Free The Sunday Hangman by James McClure Page B

furnish the necessary particulars?”
    “Not really; his name, his home address from the register, which I haven’t bothered to find out yet. He was a mercenary, you know.”
    “Uh huh?”
    “Oh, ja; he could tell you all about it. Some of the things those coons do, you could hardly believe! He had memories that were terrible. I know because once there was a bloke in the room next to his, heard him whimper in his sleep at night—sort of like a dog that thinks someone is trying to catch it tobeat it? Like that. My wife had the right word for him: she said he was haunted. But not according to Tommy; he laughed in that way of his, and asked if we’d never heard of malaria. He was always okay again after a few drinks.”
    “Boozed a lot?”
    “Hell! I’ve never met a bloke who was better company in that department.”
    Then Tollie Erasmus must have been, Kramer reasoned to himself, either very rash or very relaxed, and the more Jonkers had to say, the more it would appear to have been the latter.
    “And you all liked him?”
    “Man, you can’t exactly say he was popular,” Jonkers admitted, with the proper hesitation that goes with speaking ill of the dead, “but you can say that every man respected him. It takes quite a nerve to go and fight Commies in the bush, ’specially when you’re working for bloody wogs who can’t be trusted—and although there’s good money in it, you can still see how all of us gain in the end.”
    “So he’d done all right?” Kramer said enviously, offering Jonkers one of his Luckies.
    “Unlike some he could tell you about. But he still had to make his pile, he used to say, and he was hoping to get something quite soon.”
    “Angola hadn’t put him off? The firing squad?”
    Jonkers snorted and replied, “Tommy? That’ll be the day! He was even trying to get me to go with him.”
    “Uh huh?”
    “That’s true,” Jonkers confirmed with unconcealed pride, while studying the back of his bear’s paw. “Said I would qualify for a top rank, maybe even colonel, at my age and with all my experience behind me. You know, the military training we get at college, and the attitudes I have formed. Could see I knew how to handle myself. Oh, ja, he really pestered me, Tommy did. You never know, it’s possible if.…”
    How astute Erasmus had been in making the silly fat sod see himself as a gun-slinging glamor boy, and not as the plodding police sergeant he was paid to be. And of course, Jonkers had known all along that when it came to the crunch, he was going to say the wife wouldn’t wear it.
    “Do you think his experiences could have led to his death?” Kramer suggested, preparing to begin on another tack. “There was no farewell note.”
    “That’s Tommy’s style, all right. A hard man. You would have liked him.”
    “But I was really querying the reason for—”
    “Ach, I see, sir; sorry. You know, I’ve been wondering about that myself. It comes so sudden. Difficult, too, when a bloke has only talked in a bar, where others can listen. What I mean is, Tommy was never actually
personal
, if you follow. The wife says there was probably a divorce somewhere in the background.”
    How right the good woman was; bigamy had also been one of Tollie’s little failings.
    “There’s something that doesn’t add up here,” Kramer observed with polite curiosity. “How come he was thinking of joining up again, but had allowed himself to get so fat?”
    “His leg,” Jonkers said, as if this were self-evident.
    “Hey?”
    “He’d taken a hell of a fracturing of the thighbone—not quite a compound, he explained, but the muscles got all ripped up. That was the reason he came to Spa-kling Waters—for the treatment. He’d been advised by a specialist in Jo’burg, apparently, and wasn’t to put too much weight on it till the insides had mended. There was nothing you could see on the outside, of course, even when he was in his swimming cozzy, and he didn’t always