The African Poison Murders (5 page)

He gazed at the deepening view, hardly listening to the talk, until a sudden exclamation from Janice made him look round. She was gazing at Miss Adams as if she had just seen a ghost.

“Anita,” she said, “I forgot. Your pigeons. You must tell Mr Vachell about that.” Her voice was urgent and intense.

The unexpected remark clearly disturbed the girl.

She looked down at the table and ran her thumb over the cloth.

“I — I hate talking about it,” she said.

“I know. I know just how you feel, Anita. But don’t you see, it’s all linked up with — with what happened to Rhode.”

41

Anita Adams raised her head with a jerk and fixed her pale nervous eyes on Vachell’s face. “I came over here to tell you, really,” she said. Her sentences were abrupt and unshaded, like ant-hills on a treeless plain. “Only it — it seems such a small thing.

And I’ve tried to forget about it altogether. It makes me feel sick.”

“You’d better let me have the story,” Vachell said. He tried to sound encouraging and soothing at the same time.

“About a week ago I lost my pigeons,” she said baldly. “I mean their heads got bitten off. Clean, right off, like a guillotine.”

“That’s too bad,” Vachell said. “That’s the way mongooses act, isn’t it, or civets; or any of those wild-cat things.”

“Yes, but this wasn’t a mongoose or a civet cat.

The pigeons live in a coop that’s raised off the ground on piles, and there’s a big chicken-wire cage all round it. Of course they sleep in the coop, I always shut them in myself, and padlock the door of the pen. Well, someone must have let them out of the coop, because in the morning they were lying on the ground without heads. They couldn’t have got out unless someone had opened the door. At least, I don’t see how.” She came to a full stop and looked at him with a puzzled expression, her light eyes steady, for once, on his face.

“Does anyone have a key to the pen, aside from you?”

“Yes, Mrs Munson. She has all the keys, but she 42

lets me keep a duplicate for the mashroom and for the pigeons.”

“None of the natives has a key?”

Anita Adams shook her head.

“And the lock wasn’t forced or tampered with?”

“No. Of course I looked for that when I found them.”

“Were the torn-off heads lying around inside the pen?”

Anita Adams looked down at the table again and her hand shook as she reached for a cigarette. It was an unpleasant little story, but Vachell wondered why she should be quite so upset. She swallowed twice before answering, and ran her tongue over her lips.

“No. They were found some way off, in the bush, where they’d been thrown. Torn and —” She left the sentence unfinished. Her face was very pale.

It was getting cold on the veranda, but Vachell felt a chill that was not due to the approach of night.

Pigeons, heifers, dogs. Work for a psychiatrist, not a policeman. “Do you know of any native who has a special grudge against the Munsons?” he asked.

She gave a short harsh laugh that did nothing to lighten her colourless and uneasy face. “There are plenty of natives with grudges against Karl Munson.

They tried to poison him once. But they wouldn’t pull heads off pigeons, if that’s what you mean.

They wouldn’t bother about a pigeon — they don’t think of birds as valuable things. They’d go for his bulls and cows. Besides, they were my pigeons, not 43

his. The hens are Mrs Munson’s, but she let me keep the pigeons. They were all I had.”

The remark might have sounded silly, but it didn’t. Anita Adams looked so bare of possessions the statement might be almost literally true. Only a girl who had no place else to go would be likely to stay in a job at Munson’s place. That was her trouble, Vachell had learnt — no place else to go. Her father had died leaving a farm that fetched little more than enough to pay off the mortgage and Land Bank loan. Her mother had married again, soon after, and gone to South Africa; and the low level of commodity prices had hit the colony so badly that there weren’t many people who could afford a European governess, or help, on a farm. She wasn’t trained for anything else. Her last job had been with a Government official, but he had moved to the Falkland Islands and she’d been down and out in Marula for some time before she landed the Munson job. The Munsons probably paid her next to nothing, and were always late with that.

Janice West walked with her a little way along the path. Vachell sat alone, watching the dusky blue of night deepen in the valley below, and the lights of Karuna spring up far away. From the native quarters came the soft beat of a drum and the sound of plaintive barbaric chanting that was doubtless a free rendering of a Church of England hymn.

