The African Poison Murders (15 page)

“You found Mrs West in her room?” Vachell asked.

“Of course,” West answered shortly.

“I was in bed when I heard the shot,” Janice said quickly. “I saw someone running down by the fence out of the window, and a few minutes later Dennis rushed in. Then we came across here to see if the dogs were all right.”

“You came direct from your bedroom to this veranda?” Vachell asked.

“Yes.”

“Give me your right slipper, please.”

She looked at him as though he had gone crazy.

He repeated the sentence; his voice was expression146

less and hard. West made an uneasy movement by the door.

Without answering she pulled off the mule and handed it over, her eyes on his face. He put his palm over the sole for a moment and handed it back. There was fresh mud on it, packed under the heel, and the sole was wet. He said nothing at all.

A covered way with a cement floor led from her bedroom to the veranda, and the lawn was dry.

Neither of the Wests spoke. The houseboy came with a basin of warm water, some cotton, and a bottle of permanganate tablets. West held the lamp while Vachell went to work on Bullseye’s wound.

It was a deep knife-slash that had just missed the eye and ran down from ear to cheek. The dog squealed in pain as the permanganate stung. Vachell held her still by the muzzle and discovered that the underpart of the jaw was bruised and tender. It was easy to see what had happened. Bullseye had overtaken the quarry and got a blow on the jaw. She had sprung again and the knife had slashed out at her throat, just missing. Luckily the shock had made her give up: she was only eight months old. The next knifethrust would have been the last.

“Both askaris will be on duty the rest of the night,” Vachell said, when the firstaid job was done. “One outside your door and the other over by the farm buildings. Has the heifer calved yet, Commander West?”

“No. Not yet.”

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“If you have to go out to her, the askari will take you over.”

“My God,” West said, “are you trying to put me under arrest?”

Vachell stood up and wiped his hands. “No, sir.

I’m trying to secure your safety. I don’t want any more accidents tonight.”

“I can look after myself, thanks,” West said shortly. “And my wife.”

“The askaris will be there just the same,” Vachell replied.

He put Bullseye to bed under a blanket in his room, locked the door, and posted the two askaris.

It was still only half-past twelve. He slipped a torch into his pocket and went out to the farm buildings.

The cows slept out in the paddocks, but in the loose boxes he found two animals lying down in the straw.

They gazed at him in placid indifference, their velvet eyes soft in the darkness. He played the torch over their sleek forms, wishing he knew more about farming. To his inexperienced eye both were fatbellied but he could not tell which of the two was on the verge of calving. Their jaws moved with the deliberate motion of a liner in an even swell. He left them, feeling at a loss, and found his way to a small duck-pond he had noticed that morning among the farm buildings.

It was a shallow depression roughly lined with concrete, fed by the overflow from a big corrugated iron receiving-tank into which the ram pumped its constant flow. The working oxen came there to 148

drink when they were out-spanned, and for the rest it was available to chickens and ducks. Around the concrete’s edge was a trampled, muddy border pitted with the footmarks of many animals. Vachell bent down to study the story written in mud, flashlight in hand. Oxen had come there to drink the evening before. He found the record of a naked human foot, and then, just on the edge of the pond, he saw the mark of a small-heeled shoe. It was not a clear impression, but it was fresh. He drew a small steel measure from his pocket, took the dimensions as well as he could, and noted them down. Only the heelmark was clear; the toe was blurred. He could tell no more about it than that the foot was small.

Grass stretched around him like a rough grey carpet; the buildings squatted like hunched beasts in their own shadows. The moon had come out now; it made the tin roofs into shining pools. He played his torch over the grass. The questing beam flickered past a darker patch, returned, and held the discovery pinned down by a shaft of light. Vachell held the beam steady but he caught his breath and small cold prickles rippled up his spine. There was a dark stain on the moonlit grass. He walked up to it slowly, bent down, and touched it with his hand.

Hair rose slowly with a thrill of horror on the back of his scalp, and he rubbed together fingers glutinous with blood.

A little way off something lay like a limp discarded parcel in the shadow of a hen-house. He walked 149

towards it, forcing forward his reluctant legs at every step.

