The African Poison Murders (6 page)

She looked down at the coverings and said, as if she knew he was wasting his time: “Mr Munson got up early, of course — we work for our living on this farm, unlike some I could name. He was called about six, or a little before.”

“With tea?”

“Yes, with a cup of tea. Then he went out to the farm, generally to see to the milking first of all.

Sometimes that was close at hand, at other times he would ride out on a pony to one of the movable bails, perhaps three or four miles away. Then he’d do the calf-feeding and enter up the milk records, and see the separating properly started. On days when they were dipping he would go out to one of the dips, or attend to whatever needed to be done.

I can’t tell you exactly what he did every day. It depended on what was going on.”

“How much time did he give the pyrethrum, usually?”

She looked at him in surprise, and spoke with impatience. “Do you think these sort of questions help you to find out how Mr Munson died? He 52

didn’t have a great deal to do with it. Edward Corcoran is supposed to be in charge of the crops, but you can’t stick to hard and fast rules. Sometimes Mr Munson looked over it to see that everything was all right. You’ve got to see to things yourself on a farm.”

“And he’d come back to breakfast, I suppose?”

“Between nine and ten.” She shot him an impatient look. “Why don’t you question some of the boys? I can’t tell you anything about it.”

“I’ll get around to that, Mrs Munson. Did you see your husband this morning, before he went out?”

She looked down at her feet, two hillocks under the dirty plaid rug. Her podgy face was quite expressionless. He wondered if she felt sorrow underneath, or anger, or a sort of amorphous indifference to life.

“No”, she replied. “The boy brings my tea at the same time, but Mr Munson had gone out before I was up.”

“Last night, when you saw him last, was he all right — his health normal, and nothing on his mind?”

“He was in perfect health. And if you knew anything about farming, young man, you’d know there’s always something on a farmer’s mind.”

“And you dined alone — you four — you had no visitors or guests?”

For the first time she hesitated, and although her 53

expression did not change he got the impression that the question had annoyed her.

“We had a guest,” she said.

“I’d like to have the name.”

She raised her black eyes to his face, and this time he had no doubt of her anger.

“Why don’t you do your duty? Do you think all these silly questions will do any good? Mr Munson’s body has been taken to his bedroom. I should have thought that even an official of the Chania police would have known enough to have an examination made. But you sit here and badger me with questions …” She closed her eyes and lay back on the cushions, her face a pasty grey.

“I’d still like to know the name of your guest last night, Mrs Munson.”

She moved impatiently on the settee. “A man called Wendtland came to dinner. A compatriot of Mr Munson’s, and an old friend. Now will you go and do your job? You’ve wasted enough time….”

Vachell rose abruptly and said he wouldn’t bother her any more just now. She told him where to find her husband’s bedroom, at the other end of the building they were in. Her own bedroom was next door, opening out of the sitting-room where she was lying; then came a bathroom which they shared, and Munson’s room beyond that again. “There’s a doctor on the road,” Vachell told her from the doorway. “I’ll send him right in to you, Mrs Munson. He’ll be able to fix you up.”

Her beady black eyes had followed him to the 54

door.“I don’t need a doctor,” she snapped. “They’re a lot of thieves. I won’t have him near me.”

He smiled at her as if she had been a wilful, wayward child that had to be coaxed, and quickly shut the door. “Okay, sweetheart,” he said into the fresh sun-sparkling air. “He should give you a shot of rat poison. That would be a tonic to you.”

He had to walk along outside the building to enter Munson’s room. He pushed open the door and went in. There was nobody on guard at the door, or in the room. Anybody could have got in or out, probably unobserved. He sighed, and walked over to the bed that jutted out into the room, its head against the opposite wall.

Munson lay flat on his back on a coarse calico counterpane dyed butcher-blue. His eyes gazed up at the whitewashed ceiling in the glassy stare of death. The monocle was not there. His flesh was a colourless grey, and looked spongy as cheese; his mouth was open. He lay in an unnatural position, his legs straight and his arms like poles by his side.

