'Well,' he said hesitantly, when the shouting had died down, 'I expect you all want to know how I'm going to spend the money.' He paused and the Kommandant shut his eyes. 'Well, first of all I'm going to stuff a Dobermann.'

The audience roared its approval, and the Kommandant opened his eyes for a moment to see how the Commissioner of Police was taking it. The Commissioner was not laughing.

'It's a dog, sir,' whispered the Kommandant hurriedly.

'I know it's a dog. I know what a Dobermann is,' said the Commissioner icily, and before the Kommandant could explain the true nature of Els' intentions the Konstabel had started again.

'It's a big black one,' said Els, 'and it's been dead a few weeks now, so it's not going to be an easy job.'

The audience was delighted. Shouts and the stamping of boots greeted Els' news.

'Do your men make a habit of stuffing dogs?' asked the Commissioner.

'He's not using the word in its usual sense, sir,' said the Kommandant desperately.

'I'm fully aware of that,' said the Commisioner. 'I know exactly what he means.'

'I don't think you do, sir,' the Kommandant began, but Els had started to speak again and he had to keep quiet.

'It's sort of stiff,' said Els, 'and that's what makes it difficult to get at its insides.'

'You've got to stop him,' the Commissioner shouted at Kommandant van Heerden, as the hall erupted with hysterical laughter.

'You don't understand, sir,' the Kommandant shouted back. 'He killed the dog and-'

'I'm not at all surprised. It's a pity he didn't kill himself in the process.'

Around them in the hall pandemonium raged. Konstabel Els couldn't see anything in what he had said to laugh at.

'You can laugh,' he shouted above the din, 'you can bloody laugh, but I bet you haven't got a dog with a family tree. My dog had a special tree…' The rest of his sentence was drowned in the laughter.

'I'm not sitting here listening to any more of this filth,' shouted the Commissioner.

'If you'd just wait for a moment, sir,' the Kommandant screamed. 'I can explain what he means. He's going to take the dog to a taxidermist.'

But the Commissioner had already risen from his seat and had left the platform.

'Damned disgusting,' he said to his adjutant as he entered his car. 'The fellow's a sexual maniac.'

Behind him in the hall Els had left the stage and was telling a plain-clothes cop in the front row how he would stuff him if he went on laughing. On the platform Kommandant van Heerden had had his third heart attack.

In Piemburg Prison Jonathan did not share his sister's belief in the dignity of God. After a lifetime spent in the service of the Lord and a month in Bottom he felt unable any longer to believe that whatever had chosen to reveal itself to him in the depths of the swimming-pool had been even vaguely beneficent. As to its having been sane, his view of the world and its ways led him to suppose that its Maker must have been out of His mind.

'I thould think He must have needed a rest on the seventh day,' he told the old warder who insisted on bringing him consolation, 'and as for its being good. I think the facts speak for themselves. Whatever was responsible for the Creation cannot possibly have had anything good in mind. Quite the opposite if you ask me.'

The old warder was shocked. 'You're the first man to occupy that cell,' he said, 'that didn't come round to being converted before he was hanged.'

'It may have something to do with the fact that I am innocent,' said the Bishop.

'Oh is that what it is,' said the old warder with a yawn. 'They all say that,' and shuffled off to give his advice to Konstabel Els who was practising in Top. Alone in his cell the Bishop lay on the floor and listened to the noises that reached him from the gallows. By the sound of things he was less likely to die from a broken neck than from some appalling form of hernia.

Executioner Els wasn't finding his new job at all easy. For one thing he was fed up with all the work it entailed. He had had to empty the Gallows Shed of all the junk that had accumulated there for the past twenty years. With the help of half a dozen black convicts, he had moved several tons of old furniture, garden rollers, disused cat-o'-nine-tails, and corroded lavatory buckets before he could begin to get the scaffold ready for its task, and when the shed was empty he was not sure what to do.

'Pull the lever,' the old warder told him when Els asked him how the thing worked, and the new hangman had returned to the shed and had pulled the lever. After falling twenty feet to the floor of the shed as the trap opened beneath him, Els began to think he was getting the hang of the contraption. He tried it out with several unsuspecting black convicts standing there, and they seemed to disappear quite satisfactorily. He was disappointed that he wasn't allowed to try it out properly.

'You can't do that,' the old warder told him, 'it's not legal. The best thing I can suggest is a sack filled with sand.'

'Fussy old sod,' thought Els and sent the convicts off to fill some sacks with sand. They were quite satisfactory as stand-ins and didn't complain when the noose was fitted round their necks which was more than could be said for the black convicts. The trouble was that the bottom dropped out every time one was hanged. Els went back into Bottom to consult the old warder.

'He's not here any longer,' the Bishop told him.

'Where's he gone to?' Els asked.

'He's applied for sick leave,' the Bishop said. 'He's got stomach trouble.'

'It's the same with those sacks,' said Els and left the Bishop wondering which was worse, hanging or disembowelling.

'I don't suppose it makes a great deal of difference,' he thought finally. 'In any case there is nothing I can do about it.'

Kommandant van Heerden did not share the Bishop's fatalism. His third heart attack had convinced him that he too was under sentence of death, but he had decided that there was something he could do about it. He had been assisted in reaching this conclusion by Konstabel Oosthuizen whose experience of major surgery made him an unrivalled source of medical information.

'The most important thing is to have a healthy donor,' the Konstabel told him, 'after that it's a piece of cake, compared to my operation.' Kommandant van Heerden had hurried off to avoid having to listen to a description of the operation in which the greater portion of Konstabel Oosthuizen's digestive tract figured so memorably.

Sitting in his office he listened to Luitenant Verkramp discussing very loudly the case of his uncle who had died of heart trouble. The Kommandant had noticed recently that an extraordinarily large proportion of the Verkramp family had succumbed to what was evidently an hereditary defect and the manner of their passing had been uniformly so atrocious that he could only hope that Verkramp would go the same way. The Luitenant's solicitude was getting on his nerves, and he was equally tired of inquiries about how he felt.

'I feel all right, damn it,' he told Verkramp a hundred times.

'Ah,' Verkramp said sadly, 'that's often the way it seems. Now my Uncle Piet said he was feeling fine the day he died but it came on all of a sudden.'

'I don't suppose it was quick,' the Kommandant said.

'Oh no. Very slow and agonizing.'

'I thought it would be,' said the Kommandant.

'A dreadful business,' said Verkramp. 'He-'

'I don't want to hear any more,' the Kommandant shouted.

'I just thought you'd like to know,' said Verkramp and went out to tell Konstabel Oosthuizen that irritability was a sure sign of incurable heart disease.

In the meantime the Kommandant had tried to occupy his mind by devising a suitably caustic reply to the Commissioner of Police, who had written ordering him to see that the men under his command got plenty of outdoor exercise and had even hinted that it might be a good thing to organize a brothel for the police barracks in Piemburg. The Kommandant could see that Konstabel Els' confession was still preying on the mind of the Police Commissioner.