Murder on Safari (20 page)

“There seems to be some ghastly curse hanging over this camp,” he said. “It’s terrible, all this, terrible.” The remark was somehow pathetic in its banality. “Mr Vachell, has my daughter told you that she endeavoured to get herself married

yesterday — to that infernal young scoundrel of a white hunter my wife sacked just before she …

met her death?”

“I just heard about it,” Vachell said.

“Peto, the D.C., got back to Malabeya

yesterday morning — unexpectedly, I understand, as a result of some trouble with these Timburu poacher fellows,” Lord Baradale went on. “Just before he left his office at four o’clock my

daughter and this — this damned young whippersnapper appeared, demanding a special licence

to be married at once. Thank God, Peto had the sense to refuse. They went off in a furious temper, so he said, with that young scoundrel’s car, and came back in this direction. So it looks Mr

Vachell, as though Englebrecht is in hiding a few miles from this camp, waiting to abduct my

daughter. And what’s more, he was somewhere

within easy reach of this camp at the time my wife was shot yesterday morning. I’d suggest, if it’s not going beyond my province, that you have a talk to 203

that young man.”

“I’ve been trying to pull him in to-day, sir,”

Vachell said. “Your daughter knows where he is.

If she’d spill it, we’d pick him up right away.”

Lord Baradale grunted, finished his drink, and pushed back his chair with a vicious jerk.

“Cara’s on the edge of a nervous breakdown,

Lord Baradale,” Chris put in. “If any one tries to force the information out of her I’m afraid she — “

“I believe that I know how to deal with my own daughter, Mrs Davis,” Lord Baradale snapped.

He turned abruptly and strode off towards her tent.

“Hello, Chris,” de Mare said. He looked across at her and smiled. She had pushed her chair back into the half shadows, and he seemed not to have noticed her before. ” This isn’t our lucky safari, is it? Pull up your chair and have a drink.”

“You must have had a foul trip,” she said.

“I did. The old man’s feeling it more than he shows. I don’t think his wife’s death broke his heart, but this business about Cara nearly did.

Englebrecht’s a damned young idiot. I’d like to wring his bloody neck.”

Chris shivered a little and hunched her shoulders over her drink. “I wish to God we could pack

up the safari and get out,” she said.

“Not a hope — not for the lorries. We stuck

about ten times in a patch of black cotton about halfway between here and Malabeya, and the

water’s coming up so fast in the gulleys you can 204

almost see it. We’re here for a week, I should think.”

The brown moth had revived and started

butting its head against the lamp. Chris stabbed at it unsuccessfully with her hand.

“Danny,” she said abruptly, “what’s come over Luke?”

De Mare’s sharp features relaxed in a sudden

smile, and he fumbled in his pockets for a pipe.

The chorus from the riverbed had started up

again, but it was more subdued tonight, almost as though some emanation of the dark emotions of fear and suspicion that permeated the camp had radiated outwards like wireless waves, and penetrated the consciousness of the surrounding frogs.

“I’m surprised that you ask that, Chris,” de

Mare said. “It comes over us all at times, you know. Just plain, old-fashioned, elemental love —

very elemental, like everything else about Luke.

He doesn’t go in for subtleties, such as wondering whether Cara would be really happy as a white hunter’s wife, for instance. He reminds me of the perfect Nazi: blond, muscular, and moronic; and he “thinks with the blood’, as good Nazis ought.

He wants Cara, and he doesn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t take her. It’s part of the much overrated nature of the little child — ‘momma, buy

me that’ sort of thing. Very likely he thinks she’s lucky to get him. Perhaps she is — I don’t know.”

“I expect you’re right,” Chris said. “I suppose Cara tried to marry him to get her own back on

Lady Baradale. They’d had a row about Luke the day before, and of course Cara was furious about Luke’s getting the sack. It all seems very childish.

I should have given Luke credit for more sense.

Danny, you don’t think that perhaps he. … “

“Cleared his path to happiness by removing an insurmountable obstacle, in the form of Lady

Baradale?” de Mare inquired. “I don’t know.