Bullseye snored quietly by his side. West came in and sat beside him, puffing at a pipe and filling the air with a pungent flavour.

44

“Sorry to desert you,” he said. “Bit worried about the bull. Had to drench him, and took a blood-slide to be on the safe side. Probably only indigestion, but you never know.”

There was a scurrying in the darkness and the setters appeared, panting and waving long feathery tails and effusively greeting their master. Janice followed them up the steps.

“Anita’s a pathetic creature,” she said, half apologetically, as she sat down. “I guess she gets as much fun out of life as a turnip in a clay field in a wet December. This is about the only place she can escape to, so I haven’t the heart to drive her away.

But sometimes, I admit it, she’s a weight in the middle, like too much suet pudding.”

“She lacks sex appeal,” Vachell admitted.

“She’s got about as much sex appeal as a spike harrow left out in the rain,” West remarked irritably.

“I wish she wouldn’t come over here. You’re too good to her, Janice. I’m sorry for her, but I don’t want any of that damned Munson lot over here.

They’d better keep away. Even poor old Adams, with a face like a horse.”

“She has to come up sometimes for air, Dennis.

It’s not her fault. The children like her, poor little brats. And she just adores them. That’s why she stays with the job, I guess.”

“She told a queer story,” Vachell remarked.

“Yes, it wasn’t pleasant,” Janice agreed.

West grunted: “If true.”

45

“Lock your door tonight,” Vachell advised. “And keep a weapon handy by the bed.”

“I’m going to sit up all night,” West said. “If anything comes this time, by God I’ll plug it as full of holes as a bar of aero-chocolate. Small shot, of course — I won’t shoot to kill.”

The air was cold on Vachell’s face, and he was glad to see, through the open door behind, a houseboy come in with a glowing brand to light the fire.

He stared thoughtfully out into the garden, already dimly lit by a vast company of stars. Apprehension had laid its cold fingers on his heart.

“Maybe you’d better hold your fire,” he said slowly, “until you’re certain that it’s somebody you want to hurt.”

46

One of the police askaris kept watch until 2 a.m. in a clump of bush below the garden, where the path from Munson’s farm came in, and the other took over until sunrise. Vachell himself slept lightly, with Bullseye by the bedside, and got up at two to see that the watch was changed. But no one came.

The askaris spent a cold night wrapped in heavy overcoats and sustained by a thermos of hot tea.

They saw nothing, they reported, except two duikers eating the Barberton daisies in the garden.

After breakfast, complete with kippers that came from Scotland wrapped in cellophane, Vachell smoked on the sun-flooded veranda and wondered what to do next. He seemed to have run into a blind alley. Investigations in Africa often did. In Europe or America people were generally at hand to be questioned; whatever a person did, there usually turned out to be a looker-on. But here in Africa life was lived on two levels, with a barrier between the two. Natives might see and hear and register, but to the police be blind and deaf and blank. What 47

white men did was no affair of theirs; what they did was at all times to be hidden from the whites. The only chance was to catch this dog-slashing maniac, this psychopathic pigeon-killer, at the next attempt.

He had a hunch that if he stood by and waited, something, soon, would break.

A little before ten o’clock the telephone rang. A houseboy put his head in at the door and announced: “The hole wants you,” and disappeared.

Vachell heard the excited voice of Prettyman at the other end of the wire.

“Sir, are you there?” the young policeman said.

“Something extraordinary’s happened. Corcoran —

you know, Munson’s nephew — has just come in by car. He says Munson’s dead.”

Vachell whistled into the telephone.

“Killed, or just passed on?”

“I don’t know. He was found by a boy in the pyrethrum-drying shed this morning, about eight.

Corcoran said there were no marks of foul play. He thinks Munson must have been overcome by fumes from the charcoal braziers and fallen down in a faint, and suffocated. But I thought, after yesterday, you’d want to look into it yourself.”

“Sure thing. Did they leave the body out there?”

“At the farm, yes. Corcoran says it was no good getting a doctor, Munson was quite dead. He wants to know what to do.”

