The Sunday Hangman by James McClure

into it and saw, as Zondi must have done, that there wasn’t even a little fluff at the bottom. Then, noticing the material was slightly stiffer at one point, he turned the thing inside out. The saliva stain wasn’t all that became visible then—so did several blond hairs, fairly obviously from the head of Tollie Erasmus.
    “God almighty,” gasped Strydom. “It’s a hood! A proper executioner’s hood!”
    “Boss?” said Zondi, startled into forgetting himself.
    Very briefly, Kramer filled him in on the post-mortem results, and then, because this recital revived the initial impact of their bizarre discovery, stood in a brown study, his gaze fixed farther along the fence. When he focused again, he found himself looking at the desiccated forms of two finches, pinned onto the barbed wire by a shrike.
    “If this bloke knows all about drops,” he said quietly, “and wanted to fake a suicide, then he’d have easily found another tree with a platform the right height beneath it. But he didn’t. He didn’t even bother to find out where the hood had got to.Just stuck his kill up there for all the world to see, as if he couldn’t give a bugger.”
    “Gives me the bloody creeps, Tromp. I get visions of a first-class scaffold, with provisions for half-inch adjustments and all the rest of it. Pit, steps going down. Hell.”
    This was too much for Kramer, and he snapped out of his reverie. “Ach, steady on, Doc! If you ask me, some bastards tried to screw the cash out of Tollie with a little homemade third degree, and it all went wrong. Must have been at least two of them involved, so that one could drive his Ford here.”
    “I disagree,” Strydom said huffily.
    “Well, something like that. Can’t guess any better until we know where he’s been the last three months. Probably got up the nose of a Jo’burg mob.”
    “I’m objecting to you treating this fracture as a fluke, Lieutenant. Hell, the flukes themselves are rare enough, without hoods and metal rings and God knows what else. Do you want me to prove that to you?”
    The Colonel was scrutinizing his ceiling, where he had a favorite lizard that caught flies for him. But the hour was late and it had probably left the office.
    “Just give me an outline to be going on with,” he told Kramer, “as you’re too bloody shagged out to talk any proper sense this evening. So let’s stop psychoanalyzing Doc’s little obsession and concentrate on what action you’re taking.”
    “Firstly, sir, I don’t want this getting to the press before we understand it better. You can see the effect it’s had on a supposedly mature—”
    “Consider that done.”
    “Ta. I’ve already handed the firearms over to Ballistics, and they’re sending specifications to every gun squad from here to Cape Town. Not much of a lead, I admit.”
    “Worth trying.”
    “The usual forensic checks are going ahead on Erasmus’s clothing, vehicle, and so on. Also the hood we found.”
    “Good.”
    “We were too late to dust the car for fingerprints—Arnot’s mob had already been through it. I get the Bible back in the morning—nothing on it so far, except Erasmus’s own—and we’ll see where that takes us.”
    “You never can tell.”
    “Lead kindly light, sir?”
    “Trompie,” admonished the Colonel, a full elder of the Dutch Reformed Church, who wore a black frock coat and white bow tie on Sundays, “you mustn’t think being shagged out is any excuse for that kind of behavior! Now push off home, you hear?”
    “One other thing: I’ve put out a description of Erasmus as a reminder to those in the big cities who didn’t think this was a matter which concerned them. I bet you he was in Jo’burg the whole time, getting himself a nice tan at Zoo Lake, right under their bloody noses.”
    “Tomorrow, man. When you can also get all excited about what this same playboy was doing twenty kilometers south of Doringboom.”
    The man had a point there.
    Kramer rose from the corner