The African Poison Murders (4 page)

“Perhaps,” Vachell said equably. He glanced around at the cluster of huts, like a glorified native village, and sighed inaudibly. It was a hopeless proposition. Everybody slept in a separate hut; noone could check another’s statement. After bedtime — around 9.30, he found — anyone could slip away without being seen. The native boys slept way out at the back, and they wouldn’t be worrying, anyway, about the comings and goings of the Europeans.

His eyes came back to Munson and he caught the tail end of a wolfish grin on the German’s long, rigid face. There was something malignant in that look. He felt vaguely disturbed, as if the light had dulled suddenly with no cloud over the sun. A memory of Mrs Munson’s suety face, with its hard little eyes, increased his disquiet. A pair of troublemakers right enough. A foreboding came to him that the trouble wouldn’t end with the death of a dog.

31

“You know, sir, I shouldn’t take too much notice of all that West says about Munson,” Prettyman remarked confidingly on the way back to Karuna in the car. “He’s what you might call prejudiced. For one thing, he was a prisoner in the war, and as a result he’s convinced every German commits atrocities in his sleep. Of course that’s rot. In spite of Hitler and all the rest of it, there are some jolly decent Germans round here. One of them’s a damned good full back. I think it’s a silly attitude myself.”

“Narrow.”

“Yes, exactly. And then, of course, there’s all this business about West’s wife.”

Vachell pushed in the electric lighter on the dashboard and held it to the end of his cigarette without comment.

“It must cut both ways having a wife like that,”

Prettyman went on. “Hell of a good-looker, isn’t she? You can’t blame half the blokes in the district for wishing they were in West’s shoes. Anyway, 32

Munson’s a stiff-necked beggar but apparently he’s sound at heart underneath; he fell for Mrs West and got it pretty badly, they say. What I can’t understand is what the hell she can see in him. You’d think she’d give him the air as soon as look at him, he’s got about as much appeal as a he-goat, and it isn’t as if she couldn’t have her pick if she wants to play around. There’s Norman Parrot, for instance —

one of the neighbours. He’s a funny sort of bloke in some ways, to meet him you’d think he was a bit half baked, but actually he’s very much all there.

Well, he’d jump to it if she lifted her little finger, I should say. But there she is, letting this stuckup bloke Munson show her his compost pits and take her for picnics by the reservoir and all that sort of thing. Women are damned queer, I must say.”

Vachell was staring straight ahead at the dusty road and the graceful rounded shoulder of an extinct volcano crater ahead.

“If you want to hear the scandal, ask a policeman,” he said.

“We always get it, sooner or later,” Prettyman agreed. “Pretty useful sometimes, too. Well, you can’t blame West for getting fed up. As a matter of fact I’m surprised myself that he hasn’t cut up rough before now. He must know damned well what’s going on, and I hear he did turf Munson off his farm once, and tell him he’d knock him to blazes if he — Munson that is — ever came near the place again. But I should have thought he’d do more than that myself. Now I hear Munson has accused West 33

of poisoning some of his cattle. Well, I suppose people do funny things when they’re worked up, but I must say it’s the last thing I’d have expected of West. It’s a bit… well, somehow….”

“Un-British,” Vachell suggested.

“Yes, that’s it exactly. After all, an old sea-dog like West. Still, perhaps there’s nothing in it. I wouldn’t trust Munson an inch, and they say his wife is the worst of the two. She’s a dreadful old trout, isn’t she, sir?”

Vachell grunted agreement, eyes fixed on the road. His arms were tense on the wheel. He was finding the conversation a bit of a strain.

“I had your report on Munson,” he remarked. “I want to find out some more.”

Prettyman smoothed his slight blond moustache with a forefinger and nodded sympathetically. “I thought you would, sir. With the situation as it is you must have to keep a pretty close check on Germans and their pals over the Abyssinian border.

I bet they’ll spring something pretty hot on all of us when the balloon goes up. So I ventured to do a bit of inquiring on my own.”

“Fine,” Vachell said. “Shoot.”

