Murder on Safari (12 page)

He turned his attention to the safe. It stood where he had seen it before, black and squat, underneath the dressingtable. Bottles on the table’s surface gleamed dully and silver-backed brushes flashed like stars as he arranged the torch carefully on the bed, so that its beam fell fully on 116

to the safe’s door. He squatted down on his heels in front of the table and inserted the key in the lock. It turned smoothly and silently in his fingers. Easy enough, he thought, to open the safe without waking even a light sleeper. He hoped the papers inside might contain a lead. Funny how often hardboiled old dames like Lady Baradale went soft over letters, and kept all sorts of compromising billets tied up in pink satin ribbon.

That bundle, now, had looked like a bunch of

love-letters of some sort… .

His hand froze in mid-air as the steel door

swung silently towards him. He squatted like a stone statue, every muscle tense, all animation seemingly suspended. A prickly feeling ran up his spine and tingled over his scalp, as though each hair was rising on end. Behind him, in the dense darkness of the tent, he sensed, rather than heard, the muted movement of another living creature.

He held his breath and strained his ears as desperately as a hunted animal to catch the faintest

tremor of a sound-wave. Silence wrapped itself heavily around him like a blanket. Above the

drumming of the blood in his ears he heard the croak of a frog, the soft hoot of an owl, and then the far-off yap-yap of a peevish jackal. There was no sound in the tent, but he knew, beyond doubt, that somewhere behind him in the darkness was something that was alive.

Then, slowly, the flashlight rolled over on me bed. The safe’s door was swallowed by darkness, 117

and the beam slid along the side of the dressingtable.

Something, brushing against the bed, had

jolted the flashlight from its position.

Vachell’s breath was driven from his lungs in a muffled gasp as he braced his muscles and threw his weight suddenly back on to his heels. He

started to spring to his feet in a sort of backward leap; and then the unseen hand struck. Something hit the back of his head like the kick of a horse. He pitched forward helplessly and sprawled, motionless, on the floor of the tent. The flashlight

toppled off the bed and lay there, its beam ineffectively directed into his unconscious face.

His first thought, when he came to, was that a blinding sun was shining into his eyes; his second, that a giant sledge-hammer was pounding away

inside his head. Gradually he became aware that the light in his eyes came from an electric torch.

He put up one hand, pushed it away, and sat up shakily, feeling very sick. There was a lump on the back of his head the size of an orange, and it hurt abominably. He found that he could stand, but his knees felt like putty. He looked at his watch, and found that it was ten past one. Then he directed the torch’s beam on to the safe. The door was closed and the key had vanished from the lock.

Speculation and anger were obliterated from,

his mind by an overpowering desire for a drink of water. He walked unsteadily towards the opening, the flashlight wavering in his hand. The beam fell on to the improvised coffin and lit up the jam-jar 118

full of drooping flowers on top. By the side of it lay two round objects that had not been there when he entered the tent. He pointed the beam at them incredulously and wondered whether a crack on the head could induce optical illusions. Then he closed his hand over them and said aloud:

“Well, I’ll be Goddamned — walnuts!”

Two walnuts were sitting on top of Lady

Baradale’s home-made coffin. He pushed them

into his pocket, feeling dazed and resentful.

Everything was going haywire. The whole situation was hopelessly unreal. “Oh, nuts!” he

thought, and stopped dead, as though suddenly paralysed. Nuts! Could that be it? A message from the murderer; an insolent salute to the police? He swore tersely, and walked unsteadily out of the tent.

It was quiet and still outside, but not raining.

The camp lay in darkness, its fires extinguished.

The beam of the flashlight carved a path through the blackness, flood-lighting every grassblade. As he moved forward something white gleamed at

him from beneath a guy-rope at his feet. He leant down and picked up a half-smoked Player’s

cigarette. The action caused his head to throb intolerably. He straightened up slowly, and

walked on towards his tent.

