The African Poison Murders (28 page)

Parrot glanced across at Janice, and smiled. She shut her eyes and leant her head back, her hands linked behind her neck. Vachell helped himself to more beer and tried to fix his mind on Parrot, on the report he’d got to write, on anything to stop him thinking how tired she looked, how wrung out by emotion, how after today he would not be seeing her again.

“A little bird told me,” Parrot said. “A bird of fine plumage and sweet song, and, if one can apply the phrase to birds, of considerable guts.”

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Vachell put down his beer and reached for a cigarette, lit it, and leant back in the chair.

“You mean…?” he began, and stopped; he couldn’t press Parrot for a reply.

“Didn’t you know?” Parrot asked. “Oh, I thought you’d realize that Janice was working in with me as soon as you tumbled to my little game. (I owe you an apology about that, too; I ought to have warned you what I was up to when all this started, but I thought you’d be certain to know, as Armitage had the information. Just like the old fathead not to pass it on, I wonder if he forgot or thought it too secret to mention out loud?) Anyway, Janice was helping me in this show. When I say helping, she was doing it all, I just sat back and used the information. It’s a dirty game, at times.”

Janice opened her eyes. “If I’d known how dirty I wouldn’t have played. It’s like swimming, it’s too late once you’re in to worry about the water being cold.” There was a touch of bitterness in her voice.

Parrot walked over with a beer bottle to fill her glass, and touched her hand lightly with his own.

“It’s over now,” he said. “It worked, and it didn’t have anything to do with — with the other business, and Dennis being killed.”

“I know.” She shut her eyes again and smiled faintly, and stroked a setter that rested its chin on her knee.

“You mean,” Vachell said slowly, “Mrs West was stringing Munson along to get information on Nazi activities, which she passed on to you?”

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Parrot nodded. “Unpleasant, isn’t it? Definitely allergic to the old school tie. Why anybody ever thought that worming information out of reluctant foreigners, nine-tenths of it useless anyway, was a romantic sort of job, God knows. It’s all done by bribery, or else by taking advantage of some rather unpleasant bloke’s weaknesses, so it’s a cad’s game either way. Janice would have driven Munson off long ago, but I propositioned her to keep him on a string and find out all she could about the doings of this precious Bund. And I must say, she did it proud. Here’s to Olga Pulloffski, the beautiful spy.”

He raised his glass to Janice, but although his tone was facetious there was an almost dog-like look of devotion in his eyes.

Janice sat up and reached for her drink. “Thank you for telling him, Norman,” she said. “I didn’t know if that would be allowed.” She looked across at Vachell and some of the animation returned to her face.

“It wasn’t so bad as it sounds,” she said. “Munson was easy to handle, I didn’t have to lure him on in a negligee over supper for two with caviare and iced champagne, or anything. He liked to talk about himself. I kept the seduction on a reasonably platonic level, but it got in my hair to have him around at all.”

“And he told you where to look for the papers Wendtland wanted?” Vachell asked. He felt light in the head, as if a ten-ton weight had been taken away.

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“Not exactly, but he told me that he’d hidden them, and one day he said: ‘Every night I lie on my back in bed and see the hiding-place of the bomb to blow Wendtland up, and I think, ha, ha,’ or words to that effect. So Norman figured they must be behind the ceiling somewhere, and the first chance he got he went over to grab them before Wendtland and Mrs Munson tore the house apart.”

“And brained Vachell in the process,” Parrot added. “Munson was using them to blackmail Wendtland into giving him back the leadership of the Bund. Of course, Wendtland had taken over under orders from Berlin. He’d been down in South Africa for a couple of years, helping to organize the Siidafrika Bund, and got himself into a nice mess down there. The dark-eyed non-Aryans of Jo’burg were too much for him, he got a girl into trouble and in due course a little non-Aryan with a stormtrooper for a poppa was born. Somehow Munson’s sister dug it all up and got a statement from the girl, and some letters Wendtland had written to her, which proved the thing beyond doubt. As you know, Aryan boy mustn’t meet non-Aryan girl in the Reich or its outposts, and I suppose if loyal members of the party had raised a stink, the personnel department would have to sit up and take notice and kick Wendtland out of the Bund.”