“Apparently there’s been quite a row going on in the inner circles of the Nazi Bund. Munson was the local Fuhrer for years, as you know, sir, back in the good old days when pacts were pacts and Papa Hitler didn’t give a hoot in hell for his faraway little colonial baby. In those days the Bund consisted of two men and a swastika, more or less, and Munson 34

kept all the records and generally ran the show. But when things began to warm up, and the boys in Berlin sent out a proper home-produced young Nazi, all booted and spurred, to make things hum, naturally Munson wasn’t any too pleased.”

“We have all that on the file,” Vachell pointed out.

“I know, sir, I’m just leading up to the point.

Well, as you know, this super-Nazi Wendtland duly took over and rushed about the country giving peptalks to all the Germans and getting them signed up in the Bund. Everything seemed to be going according to plan, but apparently Munson never really learnt to love this bloke Wendtland, and they had a real dust-up about some papers — records and things, I believe — that Munson refused to hand over to the new boss. Not only that, but there’s a rumour in Bund circles that Munson has managed to get hold of some dirt on Wendtland — what its nature is I don’t know — and that he’s trying to use it to get Wendtland unstuck. In fact, there’s quite a flap going on about it, I’m told.”

“Where do you get all this?” Vachell asked.

“Rather a roundabout way, I’m afraid, sir. The sister of a girl I know teaches in a bush school up beyond Mbale. A lot of Dutch kids go there, and some Germans, including the children of a bloke who’s a sort of lieutenant of Wendtland’s. The teacher speaks a bit of German and picked the gossip up. I don’t suppose it amounts to much, just a sort of internal dogfight in the Bund, unless 35

possibly … though I suppose it seems a bit farfetched.

…”

“Go ahead,” Vachell encouraged him. He could see the iron roofs of Karuna glistening on the plain in front, like pools of water lying under a vast cloudpacked sky.

“It’s part of my job to issue permits to move cattle,” Prettyman said, with apparent irrelevance.

“Munson applied for one the other day. He sent Corcoran up to the Western Frontier to buy a batch of native cows, and bring them down. Probably that’s all in order, but it struck me as just a little odd. He’s never done it before, for one thing — I looked back through the records. He’s never gone in for native cattle at all. He’s got very high-class stuff, pedigree bulls and so on, and he grades up all the time. Why should he suddenly want to go right back to native stock? And why send Corcoran up there, anyway? There’s a couple of breeders in the district he could buy good native cattle from.”

Vachell ground his cigarette against the top of the door, to make sure that no spark survived, and flicked it out of the window. “You reckon Munson has a plan to sell out this guy Wendtland to the boys over the border,” he remarked thoughtfully.

“It’s only an idea, sir. The Bund are working hand in glove with Musso’s little gang — we know that — and if Munson could get the Italianos suspicious, he might put a spoke in Wendtland’s wheel. It does seem awfully farfetched, I know, but then Munson’s the sort of bloke who’d stick at 36

nothing. And those small cattle-traders up on the Western frontier are obvious go-betweens, always popping over into Abyssinia and back again. I bet that’s how communications between Germans and Itos here and Addis Ababa go through.”

Vachell nodded. It was a shrewd guess. “Smart work,” he said. “It’s a thought, anyway. Corcoran’s in with Munson, then?”

Prettyman shrugged his shoulders and put on his helmet. They had reached Karuna’s one shopflanked street. “Don’t know, sir. He’s half Irish.

May have spent his early youth slipping bombs into public lavatories and tube stations, for all I know.

He’s a South African, though. His mother is Munson’s sister, I think. I believe he was in the Air Force for a bit at home, before he came out here to be uncle’s right-hand man.”

“For a peaceful farming district, there seems to be plenty going on around here,” Vachell observed.

Prettyman, unconscious of dangerous ground, remarked: “Anyway, sir, you’ve got a nice snug little billet to conduct operations from.”

Vachell spent the rest of the morning in the police station, checking up on all aliens in the district and the arrangements for their disposal in the event of war. He found the young inspector intelligent and reliable, though well aware of his own virtues. At four o’clock he drove out to the Wests with two hulking native policemen, spruce in their uniform of khaki shorts, blue jerseys and puttees, sharing the back of the car with Bullseye.

37

He arrived in time for a late tea on the veranda. His host was out supervising the afternoon separating, and he was left alone with Janice.

