The African Poison Murders (11 page)

Vachell looked at Janice and saw her dark eyes widen a little as she caught sight of the gun. She put one hand, small and brown, up to her throat, and there was fear in her look.

“What are you going to do with that gun?” she asked.

“Use it,” he said shortly, “if anything comes.”

The moon was up behind the forest by the time they went to bed, silvering tree-trunks and grass, making bushes look like silent crouching monsters whispering among themselves. The night was full of subdued soft noises, shaken now and again by the shrill, drawn-out scream of a hyrax from the forest, one of the company of small furry tree-conies that hid from daylight down the snug hollows of trees. There was a sharp bite in the air, and a smell of dew, and a sort of expectancy that made Vachell sleepless and ill at ease.

He stood for a little by the open window, smoking 105

a last cigarette and staring out over the grey lawn into the blackness of bush and valley beyond. A circle of lights, twinkling like stars far below him, marked the outline of Karuna, but nowhere else was there sight or sound of the works of man. The sky was heavy with stars; the hills and plains of Africa lay in unbroken expanse around him. He felt oppressed by the vastness of his surroundings, the weakness of man. His cigarette stub, flicked out of the window, glowed for a moment on the grass and vanished from sight. Restless, somehow apprehensive, he slipped his revolver into a pocket and stepped out on to the lawn, closing the door softly behind him. Bullseye snuffled as the barrier closed in her face and whined once or twice, but then accepted the inevitable and padded back to her basket.

The police askari was again on guard. Vachell exchanged a few words with him and strolled along the path to Munson’s farm. It wound through a big paddock, among scattered native trees whose twisted branches formed curious tortured shapes, and past clumps of bush that were rustling with hidden life.

Once Vachell heard the sharp, startled whistle of an invisible reedbuck, and a little later a violent fluttering in the black foliage of a tree. He passed through a creaking homemade gate and out into the unpaddocked land, where the bush was thicker, and the grass knee-high. A little farther on the path dipped suddenly into a steep gully with a trickle of water at the bottom, and Vachell had to use his 106

hands to clamber up among the rocks on the other side. That was the boundary, he supposed, between West’s and Munson’s land.

The tall pyrethrum shed loomed suddenly in front of him, so unexpectedly that he halted in his tracks and his hand went automatically to his revolver pocket. Then he smiled in the darkness at his own nervousness. He had come upon the shed abruptly around a bend of the path. It stood among the trees, black and faintly menacing, with its curious top-heavy outline. He walked on past it, and other buildings came into view. Indeterminate snuffling sounds, suggestive of cattle, emerged from some of them. The homestead buildings were black, formless shapes around the uneven lawn. In front of the livingroom, moonlight fell on to the light roof of a box-body car, making it appear like a giant mushroom. Vachell walked up and peered inside.

It was an oldish Plymouth that he did not recognize.

The livingroom was dark and silent; no one was there.

Light emerged in a thin streak between a gap in the curtains of Mrs Munson’s room, and lay in a narrow pencil over the grass. Vachell, treading noiselessly, reached the open window, and listened with pricked ears. A man was talking rapidly in German. Vachell expelled his breath slowly and cursed to himself. He needed a course at the Berlitz school to handle this case. He raised his head very slowly until his eyes were above the level of the sill.

The curtains were napping slightly in a light breeze, 107

and he could see the whole scene within. Mrs Munson sat at the table in the centre of the room, knitting something in brown wool. The table was littered with papers that looked as though they had been blown there by a high wind. Opposite sat Wendtland, his hands resting on his thick bare knees, leaning forward in an attitude of tense concentration.

His naturally red face was flushed and shining with sweat, and he was talking with intense earnestness — not in anger, but as if he was trying to convince an obstinate listener of something of the first importance. Several times he thumped his knee with a clenched fist, and twice he mentioned Mrs Innocent’s name. Mrs Munson sat like a basilisk, without replying. Once she shrugged her shoulders and made a brief remark in an indifferent voice.

