Murder on Safari (14 page)

looked up. Two vultures were wheeling across the clear blue sky overhead, their necks craned down towards the earth — wheeling and waiting their turn. He cursed them savagely, drew out a knife, and cut the strongest stakes he could find in the surrounding bush. He tore his shirt and handkerchief into strips and bound them together to make

a rough stretcher. He’d be damned if the vultures were going to get a turn this time.

Half an hour later the party reached camp.

Catchpole’s body lay limply on the rough

stretcher, carried by a frightened and reluctant Japhet and by Vachell, naked to the waist and dizzy in the head. Konyek stalked silently behind.

He had refused, with unshakable conviction, to touch the dead body, or the stretcher on which it lay.

They were greeted by the sound of native

laughter and by the smell of sizzling bacon. With 138

a sudden shock Vachell realized that it was time for breakfast. It seemed as though an age had passed since they had started up the hill towards the sunrise.

Gordon Catchpole’s body was deposited on the

camp bed in his tent in silence, and covered with a sheet. Vachell walked slowly across to his own tent, feeling sick and shaky at the knees, and leant against the pole. His mind was a jumble of halfformed thoughts, all unpleasant. One predominated:

if he hadn’t missed, Catchpole’s crumpled

body wouldn’t be lying, lifeless, on the bed.

He hardly noticed Chris Davis’s approach. She looked cool and competent in her freshly pressed safari slacks and she wasted no time in useless words.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s ghastly. You’re

covered with scratches and you’ll be lucky if you haven’t any broken ribs. Lie down on the bed and let me clean those cuts at once.”

Vachell was too dispirited to argue. Chris

shouted for hot water, opened the first-aid case in his tent, and went to work. She bathed the

scratches and doused them with iodine, and then dressed the bruises on his side. He’d been caught by the tip of the horn just as he was leaping aside, so that his body hadn’t offered any resistance to the blow. There were no ribs broken, she said.

He told her the tragic story jerkily, lying on his side while she sat on the edge of the bed and applied a hot compress to his bruised ribs. He 139

noticed that her arms were graceful and that her long fingers worked with sensitivity and deftness.

He observed again how the pallor of her face made her eyes seem large and of a deeper shade than blue. It was soothing to watch a girl fussing over his scratches, even if she couldn’t treat the deeper gashes in his pride.

She listened in silence to the story. When he’d finished with the buffalo he told her about the events of the night before, the attack in Lady Baradale’s tent, and the headlamps shining

through the darkness from the fifth car. It was a relief to have someone to talk to. Indiscreet, perhaps, but Chris was the sort of girl who knew how to keep things under her hat.

“That accounts for Cara’s behaviour,” she

commented. “I knew there was something behind it.”

“Why, what has Cara done?”

“She nearly went off her head when I told her about Gordon just now, while you were Ч were

putting him in his tent. I think she’s on the edge of a nervous breakdown anyway. She didn’t seem to take it in at first, and then she burst into peals of laughter. Hysterics, of course. I gave her some brandy and then she said: “Well, at least they can’t accuse Luke of turning into a buffalo.” I said: “Don’t be silly, no one’s accused Luke of anything,” and she said: “You’ll see, they will.” I said: “How can they, he was with you and on the way to Malabeya when it happened,” and then she 140

burst into tears and refused to say another word. I couldn’t understand what she was getting at, but I suppose they didn’t go to Malabeya at all.”

Vachell searched out a cigarette and lit it, lying on his side. The warmth of the compress was deliciously soothing to the pain.

“They must have gone to Malabeya to pick up

Englebrecht’s car,” he said. “He left it there on his way through. The way I figure it is, they decided they’d see Lady Baradale in hell before they let her drive Englebrecht out and break up their affair, so they drove back from Malabeya in the two cars and fixed up a camp some place down the river.

Englebrecht was to stick around and be on hand in the evenings so Cara could meet him and tell him how things were coming along. Maybe she

thought she’d be able to work on her father and get him to see things her way. Then some one

bumped off Lady Baradale, and that balled everything up.”

“Do you think that Luke ….?” Chris said.

