Murder on Safari (10 page)

bloody cow waiting to be milked, or something.

I’m busy.”

“Why,” Vachell asked in conversational tones, “did you say you were here in camp all morning, when you took a walk in the hills with a gun?”

Rutley swung round as quick as a wheeling

horse and glared at his questioner. He gripped a hammer in his hand and half-raised it to his shoulder.

“It’s a bloody lie!” he shouted. “I didn’t go out with a gun — I stayed here. You can ask Paula; she saw me.” His voice tailed off towards the end of the sentence and he turned back to his work and hammered in a couple of nails.

“Can’t you see I’m busy?” he went on. “I’ve got nothing to tell you. I don’t know anything about all this. I wouldn’t want to shoot my employer, would I? She was generous to me, I’ll say that. I’ll be out of a job now.” He gave a quick smile. “The old man isn’t likely to keep me, I can tell you that.”

Vachell regarded him for a few moments with

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an expressionless face, his jaws slowly champing the gum, his hands in his pockets.

“It isn’t any use,” he said finally. “This isn’t a gag., My boy saw you with the gun. And he heard a shot.”

Rutley’s back stiffened and the hand that held the hammer remained for a second in midair.

Then he straightened slowly and turned his head.

His confident, rather bullying expression had faded as quickly as the colour fades out of stones on the beach when the sea recedes.

“Well, if I did take a stroll after a buck,” he said, “what’s that got to do with you? I walked a little way up the river and back, that’s all. I didn’t shoot anything. I was back inside an hour.”

“What did you fire at?” Vachell asked.

“A buffalo. I ran into a herd about a mile or so up the river — at least, I saw the backside of one in the bush just across the gulley. I had a shot and then there was the hell of a din, and the whole bank opposite turned black with buffaloes. They seemed to sprout out of the ground, and they

crashed through the bush like a lot of steamengines.

In the other direction, luckily. I had a

look round when they’d cleared off, but there wasn’t any sign of the one I’d fired at, so I must have missed.”

“Pretty risky business, chasing after buffaloes,”

Vachell commented.

“Oh, I wasn’t chasing buffaloes, particularly,”

Rutley answered. His hands were fidgeting with 96

the hammer. “I wanted to get a buck. Englebrecht lent me his rifle, and I wanted to try it. He’s a decent chap, Englebrecht is Ч not so damned

snooty as the rest of ‘em. This camp is lousy with rifles, but no one else ever offered to lend me one.”

“i

‘He lent you a .470” Vachell said. “That’s used for big game, not for buck.”

“He said he wanted his light rifles himself. This was the only one he could spare. He warned me it would blow a small buck to pieces. What the hell does it matter, anyway?”

Vachell made no reply, and studied the ground at his feet. His jaws champed the gum with the regularity of a sleeper’s breathing. Rutley watched him, fiddling nervously with the hammer. He took up a tin of Player’s on the bench and helped

himself to another cigarette.

“Which car did you use this morning,” Vachell said at last, “when you took Lady Baradale out for a ride?”

“One of the two Fords.”

“Do you keep a mileage record for the cars?”

Rutley reached for a notebook lying amid an

untidy litter of tools on the bench. He seemed relieved at the turn the questioning had taken.

“Yes, I do,” he said. Lady Baradale was very

particular about that. She watched the petrol like a hawk. I had to enter up the mileage of every trip and take the speedometer readings every morning to see the boys hadn’t done any joyriding on the 97

quiet.” He flipped open the book and handed it over. “I checked all the entries before I went out in the Ford this morning,” he added. “I couldn’t check either of the Plymouths, though. One went to Malabeya with Miss Baradale, and you and Mrs Davis had the other all the morning.”

“Has the second Ford been out today?”

“No — not unless some native took it for a joyride.”

“Thanks,” Vachell said. “Guess I’ll keep this for the time being.”

He switched on his flashlight and walked out of the hut and over to the carpark, about twenty paces away. He went through the line methodically, shining his torch on to the dashboard of each lorry in turn, and comparing the reading on the speedometer with the appropriate figure in the notebook in his hand. In every case the two readings corresponded.

