Murder on Safari (23 page)

fleeting moment the sloping hindquarters of a hyena, retreating from the line of cars. Vachell threw a stone after it; as likely as not it was trying to eat the tyres, or the leather upholstery. A little later he heard it howling mournfully in the bush.

At four o’clock he grew suddenly sleepy. He

stretched himself out in a camp chair in the messtent, put his feet up, and dozed uneasily through

a grey and watery dawn. The sun came up through a low bank of clouds which lay heavily on top of the hills. There was clear sky above, blue as turquoise, and a little before seven sunlight rolled down across the plain, with the triumphant

suddenness of a burst of music, and drove the raindrops out of the trees and grass in a silver mist. Birds everywhere put renewed heart into their song, and grey spirals of smoke curled

upwards to a blue sky with fresh vigour.

There was gaiety and exhilaration in the early morning air, but none in the hearts of those in the 232

Ba radale camp. There was a melancholy job to be done. Geydi took tea to his master a little after six, and at seven Lord Baradale emerged, looking as though he had hardly slept at all, and shouted to de Mare that he was ready.

Ten minutes later the little party set out, the four white men carrying a narrow rectangular box on their shoulders. Rutley and Vachell had to stoop to keep their shoulders down to the level of Lord Baradale and de Mare. They walked slowly along a winding route through the bush towards the hills to the east, into the sunlight. Their pace was slow, and the grass was cold and wet against the bare flesh of their legs.

It was all over inside ten minutes. They walked back in silence, leaving two Africans to throw the wet earth back into the trench where Sir Gordon Catchpole’s remains now rested. Vachell

wondered, as he watched his long shadow dance before him over the grass, whether tomorrow

would see another silent procession to yet another grave.

An hour later he was climbing into Chris’s

plane, receiving last-minute instructions from its owner. She had gone over the machine

thoroughly, checked the controls, and taxied to the end of the runway and back to make sure that the engine was running smoothly. While she was busy Vachell questioned the native guards. They had watched the plane every minute of the night, they said emphatically; but they looked a little 233

sheepish, and Vachell, remembering the rain, suspected that they might be lying.

The natives filled the tank with petrol from a dump of cases kept on the edge of the runway in a grass shelter. Vachell put in his .470, a bottle of water and a tin of biscuits, wedged himself into the narrow seat, grasped the stick and opened up the throttle. The plane moved off, jolting jerkily on the rough ground, gathered speed quickly, and lifted itself smoothly into the air.

It was some time since he had handled a plane, and at first he felt uncertain and strange, and not a little nervous. The air was calm, however, and the plane hummed along steadily as a flighting bird, its engine running sweetly. He climbed to about a thousand feet, banked cautiously to the right, and swung round in a big arc until he saw the gleam of water immediately below. Then he swung left again, pushing the stick a little forward until he was flying at about five hundred feet, and followed the thread of the river down, his eyes searching the dark border of bush and trees for some sign or movement that might denote the

presence of a human being.

For the first twenty minutes he saw nothing,

save for a startled herd of impala leaping in all directions at once like a bunch of jumping beans, and the grey boulder-like back of a rhino standing under a bush, bewildered, his head down. When the shadow of the plane passed over him he bolted violently downwind for a hundred yards,

234

wheeled, and darted off again in another direction, at a loss to know where to run for safety. The bush-flecked plains to the right were dotted with browsing herds of antelope and zebra. They

stopped their meals to raise their heads and listen, and then moved off uneasily, alert but not seriously alarmed.

The Kiboko river took a big loop to the south, turned west again, and tumbled over a series of black basalt rocks into a narrow gorge with steep rocky sides, and so on to the plains below. The basalt shone like the polished pates of Negroes in the sun. Vachell, peering down through the glare of the sunlight, decided that he must have missed his man. Englebrecht couldn’t have gone below the pools. There was nowhere close to the river’s edge to camp, for one thing; and you couldn’t get a car down, for another.