The night was still as death, and the leaves of the big acacia hung motionless in the air as though they had been carved in stone. Vachell stood for a few moments by the smooth bole, cooling his

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throbbing head and straining his eyes towards the invisible river. He could hear the water rippling over the rocks, and the noise of unseen birds moving and calling softly in the darkness. The frogs had almost ceased to croak, and the hyenas were silent. A feeling of expectancy seemed to encase the earth.

Vachell was not conscious of the movement

when another and alien sound first came to his ears. All of a sudden it was there Ч a low, deep note like the faint hum of a distant bee. He jerked his head round to the west. At first he could see nothing, but a little later a far-off twinkle of light gleamed at him through the trees down the river.

It moved slowly along the horizon, and then

vanished as suddenly as it had come.

It was too bright for a traveller’s lamp, too low for a shooting star, too small for a grass fire. There was only one thing it could be: the headlights of a car.

Vachell turned suddenly and made for the carpark, stumbling in his haste. The noses of the

lorries shone faintly in the starlight. They looked like squat crouching monsters. He counted them carefully: four cars, fourteen lorries, each one in its place.

Somewhere, close to them on the veldt in this vast uninhabited land, was a fifth car, driving over roadless territory at one-thirty in the morning.

The yowl of a hyena broke the silence so

suddenly that Vachell jumped and nearly dropped 120

the torch. The beast was prowling about beyond the carpark. Another answered from the bush

behind. From a long way off the sharp cough of a startled zebra pricked the veil of silence that shrouded the earth.

Vachell shivered a little, although the night was warm and balmy. He walked quickly over to

Rutley’s workshop, pushed open the creaking

wooden door, and played the torch over the bench and walls. Tools gleamed back at him like dull black eyes. The questing flashlight came to rest upon a plate of oranges and ginger biscuits on the table. A pile of peeled orange rind lay beside it.

There was something else there too, hiding behind the oranges. Vachell stepped over to the bench and peered down. Walnuts. There were five

walnuts on the plate.

He looked at them for a full minute, speculating, before he remembered what he had come for.

Then he circled the hut with the beam and

brought it back to rest on a heavy jack that lay in a corner. He picked it up, balanced it in his hand, and decided that it would make as good a weapon as any. His next job was to check up on every member of the safari; and he wasn’t going to be caught with his pants down twice. He wondered why his assailant hadn’t made a job of it in Lady Baradale’s tent. Next time, the killer might hit harder, and hit to kill.

He started with the women’s section of the * camp. Everyone slept with the front flap of their 121

tent tied back, and this made his task easier. He skirted guy-ropes and tent-pegs cautiously, and listened outside each flap for the steady noise of breathing.

Chris Davis and Paula were sleeping soundly.

He flashed the light on to their beds for a brief instant to make sure. The third tent he came to was Cara’s. He couldn’t hear her breathing, so he took a chance with the flashlight. The beam fell on to a blank expanse of white pillow. The sheets were not disturbed and a pair of wine-red silk pyjamas lay over a chair by the bedside. Cara Baradale was not at home.

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The flame that precedes the rising of the sun had started to warm a cold grey sky when Kimotho

brought hot tea and rattled the cup to wake his employer. Vachell sat up and groaned. The lump on his head was as tender as a boil and his knees were red and sore. He gulped the tea gratefully, pulled on his clothes, and fastened the ready filled cartridge-belt, which he had worn the previous day, around his waist. He took up the .470 and stepped out into the still clear morning, moving carefully so as not to jar his head

He found de Mare checking over the chains of

one of the Plymouths, ready to go. The campmade coffin was already in the back of the car, and de Mare had added a sack of maize meal to hold the box-body steady over the bumps.

“I can’t get a single native to come,” he

remarked. Vachell thought that he looked pinched and ill, and the naturally sallow tinge of the hunter’s complexion was exaggerated in the

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unflattering grey light of dawn. “Not one of them will share the back with a corpse. It’ll be the hell of a business if we stick. With no one to push us out we’ll just have to stay there, I suppose, till the road dries up.”

