The African Poison Murders (27 page)

The leopard, come to investigate, perhaps. It wasn’t ten yards away. A violent sound behind made him jump. The turkey had come to life again suddenly, and started to flap its impotent wings. Something had scared it, all right. The shape Vachell had been staring at had disappeared. It was the leopard, then.

He swallowed hard, and tried to steady his hand on the gun. The posts no longer seemed solid. They seemed a flimsy protection, and the chinks between each post yawning gaps.

Nothing happened, after that, for some time. His ears grew more accustomed to the shrill, loud cry of the hyraxes, the creak of junipers, the rustles of moving animal life. He lit his last cigarette with a steadier hand, and smoked it through. The aches in his stiff, cold limbs grew painful again, and he tried to warm his hands under his armpits, then by sitting on them, but with little avail. His teeth were nearly chattering and he had pins and needles in his feet.

A sound which seemed somehow different came 280

to his ears. He didn’t know why it was an alien noise, but it was. The sound of rustling, then of a stick snapping suddenly, then a branch whipping back into place. He realized that all the other sounds of the night, save the creaking of cedars, had ceased abruptly. The hyraxes had stopped their screeching, a buck whose soft progress through the forest to his left he had been following half unconsciously had ceased to move. Another stick cracked, and a tense silence followed. The sounds came from straight ahead. From the path. He caught his breath, and gripped the revolver again. This was it, at last.

Someone was coming, very cautiously, very slowly, along the path.

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Through the chinks of the door Vachell could see nothing but blackness; there was no moon. He could not see the figure that crept closer by stages, moving skilfully over the rough forest path. But his ears, made keener by the long silence as eyes are made sharper by the dark, could follow the approach.

Rustle, swish, and then quiet. Something too soft for a footfall, too loud for the fall of a leaf. A gradual closing in.

Vachell waited, every muscle rigid, gun in hand.

The figure must be close to the door. Close enough to see that the trap was shut.

There was a long pause. The beat of his heart sounded like hammer on anvil, the blood in his ears like a waterfall. He scarcely dared to breathe. He could feel the presence of another human as clearly as he could feel the butt of the gun in his hand. A new element had come into the air. Something electric, magnetic — no word could describe it.

The presence of a human, as definite a thing to him as the smell of a leopard to a bushbuck. He could 282

feel his mind encountering another mind in the darkness as two buck might lock horns. Behind his tense concentration, a part of his mind wondered whether it was indeed some latent unconscious sense of smell, a dim inheritance of the primitive, that warned a man when any of his kind was near.

A sudden commotion stabbed the tense, fierce silence like a knife. The turkey flapped its wings and rattled its tail feathers with a noise that sounded in Vachell’s ears like thunder. An instant later a white blinding light assaulted his eyes. He fell back involuntarily, as if he had received a physical blow.

The light came through gaps between the posts in long shafts. Beyond the posts he could see nothing at all. He pushed the barrel of the revolver into a chink of the door, his finger ready on the trigger, aiming at the light. He realized with sickening clarity that if the killer had a gun he was finished.

He couldn’t see his target, but the killer could.

The voice, when it came out of the darkness, sent a thrill of horror through his heart. It was a hoarse, rasping whisper— a crazy whisper, the whisper of an insane degenerate in the grip of the thing that had overthrown the balance of the mind.

“I can see you,” it said. “Keep still. You are going to die.” The hand holding the light moved around in a wide circle, and the beam dodged through the cracks to find Vachell’s eyes. “So it’s you, then. You will die too. I don’t mind. She must die, and then….”

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The whisper petered out hoarsely, but the flashlight went on describing its crazy, senseless curves.

Vachell started to speak quickly in a low, urgent voice.

“I’ve got you covered with this gun. You can’t shoot through this timber, but I can get you. One of my men is just behind. Switch off that flashlight and —”

The sixth sense that warns of desperate danger made him break off and jerk his body back. There was no other warning. Something flashed past in front of him from the left, missing his chest by a fraction of an inch, and flashed back the way it had come. Simultaneously he fired at the light. Before the roar of the report had died out among the startled trees the light went out.

