The Sunday Hangman Read Online Free PDF Page A

urine it passed. All he had to do, however, was to take a single step, and the jolt would startle the rat, forcing it to twist and bite and then gnaw on the bone, until he stopped. Oh, yes, it was a clever rat, this frantic, burrowing pain in his thigh.
    Zondi limped on.
    Then stopped suddenly, aware of how foolish he was being. Why, this was what pride could do to a man! It could lead him to act without thinking, and not for a moment had he given the Lieutenant’s actual order any thought. He’d been far too busy proving to the doctor what a tough little kaffir he was.
    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 longgrass 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 foundit 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