The African Poison Murders (8 page)

Vachell released his ear-lobe and regarded Mwogi with a new interest.

“Come to the room and show me,” he said.

Mwogi at first displayed extreme reluctance to enter the room, although he knew that Munson’s body had been taken away. But after a little Vachell coaxed him in. He kept glancing uneasily at the vacant bed, but he put one of the shoes down on its side a few feet from the bed, and the other against the opposite wall. They did, indeed, look as if they might have been hurled away by a man seated on the edge of the bed.

“Perhaps he threw them at the rats,” Mwogi suggested. “There are many here.”

Vachell examined the shoes carefully, inside and out, but could find nothing wrong. They were roughly made out of thick stiff leather, but they seemed in good shape. Finally he locked them into a box in the car, together with the packet of tea, for closer examination later on.

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Munson had gone out to the farm buildings soon after six. He had spoken to the milkers and inspected a cow with mastitis and another with a sore eye. At about half-past six, the boys said — their times were always vague — he had walked on past the bullpens towards the pyrethrum-drying shed, which was screened from the rest of the farm buildings by scattered olive-trees and some tall bush. A cart track led past the shed door and down a slight hill towards the pyrethrum fields beyond. Munson had walked down this cart track, and, so far as Vachell could discover, that was the last time he had been seen alive. He’d said nothing to the boys of his intentions, save that they were to start to handdress the bulls and he would be back to see that the job was being properly done.

That left an hour and a half to fill in. He might have gone straight into the pyrethrum shed and died at once. Or he might not have entered it at all for another hour. Or, of course — if it was foul play — he might have died elsewhere and been taken to the shed afterwards, though for what reason it was impossible to say.

Prettyman was instructed to go over the shed with a fine-tooth comb, using a magnifying-glass on the edges of the louvres to search for traces of anything having been stuffed in to block the ventilation system.

Vachell went through all the letters and papers he could find in Munson’s room, and the contents of the dead man’s pockets, without discovering 74

anything beyond farm documents — bills, receipts, estimates, circulars — and a few personal letters which seemed of no special interest. A list of recent cream cheques showed that Munson was dairying on a big scale; at the present price of butterfat he must be doing well. There were plenty of pleas and threats from firms whose bills he hadn’t paid, and one or two lawyers’ letters. But he could find no trace of anything relating to the Nazi Bund, nor communications of any sort from Munson’s fatherland.

Of course, Mrs Munson had had plenty of time to deal with those, and he had no right to make a search. He sighed, and put on one side for further examination the dead man’s passbook, some letters in German from an address in Natal and signed Kate, that he judged must be from Munson’s sister, and two notes that looked worthy of closer attention. One would be easy to follow up; it had a date and an address and read:

“DEAR MR MUNSON,

“I have not received your cheque for what you owe me. Unless I do so within one week I shall go to a solicitor. I do not think you would like to be sued in Court. I shall not hesitate to bring out things you would rather keep quiet for the sake of your Reputation and also the reputation of others who are without Protection as I am.

“Yours faithfully,

“DAISY PARSONS”

It was dated three weeks ago.

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The other note bore no date, address or signature.

It was scrawled in a large, rather childish hand, on a piece of paper torn out of a cheap notebook, and bore every sign of having been hurriedly written.

“I can’t meet you this evening,” it ran. “D. is being difficult, I’m afraid he’ll suspect. Don’t want him upset now. Be at same place tomorrow, same time, will get there if I can. You understand, don’t you? It’s all so difficult. Love.”

Vachell read it with a frown and folded it carefully into his pocketbook. Munson’s death, accidental or otherwise, seemed to have been a fine thing from every angle.

Finally, with a good deal of reluctance, Vachell went in search of the two children he had seen, briefly, earlier in the day. He found them in the schoolroom, part of yet another of the dilapidated mud-and-rubble buildings scattered about the homestead without design or plan. This one had a thatched roof. The walls inside were protected by papyrus matting that rustled and crackled faintly all the time, whether from gentle stirrings of the wind blowing in through the open door and windows, or from the seething insect life that doubtless went on in its recesses, it was impossible to say.