The sun was behind the house, and the hills across the great valley below looked quite different.

They had gone from blue to purple, and were full of sharp detail unrevealed before.

Janice West showed no traces of the fear that had shaken her composure the night before. It seemed as if sunlight had brought reassurance, and the daily chores of a farm had calmed her nerves. They talked about America, about places they both knew; of her childhood in New York, and the summers she had spent in Canada after her father, a professor of psychology at Columbia, had made enough money out of a lucky venture in amusement parks to retire.

He had taken his daughter on a trip around the world, and that was how she had met Dennis West, then in the China Squadron and stationed at Hong Kong. Acting with a decision and speed proper to the Navy, West had gone straight to New York on his first leave, and a month later they were married.

Soon afterwards he had retired from the Navy and fulfilled his life’s ambition to invest his small capital in a farm. He had first visited Chania when a sublieutenant in the East India Squadron, which paid it periodic calls, and had decided then and there to make it his eventual home. The climate was fine.

Living was cheap and easy; the country still free from the more rigid fetters of convention, still with a tinge of the frontier about it. They had been 38

happy there, Janice said, building a farm from the foundations and making a home. It had been hard work, full of the disappointments farmers always met with, especially on land untouched before by man; but it had been exciting enough at times, and a satisfactory job to do.

“I used to get homesick at first,” she admitted, “but I wouldn’t care to go back to the United States now, not to live in a city again. You get to depend on the sun, and the way the natives just sit around.

They don’t worry about stock market averages and the next war and the budget, and I guess they have the right idea. After a while you stop worrying too.

If I ever get a little nostalgic I think about that professor’s rats — the ones that went nuts when he made them jump off a plank and bump their noses, after he’d gotten them accustomed to finding the ground give way gently and land them on top of a piece of cheese. Being faced with an insoluble problem, that’s what sent them crazy. Well, I guess there are insoluble problems here too, but you don’t go crazy trying to figure them out, you just leave them over till next week.”

“I’ve noticed it,” Vachell said. “The Government does a swell job on that.”

Janice laughed. “If the professor’s rats had never jumped at all, they wouldn’t have encountered any problem. That’s the way the Government figures.

The professor used to blow them over the edge with a gust of hot air. There’s plenty of hot air around 39

here, at that, but I guess there’s no one who can work the bellows.”

“You ought to come down to Marula more often,”

Vachell said, “and brush up your civilization. We have four movies now, a municipal slaughterhouse, and the latest thing in high-powered street lights.

And a hell of a lot of civic pride. Besides, sometimes there are parties that turn out to be fun.”

“Dennis doesn’t care a lot for parties. And then it’s hard to get away — there’s calves to feed, chicks hatching out, milk records, butterfat tests — you know how it is on a farm. I like it all right, only lately it’s been — well, I guess things have gone a bit sour.”

Vachell didn’t say anything to that. The peace of evening lay over the garden and the vast drowsing valley. The boles of acacia trees were reddish-gold in the slanting light. In spite of all the beauty he could feel the sadness too. A phrase of Prettyman’s stung his mind like a persistent mosquito. “What I can’t understand is what the hell she can see….”

That coarse, arrogant bastard. He dodged the thought and focused all his attention on a shining emerald sunbird deftly robbing the flowers of a giant buddleia bush.

A tall figure rounded the corner of the house, walking with long strides. It was Miss Adams. She came up to the veranda and halted awkwardly below them on the deep-green lawn. Her face was a little flushed from the walk and she looked, somehow, 40

less flattened, more three-dimensional, than she had in Munson’s presence.

“Hello, Janice. Hope I’m not butting in,” she said. “Edward’s taken the children up to the top dam in the car, so I took the chance to slip away. I do hope you don’t mind.” Her voice had a new warmth in it; Vachell was vaguely surprised at the change.

“Of course I don’t, Anita. Come right up and have tea. You’ve met Mr Vachell?”

The girl muttered something and came on to the veranda, moving jerkily. She did not look at Vachell at all. She sat down and talked to Janice about the Munson children — there were two of them, a boy and a girl — and the rains. He could see that Janice was sorry for her rather uncouth and lonely visitor, but he couldn’t imagine they had much in common.