The African Poison Murders (3 page)

leopard. They come often to the forest.” Leopards, Vachell retorted, didn’t sever dogs’ legs neatly through the joint; the job had been done with a sharp knife. The boys had strong views on Munson.

“A bad European,” the head boy observed. “When black men go to his farm he catches them and ties them up to trees with ropes. He eats meat that crawls with maggots, after it has gone bad. He had a case against Bwana Anstey and he promised his herd-boys a cow each if they told the judge what he instructed them to say. In court they did as Bwana Munson had told them, but when they asked for the cows he threatened to beat them. That is very unjust.”

Vachell found Janice in a lean-to shed attached to one of the stores, filling the incubator lamps with the kerosene. The incubators were well-worn and rather battered contrivances, of an old and clumsy model. The eggs were spread out neatly in rows, a pencilled cross on each brown shell.

“May I join you in a game of noughts and crosses?” he inquired.

She looked up smiling, her hands glistening with oil, as slender and graceful as a Chinese girl. She was dressed in brown corduroy slacks and a bright orange shirt.

“I see you never raised chickens,” she said. “You know eggs have to be turned twice a day, morning and evening. You make a mark to show which side up they are.”

He looked down at her and grinned, just for the 21

pleasure of seeing her turning eggs in the incubator shed. What’s the use, he thought, when he’d come to say good-bye. But as soon as he began to thank her for the hospitality, she protested and pressed him to stay on until the mystery was solved.

“I guess I sound like a baby afraid of the dark,”

she added, “but I’m scared. I can’t help it after …

after last night. Couldn’t you just stay a few days longer? There’s another thing, too — while you’re here you can help keep Dennis on ice. I’m so scared of what he might do, alone here with me, thinking of Rhode.”

Vachell took a deep breath; he saw the roads of duty and inclination meet. The Wests’ farm was a fine lookout post from which to make a closer study of the Munson menage, too. He could spare two days.

“Right now there isn’t a thing I’d like better,” he said. “You’re very kind. I’ll find that maniac for you, Mrs West, if I have to use black magic and spells.”

With an unfamiliar mixture of excitement and misgiving he heard a car in second gear climbing the hill towards the house. It was his, coming over with Prettyman, the young policeman from Karuna, at the wheel.

Although Munson’s house was a mile from West’s by path, the dirt road went down to the railway station and up again and made the distance eight.

On either side were big pastures spattered with remnants of the bush and forest that had once 22

clothed the slopes. There had been rain recently, and grass and brush were a vivid green starred with orange-flowered creepers, clusters of small mauve lantana and, close to the earth, the brilliant blue of hounds-tongue.

“Looks like swell farming country,” Vachell remarked.

“First-class, sir,” Prettyman agreed. “Blokes like Munson do nicely, thank you, in spite of prices and ticks. All the same, I’m jolly glad I’m not a farmer.

Stuck in one place all your life, tied down to a lot of cows. Makes a feller awfully narrow, I always say.”

He was a slight, dapper young man with blond hair brushed straight back from a narrow forehead, and a small moustache which he was apt to finger while he spoke. His chief worry was his name, which filled him with deep resentment. Headquarters believed him to be hard-working when on the job, and new enough not to have lost his ambition.

“You’re for the big cities, like Karuna.”

“Oh, it’s not such a bad little spot, sir. We get a game of rugger every week-end, except in the dry weather. There’s quite a decent movie, and nearly always a dance at the Black Buffalo on Saturday night.”

“Be careful not to get the rush and bustle of city life into your blood,” Vachell advised. “You might get a frontier post next tour.”

When they drove up to Munson’s place Vachell 23

thought for a moment that they had reached a clump of Indian shops. Straggling, untidy brown hovels were scattered about on the top of a rounded hill, like dog-biscuits upset out of a packet. There was a lawn of sorts, but it was littered with farm implements and gear, and five gaunt-boned oxen were cropping the grass. A little way off a herd of donkeys wandered about nibbling at the unmown grass around some of the huts. Chickens picked their way in and out of buildings, and several natives in patched unwashed shorts were strolling about.

“Well, we missed the circus,” Vachell remarked.

“Looks like the elephants and tigers have moved on.”

Prettyman laughed. “You’ll still see plenty of freaks,” he said.