“I don’t know. I have to find him first, and then ask questions.”

“Cara gets г100,000 under Lady Baradale’s

will,” Chris remarked.

“How do you know that?”

“She told me. Her father told her, I think.”

“Does she mean to marry Englebrecht?”

“I don’t believe she can be really in love with him, though apparently she thinks she is. But she’s so obstinate I’m certain she’d have married 141

him to spite her stepmother. You can hardly

blame her, really; Lady Baradale drove her into it.

Of course she wouldn’t have got the money if

she’d married him while Lady Baradale was

alive.”

“She’d have got the air,” Vachell said.

Chris finished dressing his ribs, rubbed an ointment into them, and strapped them up in elastoplast.

Vachell swung his legs off the bed and sat up, feeling much better.

“There’s one small item to go on the credit

side,” he remarked. “I guess that buffalo has put Rutlev in the clear.”

“I suppose it proves his alibi after eleven

o’clock,” Chris agreed. “But how do you know he didn’t shoot Lady Baradale somewhere beyond the drift between ten and eleven, dump the body,

come back to camp, and then go up the hill and get mixed up with the buffalo?”

“Here’s why,” Vachell answered. “Rutley drove Lady Baradale thirteen miles between ten and

eleven. I got that from the speedometer. So he wasn’t hanging around the drift; he must have driven along the track, like he said. Well, suppose he shot her. His natural instinct would be to throw the body out somewhere in the bush, and hope it wouldn’t be found before the hyenas had a chance to clean it up.”

“Yes,” Chris agreed, “except that we might be guided to the place where he left it by the vultures, when we started to look.”

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“Then why bring the body right close into

camp, where we could almost see the vultures

from our own front porch? Catchpole’s lion wasn’t killed until around 11.30 and Rutley was up the hill with the buffaloes by then. If he bumped Lady Baradale before eleven, why would he bring the body back and dump it practically on our

doorstep? If he did that, he’s nuts.”

“It does seem odd,” Chris admitted.

“It’s screwy. And here’s another thing. This

river has crocodiles in it. Crocs have trunk

murderers and guys who push bodies into

incinerators or bury them in quicklime, licked before they begin. They do a swell disposal job.

Why didn’t this murderer use them, once he’d

decided to move the body around?”

“Heaven knows. On the other hand, surely

Lady Baradale couldn’t have been killed close to the hippo pool without someone hearing the shot.

There were plenty of people about, and Japhet and Konyek wouldn’t make a mistake like that.”

“It doesn’t make sense either way,” Vachell

said. He got to his feet and found that he was steadier on his legs. His side ached persistently, but his head was clear again, and he felt hungry.

“I hope to Heaven you clear it up soon,” Chris remarked. She put away the bandages and closed the medicine-chest. “Now poor Gordon’s got

killed it will just about finish Danny’s career as a white hunter, I’m afraid. It’ll be even worse if the thing remains a mystery. In a way, I suppose, 143

we’ll all be under suspicion, and he’s in charge of the safari. It’s awful.”

Vachell felt an unreasoning annoyance prick his mind like the bite of a mosquito. Why the hell did she spend so much time bothering about how

Danny de Mare would come out? It was obvious

he didn’t give a damn for her, except as a competent assistant. She was throwing her sympathy

away.

“It isn’t so hot for any of us,” he said. “I shall feel pretty smart when I walk into Armitage’s office and say: ‘H’ya Commissioner, the jewels are gone and their owner has been knocked off and another guy got trod to pieces by a buffalo, but it’s all right, we got the buffalo.’”

“I’m sorry,” Chris said quickly. “I know it’s just as important to you as to Danny. Let me

know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

“Thanks.” Vachell felt a little embarrassed. He looked up and met her eyes, blue and sincere, and thought how attractively her thick blond hair grew back from her forehead. “Here’s another thing that’s cockeyed,” he said. “The way I missed that buffalo. Is it possible for a bullet to ricochet off the horns, if it hits squarely on the boss?”

“Oh, yes, that’s happened. But not with a solid bullet at ten yards, I should think. Are you certain the cartridges aren’t old?”