In death it was plain what a strongly built man he had been. His shirt had been opened and pulled apart, and a broad hairy stretch of chest showed below. He wore shorts, and nothing else but a pair of shoes made in the shape of moccasins. They were very old; at the toe, the soles had come adrift from the uppers so that they must have napped when he walked, and one sole had a big hole in the ball of the foot. Vachell put out a hand and touched the dead man’s flesh; it was cold as marble. He lifted 55

the forearm by the wrist and found it stiff; rigor was well advanced.

The room had been cleaned and tidied since Munson had slept in it. The bed was made, the early morning tea removed, and the cup, no doubt, washed long ago. He looked around the room carefully from habit rather than from hope. It was cleaner than the rest of the homestead, or what he had seen of it. Munson’s wardrobe was much as he had expected: a small supply of shorts and corduroy slacks, two heaps of short-sleeved, much-laundered shirts made of a cheap Japanese cotton material, a couple of flannel suits, and an old, considerably battered dinner-suit. There was a black tin box full of letters, old photograph albums, account books, and flotsam and jetsam of all sorts. Fishing tackle, two rifles and a shotgun leant against the wall, and some well-thumbed books on animal diseases and cattle-rearing lay about. The only pictures on the wall were photographs, two of prize bulls, and the third of an Arab stallion. The whitewashed celotex ceiling was stained yellow in one corner, where water from a leak in the roof had come through. It was a curiously soulless, characterless room.

Vachell paid special attention to the dead man’s footgear. It stood in a row underneath the homemade hanging-cupboard. Munson was clearly not extravagant as regards his dress. He had one good pair of shoes, moccasin-shaped like those he had worn when he died, but new and recently cleaned; a pair of soft leather mosquito boots reaching to just 56

below the knee; and a pair of leather mules.

Wrapped up in newspaper in the bottom of a drawer Vachell found some old cracked evening shoes.

There was a pair of gum-boots in the corner, and that was all.

He stepped outside and closed the door; there was no key. The sunlight was deep and reassuring.

Trees xcast cool black shadows on the coarse grass, but the day was not too hot. Big flat-bottomed clouds were beginning to swell over the hills across the valley. He sighed, and lit a cigarette. He had never struck a case that seemed so barren of clues. There were blank walls everywhere: motives lying around as thick as leaves in fall, opportunities for everyone, the room cleaned, the body moved. And, beneath it all, an indefinable feeling of menace, of unexplained queer happenings, perhaps of an evil twisted mind at work under cover, like a maggot underground.

He drew at his cigarette and muttered: “Something nasty in the woodshed…” and then pulled his thoughts back under control. Most likely it would turn out to be death by misadventure after all.

57

The noise of a car in second gear came from beyond the livingroom, and Prettyman, wearing uniform, drove up with Corcoran and the doctor beside him.

Prettyman had brought two askaris. Vachell posted one by the door of Munson’s room and sent the other around to the kitchen to find out anything he could. The doctor went straight in to make his examination.

Edward Corcoran, Vachell estimated, must be about twenty-eight or thirty. He was a nice-looking young man with clean even features and lively brown eyes. His hair was dark and curly and he had a small black moustache. But he spoke with a rather affected Oxford drawl that got into Vachell’s hair.

It seemed incongruous in a man half Irish, half German. He looked so British that it was hard to realize that he had no English blood, and was colonial bred. Now, however, the excitement and shock had undermined his self-assurance, and he answered questions eagerly, with every appearance of being anxious to help. He was an unexpected 58

type to find at Munson’s place, either in the capacity of employee or relation, Vachell thought. It seemed unlikely that farm life would meet all his requirements.

It was easy to recognize the roving eye.

He was, Vachell established, employed by his uncle at a nominal salary of ten pounds a month, with the idea that one day he would have a share in the farm. His uncle wouldn’t let him have much to do with the stock, but he was in charge of the cultivation side — pyrethrum, corn, oats, alfalfa and one or two other things. Vachell got the impression that Corcoran hadn’t liked the arrangement, that he found the livestock the most interesting side.

“Munson was stepping over into your territory, in a sense, when he went into the pyrethrum shed this morning?” Vachell inquired.

“Yes, that’s rather odd,” Corcoran agreed. “Not that he mightn’t have gone in any time, of course.

