The African Poison Murders (9 page)

“No,” Vachell replied. “How did you hear the news?”

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“Oh, it’s about everywhere, you know — news travels like billy-o in this part of the world. True, false, and wish-fulfilment, all the same. We always hear about the next war a week before it doesn’t start. Last week there were a thousand tanks camouflaged as a herd of wildebeest coming over the Abyssinian border, and the week before all the railway bridges had been blown up by Italian spies disguised as Franciscan missionaries. The boys have practically declared a public holiday on my place, so I came up here to see if there was anything I could do. Neighbourly, you know, and that sort of thing.”

“I didn’t know the good-neighbour policy operated so well in this neck of the woods,” Vachell observed.

Parrot laughed, crinkling up his face in a wholehearted way. He looked young, but on closer inspection Vachell decided he was older than he looked.

There were lines under his round, rather childlike blue eyes. He wore a small moustache, so fair and clipped so short that you overlooked it at first glance.

“There’s not much love lost between Munson and the rest of us,” he admitted. “But after all, the fellow’s dead. I came up to see if there was anything I could do. Sudden deaths are apt to leave things a bit up a gum-tree, if you know what I mean.”

“Mrs Munson’s in her room,” Vachell observed.

“I don’t know where Corcoran is. Quite a crowd coming up to pay their respects to the widow. I guess Munson was more popular than he knew.”

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“Oh, aren’t I the first?” Parrot made a grimace of disappointment. “I hoped old Mother Munson might be so softened by the gesture she’d keep her cows to herself in future — they’re hers now, presumably. But I suppose Dennis West had the same bright idea.”

“No. Wendtland,” Vachell said briefly. He was watching Parrot with veiled but keen attention. All Munson’s neighbours seemed to have good reason to dislike him, and he wondered a little that one of them should hurry so promptly to the scene, full of consolation for the widow. Corcoran, after all, was there to take care of the farm.

“Oh, him.” Parrot rubbed the bowl of his pipe with a thumb and grinned again. Vachell noticed that his hands were seldom still. “Well, he can stay Mother Munson with swastikas and comfort her with the sayings of the Fuhrer better than I can. I’ll just go and show my face through the door and push on, then. What’s the idea about Munson, by the way? Heart attack, or something?”

“There’ll be an autopsy. Until then it isn’t possible to say. Do you raise pyrethrum, Mr Parrot?”

Parrot looked mildly surprised. He gave the impression of a man who would never be more than mildly moved by any emotion. “Well, a little, in the early stages — I’ve just begun. I’m a new hand at this game, you know — been here less than a year.”

“Do you have a drying-shed?”

“I’ve just built one, of sorts. Why?”

“There’s a possibility Munson was overcome by 85

fumes from the charcoal brazier. How does that strike you, as a pyrethrum grower?”

Parrot shook his head. “I haven’t enough experience to give an opinion. Can’t say I’ve felt like passing out myself yet, but then it’s early days to say. Perhaps someone was plotting against his life and introduced a poison gas into the shed to mingle with the charcoal fumes. I say, that would be a neat trick, wouldn’t it?”

“Sure,” Vachell agreed. Parrot’s friendly but facetious manner was getting a little on his nerves.

“I guess you’ve hit on it, Mr Parrot. Fact is, Munson was a Nazi spy, but he double-crossed his outfit so the Nazis fixed a pipe in the drying-shed and put through a deadly, colourless, odourless gas, hitherto unknown to science. The other end of the pipe comes up at Berchtesgaden.”

Parrot nodded gravely. “A device worthy of their devilish ingenuity,” he observed. “But you’re wrong about the gas. They just got Hitler to talk down the pipe about the will to peace of the German nation and that did the trick.”

He dropped his pipe into the pocket of his quite superfluous old burberry, grinned good-bye to Vachell, and strode off, the coat flapping against his legs, towards the Munsons’ bedrooms.

Vachell felt vaguely unsatisfied about Parrot. He seemed to be an amiable, good-natured sort of Englishman without too many brains, but he was quick-witted enough, and hardly the type to gravitate towards the scene of a sudden death out of 86

morbid curiosity. Still, he might feel that neighbours were neighbours, even if they didn’t always get along, and after all it wasn’t every day that sudden death overtook a robust farmer next door.

