The African Poison Murders (22 page)

A little before midnight an idea clicked in his brain. It was like a movie of the collapse of a house of cards seen in reverse: one basic card was put in position, and the whole structure reared itself miraculously in the air. With a deepening excitement he ran through notebook and memory to check the foundations of the idea, and its implications.

Everything fitted into a coherent whole.

Motive was conjectural, but he had the rest — and, above all, the little discrepancy in one person’s actions that had provided the key.

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The Commissioner was always difficult to understand on the telephone; he snorted like a hippopotamus, and snapped: “What, what, what?” like a repeating rifle when he couldn’t hear. But next morning, with perseverance, Vachell made him understand that he intended to make an arrest.

“Quite sure you’re on solid ground?” Major Armitage barked. “Can’t have mistakes being made, y’know. International complications in this case, you realize that. German Consul’s been on at us this end, kicking up a hell of a row.”

“It’s a question of the public safety, sir,” Vachell explained. “I’m afraid we’re not at the end of the road. There may be a third murder in the next few days.”

“A third murder!” the Commissioner’s voice barked. “Can’t have that, wouldn’t do at all. There’s been enough comment as it is. I saw H.E. yesterday and he’s quite concerned about these incidents, quite concerned. You must see to it, Vachell, you must see to it without fail.”

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“Yes, sir,” Vachell agreed. He hung up, and sat for several minutes staring at the phone. The lines on his long face had deepened, and his eyes were tired. Prettyman noticed something dispirited about his movements, and wondered if he’d had bad dreams, or a ticking-off from his boss.

“The hell of it is,” Vachell said aloud, “unless there’s a third attempt, we haven’t the proof to convict a bee of stealing honey. And if there’s a third attempt…” He left the sentence unfinished.

“We’ll catch him in the act,” Prettyman said cheerfully. Vachell looked up with eyes that had lost their sparkle.

The half-sceptical, half-amused expression habitual to his face had faded; he looked grave now, almost afraid.

“Catch a maniac who’s got enough poison to rub out a hundred men,” he queried, “a poison that you can leave around on a nail or a splinter or anything sharp that your victim’s likely to handle, and kill him stone dead in five minutes when you’re fifty miles away? A killer who’s living so close to the next victim marked down for elimination, the job could be done any time in the twenty-four hours?”

“Put that way, it does sound a tall order,” Prettyman agreed.

Vachell drummed on the office desk with his fingers for a little.

“Listen,” he said suddenly. “Is there accommodation for women prisoners here?”

“Women prisoners?” Prettyman exclaimed, as if 227

the superintendent had referred to green snow or eight-legged cows. “Well….”

“For God’s sake, don’t women in this district ever go wrong?”

“Well, there was Mrs Shew,” Prettyman said doubtfully. “She was a bit batty, and finally she had a row with her neighbour, a Seventh-Day Adventist, and I must admit a tiresome sort of bloke, and jabbed him in the backside with a red-hot brandingiron.

There isn’t a woman warder or anything here, not for Europeans. My predecessor locked her into a room at the Black Buffalo and those swine at the Treasury knocked the hire of the room off his pay.

Actually, the spare room in my bungalow would do, I suppose…”

“Get it ready,” Vachell ordered briefly. “And if there is an arrest, for Christ’s sake don’t talk.”

“Hush-hush stuff?”

“For as long as possible.”

“Okay,” Prettyman said. “I’ll have the sheets changed this morning.”

But Vachell didn’t make his arrest all day. He put it off a dozen times, reluctant to act, uncertain how to prevent a crime whose final shape, he knew, was growing hour by hour in a twisted, cunning mind. An almost unbearable feeling of expectancy tortured his nerves. He dreaded to see, at any minute, a figure coming running with urgent news, a car draw up with a squeal of brakes, to know that he must face the sight of the third victim, too late again to save a life.

228

He had the opening surprise of a long, nerveracked, surprising day when he reached his first port of call that morning, Norman Parrot’s farm.

“The bwana is not back,” Parrot’s houseboy said.

“Back from where?”

“From the burial of Bwana West.”

“But Bwana West was buried yesterday morning.”