He pulled the stick back a little and climbed a couple of hundred feet, preparing to bank. The sky looked blue and depthless as the nose of the plane rose in response to his touch. Air swirled past his helmeted ears and the exhilaration of flying enveloped him. The Hawk seemed as sensitive as a well trained polo-pony in his hands. It felt good to be handling a plane again.

Then, suddenly, the knowledge that something

was going wrong with the machine gripped his

mind. A second later the engine misfired, spluttered, and roared again. He pushed the throttle

wide open and held his breath. Again there was a 235

spluttering choke, and the motor wavered and missed. It sent a chill down his spine, as the gasp of a dying man might do. The engine was like a suffocating person struggling for breath. He could feel the plane quiver as the engine stalled, and then begin to lose speed. He pulled the stick back farther to correct the dipping of the nose. Another roar, a splutter, and then a ghastly stillness as the motor gave a last despairing cough, and died.

The sudden silence cracked against his

eardrums like a physical blow. His mouth was dry and his heart was pumping wildly. The plane

glided on, wobbling a little from side to side as its nose dropped towards the earth and it lost height.

It fluttered with the agonizing inevitability of a falling leaf towards the black pools below, and the craggy cliffs. The pools looked suddenly menacing, like giant mouths yawning open to suck in their prey. Around them was rock and dense bush. No place to attempt a forced landing, even if he had the height.

Now the plane was hurtling downwards, its

nose headed straight for the grey-green tangle of bush below. Vachell juggled desperately with the stick trying to bring the plane back into control.

He saw the earth rushing wildly towards him, and his eyes photographed the flat tops of acacias, the pale gleam of grass. Frantically he unhitched his safety-belt with one hand, a single thought

dominating his mind: fire, and the devouring

tongues of flame. Behind that monster, a disor-236

derly host of little ogres raced in and out of his mind as the earth advanced: pools, flat black water; the plane stalled before; it backfired, like rifle shots; above the hippo pool; Chris was in the seat behind me; she had rifles; no time to jump; she fixed the plane this morning; she did something to it; relax all muscles before you —

The Hawk hit the earth at the angle of a racing diver. A violent blow caught Vachell in the chest and simultaneously there was a tearing, ripping sound as the undercarriage crashed through the crown of a thorn tree. Thunderous breakers

seemed to be rolling up and sweeping him against the rocks. He hit the ground with an impact that felt sufficient to break his body into pieces as if it had been a dropped plate. For a few seconds he lay stunned, oblivious. Then an explosion crashed in his ears and jolted him into consciousness. Before his dazed eyes leaped a flash of orange flame, and a scalding wave of heat poured over his face.

He never knew how he got out. Afterwards, he

realized that the plane must have crashed through the foliage of an acacia and catapulted him out on to the ground. His fall was broken by the branches of the tree. They tore his clothes and scratched his body, but they saved his life.

He crawled rolled and staggered out of

danger, away from the blazing mass of wreckage in the trees. He stood up gingerly, and found to his amazement that no bones were broken. He was bruised all over from the fall and covered with cuts 237

which bled profusely, but still intact.

After a short search he found his rifle, thrown clear as he had been, some way from the burning wreckage. Leather guards protected the sights, and so far as he could see it was unhurt. He was less fortunate with his hat. He looked everywhere, but it couldn’t be found. Still, he reflected, one can’t have everything, and he couldn’t really complain to fate about the loss of a hat.

He had only one plan: to follow the river back to camp. It must be thirty miles, he reckoned. No doubt de Mare would send a search party down

the river later in the day, when he didn’t get back, and if the cars could get along they might find him before nightfall. Or he might have to spend a wet and hungry night in the bush.

He had a drink at the river, slipped two solids into the breach of his .470 in case of rhino, and started out. It was slow going. The riverbed was too soft for walking, the banks stony, and the grass above them waist high. Bush grew in thick belts and clumps. He had to cover twice the

distance he travelled to get around patches of vegetation too solid to be penetrated. The thick matted grass twisted its stems around his legs and caused him to stumble and curse every few yards of the way.