“The information wasn’t much use to you,”

Vachell suggested.

“No, not directly, although it’s all gone off to the right quarters in Berlin, on the general theory that 294

anything which upsets an apple-cart is a good thing.

That was why I had to disappear so suddenly, by the way; I had to get it off in Munson’s name before news of his death got back to Germany, and the channel doesn’t, so to speak, open out from here.

However, there was some other stuff with the proofs of Wendtland’s little slip — lists of active Nazis here, and one or two other documents Munson evidently hadn’t wanted to hand over to his successor.

He wasn’t a very loyal Nazi, I’m afraid.”

Vachell looked across at Janice over the rim of his glass. “I owe you two apologies,” he said. “One for getting you all wrong — if I hadn’t been a sap I’d have guessed how it was between you and Munson — the other for having you forcibly abducted by one of your sincerest admirers, Inspector Prettyman. At least you didn’t have to go to jail.”

Janice looked down at her hands resting on her lap and said: “It seemed a little harsh. I thought you really believed that I’d killed Karl Munson and then Dennis. That was tough, you know.”

“Yes,” Vachell said. “I gave Prettyman the job.

I couldn’t take it. I was afraid you wouldn’t agree to leave the farm at my suggestion, and I couldn’t explain — I had no proof. I figured you’d think I was nuts and stay where you were, right here, and that was another thing I couldn’t take — the knowledge you were in danger.”

Janice looked up at him in surprise. A slight touch of colour had come to her cheeks. “I don’t Ł ‘ 295

understand,” she said. “Why should Anita — that poor girl, I can’t possibly realize she was that crazy, and I never knew it — why should she want to hurt me? We were always very friendly, she seemed to like me well enough, she never gave any sign….”

“Sure, she liked you,” Vachell answered. “You had everything she hadn’t and never would have — looks, poise, and whatever it takes to turn levelheaded guys like Parrot here and me into softheaded saps who’d pull out their eye-teeth if you wanted them for souvenirs. She could admire it, she was kind of fascinated, she liked to watch and talk with you, and the more she did so the more a festering sort of jealousy grew in her twisted, abnormal mind. When those crazy spells attacked her things came up out of the subconscious like seabeasts from the ocean bed after a marine earthquake.

And, among them, was a blind and ghastly sort of jealousy, because you had all the things she wanted and never could have, whatever she did.”

Janice shook her head. “I can’t believe it, even now. She was a pathetic creature. I can see how she was all tangled up inside, with no normal home life and the sort of treatment the Munsons would give a governess, but it’s the violence I can’t understand.”

“I can’t understand much of it either,” Vachell agreed. “It’s the sort of case a psychiatrist would go to town on, but it’s over the head of an ordinary cop. From what Anstey said, it seems she wouldn’t remember much of what she did when these spells were on her, after they passed off. They were all 296

attempts to injure you. Remember you told me, right at the beginning, you felt there was something malicious trying to get at you? I reckon she wanted to make you suffer for the injustice done to her, to give you hell because you had everything when she’d been cheated of it all. She tried to hurt you through the things you cared for — your prize flowers, your dogs — but she might not have kept going that way. She might have turned on you. That was why I was scared.”

Janice shivered a little, and said: “It’s horrible.

Anything turned inside out, that one can’t understand, gives me the heeby-jeebies. If only I’d known….”

“There wasn’t a thing you could do. Her mind was diseased. Once she’d started on an orgy of murder she couldn’t stop. I reckoned the only way to play for safety was to get you right out of it, with Prettyman and a couple of police askaris guarding you with fixed bayonets and drawn swords.”

Janice smiled wryly: “Thanks,” she said. “It would have been nice to have known that at the time. It isn’t so good to be locked up in an eightby-eight bedroom with a cop by the window and another outside the door, even though Inspector Prettyman was the soul of courtesy, and so embarrassed, poor boy. But I still don’t understand. These crazy spells are one thing, but brewing arrowpoison and smearing it on nails is something else again.”

“Sure, there wasn’t anything exactly crazy about that part. That was a scheme built by her conscious 297

mind, I guess, not a sort of outbreak of criminal lunacy, like tearing off the heads of ducks. But it was the product of an abnormal mind, just the same.