“Yes, that is true. My bwana went to Karuna for the ceremony, and has not returned.”

Vachell scratched his chin, taken aback. Parrot would hardly have stayed in Karuna all yesterday, kicking his heels. The only thing was to go back and pick up his trail. He spent the best part of a hot and aggravating morning trying to dig out news, but so far as he could make out Norman Parrot had vanished into thin air. He had been at the funeral all right, and soon after it was over he had been seen by the Indian bootmaker who repaired his shoes coming out of the doorway leading to Mrs Innocent’s office. But Clara Innocent herself denied emphatically that he had been to see her — she had never acted for him in any way, she said —

and the Indian, on being pressed, admitted that he might have been mistaken, it might have been another doorway, or perhaps someone else, not Parrot at all. Telephone calls to Marula yielded no result. He had not checked in at any of the hotels there, or at the country club.

“Who are his pals?” Vachell inquired. “Maybe he took a fancy to go off on a visit.”

“I don’t know,” Prettyman confessed. “He’s a 229

newcomer, you know, and I don’t think he had any particular pals. He’s friendly with most people, but no one more so than others, so far as I know, except the Wests. Funny his clearing off like that when she’s left on her own. You’d think he’d stay and help her, now she’s in a hole.”

“We’ve got to find him,” Vachell said. “This is no time for a guy to stage a disappearing act.”

“I’ll wire all the stations, if you like. After all, his car’s gone too, so we ought to trace him by that. I’ll get the licence number from the garage. Have you asked Mrs West, sir? She’d be most likely to know what he’s up to.”

“Not yet,” Vachell said.

He knew he ought to go up there, but he put it off again to go to Wendtland’s farm. The young German was not there either. He had driven off that morning in his car, the boys said, after a telegram had come. Perhaps he had gone to Marula; they did not know; he often went away like that. In spite of its master’s frequent absences the farm looked active and neat, with well laid-out paddocks, a chain of small conservation dams, and broad-base terraces on all the slopes. Quite a lot of money must have been spent on it; the British settlers were convinced this came from Nazi funds.

The askaris left on Munson’s farm reported nothing unusual. Following Vachell’s instructions, one had kept close to Mrs Munson all day, and the other had searched all the buildings and sheds methodically for an empty gasolene can with a 230

bottom blackened by fire. They had found two.

Vachell inspected them carefully, using his magnifying glass, and then said: “All right, return them; and look again.” The Europeans, they added, had not gone away, but the night before a leopard had tried to get into the bullpen, and Corcoran was building a trap on the lines he had learnt from the Dorobo, who were experts at the art.

It was dark before Vachell finally reached the Wests’ farm. There was a light in the livingroom and the dogs barked when they heard the car.

He knocked and went in, feeling as if it were an operating-room and the anaesthetist were approaching with the mask.

Janice West was at the writing-desk, her forehead resting on one hand, wrestling with a water permit form requiring her to estimate the daily flow in cusecs of water over a dam. She looked up as he entered, and smiled.

“Come in,” she said. “I’ve been hoping to see you all day.” She got up and turned a setter off the sofa to make room. Her eyes looked enormous in a white tired face; her movements were jerky and he could see that her nerves were strained almost to breaking-point. She looked as though it was a long time since she had eaten or slept. “It’s bad being without news,” she added. “I haven’t seen anyone all day, but one hears endless rumours from the boys. Has anything fresh….”

Vachell shook his head, keeping his eyes on the pack of cigarettes in his hand.

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“Not yet. I’m looking for Norman Parrot.”

Her left hand went to her throat in the familiar gesture and rested there. “Norman…? Nothing has happened to him?”

The question went unanswered.

“I need information. Where has he gone?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I didn’t know he’d gone at all. When….”

“He was with you yesterday in Karuna?”

“Yes. He came to … to the funeral.”

“Did he bring you back?”

She shook her head. “I came by myself. I wanted to. I haven’t seen him since.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“No. I thought he was coming back directly to the farm. He never said anything about going away.

I kind of expected to see him today; he said he’d come up … Don’t his boys know?”

