Free The Sunday Hangman by James McClure

what happened in Soweto? I am the one who knows how to work with authority! With children it is always the same; they are too impatient. And they must tell me if they hear of agitators, because those men are very foolish.”
    “Hau! You would talk of foolish men, is that so?”
    The water was fast losing its warmth. Zondi soaped both his legs and cunningly massaged the right one. Then he sniffed, noted a strange aroma, and looked up to see what his wife was mixing in a cup.
    “Yes, my husband,” she said, “I have been to the street of the witch doctors, and there I have paid good money for what you told my mother was rubbish for old savages. Now drink!”
    Zondi drank. He was, very secretly, desperate. And besides, his gentle wife had the kettle poised over his genitals.
    The unbelievable breakthrough came at almost exactly the same hour that the new man from Fingerprints had walked up to Kramer the previous day. It owed nothing to luck, and had very little to do with statistics, but had been preordained by the system.
    Kramer was slumped alone in his office, with his feet on the window sill and his brain on a shelf, when fatherly Warrant Officer Henk Wessels, from Records, looked in.
    “I’ve just been talking to the station sergeant at Witklip,” he said, taking Zondi’s stool from behind its deal table. “Maybe you know him—Frikkie Jonkers?”
    For a moment there, Kramer wasn’t even sure that he knew where Witklip was, then he recalled a tiny dorp way up, practically in Zululand. On the other score he had to admit ignorance.
    “Ach, Frikkie’s all right,” Wessels observed carelessly. “Got a chip on his shoulder, and isn’t what you’d call a mass of intelligence, but I think the pace of Witklip just suits him. Three stock thefts, a beer party, and that’s his week gone. Anyway, as I was saying, he gave me a tinkle.”
    “Uh huh?”
    “Just on the off chance, Frikkie said. You know, he’s got this big chum of his who runs a hotel there? Hotel? Christ, that’s a bloody joke! The bastard cheats townies into booking it for their holidays by advertising horseback riding and all sorts. You’ve got to break the bloody horses in first! Him.”
    “You’ve been there?” asked Kramer, glad of the diversion, and already tasting the stolen vodka in this.
    “My eldest did; nearly broke his heart, poor kiddie. On his honeymoon, too, it was. I wanted to sue. Anyway, seems they’ve had this bloke Tommy McKenzie staying there for quite some time, and then suddenly he vanishes. Two nights ago. So they look in his room and find his suitcase—a cheap job—and a few clothes—stuff nobody would worry about leaving behind. Not a large amount involved, Frikkie tells me, on the hotel bill, that is. And maybe he’ll be coming back tonight, but to be on the safe side, he wanted a check. The name wasn’t on our hotel-bilkers list, so I asked for a full description. Here, Lieutenant, old son—you take a look.”
    Kramer scanned the particulars and noted that they matched, in most respects, the particulars he had himself used to describe Tollie Erasmus. But what clinched the matter, on paper at any rate, was the green Ford with TJ number plates.
    Then he shook his head. “Tollie? In Witklip? You talk about a townie, man! Hell, the idea of going to a place like this would never enter his head.”

7
    T HE WHITE STONE to which Witklip owed its name was actually a giant boulder, balanced on top of a high, black hill overshadowing the settlement. It looked as though one push of a child’s hand would bring the thing crashing down the fire-scorched slopes, and yet, by some miracle of brute inertia, it remained there.
    This was very different countryside from that found around Doringboom. A dung beetle entering a field plowed by oxen would not have encountered a greater variety of gradients, obstacles, and ragged skylines than had the Chevrolet over the past fifty minutes. The red soil showed like infantile eczema