Murder on Safari (25 page)

seen; but now the rains have broken I don’t think she will be able to.”

Vachell stood up stiffly and stretched his arms.

“You don’t need to worry about that,” he said.

“You’ll see Cara all right, because we’re going to beat it back to camp right now. The veldt has had all day to dry, and I guess we’ll make it.”

They made it, though not without a good deal of trouble and some vigorous pushing by Vachell and Englebrecht’s boy. The car was an old and

battered Model A Ford, tied together with wire, that looked like something left over from the aerial bombardment of a city; but it leapt from

hummock to hummock through the roadless bush

and churned its way out of mudholes with a determination and agility no longer shown by its

younger and more streamlined brothers. It was a lion-hearted car, and refused to be daunted even by the muddy drift, which had partially dried with surprising speed after a day’s hot sun.

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They reached camp a little before eight. Vachell went straight to his tent, called for a hot bath, and lay in it in sections. Kimotho, voluble with excitement, stood by and bubbled over with news. Two

cars had started off at eleven, Vachell learnt, to search for him, driven by Chris and de Mare.

They had gone down the river until they had stuck in a sandy gulley, and then de Mare, Japhet and two trackers had gone ahead on foot, on the

chance of running into the wreckage of the plane. Every one in camp had given him up for dead.

The African staff was convinced that the place was bewitched with a magic of unprecedented evil and power. Five natives had run away in a panic.

Rutley and Geydi had gone after them in a car, but returned about nightfall with no news of the fugitives.

Cara Baradale was still sick, and Chris so

distraught that she lost her temper with the cook when he came to tell her that the meat was

finished and to ask for more. The cook had gone on strike as a result, and refused to prepare any lunch. And only half an hour ago the D.C. from Malabeya had arrived, and had been engaged in restoring order in the camp. He had with him a Timburu prisoner, a boy caught by a flying

column of police who were searching for the

poachers. Before he was caught there had been a fight, and one of the police askaris had been wounded with a rifle. The cook, now under arrest, was preparing dinner with a guard of two six-foot askaris standing over him, loaded rifles in hand, in 253

the kitchen.

Half an hour later Vachell emerged from his

tent still sore and aching, but considerably

revived. He had dabbed iodine on all his

scratches, sealed the worst of them with tape, and restored his morale with half a tumbler of neat whisky, a plate of sardines and some ginger

biscuits. Now he had a warm feeling inside, a slight swimminess in the head, and a full-blown plan of campaign.

He held no cards in his hand. There was only

one chance, he decided: to pull a wild and

barefaced bluff, hoping for a break. The bluff would be a dangerous one, and might end in a

farce or in disaster. It was foolhardy, no doubt, and not the sort of procedure for which police regulations allowed. But it offered the only slender chance, so far as Vachell could see, of getting what he needed so badly and lacked so completely:

proof of the murderer’s guilt. The Police Commissioner would arrive the next day or the day after,

if he could get through. Unless something desperate was done, Vachell would have to face him

with the news of two successfully accomplished murders, and without a shred of proof to point to the guilty person.

It was a time for drastic measures and for taking risks. He had decided to borrow a trick from the native hunter’s trade. Leopards, wariest of beasts of prey, were sometimes captured in a trap baited with a living goat. That was to be the model. The 254

murderer was the wary, prowling leopard, and Vachell was to be the living goat.

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chapter TWENTY FOUR

The District Cc^1111^101161’ was ^S m the messtent drinki^ .Scotch and soda and talking volubly to a tall trlba1 Policeman with a strange pattern of tattoo5 and cuts on hls cheeks’ wh0 stood at attentio11 and punctuated the discourse with an occasio^ Yes’ bwana. pet0 was a

heavily built ma^’ broad shouldered and muscular with the phy^^ of an ^-^wmg blue, and a

shock of white h^ above apairofkeen steely blue eyes and a rounds red-cheeked face.

He was know^ inChama as a martinet with a

sense of hunW1, The nomacilc somalls and

Timburu and ^ther warllke trlbes under hls control feared and respected him: they found him capricious, but ^st and firm, .His superiors in the Secretariat disapP1‘0;^ ofhlm’ ^^ found hlm outspoken, inde^ndent and deplorably lacking in the three sacrec),virtues- ^P^ for seniority, devotion to prece^ and ^scretion. They would

have fired him l^S Bg0’ but ^ was too efficient.

