, and the striking force would be thirty-four hundred weights-or in the region of 1,120 pounds too many. I leave the rest to your imagination.”
Myburgh actually seemed to shudder.
“Okay, Doc-so how much did he get?”
“Three feet.”
“He couldn’t have jumped from the fork in the tree.”
“No.”
“Or from the-”
“No.”
This time the match made it to Kramer’s Lucky, which trembled behind the cup of his hands.
“Then I don’t see how he could have possibly done this by himself,” Myburgh said softly, lifting off Erasmus’s vault to look into his brain. “And yet.…”