He drove up to the only hut which possessed a veranda. Unexpectedly, it had a flagpole in front. It was a tin-roofed cabin made of uncut stone and mud, unplastered. They got out of the car and Prettyman shouted, “Hodi”. There was no reply, so they went up the steps on to the veranda and into the livingroom beyond. The mud walls were concealed by hanging strips of native rush matting.

Otherwise little attempt had been made to make the room look habitable. Roughly carpentered sofas and chairs were covered with skins flung over the oxhide webbing. Some dirty tea-cups stood on a big bare table in the centre of the room. There was a dry, unpleasant smell of badly cured hides, and another smell that Vachell diagnosed as pure dirt.

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The whole room looked as if it hadn’t been swept in a month. Prettyman remarked: “Careful of the little strangers,” and scratched an ankle resentfully.

After a long interval Mrs Munson came in. Her squat, lumpy figure was dressed in a khaki twill skirt and a bushman’s shirt with big bulging pockets.

Long strands of hair escaped from the bun into which it was screwed at the back. The idea passed through Vachell’s mind that she was wrapped in fat as a dancer might be swathed in shawls. It did not seem to be an integral part of her; there was something essentially jovial about fat, but nothing so easy-going as joviality about the woman who stood in front of him, her feet squarely apart, darting her small eyes from one visitor to the other like a chameleon flicking its long tongue at a couple of flies.

“Good morning,” she said abruptly. “What do you want?”

By arrangement, Prettyman answered: “I’d like to see your husband, Mrs Munson. I’m checking up on any unregistered vagrants, looking for a couple of blokes we want for theft. I’d like to see a list of the boys he’s signed on lately.”

Mrs Munson grunted. “You won’t find any vagrants here. My husband is always careful to make proper inquiries. Unlike some round here, who’ll sign on any native that comes along with a pack of lies and a wheedling manner.”

“Well, if you’ll tell me where I can find Mr 25

Munson, I’ll go and have a chat with him,” Prettyman persisted.

She glanced at an ornate china clock on the mantelpiece, filmed with dust. “He isn’t back to breakfast yet,” she said. “He’s very busy. Farmers don’t sit about twiddling their thumbs at half-past nine in the morning; they’re out at work.”

“Well, we’ll follow his example,” Prettyman answered. He led the way out into the sunlight, and asked a native where the bwana was. They found him in a store, mixing a ration for pigs. He was a tall man, broad-shouldered, with a poker-stiff back.

His mouth was a thin line across a leathery face, sunburnt to a brick red. He had a big nose and wore a monocle in his left eye. His hair was cropped short and his face was totally devoid of humour.

Vachell judged his age to be about fortyfive.

He seemed to be on the defensive when he saw Prettyman’s uniform, but he was civil enough, and took them over to his office to show them the labour register. His German accent was unmistakable, but his English good. “Strange natives may not roam over my land,” he said. “I keep guards to watch my fences. You see I am also raising steers, so I try to make my land clean from measles. You will find that all boys here are signed on according to the law. If you look for vagrants you’d better go to Commander West,” he added. “All bad-hats are welcome there. Anyone with a black skin, that is a passport.”

After they had made a pretence of inspecting the 26

labour register, Vachell extracted an invitation to see the farm. The place had a cheese-paring and ramshackle and yet, at the same time, an organized look. Nothing was tidy, but plenty was going on.

He was shown the pedigree bulls — Carnation Friesians, muscled like Olympian athletes, imported from Seattle — the pure-bred heifers, the Large Whites, the movable calf-rearing pens, the silo pits, the dairy, and a host of other things. Farther on rows of hessian-bottomed trays were spread out in the sun, each tray white with the half-withered flowers of pyrethrum, one of Munson’s principal crops. The flowers were dried and ground up to make insecticide powder, Munson said. He took Vachell into the drying-shed, built on the principle of oast-houses used to dry hops in Kent, but square, tall, and made of logs. There were two floors. On the ground floor a number of charcoal braziers gave off heat and thick acrid fumes, and on the first floor a layer of flowers was spread out thinly to dry. The atmosphere was like that of a hot-house, about 90

degrees, and so stifling that VachelFs throat tickled and his eyes ran and he had to come out coughing.