At the end of the line was a gap, and then came the two Ford saloons. The speedometer of the first registered 2,489 miles, and the corresponding entry in the book was 2,476. Rutley was all right so far, Vachell thought. He’d said that he took Lady Baradale six or seven miles along the road that morning; and thirteen miles had been added to the speedometer.

He moved on the the other Ford, and read

2,643 on the dial. He flashed the beam on to the book in his hand and read 2,614. He looked at the entry again, frowning, and back at the dial.

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There wasn’t any mistake. The second Ford’s

speedometer had registered twenty-nine extra

miles since the mileages had been noted that

morning.

The sudden burr of a motor broke the silence of the night. A wide shaft of light sprang out of the darkness and slid rapidly towards him over the ground until it illuminated the fronts of the lorries, making their headlamps shine like a row of twinkling stars. A car bumped into sight out of the brush and swung into line in the park. The brakes squealed as it stopped abruptly, and then the motor died. Vachell stepped forward and pulled open the door of the Plymouth box-body. The car was thickly spattered with mud and there were chains on the back wheels.

“Good evening, Miss Baradale,” he said. “With all that rain, you must have had a tough trip.”

“It was a bit foul,” she answered. She slipped out of the car and groped in the pocket of her slacks for a cigarette case. “I struck a lousy storm on the way back, but managed to get through with chains. What I need now is a drink.”

Vachell switched on his flashlight again, leant over the wheel, and peered at the speedometer. It registered 3,302. He turned the light on to the notebook and read the appropriate entry: 3,076.

It was almost exactly a hundred miles to Malalbeya.

The car had travelled 226 miles since morning.

He flashed his light into the back of the car and 99

it came to rest on a rifle lying on the wooden floor.

He reached over for it, balanced his flashlight on the front seat, slipped out the bolt, and squinted down the barrel at the light. The metal shone into his eye like a new shilling. It had been cleaned since the last time it had been fired.

“What on earth are you doing?” Cara Baradale’s voice sounded astonished and annoyed.

Vachell slipped the flashlight into his pocket, took out a matchbox, and lit her cigarette. He thought her face looked tired and strained in the sudden glow of the match. “Come along and I’ll tell you,” he said.

As he steered her towards the tents over the

uneven ground he told her the news, bluntly. She stopped dead in her tracks, and he could feel her staring at him through the darkness. “It must have been an accident,” she said.

Vachell gave her the facts, briefly. He felt her arm, thin as a match-stick, shiver under his hands as a shudder passed through her body.

“When did it happen?” she asked. There was

apprehension in her husky tone.

When Vachell told her, he thought that she was going to faint. She caught her breath in a sort of choke and put one hand up to her neck. He put his arm round her waist to steady her, and felt her body shiver convulsively. She started to say something, checked herself, and walked on unsteadily

in the dark.

“Do you know who… ?” Her voice was low

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and shaky.

“Not yet,” he answered.

She went straight to her tent and did not emerge until dinner was on the table. The meal was held in the big messtent, for the night was heavy with the coming storm. From time to time a few spatters of rain were ejected from the tightly packed

sky as if a growing tension had squeezed them out of taut reluctant clouds.

No one expected the meal to be a cheerful one.

Lord Baradale, presiding at the head of the table, ate little, drank quantities of champagne, and scarcely spoke. Gordon Catchpole, looking wan and wearing a heavy purple silk dressing-gown embroidered with golden dragons, sat opposite, nibbling at his food and devoting himself mainly to gin. Cara had clearly made an effort to pull herself together, but her brittle manner was an imperfect mask for the tense feeling of strain that lay beneath. The vivid red gash of her lips was the only colour in her long thin face, framed in its dark background of hair.

De Mare ate glumly, his beaky face expressionless and severe. From time to time Chris Davis

glanced at him, as it to find reassurance. She barely attempted to deal with the food on her plate. Her eyes looked large and troubled against the pallor of her skin. The radio in a corner of the tent emitted a flow of swing music punctuated by crackles caused by the thunderstorm, until Lord Baradale, swearing under his breath, got up and 101

switched it off.