He kept a general eye on things. But he didn’t like going into the drying-shed; the pyrethrum gave him a sort of rash. He avoided the stuff whenever he could.”

“He didn’t say anything to you about checking up on the pyrethrum, then?”

“No, not last night, and I didn’t see him this morning — I mean till … till I had to go in, and he was lying there, dead. And now you mention it, it is funny, because today was the day for handdressing the pedigree bulls, and he always sees to that himself. Always. It’s the first time he’s missed since I can remember.”

59

“I guess I’m a city boy after all,” Vachell confessed.

“Handdressing. Could you explain?”

Corcoran looked a shade self-satisfied about his superior knowledge, and ran a hand over his dark curly hair.

“Well, all our cattle go through the dip every seven days. (We use five-day strength.) It’s too risky to send valuable bulls through in the ordinary way, they might kick up a fuss and do themselves an injury. So we spray them with dip mixture out of a fruit spray, and then we go over them by hand to see that no ticks escape. You can’t trust a native to handdress really properly, so Uncle Karl always saw that done himself. It’s definitely odd, I must say, his going into the pyrethrum shed today. I suppose he just looked in and got overcome by fumes, and that was that.”

The young man paused and cleared his throat, clearly anxious to say something more and uncertain how to begin. “By the way, I hope you won’t take everything my aunt says too seriously,” he began, using a man-to-man tone. “She’s convinced that someone poisoned Uncle Karl. That’s all rot, you know. She’s got a sort of mania about being poisoned ever since they both got dysentery after the only time in history that they kicked over the traces and took a fortnight’s holiday at the Coast. She wouldn’t believe some native hadn’t got at her soup. Uncle Karl’s been out here twenty years and nobody ever tried to poison him before.”

“Who knew about his getting this pyrethrum 60

rash?” Vachell asked suddenly. “Did everyone know?”

Corcoran looked surprised and answered: “I don’t know, but I never heard him mention it. He’s …

was … one of these tough guys who can’t bear to let on if anything’s wrong with his health. Even when he had a go of ‘flu he pretended he was bright as a daisy. He did tell me about the rash once, though, when he said I was to take over the pyrethrum.”

Vachell saw the doctor come out of Munson’s room, bag in hand, and walked out to meet him.

The doctor shook his head. He was a tall, lanky man with a slouched walk and long, nervous hands.

He had a reputation as one of the two best surgeons in Chania, but there might be more doubt as to his skill in diagnosis. He stood under a tree and wiped his spectacles.

“Can’t help you much, I’m afraid,” he said.

“There’s no way of establishing cause of death without an autopsy. It’s none of the obvious things.”

“How long ago did he die?”

The doctor squinted at the sun. “You ought to know how difficult it is to answer that here. Rigor’s set in, but isn’t complete. Say a couple of hours ago, or perhaps a little more.”

Vachell looked at his wristwatch. It said five to eleven. “That makes time of death around nine o’clock, or maybe half-past eight. He was found at eight o’clock, so that doesn’t make sense.”

The doctor, Lawson by name, blinked in a puz-61

zled way and looked irritated. “Well, I don’t understand that at all,” he said. “If he’d been dead for three hours rigor would have been a great deal more advanced.”

“You know he was found among a lot of braziers in a drying-shed?”

“No, I didn’t,” the doctor said. “That would delay rigor, of course. I could tell better if I could see what the atmosphere’s like.”

Corcoran led the way to the pyrethrum-drying shed. It was a little distance beyond the rest of the farm buildings: a queer-shaped, two-storey building made of cut stone, taller than it was long or broad.

It was perched up like a square church steeple without the church. A blast of hot air hit their faces as they went in. Sharp acrid fumes made them cough and choke.

“Whew!” the doctor exclaimed. “It’s like a furnace.

What’s the temperature in here?”

“Ought to be kept between 85 and 90 degrees,”

Corcoran replied. “It varies a little, of course. You see, the braziers are all down here on the ground floor. They burn charcoal. The pyrethrum’s spread out on the floor above, only about one flower deep.

The heated air rises and dries the flowers, and the whole place is ventilated by those louvres in the roof. It’s on the same principle as an oast-house in England, of course.”