The Sunday Hangman by James McClure

limp.”
    The irony stunned Kramer. Then he rationalized, and saw that a fractured thigh would have been, after the story in the papers, the first injury to come to Erasmus’s mind. A thinkingmind that might also have gauged that a coincidence is the first thing most people dismiss.
    Something in his expression must have cued Jonkers for a divergent response of his own: “Hey, that’s it, isn’t it, sir? The leg made him do it! I’d noticed he wasn’t talking about it anymore—but it
wasn’t
getting better, it was getting worse!”
    Kramer could only grunt to that.
    “You mean the big irony involved, Lieutenant?”
    “Which one?” said Kramer, surprised by an abstract.
    “The irony that in the end those bloody black Commies got Tommy,” sighed Jonkers. “Oh, ja, it certainly makes a man think.”
    Which was as fine a red herring as ever there was, and in Kramer’s opinion, his complete vindication.
    The hotel was positioned on a wooden shelf in a steep-sided valley, all of one kilometer down a rutted track that expanded into a nothing designated FREE CAR PARK . Some black children squatted there, hoping to pit their strength against any incoming suitcases. A four-wheel-drive vehicle could continue on around the corner, go through an assault course, and end up near the kitchen entrance, trailing oddments of vegetation behind it. The hotelier’s own Land-Rover had a good-sized branch wilting on its roof rack, and a flat front tire.
    Kramer followed Frikkie Jonkers along a crazy-paving path and out onto the scrubby lawn, further designated THE TERRACE . He was fast learning that if you found it difficult to believe your eyes at Spa-kling Waters, then a reassuring notice was bound to pop up. A deep verandah ran the full width of the farmhouse—it could never have been anything else—with access to both private and public rooms being provided by narrow French windows. The concrete pillars that held up the verandah’s molting thatch had been painted various fairground colors, and the rafters had been strung with colored electric light bulbs—which weren’tworking, because at least one in the series had fallen out. On the verandah itself was an assortment of cane furniture, repainted so often the weave had almost been obscured, and in this cane furniture sat an assortment of guests.
    Kramer felt pity prick his hide; plainly, for many of them, the place could be safely renamed the last resort. They were the not-so-rich sick, making do with frayed collars and goiters, crudely-made hospital boots and clubfeet, and daring him, with their eyes, to insult them with a stranger’s compassion.
    “Good afternoon,” said an old duck with her legs in bandages. “Hasn’t it been nice today?”
    “Good afternoon,” they all said.
    “Hell,” said Kramer, looking hard at her legs, “you seem okay to me, lady—but what did you do to the poor bloody horse?”
    How she laughed—they all did—and he was able to escape gratefully into the reception hall. There he barged straight into Piet Ferreira, the manager, and Jonkers made the introductions. Ferreira was, surprisingly, only a little over thirty, and meatily plump; he wore sunglasses in his overlong hair, a bleached shirt, dirty white shorts, slip-slop sandals, and carried a huge jangle of keys, mostly for small padlocks.
    “Bar doesn’t open till six,” he said, “but if you’d—”
    “No, hang on a tick—we’re here on business about Tommy,” Jonkers interrupted, very importantly. “This officer has informed me that his body has been found murdered.”
    “Christ!”
    “And so you see I was right and you were wrong, hey? But we’ll consider the matter dropped.”
    “What’s this?” asked Kramer, all innocence.
    “Nothing, sir. Now, if you’d like to see that register and the—”
    “Later, Sarge; once me and Mr. Ferreira have had a little talk. Here, you take his keys. I’m sure you know which one it is. It’s on me.”
    There was not much