Roy and Theodora Munson were sitting at an ink-stained table, one on each side of their teacher, laboriously taking down dictation. Both looked white-faced and disturbed, but they were cleanlooking, friendly-seeming children, and Vachell could not help feeling a sense of surprise that the 76

Munsons should have offspring at all — it was illogically unlikely — or that, having them, they should be such nice-mannered kids. For this, he supposed, Miss Adams should be thanked. She rose when he came in, pushing her straight, soft hair behind her ears, and making an effort to smile. Her eyes looked apprehensive in her thin face.

“Mrs Munson insisted that we should carry on as usual,” she said. “It seems ghastly, but it does give us something to do.”

Vachell sat down on a spare chair that wobbled dangerously, looked over the dictation, and tried to make the children feel at ease. It was, of course, a hopeless task. He put his questions casually, first about routine. Breakfast, he found, took place in the schoolroom at seven-fifteen; lessons began sharp at eight. Roy and Theo were generally up by sixthirty, and filled in the time before breakfast pottering around the farm buildings and playing games, while Miss Adams was busy with chickens and turkeys. That morning, she told him, she had gone out as usual about half-past six, let the young chicks out of their heated coops into the movable runs, fed them, turned the eggs in the incubators, and filled the drinking-troughs with skim milk. That had taken her till breakfast time. She had eaten, as usual, with the children, and started lessons punctually at eight. She had been in the schoolroom until a boy came to summon her to Mrs Munson; and then she had heard the news. She remembered seeing Munson in the distance by the cowsheds when she 77

first went out, but not to speak to; and that was all she knew.

Roy Munson suddenly became embarrassed when Vachell asked him how he had spent the prebreakfast interlude. He wriggled and looked at the table and then at Miss Adams with a mute appeal for help. Beneath his freckles he was pale and his eyes were wide with alarm at the terrors of the morning. He was a well-built, sturdy lad, tall for his age. It seemed more of a mystery than ever that such unprepossessing parents should have given rise to such a promising product.

Miss Adams smiled at him and said: “I don’t think you need worry, Roy. Mr Vachell won’t give you away.”

With the children she seemed a different person from the defensive, awkward young woman he had seen at the Wests’. Her manner had softened and lost its prickles; the difference was that of a fish swimming in its native pond and a fish gasping on the bank. From their manner it was clear that the children, Roy anyway, liked her in return.

“Well, I was out shooting,” Roy said defensively.

“Say, that’s something,” Vachell remarked, deeply impressed. “What did you use? An air-gun?”

Roy wriggled his shoulders again. “No, bow and arrows, but a proper real one, like the Dorobo have.

Only don’t tell dad or …”

Roy broke off and paused, horror-struck at what he had said. “I mean …”

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“I won’t say a word to anyone,” Vachell promised.

“What kind of game do you go after?”

“Well, only birds so far, pigeons — but when I’m a good enough shot Arawak’s promised to make me a bigger one and I can get buck, duikers and bushbuck even, and one day I shall hunt buffaloes.

The Dorobo do, you know, or at least they used to.

Arawak’s father shot lots. So far I haven’t hit anything but I’ve only had it a week, and I can’t practise much as they’d take it away from me if they found out.”

“This Arawak is a Dorobo mole-catcher who lives on the farm,” Miss Adams explained. “He made Roy a bow and arrows just like his own, only smaller.

But please don’t tell Mrs Munson or I shall get into awful trouble. She’d be furious if she knew.”

Vachell remembered hearing about Dorobo people; they were a small bright-eyed race of hunters who belonged to the forest and lived on honey and game. In the old days they had been adepts at killing elephant and buffalo with poisoned arrows and at trapping smaller beasts in pits. Now the Government had forbidden such pursuits, especially the use of poisoned arrows, and the Dorobo had left the forest, for the most part, to live on farms by catching moles and scaring birds and performing other light tasks.

Roy and Theo had gone in search of pigeons that morning up behind the pyrethrum shed, where juniper and olive-trees stood among the park-like pastures. They were quite certain that they had 79

caught no glimpse of their father, nor of anyone else except one or two natives, whom they knew, going down towards the pyrethrum.