Vachell shook his head. “Do you know of anywhere he’d be likely to go in a hurry, without so much as packing a grip?”

“No.” She walked over to the sideboard and started to mix a drink, turning her back. “Gin-andFrench or Scotch? I don’t know him that well. I guess he’s like that, he gets impulses. Maybe he’s gone off for a few days fishing. He goes up to the Samaki river sometimes, to a little fishing-hut up there.”

“In his best suit?”

Janice said nothing, but brought him over a drink.

She did not meet his eyes. He knew that she was 232

lying as certainly as he knew that he wanted to kiss her as much as he’d ever wanted anything in his life.

A sharp knock at the door made her start so much that some of her drink spilt over. She turned her head to watch the door with a frightened jerk. Her eyes were wide with apprehension.

Before she could speak the door opened to reveal a police askari, square-shouldered and erect. He brought his hand up smartly to the temple and the hand went on quivering like the surface of a gong after it has been struck.

“What is it?” Vachell asked.

“We have found a petrol tin, bwana.”

Vachell nodded, and said: “Good. Where?” There was a sound like a breeze just stirring a tree’s foliage as Janice expelled a deep gulp of air. Her muscles relaxed, and she walked across to the sofa and sat down.

“In a hut behind the kitchen, bwana. It is an old hut once used as store, perhaps, but now ready to fall down.”

“Where was the tin?”

“In a corner, beneath an old sack and some boards.”

“Bring it here.”

The askari saluted again and vanished into the blackness outside. The setters, disturbed by the arrival of another stranger, roamed around the room and settled themselves afresh on the chairs. Neither of the people in the room spoke. The askari came 233

back with an empty four-gallon Shell petrol tin held by the rim in one hand. He put it down on the floor and stood to attention.

Vachell turned it over and examined the bottom of the tin. There was a round black patch on the outside.

“This has been used to cook with,” he observed.

His voice was conversational, as though he was pointing out the features of a washing-machine or discussing the merits of a car. “You can see where the flames blackened the tinplate. Let’s see what we can find inside.” He held it up to the light and peered into its empty depths.

“I don’t understand,” Janice said. From the way she spoke he could tell that her mouth was dry.

“It’s been recently cleaned,” he went on, “but it’s hard to clean thoroughly right in the corners.

See that black deposit down there?” He held the tin so that she could see inside it. She pushed it aside and stood up, breathing fast.

“Do you have to put on this act?” she demanded.

“Do you think I’m impressed, do you believe it gets you anywhere? Why can’t you say what you want to say, and go? Your askari has found an old gasolene can in an old hut. So what? What does it all mean?”

Vachell had produced a pocket-knife and was scraping out a corner of the tin. The blade came away with traces of a black sticky substance on the steel.

“It means that this is the utensil in which the 234

arrowpoison that killed Munson — and your husband — was brewed,” he said.

235

It was a little after seven when Vachell braked his car in front of the Munson livingroom. Through the undraped windows he could see that the family had not yet begun the evening meal. Mrs Munson, Corcoran and Anita Adams were sitting around an unlighted fire when he entered. He got the impression that he had interrupted a not too harmonious discussion. Corcoran’s good-looking sunburnt face was flushed, and he was breathing quickly. Mrs Munson, on the other hand, bore all the signs of having scored a good point. She was sitting four-square on the edge of a chair, her hands full of knitting.

“Excuse me for intruding,” he said. “I don’t want to break up anything. I just dropped in to see everything was okay.”

There was an awkward silence. Mrs Munson broke it by saying, almost affably: “We have been expecting to see you all day.

Your two askaris are here making a nuisance of themselves to everyone but doing no work whatever.

Have you caught the murderer yet, may I ask?”

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“There’s been no arrest.”

“I’m glad you’ve turned up at last,” Corcoran said. “Now you’ve had a chance to consider it I hope you’ll—” He broke off, glanced at Anita Adams, and frowned. “I hope you’ll agree to what I said last night.”

“Sorry,” Vachell said. “I can’t play ball.”

Corcoran started to say something and checked himself sharply. He looked very annoyed.

“I can’t see what use it can possibly be to you to have —”