For a second there was no sound. Then a low, hideous laugh sounded almost in Vachell’s ear. His own flashlight sprang to life and lit the rough cedar posts of his prison with a blinding illumination. He swore violently and switched it off. The chinks between the posts were too narrow. Threads of light struck through, but reflection off the posts blinded him and the light threw his own position into sharp relief. And from outside the killer was jabbing through the gaps with a pointed stick, whittled down to pencil thinness. A stick whose tip, he knew, was coated with black poison.

The turkey was beating its wings in a frantic paroxysm in the corner. Vachell cursed it aloud. All other sounds were drowned by its thrashings. He 284

was sweating with terror, feeling the pricking of the stick’s point on his flesh in a hundred places. Arrowpoison —

no antidote. The thought swelled like a balloon in his head.

He heard the rattle of wood on wood to his right.

In a chip of a split second he switched on the flashlight, saw a black point coming towards him, flung his body forward, felt the sleeve of his coat rip open and something rough brush against the skin of his arm. He didn’t know whether it had cut the flesh. He dropped the flashlight and with a twist of the body brought his left arm round underneath, rolled over as far as he could go, and made a desperate grab for the stick. He caught it as it was being jerked back and felt his flesh burn as it tore across his palm, and his hand close on air. He pushed up his right arm and fired three times through the cedar posts to his right. Then he heard the laugh again, low and crazy.

Now he was panting and sweating with fear. The inside of the trap was flooded with light, and smoke from the gunpowder danced in motes across the 1| beam. He picked up the flashlight and jabbed it ||| against the posts, trying to shine the beam through the chinks. A long thread of light picked out leaf mould, earth, a tangle of thin branches. It was no good.

Panting still, he sat back on his heels, flashlight in one hand, gun in the other. He put down the flashlight and reloaded the gun, trying to keep his hands steady. From behind he could feel in 285

imagination the prick of the pointed stick all down his spine. He bent quickly to one side, swivelled his wrist, and fired behind him through the back of the trap. Silence closed in after the crash; and then, from the direction in which he’d fired, he heard again the hoarse, low-pitched laugh.

His ears ached for the faint sound of wood grating on wood. Before it came, another sound broke the stillness from in front. A long shout, repeated, and then the distant crashes of a body hurling itself through the undergrowth towards the trap. Vachell, sick with hope, fired again into the posts at his back.

Now he could hear the running feet. He shouted with all the force of his lungs. A moment later the askari burst through the thicket ahead and pulled himself up against the door of the trap.

“Watch out!” Vachell called. “Shoot what you see!”

He heard the askari’s panting and the slap of his hand against the rifle butt.

“There is no one, bwana.”

Vachell swore. “Let me out. Quickly, lift the door…” At last he stood erect outside, his cramped knees aching painfully. He took a deep, glorious breath, and swung the flashlight around. It showed thickets, brambles, vast mysterious pillars immobile in the darkness, the thick boles of towering trees.

Behind the trap some leaves on a branch were swaying slightly. The flashlight picked them out in sharp relief. The whole scene looked unreal, cut out of paper, like a stage set.

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“Gone!” he exclaimed. “You followed?”

“Yes, bwana,” the askari’s face gleamed with sweat. He spoke in a quick, excited voice. “To where the path forks, but then I did not know which way. I waited, hidden in the forest, because I…”

“Yes, yes! This path — where does it go?”

“A little way, to a place where wood is cut —

that is all, bwana. It does not continue. No one can escape that way.”

“They can circle back. The house and the road are guarded?”

“Yes, bwana. Corporal Abdul is there. Capture is certain, unless…” The askari clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Perhaps …”

“What? Quickly!”

“The motor-car — if it could be reached. No one guards it. One askari only….”

“Go,” Vachell ordered. “Run like a cheetah, tell Corporal Abdul to seize whoever moves and guard the car. But do not shoot.”

The askari clicked his heels, saluted, turned and ran back down the path in long, loping strides.