Vachell asked them to take him up there, and to show him where they had done their hunting that morning. They started out with enthusiasm, forgetting, with the resilience of childhood, the dreadful, half-comprehended things that had happened that day.

“We’d better take the bow and arrows,” Roy suggested with transparent innocence, “if you want to see exactly what we did. I can show you which trees the pigeons we shot at were in.”

The weapons were kept concealed in the mashroom behind a bin of kibbled maize.

“Mr Munson never comes — came in here,”

Anita Adams explained. “Mrs Munson does occasionally — she’s got a key — but we didn’t think she’d be likely to move the bin. It wasn’t safe to keep the weapons anywhere in the house.” All three had the air of conspirators; the secret drew them together with a bond of enmity against a hostile world. Miss Adams looked into the incubators to see that the lamps were burning properly and Vachell noticed that the surfaces of the eggs were bare of crosses; they had been turned since he had seen them on the previous day.

“I’ve got to mix some more mash for the chickens,” she said. “Roy, you and Theo show him where you went.”

Beyond the drying-shed Roy took Vachell over 80

the ground he and his sister had covered early that morning, picking out the trees where he had fired at birds. His bow was long and only slightly bent, and the arrows, instead of being sharp and pointed, had thick ends shaped like trumpets, about two inches across. The bird, if hit, would be knocked off its perch and stunned by a blunt instrument instead of being pierced by a barbed tip. It was a new idea to Vachell, and he asked Roy to give a demonstration. A fat, pink-breasted dove cooing in the branches of an olive-tree was marked down as a quarry, and an elaborate stalk conducted until the hunter was within a few yards of the tree. Then Roy put his blunted arrow to the bow, drew back the string, and let go. He had fired many shots before, and this time the law of averages was ready with a reward. The trumpet-ended arrow caught the bird on its side and knocked it spinning to the ground.

Roy dropped the bow with a loud squeal of delight and darted forward with an excitement that no biggame hunter confronted with the corpse of a record lion could exceed.

But the dove was not dead. As soon as he picked it up it started to flap its wings. He swung it by the legs and hit its head against the ground, but without effect; it flapped more than ever in a last effort to escape. Roy seized its head between his first and second fingers and, with an expert jerk, snapped its neck. The jerk was practised, but too strong, for the head parted completely from the body, and the 81

headless dove, hanging from its feet with a bleeding neck, danced convulsively in Roy’s hand.

“Gosh,” he exclaimed. “Look at it wriggling without a head!” He observed the phenomenon with great attention, oblivious of the blood that was spattering his bare legs. But his sister stared with open mouth and widening eyes, and then turned her back and burst into tears.

“That’s the way brothers are,” Vachell told her.

“Don’t pay any attention — he didn’t hurt the bird.

It didn’t feel any pain.”

But Theo was not to be comforted so easily. “It’s like Miss Adams’ pigeons,” she sobbed. “I found them with no — no heads on. They had no heads.”

She went on crying and Vachell, holding on to a damp hand, led her back to the schoolroom as quickly as he could, glad to get out of sight of the dead dove. In some way he could not define the little incident was more horrible than the sight of Munson’s dead body on the bed. At any rate, he thought, he’d found out what he wanted to know.

Although the children had spent that vital halfhour, sixthirty to seven, within sight of the pyrethrum shed, their attention had been too closely held by other things to observe who had passed —

if anyone had done so — along the footpath leading from the Wests’.

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A stranger was waiting at the Munson homestead when Vachell returned — a tall young man wearing, for some obscure reason, a very decrepit burberry over his crumpled khaki slacks and shirt, and sucking at an empty pipe. He was sitting on the rail of the livingroom veranda, kicking his heels against the uprights and apparently lost in thought. A bare head revealed a thatch of curly fair hair. He had a concave, upturned nose that looked like a button in a broad, good-humoured face. When he became conscious of Vachell’s presence he jumped off the rail and came forward with a long, outstretched arm and a friendly grin.

“Hello, hello,” he said. “My name’s Parrot. The police in possession, I see. Can’t find anyone else about at all.” He waved an arm in a vague allembracing gesture which made his burberry flap against his knees. “Where is everyone — Mrs Munson, Corcoran, the kids? They haven’t got Munson lying in state by any chance, have they?”