Unexpectedly, Wendtland flung up his hands in a gesture of finality and rose to his feet. He was facing the window and for a moment his eyes seemed to rest full upon VachelFs. For a split second no one moved. Then Vachell ducked, leapt sideways with a crabwise motion, slid around the angle of the building and waited, flattened against the wall.

He heard sounds from the room, footsteps, and something that might have been the curtains being drawn back. Then came a long silence, unbroken in VachelFs ears save for the thumping of his own heart.

He did not know how long he waited, but it seemed an hour. He could hear no sound, now, 108

from the room. Moving cautiously, he edged back around the corner to the window. It was shut, and the curtains closely drawn. There was still no sound from within. He moved on along the back of the building to the other end, past the closed window of Munson’s bedroom. As he drew abreast of the window his ears caught a new sound: a sort of scraping, as though something were being dragged across the floor. He froze in his tracks, straining every nerve to catch the sound. It stopped, and through the thin curtains came a faint gleam that moved and then suddenly disappeared.

Vachell let out his breath very slowly and felt a prickling in the small of his back. A flashlight had been switched on and off. There was someone in Munson’s room.

He moved silently around the end of the building to the bedroom door, and paused with his fingers on the knob. He had only two hands to open the door, switch on his flashlight and handle the gun.

With the gun in his right hand and the flashlight tucked under his right armpit he flung open the door with his left, stepped forward, drew the flashlight from under the armpit with the free hand and slid over the switch. The room sprang harshly into life. The bed had been pulled out from the wall and lay across the room at an angle, and a chair stood on the bed. The beam raked the walls swiftly, lighting up bureau, cupboard, other chairs. The silence was unbroken. There was no one in the room.

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The other door, the one that led through a bathroom to Mrs Munson’s room, stared back at Vachell blankly from the wall on his left. The flashlight and the gun monopolized both hands. He tucked the flashlight under his armpit again, strode over to the door and tried to pull it open. Nothing gave; it was locked.

Something warned him of danger, but too late.

He heard a sound behind him and at the same instant a violent blow on the point of the elbow crippled his right arm. Gun and flashlight crashed together to the ground. As he flung himself around to grapple, something hard encircled his neck and jerked his head back into his shoulders, and he felt, amid the agony of choking, a hand pressing up his chin. The arm, thrashing wildly, seemed to get entangled with something soft and yielding that felt like cloth. He struggled frantically for breath, his eyes and temples bursting. His knees gave way and he crashed to the ground, feeling hands on his throat. There was a blinding crash, a stab of pain, and then oblivion.

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It took some time, after consciousness began to seep back, for Vachell to realize that he was still alive.

He was lying in pitch blackness on a hard floor, and everything was aching at once — his head, his chest, his arms. Red-hot needles jabbed him whenever he tried to move. He sat up gradually, and bumped his head against something hard and sharp. When he had recovered he stretched out a hand to investigate.

The thing he had bumped against was smooth and cold. After further investigation he decided that it was the edge of a bath.

He sat up then, and felt his ribs, arms and neck tentatively. There seemed to be nothing seriously wrong. A groping hand came on something familiar on the floor by his side; his own flashlight. He switched it on, wonderingly. By its side lay the revolver, within reach of his hand. He gazed at it half comprehendingly, and pulled himself up unsteadily by the edge of the bath. It all seemed screwy, but his mind was too hazy to think. The tap worked, however, and when he had bathed his head ill

in cold water and drunk what he could out of a cupped hand he felt much better. Perhaps, he thought, this unusually solicitous assailant had not only laid out his flashlight and gun by his side but had dragged him to the bathroom in order that he should come round conveniently close to the tap.

The door leading to Munson’s bedroom was no longer locked. Vachell pushed his way in, too bruised and sore for caution, and found the switch near the door. Light flooded the room, and once again he found it empty. The bed had been pushed back against the wall, and the chair was once more in its proper place. A tidy-minded burglar, evidently, who liked to put things back as he’d found them.

In one corner of the room a square of the celotex sheeting that formed the ceiling was torn and gaping. It was the corner where, on his previous examination of the room, Vachell had observed a discoloration of the ceiling due to a leak in the roof.