That’s Vachell’s job. But it’s hard to believe that some one you’ve lived and worked with for several years can be guilty of murder. Don’t you agree, Chris?”

“I think there are worse crimes than murder,”

Chris answered. She reached for her glass and sipped its contents, staring into the darkness over the river. Her face, Vachell thought, looked as pallid and fragile as a piece of old china.

“Ah, but you let your charity run away with

you, ” de Mare said. “Women are always ready to justify themselves, and good-looking young men.”

“A lot depends on the motive.”

“Murder for money is always inexcusable, don’t you think? It’s sordid, anti-social, and unscrupulous.

Even you, Chris, can’t make a noble motive

out of that.” De Mare was smiling faintly, and there was a sort of barbed banter in his tone.

There was some hidden thrust and parry behind their words that Vachell couldn’t understand.

“I suppose not,” Chris said. She was staring

with a set and tense expression across the river.

“But it’s too late now to make any difference.”

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“Murder always makes a difference,” de Mare

said. “I’ll leave you to find that out for yourself.”

He got up and took his rifle off the chair where he had laid it. “Well, murders or no murders, we must still wash.” A minute later they heard his voice shouting for hot water.

Chris shivered, although the air was warm

under the glittering stars, and stabbed at the blundering moth with a nervous hand. She knocked it

on the table and quickly imprisoned it in an

inverted glass. “Damn that beastly moth,” she said. “It’s getting on my nerves.”

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Dinner was a difficult meal. Cara failed to appear, and her father ate sparingly with de Mare, Vachell, and Chris. They tried to ignore the

subject which continually pushed its way back into their thoughts — the subject of the trampled body that lay in a tent less than twenty paces from the dinner table, unwillingly guarded by a native who squatted on his heels by a small fire outside, his blanket wrapped closely around him.

De Mare and Chris kept up a desultory conversation and Vachell occasionally contributed a

remark. Lord Baradale sat in moody silence until something that one of them said about the possibility of striking oil in the Western frontier caught his attention. He launched into a rambling

discourse on the future sources of power,

developing a wild and complicated theory of his own for harnessing the osmotic force of plants to industrial use. This led him on to an account of a company he had once nearly formed to grow

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London’s vegetables on trays in chemically treated water in a series of twenty-story wooden towers at Wembley; and finally the conversation returned, by devious routes, to the subject of big-game hunting.

“It’s a lot of tommyrot, this so-called sport,” he exclaimed forcefully. He had abandoned any

attempt to eat and was puffing at a small cigar and drinking liqueur brandy. “It’s rotten to the core, like everything else about this modern civilization.

Sport! It’s no more a sport than shooting sitting pheasants, if as much. There’s only one sporting way to hunt big game, and that’s the old way, the way these natives follow — to hunt on foot with spears and bows and arrows, weapons a man can make himself out of materials ready to his hand.

That’s fair, and that’s fun. It’s a battle of wits between one man and one beast: a test of which can command the greatest cunning, the keenest senses, the highest skill. Man, if he uses his wits, can usually win; but it’s a victory worth having, because it doesn’t go to the coward or the dolt.”

“I agree,” de Mare said. “It’s skill versus skill, always; but it’s man’s superior skill that has led him to invent gunpowder, and weapons that can use the force of gunpowder. So man is justified in using the modern rifle just as much as the primitive bow and arrow. They’re both a product of his

skill.”

“Of mankind’s skill,” Baradale replied, “not of the individual’s. You’ve substituted the skill of 209

one man versus one beast for the skill of the whole race of man versus one beast. If you had all man versus, say, all lions, that might be fair. But lions can’t combine. So you have the brains and

resources of every one from geniuses like Priestley and Pasteur to modern big business combines like I.C.I, and du Font, pitted against the wits of one poor African lion. It isn’t sporting; it isn’t even jj]’ j exciting. True sport involves equality between the rivals, you see. They give handicaps in everything from horse-racing to ping-pong, in order to

achieve a rough equality; but they never give a handicap to the beast. It isn’t sport; it’s murder.”

There was an uncomfortable pause as the last

word, now charged with a personal and fearful meaning, rang loudly through the silence of the night. Lord Baradale checked himself, realizing too late that he had ventured by a concealed back entrance on to a forbidden ground.