“Load him into a car and take him back there right away, and bring out the first doctor you can corral. Warn the doc if he can’t certify cause of 48

death he’ll have to do an autopsy, and get the inquest arrangements under way. I’m going right over. Meet you there as soon as you can make it.”

“Okay, sir,” Prettyman said, and rang off. Vachell collected a box of gadgets filled with his detective apparatus, known locally as the abortionist’s bag, got into his car, and bounced off over the lawn and down the drive inside three minutes. He made the Munsons’ homestead in less than fifteen more.

There was a look of disorganization about the straggling homestead. No natives were to be seen; probably they had taken cover in their huts, to speculate over maize-meal porridge and cups of black syrup-like tea. Vachell made straight for the livingroom. At first he thought it was empty, but then he saw two white-faced, wide-eyed children sitting side by side on the sofa, their looks fastened on his face. The bigger was a boy of about ten, with freckled face and tousled hair; the other was a girl perhaps two years younger, a scrawny creature with cropped hair and a thin angular body.

“Hello there,” Vachell said. “Seen your mother anywhere around?”

The boy got to his feet and answered nervously, in a voice so low that Vachell could scarcely hear.

“She’s in her bedroom, sir. I’ll show you, if you like.”

He led the way across the rough half-grassed space that did duty as lawn and yard to a long mud building with four doors in it that Vachell would have taken for a stable. The roof was of corrugated 49

iron, and big rainwater tanks stood at each corner.

The boy knocked timidly on the end door on the left. In a moment the top half opened — the doors were in two sections, like those of horse-boxes —

and Miss Adams looked out. Her face was paler than ever, and her eyes so faded that they looked almost white. Her hair was untidy and uncombed.

When she saw Vachell she managed a smile and said:

“Thank God you’ve come. Mrs Munson has had some sort of attack. She seems all right now —

you’d better come in. Roy, run along back to your sister, I’ll be over in a few minutes.” The boy turned obediently and Vachell slid back the wooden slat that fastened the door, and walked in.

He was in a sort of sitting-room, with leopardskin rugs on the floor and many faded photographs on the wall. A mahogany desk of mammoth proportions squatted under the window to his left; it was entirely snowed under beneath a drift of papers.

Against the wall to the right was a low couch and on it, covered by some dirty and dog-chewed rugs, lay Mrs Munson. She was propped up against some cushions, and her black keen eyes were fixed with an undeviating stare on his face.

He drew up a chair, sat on the edge of it and offered his condolences. She inclined her head a little, never relaxing her stare. Then she said so sharply that he almost jumped: “Go back to the children, Anita. They must do their lessons as usual, don’t forget that. You want me to tell you how my 50

husband met his death. Why were you here yesterday with that conceited young whippersnapper, pretending to be interested in labour-sheets?” Her voice was sharp-edged with suspicion.

“I just happened to be passing through.”

“You were here very quickly today.” She put a bright check handkerchief to her lips and her eyes left his face and rolled up to the ceiling. Alarmed, he jumped up to hand her a glass of water from a table in the middle of the room; but she recovered, lowered her handkerchief, and nodded towards the chair.

“I can look after myself, thank you. I can tell you very little about Mr Munson’s death. One of the boys found him before breakfast, lying on the floor of the pyrethrum shed. He fetched our assistant, Edward Corcoran, but it was too late. He was dead before they found him in the shed.”

“With no marks of violence?”

“Certainly not. There was no question of his being attacked. Edward thinks that he was overcome by fumes from the brazier in the shed. They are certainly strong, especially in the mornings when the doors have not been opened for fourteen hours at least. Personally, I have no doubt how my husband met his death.”

Vachell looked his question, watching her face.

“He was poisoned.” She was going to say more, but a fit of choking interrupted her. Vachell held the glass for her while she sipped a little water. It 51

looked as though there was something wrong with her heart.

“You’ve made a serious allegation,” he said.

“Whom do you suspect?”

“That is for you to find out.” She spoke flatly; he could see that her mind was made up.

“I’d like to know your husband’s normal routine, if you please, Mrs Munson. Starting from the time the houseboy called him in the morning.”