The damp had made the sheeting sag, and someone, by the looks of it, had put a fist through, or in some other way had torn a hole. That explained the pulled-out bed, and the chair on top of it. Someone, evidently, had known where to look for what he’d come to find. The space between the celotex and the iron roof was big enough to hold anything from a matchbox to a corpse. Now there was nothing up there but the droppings of rats.

It was painful to stoop, but Vachell managed to examine the room with a fair semblance of thoroughness. He was afraid that the burglar was 112

too tidy-minded to have left any trace. The search of Munson’s bedroom was without result. But in the bathroom, lying in shadow under the tub, he was rewarded by a find. A small one, certainly, but a tangible relic of the intruder: part of a pipestem, black and well used. The bit had been broken off at the end nearest the bowl. It might have been lying there, of course, for some time, if the boys were careless about the way they swept; it might have nothing to do with the case. Or it might have got caught up somehow in Vachell’s clothes as the intruder had dragged his unconscious body through the bathroom door. In that case it was the first and only clue he’d found. With a sigh of hope he wrapped the fragment of vulcanite in his handkerchief and stowed it in a pocket. Funny, Wendtland didn’t smoke a pipe — or at least he’d been smoking a small cigar when he’d come to call on Mrs Munson that morning. Vachell’s watch had got broken in his fall and stopped, so he did not know the time.

As he walked across the lawn, moving unsteadily as if he was drunk, he saw that Wendtland’s car had gone. The window of Mrs Munson’s room was blank. Everything lay in silence, and the moon was high overhead.

He slept late next morning, and awoke sore, but more or less recovered, although he still had a headache and his bruised temple hurt him badly.

As he shaved he observed that his throat, also, was black with bruises, which gave him the depressing appearance of having a dirty neck. A blue-and-113

white polka-dot handkerchief wound around it like a muffler gave him a rather rakish look. He frowned at his reflection in the glass, wondering which was better, to look as if he didn’t wash his neck, or as if he was trying to imitate a tourist imitating a settler from the open spaces. In the end he left the handkerchief on.

He was late for breakfast, and the boy said that West was out on the farm. Janice, also, was nowhere to be seen. The sun was already hot, and the birds accompanied his breakfast with song and the flashing of brilliant wings on the lawn. It was too lovely a morning for even the thought that Janice might be avoiding him, that anyway he ought to leave, to depress him. The incident of the night had put new heart into him. For the first time something definite had happened that didn’t melt into a mist of uncertainty and vagueness when you examined it. An undoubted person had hit him on the head with a very tangible blunt instrument, and that was a crime, whether Munson had been murdered or not.

But once again, when he reached the Munson place in his car after breakfast, the line seemed to peter out. He used the insufflator on every likely looking surface he could see in Munson’s bedroom, but got no promising results. The surfaces were all rough, and seemed to have been wiped over. Mrs Munson and Corcoran had gone into Karuna to the inquest, which was being held that morning. It would be purely formal, conducted by the District 114

Commissioner, and there was no need for Vachell to attend. Prettyman would handle the police end of it, and an open verdict was the only possible one that could be returned. The funeral would be held immediately the inquiry closed.

A police corporal had been left at Munson’s to make inquiries among the native boys and to keep an eye on the Europeans as well. Vachell found the askari in the kitchen, drinking tea. All had been quiet yesterday afternoon, the native reported. Corcoran and Mrs Munson had gone away in the car about three o’clock and returned at five. Corcoran had ridden out to the farm on a pony until dark, and later, after supper, he had taken the car and disappeared until late. The corporal did not know the exact time he had returned, but it must have been after midnight.

Another bwana (that must be Wendtland) had come in a car at nine o’clock and stayed until about half-past ten. The corporal had heard the car go, that was how he knew the time. No, he had not seen the bwana leave himself, he was in bed then; he had not received orders to report the movements of people who had come to visit the farm. He had heard no other visitors, or strange noises, witnessed no intruders or unusual incidents, in the night.