All through the morning he toiled on, stopping sometimes for a drink and a short rest in the shade of a tree. Sweat poured off in rivulets, and his skin was burning with cuts and bruises. As he prog-238

ressed the bush seemed to develop more and more branches and sharper and sharper spines. The sun was hot and biting on his unprotected head. Once he was startled into alertness by a sudden crash of breaking branches ahead. He brought the rifle to his shoulder, but the noise grew fainter as a heavy body plunged through the bush in the opposite direction. A rhino, probably. Vachell heaved a sigh of relief and plodded on, cursing the bush, the plane, the case, the profession of detective as followed in Africa, and the whole Baradale outfit, innocent and guilty alike.

All the time his mind was worrying, puzzling, and going round in circles, searching in every recess of his memory for the key to the puzzle. He knew that it was there, lurking somewhere just out of reach. Somewhere there must be a fact, an indication, a sentence, a hint — some pointer that, if he could only grasp its significance, would lead him straight to the mystery’s solution. A cloud of odd, unrelated facts, of half suspicions, of notquite-natural actions wrapped the case around like

an autumn mist, concealing the true solution and yet allowing hints of its shape to show through.

Somewhere, if he could find it, must be a

password that would dispel the mist and reveal the truth, in its stark inevitability, beneath.

He wondered if the final picture that he knew awaited discovery would include an explanation of the burnt-out Hawk. That was the immediate

problem: accident or design, engine failure or 239

attempted murder? For twenty minutes the plane had gone as sweetly as a bird, then, suddenly , the engine had died as though deprived of fuel. But he himself had seen it filled, half an hour ago; and the gauge had shown a full tank. He didn’t see how a thing like that could have been fixed; nor, after the incident of the cartridges, how the engine failure could have been a pure coincidence.

By one o’clock he felt hungry, footsore, and

dizzy in the head. An aeroplane crash, coming on top of a sleepless night and a difference of opinion with a buffalo, was hardly a good preparation for a long and hatless country hike in the sun. He wasn’t, he reflected, either a mad dog or an

Englishman. He lay flat on the sand and took a long drink, bathed his face and arms, and settled down for a rest under a tall green tree. Luckily, his cigarettes didn’t seem to have suffered. He lit up, drew out his notebook, and started to compile a list of unsolved problems in the Baradale case, hoping to find some sort of connecting link

between them. Before he had scribbled more than half a dozen lines a wave of drowsiness paralysed his mind. His head dropped on his chest and he fell fast asleep.

It was nearly four o’clock when he awoke with a dry throat, a splitting headache, and a guilty feeling.

Going to sleep under a tree didn’t seem to be the regulation way to go about tracking down a dangerous criminal, he thought. He struggled to his feet, as stiff as an octogenarian, so stiff that he 240

could hardly move his limbs. Every part of him felt sore and tender. His arms and legs were

covered with congealed blood and there were blisters on both heels.

Shadows were beginning to lengthen over the

white sand and the racing, muddy water when

Vachell started off again. Every step, at first, was an effort to break through the stiffness. But the riverbed had broadened out a little, and he was able to travel part of the way on the sand.

About half an hour later he came to a small

pool. The banks were flattened, and on his side was a narrow sandy beach, sloping gently up to the veldt above. Such pools were always favourite drinking places for game. He paused by the

water’s edge to read the story of the morning’s activity that was written in the sand. He saw the round, flat footprints of a rhino; a network of zebra’s hoofmarks, and a large selection of long, slender impressions of the hoofs of different buck.

A trained hunter, of course, would name them all — gerenuk, oryx, waterbuck, Grantii, Tommy,

eland, oribi; not only name them but tell, in the case of larger game, whether they were male or female, even good heads or bad.

He shifted his rifle from one shoulder to the other, wiped his forehead, and started laboriously to climb the bank. On the edge of the sandy beach he came upon a new type of spoor: a human foot.

And not only human spoor, but the spoor of a man wearing boots. His heart missed a beat in his 241

excitement. At last, he had hit the trail.