He reached the object and turned it over with his foot. It was the lifeless body of a duck. The head had been wrenched off and one wing half torn from the body. A dribble of blood from the mangled neck and head stained the ground. A second duck, headless also and mutilated, sprawled on the grass close by. The door of the wooden coop was open, and a piece of wire which had secured the fastening gleamed in the moonlight on the ground.

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FR1;FR2;CHAPTER

FOURTEEN

The first thing Vachell saw in the morning was a fly-catcher with a white-rimmed eye sitting perkily on the window-sill, and beyond that a deep red rose swaying in a light breeze. In the clean freshness of morning it was almost impossible to believe in the events of the night, to think without incredulity of that crouching monster in the cowhouse shadows craving the warm, thick feel of blood as a dipsomaniac craves for alcohol; of headless ducks bleeding onto moonlit grass; of a slashing knifethrust in a bull-terrier puppy’s face. Blood-lust and roses, the obscenity of madness and a purple waxbill swaying on a twig — such discordant elements could not be made to blend. But Bullseye’s bandaged head, the revolver on a table, bloodstains over VachelFs dressing-gown, furnished proof that it was not a nightmare, and quelled, in doing so, a little of the brilliance of the sun.

By breakfast-time Vachell and the two askaris had searched every square yard of bush below the garden, the bush that had swallowed the crouching 151

figure as completely as a lake swallows a stone.

They had found nothing at all. The askari who had seen the figure remained convinced, though he would no longer admit his belief, that a spirit had attacked the ducks. The ground was hard, and there was no sign of footprints. The marauding figure had left no trace, beyond its bloody signature of headless ducks, and Bullseye’s wound.

At breakfast both the Wests looked as though they had not slept at all. Janice’s pale smooth-skinned face showed nothing of her feelings, but her eyes looked tired and for the first time he noticed little crowsfeet scarring their corners. West’s hand shook as he lifted his coffee-cup, his eyes looked haunted; Vachell wondered how long he would resist a breakdown.

“Your heifer calve all right?” he inquired.

The Commander shook his head. “Not yet.”

After Vachell had dressed Bullseye’s wound and packed his bag he said good-bye to Janice. The time had come when no excuse could justify his staying on. His eyes avoided her face, but he could not help his senses responding, as the ear to music or the blood to rhythm, when he held her hand in his own.

“I’m sorry we had to meet like this.” He could think of nothing better to say.

“You must come again to visit us when all this … when this nightmare is over. Maybe it will be different then,” she replied.

“I’m sending a couple more askaris over today,”

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he added. “There’ll be two on duty all night. If they’re any good they’ll see that nothing like last night’s performance happens here again.

West looked greyer than ever, and his face twitched a little as he came to see his guest off the farm.

“It’s a ghastly business,” he said. “It’s so … so, well, indecent. I wish … I suppose you couldn’t…” His voice tailed off.

“Let the whole investigation drop?”

West looked startled and then nodded his head.

“Well, I was going to say something like that. Look here, you don’t know, do you, that Munson didn’t die from the fumes in the pyrethrum shed? That’s what it looks like. Doctor couldn’t find any other cause of death. Isn’t that good enough? You know what sort of man he was. Far better out of the way.

Couldn’t it be left at that?”

“How about Rhode,” Vachell asked slowly, “and what happened last night?”

“How do you know there’s any connexion? Very likely there’s some native in the district who’s gone crazy and prowls about at night, but he’ll soon be brought in. His family will take him along to the native hospital, I expect. Naturally we’re upset about Rhode and the … last night, but I don’t want to lodge a complaint….”

His voice tailed off again as he gave Vachell the sort of look a dog who’d stolen a bun off the teatable might give its master, hoping against hope that the matter would be overlooked.

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Vachell got into his car and pressed a thumb on the self-starter.

“Cops can’t listen to fairy stories all day,” he said.

“It’s nice, but they have to work sometimes, to keep up appearances.”

“The Mail Must Go Through,” West said, with a ghost of a smile. “I’m afraid someone may get run over.”