Conversation was devoted largely to the prospects of getting the safari back to Malabeya, and

thence to Marula. Lord Baradale had first

announced that his wife was to be buried at dawn the next morning on the outskirts of the camp; but later in the day it had been discovered that no one possessed a prayer-book or could remember any part of the burial service, so he had decided that he and de Mare were to take the body into

Malabeya early the next morning. The District Commissioner’s office even though temporarily devoid of a District Commissioner, should be able to produce a prayer-book, and perhaps even a

native minister to preside at the last rites.

Cara tried to discourage her father from his

plan. “You’ll only get hopelessly stuck in the mud,” she told him, “and then what would you do with … well, you’d be sunk. If it rains tonight the road will be impassable. We shan’t be able to leave here till God knows when, if it goes on.”

“I agree with Cara absolutely,” Catchpole said.

“Besides, Malabeya’s so sordid. I’m certain that Lucy would infinitely rather stay here, out in the open, unspoilt veldt, that be taken to that horrid, dusty little outpost. She’d feel so jostled. You know how she hated humanity when it got unsorted. I think she’d be happiest on some stark eminence, where she could look down on everything.

Don’t you think that would be more in

keeping with her nature?”

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There was an awkward pause, broken by the

pop of a champagne cork which showed that

Geydi at any rate, had not forgotten himself.

“I’ll ask your advice when I want it, Gordon,”

Lord Baradale said curtly.

“I was only trying to interpret her real wishes,”

Catchpole said plaintively. “I can’t bear to think of the obliteration. Africa is so egotistical, somehow.

It simply doesn’t care what happens to anyone.

You know, I believe that’s why there’s such a lot of it in the Empire. We’re so impervious, somehow.

We’re really the only nation that can beat

Africa at its own game.”

“You should speak with authority,” de Mare

said acidly.

“Take whisky and golf,” Catchpole continued.

“Both invented by the Scotch to go with a cold, wet, draughty climate. We go on drinking one and playing the other in the most arid deserts. And eating Californian tinned peaches in the middle of the most tropical fertility, and building sanitary abattoirs in native villages, and making it illegal to buy a drink at five past ten in the recesses of the jungle, and making anecdotal after-dinner

speeches in mud huts in the most unconvivial places. We simply carry on, regardless of how any one else behaves. We’re the only nation really in harmony with the spirit of Africa.”

Lord Baradale gave a snort of disgust and drank a glassful of champagne at a gulp. Cara pushed her plate away and said: “Oh, do shut up, Gordon. No 103

one wants to hear your theories, and anyhow

they’ve got whiskers.”

Catchpole gazed fixedly at Cara’s face. His eyes gleamed like those of a cat in the bright light of the unshaded electric bulbs.

“You’re prejudiced, my sweet,” he said. “The

empire-building attitude is terribly contagious, and I must say you’ve been moving in very

infected circles. I only hope that now all obstacles in the path of true love have been so opportunely removed, you won’t find the wide open spaces

terribly flat.”

Cara banged her glass of whisky down on the

table and looked at her fiance with narrowed eyes.

“Just what do you mean by that?” she asked.

Her voice was trembling on the edge of selfcontrol.

“I’m

only wishing you good luck. After all, it’s

no good being too hypocritical, is it? Every one knows that poor Lucy didn’t forget you in her will, so now you’ll be free as air to choose your own fiances, regardless of any sordid questions of finance. In fact, you can be your own mistress Ч

using the phrase purely as a facon de parler, my sweet.”

“Damn you, Gordon, don’t you dare speak like

that to Cara!” Lord Baradale exploded from the other end of the table. “Haven’t you an atom of decency left? You sit there, within a few hours of Lucy’s death, and …” Words failed him, and he sat glaring at Catchpole in impotent anger.

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“It’s all very well to accuse me of having no decency,” Catchpole said, his voice rising several keys. “It wasn’t very decent to steal Lucy’s jewels and then kill her, was it? You all behave as if you thought I did it; but when a stray white hunter without a penny to his name makes a play for Cara because he’s after her money, and then sneaks away a few days after Lucy’s jewels are stolen, and then Lucy gets shot a few hours after he disappears, you don’t say a thing\ I think you’ve got the most distorted ideas.”