“If you don’t get back tonight I’ll come out in one of the trucks tomorrow to pick you up,”

Vachell promised. He handed de Mare a sheet of paper on which he had written a brief report of the murder for the Commissioner of Police. “I’d be grateful if you’d send this off by wire,” he added.

“That’ll fetch the Commissioner up here with a hop, skip, and a jump, or I miss my guess.”

The gun-bearer Japhet and a tall, lanky native tracker in shorts were standing stiffly about twenty paces away, watching de Mare’s activities with wooden faces. They were ready, the hunter explained, to conduct Vachell on his buffalo hunt.

“For God’s sake be careful,” he added. “We don’t want any disasters. And whatever happens, don’t let any of the others leave the camp. You’re

responsible for their safety while I’m away. If there’s any trouble, you can always count on

Chris.”

De Mare folded the chains into the tool-box and turned to greet Lord Baradale, who arrived,

escorted by Geydi, in a clean and pressed pair of grey flannels, a bright blue woollen sweater, and a brown tweed deerstalker hat pulled down over his head. Geydi deposited a box of cigars, a luncheon basket, and several cameras in the car with his 124

usual disdainful air. Baradale nodded curtly to the two Europeans and climbed into the front seat without waste of words. It was clear that his temper was thoroughly soured.

The car jolted off into the bush with its gruesome cargo. Vachell called Japhet over and

explained the object of the next expedition, to ascertain whether a herd of buffaloes had grazed, the previous morning, over the hills behind the camp. The idea behind the quest was simple

enough. If there weren’t any traces of a herd of buffaloes, Vachell reckoned, then Rutley’s story could be accepted. It wasn’t likely that he could have known of the buffaloes unless he had seen them for himself. That, of course, didn’t prove that he had fired at them; the shot that Kimotho had heard might have had a more sinister objective.

Still, it would clear the ground to prove even fifty per cent of Rutley’s story either false or true.

This certainly was a queer case, Vachell

reflected as his little party started out. The thin, lanky-legged tracker, gripping a stick, led the way, and Japhet, clasping his master’s heavy rifle, followed behind. If the case ever reached its climax in a court of law, the tracker Konyek, with his bronze graven-image face, curiously Egyptian in its cast of features, and his tattered khaki shorts patched in the seat with a piece of flowered

cretonne, might find himself doing duty as an expert witness for the Crown. “Can you explain to the jury, Mr Konyek, in language as intelligible as 125

possible to the layman, the precise method that you follow when estimating the age of buffalo droppings… ?” Vachell thought of Sir Bernard Spilsbury, and smiled. It took all sorts of expert witnesses to make a trial.

Japhet was in an expansive mood. He understood that the bwana was not one who knew safari

work, but only a white askari. Well, that was all right; he, Japhet, would protect him; he needn’t be scared. Bwana Danny had said so, and he was the greatest hunter in Africa; the elephants and lions that he had shot were as numerous as the goats of a very rich chief;

“What is the talk of the black men in camp?”

Vachell asked. “Who do they think killed bwana Lordi’s wife?”

Japhet shrugged a pair of broad shoulders

encased in a khaki woollen jersey, and spat.

“They do not know, bwana. How should they?

They say: why do the white men make such a

fuss? She was only a woman. If her husband killed her, he must pay many cattle to her father, and then it is all right. If some one else killed her, then her husband must find the man and get from him the cattle that are his due. It is his affair. But Europeans, they call always for the police. Are they children, then, and are the police their mothers?”

Vachell was trying to think out a suitable retort when he heard a shout from behind. All three

stopped dead and turned their heads to see

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Gordon Catchpole hurrying along the faint gametrack which they were following uphill through

the bush. He was hatless, and carried a rifle in one hand. He waved it at them to stop. By the time he reached them he was panting hard.

“This altitude?” he exclaimed between gasps.

“It’s so breath-taking. I wonder if it really sends one mad? Why didn’t you tell me you were going out shooting? Danny never mentioned it, either.

He said nobody was to leave camp, but I saw you sneaking off the moment he’d gone. Is this your form of relaxation, or have you discovered a real, red-hot clue?”