It’s hard to draw a line between the two.”

“What I can’t understand,” Parrot interposed, “is why she decided to bump off Munson, particularly.

He was a nasty piece of work, and anyone might have wanted to get him out of the way, but after all if she didn’t like him (and who shall blame her) she could always have pushed off and got another job.”

“Not without leaving the children. That’s where the crazy part comes in. She loved those kids, they were the only living creatures she had to love, and the only ones who showed her any real affection in return. And they weren’t hers. That was what burnt her up — they weren’t hers.”

“You mean she killed Munson in order to get the children to herself?” Janice asked incredulously.

“I’m dealing with supposition here. But I’ve talked with Anstey, and he says it has a basis of possibility. It’s the same kind of feeling she had toward you — a violent unreasoning jealousy, with its roots in God knows what complexes and maladjustments.

The kids were hers, she took care of them and loved them, but all the time they belonged to the lousy Munsons, whom she hated, and not to her. The injustice swelled up to the size of a monster balloon in her mind. So she decided to clear the tracks, to rub out both Munsons and get the kids for her own. They’d be hers for keeps, then.

“It was a crazy scheme, the product of a crazy 298

brain. She got the Acocanthera from Arawak, the old Dorobo mole-catcher — at least that’s my guess.

We haven’t pulled him in yet, but when we do we’ll get that loose end tied up. She stewed it in an old gasolene can, which she subsequently planted over here so if it ever got found it wouldn’t be traced to her — that was another crack at you — and stuck a doctored nail through the sole ofMunson’s shoe.”

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“But what made you ever suspect Anita”, Janice asked, “at all?”

“You did.” Vachell poured out some more beer and grinned at her across the froth.

“But I had no idea….”

“Two little pointers gave me a line, but if it hadn’t been for something you told me, I’d never have doped out just how she lied in regard to her alibi for the time when the poisoned nail was taken out of Munson’s shoe.”

“Couldn’t you begin at the beginning and go on from there?”

“Okay. I’ll take the two pointers first. We figured, very early in the case, that the reason Munson went into the pyrethrum shed was to keep a date, and that the date was probably with you. If that was so, you must have sent either a note or a message, since Munson’s place isn’t on the phone. I couldn’t get to hear of any note, but Anita Adams had been over here to tea the afternoon before Munson was killed, and she could have taken a message back if there was any message to take.

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“That was the set-up. There was another angle.

Anita could have given a message to Munson from you that didn’t come from you at all. She could have invented one. That was only a possibility, and I had no proof, but I kept it in mind.”

Janice nodded, a slight frown of concentration on her face.

“So that was it. And the other pointer?”

“Anita Adams told me how the pigeons had their heads torn off, one night, over at the Munson place.

She said Mrs Munson and herself had the only two keys to the pigeon pen, and the lock hadn’t been forced. It didn’t seem likely anyone would steal a key for the sort of screwy crime that wasn’t premeditated but the result of a sudden mania to kill and destroy. That looked as if it was either she herself or Mrs Munson that had torn off the pigeons’

heads.”

“Mrs Munson might have been a good bet,”

Parrot suggested.

Vachell shook his head. “She wrote the anonymous note smearing Mrs West with the murder.

When that didn’t seem to register she even poisoned herself with cattle-dip in the sherry (as well as Corcoran and Anita Adams) and then pulled a phony story of how she’d seen Janice snooping around Corcoran’s room, and found her alone in the livingroom with the sherry. She made the houseboy, Mwogi, back the story and say he’d seen Mrs West, too.

“She was another one half eaten up with jealousy 301

and a desire for revenge. She had only one idea, to get her claws into the woman who’d been carrying on with her husband, and rip like hell. I reckon she really believed you’d done the murders, Mrs West, but whether she believed it or not, she meant the police to. If we wouldn’t arrest you on the evidence we had, by God she’d give us the evidence. So she tried to frame you by making it appear that you’d sneaked over to the Munson place and spiked the sherry with a shot of cattle-dip. It was clumsy as the devil, but Mother Munson is not a subtle woman.

How did she know you used a sleepingdraught, by the way?”