Vachell pushed his way into the forest through a gap where the quivering leaves hung. The path was very narrow. Fallen logs lay across it, a branch hung low. The flashlight picked out the obstacles in vivid black and white. The gun was ready in his hand.

But the quarry had vanished into the forest and the dark. Vachell came to an old clearing, full of mossy stumps and slippery, rotting logs, and retraced his footsteps past the trap. The white turkey still 287

crouched in a corner, bemused with fear. No sounds but those of his own progress came to his ears.

He felt like a man released from a lightless dungeon when he came out of the forest and stood in the open, a star-strewn sky clear and untroubled overhead. The air was cold as sleet on his face. Half running, half walking, he reached the Munson homestead, breathless but warm at last. The corporal and the other askari were patrolling the buildings on bare, silent feet.

“Not yet bwana,” the corporal reported. “But, whoever comes, we shall see.”

Vachell nodded, crossed the lawn to his car, and got in. He pulled a flask out of the dashboard pocket and took a long drink. The whisky spread out inside in a warm, sharp flood. He found a packet of cigarettes and lit one, frowning at the match. The hand that held it was shaking like the leaves that had trembled over the forest path. He blew out the smoke with a deep, grateful breath. His blood was tingling from the whisky in his hands and toes and ears.

He was jerked back into action by a shout from the direction of the hen-houses, a distant, shapeless mass in the pale light. He was half-way across the lawn when the shot came. A second later a ghastly screech, a cross between a cry and a bellow, brought him to a halt. Once he had shot a monkey; it had fallen from the tree with a cry like that, and he had never fired at another. A half human, half animal cry. He plunged on, rounded the corner of the 288 I

hen-houses, and saw both askaris bending over something on the ground.

The corporal stood erect when he reached the scene.

“Bwana, I shot at the leopard,” he exclaimed. “I saw it come, it was creeping round the corner and the house of the chickens. I did not think — I did not know — what man walks like a leopard, bent low?”

Vachell knelt down and turned the body over.

The shot had torn through the chest. The head lolled back, and the lifeless face — white, distorted, the lips drawn back from the teeth, the jaw hanging loose — stared into his own. Possessed by a madness that could be concealed but not conquered, diseased in mind and yet pathetic in futility, Vachell felt a twinge of sorrow for Anita Adams as he let her body sag back on to the ground. The corporal was jittering by his side, fearing rebuke. Vachell stood up slowly, and wiped his hands on a handkerchief.

“It was a good shot,” he said.

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The sudden snapping of the tension that had stretched their nerves to breaking-point during the past few days made them all a little lightheaded.

Norman Parrot, looking true to life again in his old burberry, his blond hair dishevelled and curly, had been rolling about on the lawn in a violent game with Bullseye and the red setters. He was hot and panting and covered with bits of grass. Janice West was lying back in a garden-chair, a glass of beer at her side. Her eyes were still tired and haunted but she was smiling at Parrot’s antics. It was the first time there’d been anything to smile at, Vachell thought, for what seemed like half a lifetime, or more.

Parrot abandoned the dogs and came over to join them in the shade of a tree. A bed of delphiniums between them and the view made a brilliant patch in the sunlight, and a syringa in full blossom scented the air.

“I need beer,” he remarked. “I could drink enough to waterlog the Queen Mary.”

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Janice West waved a hand towards the table, bearing bottles, and said: “Help yourself.”

“You know, Vachell, I owe you an apology,”

Parrot remarked. “I’m sorry I had to spring on you like a jaguar and then bat you on the bean with a torch. Highly irregular, I’m afraid, and I dare say I shall get ten years in chains. The trouble was I didn’t know who you were till the damage was done, and then it was too late to explain.”

Vachell rubbed the back of his head reminiscently.

“I bought it,” he admitted. “I should have known enough to look behind the door.”

“I heard you outside Munson’s room and only just had time to slip out of sight, ready for the pounce. I thought it was Wendtland, of course. You could have knocked me down with a feather when I saw I’d laid out the pride of the Chania police.”

“It was smart to know where to look,” Vachell observed, “to find Munson’s horde of nuts.”