Prettyman had found no sign, however faint, to suggest that the louvres of the drying-shed might have been blocked. They drove back to Karuna together, Prettyman silent for once, finding his audience unsympathetic. His theory was that someone had slipped some poison into Munson’s tea. Vachell said shortly it was probably heartfailure, and relapsed into his thoughts. Two points puzzled him most: why Munson had gone into the drying-shed on his morning for grooming prize bulls, and why he had put on his old shoes. He wished, too, that he’d understood what Wendtland had said.

The doctor’s report would not be ready until late; so he filled in the time with a visit to Munson’s solicitor. He was surprised to learn that Munson had employed a woman, until he learnt that her fees were slightly lower than those of her rival in the town. It was said that Munson brought enough cases, mainly against natives, to keep Mrs Innocent for the rest of her life — if she had ever got paid.

As it was, he paid her just enough to keep her in a state of hope, so that she didn’t refuse his work altogether. She was said to be clever, but her brisk manner alarmed the more conservative farmers, so they got their own back by shaking their heads and 87

saying darkly that she sailed a bit too close to the wind.

Clara Innocent’s office was in a new stone building over a boot-shop in the main street of the small but active farmers’ town. She greeted Vachell cordially, and with undisguised interest; the news of Munson’s death had already created a local sensation.

She was a plump, active-looking woman with a freckled face, a fuzz of auburn hair and large, broad hands. A pair of horn-rimmed spectacles gave her a look of wisdom which Vachell assumed she cultivated as much as she could, but from the lively expression in her brown eyes and the humorous lines at the corners of a rather large mouth he imagined that her legal studies had not smothered her ability to see a joke. She wore a severely cut grey flannel suit with a white stripe and a crepe de Chine blouse in apple green.

She got up when Vachell entered and shook hands with a firm grip across a big table covered with documents and a huge typewriter, which took up more than its share of space. He judged her to be a woman of forty to fortyfive, good-looking when young, before she let her figure go. She had a hearty, forthright manner that might be disconcerting socially, but made her easy to deal with on strictly business lines.

“Well, is it murder or natural causes, Mr Vachell?” she asked at once.

Vachell explained that so far he didn’t know.

“Our minds are made up here,” Clara Innocent 88

continued. “Everyone’s saying: ‘I told you so. It was only a question of time.’ They all think some native did him in, of course, and Heaven knows there are plenty with a grievance; I’ve seen some sent down myself on evidence as phony as a Red Sea mermaid.

You’ll be wanting to know about his will, I suppose?”

“I’ve no right to demand the information,”

Vachell said cautiously. “Of course, if Munson died from natural causes it’s no concern of ours. Just the same, if you reckon there’d be no harm in giving me a line on it in confidence, I’d be in your debt.”

“Lord, no, I don’t mind in the least,” Mrs Innocent said heartily. “As long as you don’t let on to Mother Munson; I expect she’ll be popping round here any moment now. She disapproves of me, anyway, and after what I’ve got to tell her I’ll be lucky if I come out alive. It’s rather interesting about this will. Munson altered it not long ago, and now it’s rather a curious document. And it’s going to make the old girl hopping mad.”

She reached for a folded document on her desk and spread it open. Vachell was surprised to find her making quite such short work of professional etiquette. Then he remembered that most of the police work in Karuna at present went to her rival, who had less experience but was preferred on account of his sex.

“Here it is,” Mrs Innocent added. “The old will left everything to Munson’s wife, and after her to their son. That was made just after Roy was born.

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About six months ago he came in and said he wanted to draw up a new will, but the provisions were to be kept absolutely secret. As you’ll see, he left the farm, stock, and all equipment — the whole bag of tricks — to his nephew Edward Corcoran, until his son Roy comes of age, when he, the son that is, takes over a half share. And there’s a proviso that Corcoran can buy Roy out, if he wants to, at a price to be determined by the Land Bank Board.”

“That’s a hell of a will,” Vachell observed.

“Where does Mother Munson come in?”

“That’s the curious part. She gets no capital or property at all. But Corcoran has to pay her an annual sum, as a first charge on the estate, based on the mean price of butterfat for the year. If butterfat is ninety cents a pound or over she gets five hundred a year. If it goes down to seventy-five she only gets three hundred, and if it drops to sixty or under he only has to pay her one hundred a year.