“The air’s thicker than a fat girl’s ankles,” he remarked.

“There is ventilation at the top,” Munson explained. “A slit in the roof. A boy once stopped it up with a sack because the rain came through; he was thinking to be clever. Next time he entered the gas made him faint, but he recovered, and now he does not stop up the hole any more. Ha! ha! But 27

the pyrethrum, I have little to do with it myself. I am busy always with the stock. To look after it is the business of my nephew and assistant, Edward Corcoran. Today he superintends the sowing of some oats.”

They walked back through a paddock full of movable hen-houses with covered runs attached, made of wire-netting and canvas washed over with cement.

“The hens, they are for women,” Munson observed. “To them goes the greater part of my skim. Mrs Munson keeps also turkeys of a very good breed. Eggs came first by air from Holland, and then Mrs Munson successfully hatched.”

“That’s all right,” Vachell said. “I guess I’ll skip the turkeys and hens.”

“Miss Adams also assists. I see that she is in the mashroom. She will demonstrate to you the hens.”

Munson, having undertaken to show Vachell around the farm, was going to complete the job.

“Miss Adams is governess to my two children,” he explained.

Miss Adams was indeed in the mashroom, a dark and smelly shed, mixing a new supply of middlings, maize and bone-meal feed for her charges. Sacks of potatoes and grain lined the walls. Three incubators, some spare braziers and a few empty petrol tins occupied most of the remaining space.

The governess was a tall, long-limbed girl with a thin, pale face and straight, mouse-coloured hair badly cut and innocent of wave. She was not 28

attractive, and her skin was an unhealthy colour, but when she came into the sunlight Vachell noticed that she had interesting eyes. They were light blue, with unusually pale irises, and very restless. He thought that she looked hungry, and wondered how much Munson employees were given to eat. She seemed nervous in front of Munson, and ill at ease with the visitors. She wore a pair of khaki slacks that had been washed into a threadbare faded condition, a yellow sweater darned a good many times, and no hat.

She said her piece about the chickens in a jerky yet monotonous voice, self-consciously, keeping her eyes away from Vachell’s face. He felt sorry for her, she was so painfully shy. Directly it was over, she turned her back to attend to an incubator in the corner of the shed. The top had jammed, however, and she couldn’t get it open. Vachell stepped quickly forward with an offer of help. It was a homemade contraption; the lid, constructed of boards, had swollen and refused to budge. He dug at it with his pocket-knife and then asked for the big sheath-knife he had seen hanging from Munson’s belt. When Munson handed it over he ran his thumb down the cutting edge. It was sharp as a sliver of glass, and so bright it must have been recently cleaned. He prised the lid open and noticed that the eggs inside had crosses on their uppermost sides, and that reminded him again of Janice West.

Outside, in the bright sunlight, he said: “Thanks a lot, Mr Munson. There’s just one more thing.

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There was a little trouble over at Commander West’s place last night — an accident to a dog. The boys thought they saw someone, they don’t know who, make a getaway along the path that goes to your farm. I’d like to know if you can account for all of your household around, say, ten o’clock last night.”

Munson scowled, and readjusted the monocle in his eye. “What do you think — that one of my household goes at night to cause an accident to West’s dogs? What has occurred to the dog?”

“Someone cut its paws off with a knife.”

A slight sound, it might have been a stillborn gasp, caught his ear, but Munson had halted and swung around before he could get it classified in his mind.

“Why do you listen, Miss Adams?” he barked.

“What business has this of yours?” The girl was standing in the doorway, her eyes fixed on Munson, a curious expression, half of fear and half enlightenment, on her face. She shook her head. “None —

none at all. I — I’m sorry I didn’t mean to hear. I was thinking of the wretched dog.”

“Wretched dog,” Munson repeated. “You think of West’s dog, what of my heifers? Three die of poisoning. Poison plants, the vet says. Where do those plants come from? They do not grow on my farm. They are put there at night, in the paddock by the boundary of West’s farm. Why will not the police attend to that? But no, they will come here to tell me that I cut off dog’s paws with a knife!”

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“I’m asking, not telling,” Vachell said. “Where were you at ten o’clock last night?”

“In bed, of course. What do you think? That a farmer stays up to midnight playing beggar-myneighbour, perhaps?”