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He kept out of reach of trouble like a wily antelope eluding the hunter. The Secretariat’s strategy was to give him all the difficult districts, where natives had got out of hand and murderous, and where a false step would have led to bloodshed among the tribesmen and a Colonial Office reprimand for the D.C. This delighted Peto, for his ruling passion in life was plant collecting, and the rarest specimens were to be found in the wildest regions. So far he had steered clear of trouble, and left for each of his successors a reasonably peaceful district and a perfectly irrigated garden, complete with shaded lawns, water-lily ponds, terraces, and pergolas.

Natives who had done time in jails in Peto’s

districts were much in demand by Europeans as head gardeners when their terms of imprisonment were over. Peto looked up as Vachell approached the tent, and said: “You’re the missing superintendent, I suppose. We all thought you were dead.

Poor Chris was awfully upset about her plane. Sit down and have a drink.” He dismissed the tribal policeman, and pushed the whisky bottle across the table. He wore shorts and a blue shirt and a pair of giraffe-hide native sandals.

Vachell helped himself and settled down to give an outline of the history of events since Lady Baradale’s death. He needed the D.C.‘s help. Peto listened carefully, his head on one side, drumming his finger-tips on the table.

“Your boss will be here tomorrow,” he

remarked, at the end of the recital. “A wire came 257

through just before I left, to say he was due at Malabeya late tonight. I had to leave him my cook, curse it, and now this blighter of Baradale’s tried to go on strike. I’ve placed him under arrest and told him he’ll get two years’ hard if he doesn’t turn out a damned good meal. That’s cooked his goose and now he’s cooking ours, I hope — I shot one on the way in. Old Armitage will turn up

bristling with warrants and handcuffs, I expect.

Any idea who to use them on?”

“Yes,” Vachell said, “but I can’t prove it.”

“One never can,” Peto said cheerfully. “I’ve

caught dozens of murderers in my time, but I’ve very seldom had any proof. My method is to arrest them, and if they’re guilty they generally confess, or else some of their pals who want to curry favour with the Government because they haven’t paid their poll tax come along and do it for them. In any case, the appeal court lets them off on a technicality, so it’s all the same in the long run.”

“In this case we aren’t dealing with the confessing type, sir,” Vachell said. “If I throw a scare into this murderer, I may get a reaction I can use to get this thing cleaned up. I reckon it’s the only chance I’ve got, and I need your help.”

“I can’t allow any of your American thirddegree stuff, you know,” Peto said. “Our methods

may be a bit primitive up here at times, but

they’re fairly respectable.”

“It’s nothing like that. All I want is for you to post two of your askaris down by the hippo pool at 258

ten o’clock tonight. They’re to take their rifles and be ready to use them. I want one on each side of the pool, and they should hide in the bush and keep under cover and watch. They’re not to move unless someone fires a shot. Then they’re to move like hell, and ^rab the guy who fired the shot, and hold him. They may have to shoot in self-defence, but I don’t wa^t anyone killed.”

“A bring-‘e^-i-back-alive stunt, in fact,” Peto remarked. “I ^eep on expecting to find a battery of cameras arid a director with a cigar and a megaphone behind every bush in this camp. It

doesn’t sound to me the sort of procedure that would commerid itself to our pastor and masters of Marula, but that, thank God, is your affair. You shall have youl-two sharpshooters, if you promise not to let the^n get hurt. I can’t have anything happening to rny askaris. I warn you, if it does, I shall have your blood.”

“My blood seems to be in too darned much

demand,” Vachell remarked. “I can’t promise you the first refusal.”

Petro grunted his disapproval, and finished his drink. “When you’ve got the melodrama off your chest,” he said, “you might give your attention to another murder that’s very nearly taken place.”

“Timburu?” Vachell asked.

“Yes. That’s what brought me here to-day, as a matter of fact. J leave these European vendettas to the police. But there’s a gang of murdering

poachers in this district, as you know, and I’m 259

here to catch them.”

“They speared a game scout about a week ago,

I understand,” Vachell said.