It’s a fantastic idea and I did my best to dissuade him, but he insisted, and I couldn’t refuse pointblank; I don’t find anything against it in law.”

“He had originality,” Vachell said reflectively.

“Did Mrs Munson know about this?”

“Not unless she found out just recently. Mother Munson had him pretty well where she wanted him, you know. She was the stronger character of the two. He was terrified she’d find out about this will, and the very last time I saw him he mentioned it again. ‘Don’t say a word about it,’ he said. ‘My life wouldn’t be worth living if it got round to a certain 90

quarter — you know.’ So I’m pretty sure he never gave it away.”

“Any idea why he changed his will?”

Mrs Innocent smiled and shook her head. “For a lawyer I’m inclined to be indiscreet, I’m afraid.

Some of my male colleagues keep up a pretence of guarding secrets only known to themselves, their client, and God. I can’t do that, I’m afraid, but I do draw the line somewhere. Frankly, I can make a guess, but that isn’t evidence. Anyway, as a policeman, your guess ought to be better than mine.”

Vachell read the will through. A small amount of German property was left to a brother in Hamburg, but there were no other minor bequests. Mrs Innocent and one of the Land Bank directors were appointed trustees. There was no provision at all for Munson’s daughter, and nothing beyond a halfshare in the farm at the age of twenty-one for his son.

“How much did Corcoran know about this?” he asked.

Mrs Innocent shrugged her shoulders and looked out of the window at the heavy clouds piling up over the lake. “I haven’t any idea. Perhaps nothing at all. Perhaps, on the other hand….”

She did not finish the sentence, and Vachell read the will through again. The butterfat provisions were very shrewd. They adjusted the burden on the farm to its capacity to pay. In good years it would pay the full amount, in bad years much less. If all 91

interest charges and mortgages and loans were on that basis, he thought, modern farming would be another story. It was altogether a fairer deal than squeezing the farmer for a fixed sum to meet interest in years when he received a quarter as much as usual for his output.

He could think of only two reasons for the drastic change in Munson’s will: a violent quarrel with his wife, or a very successful piece of blackmail on the part of the new heir.

Mrs Innocent walked with him down the stairs and shook hands at the door leading into the street.

He noticed with appreciation that she had not succumbed to the large woman’s tendency to flop; her clothes and her hair were under good discipline.

“You know,” she remarked, as a parting shot, “if you want to find out more about the causes that led up to the change in Munson’s will, I understand that you’re well placed at present for some firsthand research.”

Vachell looked away down the broad sun-flooded street and made no reply. The shiny bodies of parked cars reflected the sunrays like mirrors, and the glare made him screw up his eyes. Natives in every variety of costume, from smart young bloods in double-breasted suits and pipe-clayed sunhelmets to bewildered old men in blankets come to see a daughter in the native hospital, ambled up and down the black-paved street. Two people stepped out of the grocer’s across the way: a short, dumpy figure in khaki drill, and a taller, more slender 92

attendant, carrying the parcels, in brown corduroys, slacks and a windbreaker jacket. Vachell shook hands and said good-bye quickly, and walked away.

A little later he looked back and saw Mrs Munson and Edward Corcoran disappear into the doorway leading to Mrs Innocent’s office. A solution to the problem of Wendtland’s message flashed into his mind. It was a hunch; he had them sometimes, and they were seldom wrong. He pulled at the lobe of one ear and cursed to himself. Mrs Innocent was a shrewd woman, Wendtland a smart young man.

Right, or wrong, there was nothing he could do.

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The autopsy report, when the doctor brought it round to the police office that evening, was long and technical, but it boiled down to something quite simple: Dr Lawson had been unable to establish the cause of Munson’s death. All the organs, so far as he could see, were in a perfectly healthy state. He had found no sign of disease or inflammation in the region of the heart. The lungs had been subjected to a careful examination, but no damage from toxic gases could be detected. It was true, Dr Lawson said, that if a person died from excessive concentration of carbon dioxide there need be no specific symptoms, since the cause of death would be simple suffocation; but the state of the lungs did not suggest that suffocation had in fact occurred.