“I bought them this week,” Vachell said. He

dug the empty shell out of his pocket and handed it over to Chris.

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“Don’t brood over it,” she said. “Even if you’d hit the buff, he might have gone on and killed Gordon just the same.”

He looked down at her and smiled. “Swell of

you to say that,” he said, “but you know it isn’t true. I guess I’m just a bum shot, and that’s all there is to it.”

“You’re honest with yourself, anyway,” she said, “and that’s unusual, you know.”

Vachell grinned broadly at her and said: “Sure, but then, you see, I’m different.” He went over to his suitcase and extracted a clean shirt. It hurt a lot to bend. He poked his head inside the shirt and struggled as gently as he could into the sleeves, for his arms were tender from scratches. The worst ones were now covered with adhesive tape, so that he had a curious patched appearance. When he

finally got his shirt on he looked round and saw that Chris was sitting on the bed, holding the empty shell to the light and examining it with close attention.

“Look at this a moment, will you?” Her voice

had a note of urgency in it. He sat beside her and took the shell. At first he could see nothing, but then he noticed a few faint scratches around the rim, where the copper case containing the explosive powder clasped the lead bullet. He extracted

a magnifying glass from his box of detective’s apparatus on the table by the bed, and examined the case again. He made out a series of small scratches around the rim and two very slight

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dents, too small to be seen with the naked eye, in the sides of the shell’s circular base.

“What the hell!” Vachell’s face expressed bewilderment and doubt. “These cartirdges are new. I opened the box yesterday. And cartridges don’t come with scratched shells.”

Still frowning, he walked over to a corner of the tent and picked up the cartridge-belt which he had thrown aside when he lay down for Chris to dress his scratches. He had worn it that morning. There were two rows of slots to hold cartridges, ten on the left of the belt and ten on the right. The lefthand slots held soft-nosed ammunition, five

rounds for the .470 and five for the .275. On the right were the solids, five rounds per rifle. There were three .470 cartridges left in the belt.

He extracted them from their slots and

examined them one by one, his lips clamped into a tight line across his bony brown face. Each cartridge had similar little scratches along the upper rim of the copper shell, where the bullet fitted in. He put down the magnifying glass and looked at Chris. His face was grim and a little savage. “Jesus!” he said. “Then that’s a second murder.”

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FR1;FR2;CHAPTER

FIFTEEN

Chris had gone as white as the river sand at midday, and the pupils of her eyes were distended

with fear. She put one hand to her neck in an instinctive gesture. It looked brown as a Rhode Island egg on a white table-cloth. He jumped to his feet and put an arm round her shoulders,

afraid she was going to faint. She swallowed once and bit her lip, as if to bring back the feeling.

“I’m all right,” she said. Her voice was faint and low. “It’s rather a shock, isn’t it?”

“I’ll say it is,” Vachell agreed, “Murder by

proxy. I never ran into anything like this before.

This guy must be smart as hell. But how could he know there was a wounded buffalo roaming

around those hills? I don’t see it. No one could have known about that bull except Rutley. I’ll need to figure this out.”

He found that his arm was still round Chris’s shoulders and removed it, feeling a little foolish.

“Stay here and rest a while if you want to,” he 147

added. “I have to look into this.”

“I’m all right.” Her voice sounded more normal now, and she got to her feet. “I must go and see how Cara is. This seems so terribly — well, calculated, I suppose. This must have been meant for

you, mustn’t it? They may try again… . Don’t go and get killed too. Please be careful.”

He looked back from the tent opening and

smiled at her. “You bet,” he said. There were several strips of elastoplast on his face and smiling was difficult. “With all this adhesive tape, I’m practically in armour.”

Rutley, Vachell supposed, was still at breakfast.

Anyway, his shop was empty. The detective

pushed open the rough door and went over to the bench. He took one of the scratched cartridges and clamped it, bullet upwards, into a small vice.

He selected a strong pair of pliers from a case lying open on the bench, gripped the bullet in their arms, and tugged. It was like extracting a tooth.

He worked the bullet round, and after a few

grinding motions he felt it give. A minute later it came out with a little plop.