“They did. And they damned nearly killed one

of my men yesterday. I sent out a patrol to round them up, and the askaris came up with them

yesterday morning. There was a bit of a dustup, and my corporal got a bullet through the chest that only missed the lung by half an inch. The point is, how did they get hold of the rifle? They weren’t armed last time we heard of them, apart from

spears. That’s why I came out here.”

“I think I can help you there,” Vachell said

slowly.

“I hoped you might. My patrol sent the

wounded corporal back to Malabeya and went on after the Timburu, and they’ve caught one of the party. He’s here now; they brought him in this evening. Unfortunately he’s only an uncircumcised boy, not a warrior — a sort of bottle-washer that they took along, I think. He’s scared stiff and won’t talk. I’m going to have another go at him when he’s got a square meal in his belly. At the moment he thinks I’m going to eat him or deprive him of his manhood at the very least.”

“There are some folk in this camp who’d like to deprive him of his powers of speech, I guess,”

Vachell said. “I’d suggest, sir, that you keep him closely guarded.”

“He is — very closely. He’s handcuffed to one of my askaris, a very reliable man, and one who 260

never trusts a Timburu a yard. He once had a Timburu wife who ran away, and he never got the goats refunded from her father. Incidentally, Chris tells me that one of Lord Baradale’s rifles was pinched three days ago. Since the Timburu turned up with one to-day, that looks fishy, to say the least. The question is, how did it get into the hands of those poacher fellows?”

“The Somali, Geydi, gave it to them,” Vachell answered, “in payment for services rendered, I guess.”

“What!” Peto sat up in his chair, his hard blue eyes under bushy eyebrows staring unblinkingly at the speaker. “You know that, do you? By God, then, we’ll have this Geydi put under arrest at once.”

“There’s more behind it,” Vachell said. “Geydi was acting under orders.” He finished his drink and got up stiffly, preparing to go. “I can give you the complete picture, I think, but I’d prefer to wait until this other job is over. Then we’ll get down to cases and tie up all the ends.”

Sardines and ginger biscuits, Vachell decided, hadn’t been sufficient to fill a very empty

stomach. His head felt more swimmy than ever, and his legs refused to obey his brain efficiently. It was long past dinner-time, but the kitchen rebellion, although now quelled, had delayed the meal.

The table was laid, as usual, under the tree. He walked unsteadily towards it and found Chris

there, knitting a jumper. She had bathed and

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changed into her black silk dressing-gown with its scarlet facings. The steel knitting needles flashed and clicked steadily in the lamplight. The image of Chris seated under the acacia with a half-full tumbler on the table beside her, her face white against a dark background, and light glinting on the tumblers and bottles, had fixed itself in his mind as a sort of hall-mark of the case. Whenever he came to that tree she seemed to be sitting there, waiting, and often the picture flashed unbidden into his mind at odd moments, a picture of the tall, straight-trunked acacia, and under it, in the white lamplight, the silent figure, her thick yellow hair combed back in deep waves, her grave pale face with a little pucker of concentration in the forehead, her sharp pointed chin.

He stood by the table and looked down at her, and she raised her head and met his eyes.

“I’m sorry as hell about the plane,” he said.

“The engine stalled, and there wasn’t a thing I could do.”

“So that was it,” she said. “The engine was all right when you started… . But so long as you’re safe, that’s the main thing, of course.”

A wave of revulsion for the whole case, of a deep disgust with his inevitable duty, swept over him in a sickening rush. He felt as though a load was pressing on his lungs, and a hand gripping him by the throat. He burned with a sudden rage against the smug demands of society, and its obedience to the Mosaic precept of retribution on which is 262

based its criminal law. “I wish to God I’d never started on this case,” he said aloud.

He saw Chris’s eyelids flicker, and something changed in her face. He was never able to analyse what. It seemed as if her face shrank and grew older, and a look for which no name existed — not ferocity, not hatred, not entreaty, but with something in it of all three — came up from the depths and passed over as quickly as a scudding cloud.

“It’s nearly over,” she said. Her voice was so low that it was barely audible. Vachell sat down heavily in a chair and covered his eyes with his hands. The light made them smart, and the swimming in his head was bad. When he looked up, the