“The beast wins out sometimes,” Vachell said

quietly.

Lord Baradale darted a quick glance at the

detective and drew deeply on his cigar.

“Only by accident,” he said, “and carelessness Ч once in ten thousand times. Bell and Sutherland both claimed to have shot over a thousand

elephants, I believe. That’s mass-destruction, not a battle of wits. Besides, you’re not consistent.

You say it was man’s skill that invented the highvelocity rifle. True enough. It was his skill, too,

that invented machine-guns, aeroplanes, bombs, 210

and poison gas. Why don’t you tackle elephants and rhinos, then, with those products of human skill? You wouldn’t pretend that was sport; but why is it more unsporting to bomb a herd of

elephants or turn a machine-gun on to a pride of lions than to drive up to them in a motor-car and shoot them with a high-powered rifle? If it’s legitimate to use one, why not the other? I can’t see the difference myself.”

“The difference is in the element of danger,” de Mare answered. “There’s always some risk in hunting with a rifle.”

“Danger!” Lord Baradale snorted. “Danger be

damned! There’s no danger at all in going after some wretched animal, whose only idea is to

escape, armed with a battery of expensive highvelocity rifles and flanked by a couple of professional sharpshooters. There’s ten times the risk in

a single drive in a fast car along the Kingston bypass.

If any one wants to hunt, let him use a bow

and arrow and match his wits against those of a lion or an elephant, as some of these natives do. If he uses a rifle, he shouldn’t pretend it’s sport; that’s my opinion. But I don’t expect you young fellows to agree with me.”

“Well, I do,” de Mare said unexpectedly. “But then, big-game hunting isn’t a sport to me; it’s a profession. I don’t have to pretend. On my last safari, I cut twenty-five miles of road through the bush to a waterhole where I knew a herd of

elephants came regularly to drink, and the man I 211

was taking out flew down from Manila one

morning in a chartered plane. I met him in a car at one end of the road and drove him to within a mile of the herd at the other, and he was back in Marula dining at Dane’s that night with a very fine tusker to his credit — if you can call it that. No one could say that was sport. It’s efficiently conducted execution.”

“You must get fed up with your own profession, if you feel like that,” Lord Baradale remarked.

“I often do,” de Mare said.

Coffee, sweet and fragrant under the rustling leaves of the acacia, came and went, borne by Geydi’s deft, walnut-coloured hands. Conversation faded, again, fitfully into silence. Tobacco

smoke drifted in blue twirling spirals towards the dark boughs overhead. From the boys’ quarters came the occasional sound of raised voices, and once a burst of laughter that died quickly, as though the sound itself was conscious of its

impropriety.

Lord Baradale broke the silence abruptly.

“Well, I’ve got some work to do,” he said. “Please excuse me, Mrs Davis. De Mare, I shall see you in the morning. I suggest seven o’clock for this very distressing duty we have in front of us. Mr

Vachell, I wish you good night.”

De Mare lit his pipe and excused himself to

attend to the preparation of a grave. The storm had obliterated, with the road, the possibility of taking Catchpole’s body into Malabeya, and he 212

was to be buried close to camp.

“I ought to go and see how Cara is,” Chris

remarked. “I hope the old man didn’t bully her about Luke.”

“Not he,” Vachell said. “He’s nuts about her.

Let’s take a walk along the creek. If we watch the water long enough maybe we’ll get cool.”

“It is stuffy,” Chris answered.

They strolled down the bank in the soft darkness, listening to the throaty call of the frogs, the chirping of tree-crickets, and the whisper of the running water. The air left no breath of coolness on their faces. It was not a clammy heat and not uncomfortable, but the threat of thunderstorms kept the air motionless and heavy. A sky crammed with stars gave enough light for them to see their way among the faint shadows suggested by bush and trees. Chris caught her toe in a root and Vachell took her arm to steady her, and for a little they walked in silence.

“I wish it was all over,” Chris said. The remark had all the sincerity of a prayer. “It’s this waiting for the next thing to happen that’s so awful.”