Vachell slipped in the gear lever but kept the clutch pedal down. He glanced up at West’s face.

“You don’t have any ideas, I suppose?” he asked.

West hesitated and Vachell could see that some sort of struggle was going on in his mind. At last he shook his head.

“No,” he said, “I haven’t. It’s beyond me.”

Vachell waited, but no more came.

“If you develop any, take some advice; don’t talk to anyone but a policeman,” he said.

, As he drove down the hill he could see, in his mirror, the Commander standing bareheaded on the lawn, staring at his feet. He looked somehow defeated and forlorn. Afterwards the picture came back very clearly to Vachell’s mind, and he reflected often on the irony of events, that this last message should have been an unregarded warning.

In Karuna he found that a preliminary report from the labs had come in, but it was negative, as he’d known it would be. Prettyman had checked on Wendtland’s movements and found several of his natives who were ready to swear that their employer had been on his own farm the morning ofMunson’s 154

death, until after nine o’clock. But Wendtland had dined the night before, as Vachell knew, at Munson’s place. The Dorobo hunter Arawak could not be found; Vachell had a general call put out for him by telegraph to all the police-stations and district headquarters in the colony. Since Dorobo could live for years in the forest on honey and the produce of their traps and bows he did not entertain very rosy hopes of the effectiveness of the appeal. He tried to see Mrs Innocent again, but she was pleading all morning in court and couldn’t be called out.

After an early lunch he drove back to the Munsons’

farm, leaving Prettyman to catch up on ordinary routine. He could tell that something was wrong as soon as he drove up; the homestead looked deserted, and in the distance he could see a native running, in itself a sign of something unusual.

Before he could get out of the car the children came tearing out of the schoolroom, excited and apparently alone.

“There’s a fire!” Roy called out. “A big one, with huge flames, it’s coming this way.” He halted, panting, beside the car. “Oh, you’re the man we told about Arawak’s bow and arrows. Look, will you please take me to the fire? I can help just as well as the others. You’ll take me, won’t you, please?”

Theodora, standing beside her brother, said: Oh, yes, please! We’ll be awfully good, really, we won’t get in the way or anything.”

“I can’t do that,” Vachell said. “I’m sorry, but your mother would bawl me out and I guess Miss 155

Adams would get mad with us all. Listen, where is this fire?”

Both children looked downcast and disappointed.

Vachell knew his stock had fallen with a bump.

“I do think you might take us,” Roy said. “We’ll jolly well come anyway, though. I’m not going to miss all the fun. It’s up by the edge of the forest, I think. You can see it, over there.”

A thick cloud of smoke stood up in the sky above the forest, towards Anstey’s land. There were vultures wheeling about in it, black specks in a dense grey pall.

Vachell started up the car and steered for the smoke, jolting along farm tracks that skirted the paddock fences all over the farm. As he drew closer the sharp acrid smell of burning filled the air. A steady wind was blowing, enough to fan the flames and carry the vicious red snake of fire into the forest and up the side of the mountain, or perhaps across towards the buildings and the stock.

The car rounded a corner and he saw the fire ahead, creeping low over the knee-high grass towards a wall of forest. The foliage of scattered trees was blazing and shrivelling visibly, and black smoke arose in angry swirls. Kites and cranes were circling overhead, darting at intervals into the smoke to seize mice, frogs, and insects as they scurried and hopped in panic before the running flames. There was something very ugly about a big fire.

Through the smoke, on the far side of the flames, figures darted and called, beating at the fire with 156

sticks and damp sacks. The bark of axes sounded from the forest beyond. Evidently Corcoran was trying to clear a lane in the fire’s line of advance.

It was going up the hill and into the forest, away from the Munson homestead; but if it went far enough in that direction it would encounter Anstey’s house and buildings in its path.

On the right the fire had been checked by the gully dividing Munson’s land from West’s. Vachell clambered up the gully, got behind the line of flames, and ran along to join Corcoran and his gang of boys, who were chopping undergrowth and small trees against time to clear an open barrier. Corcoran’s face was as black as his men’s and his hands were scratched and bleeding.