Murder on Safari (29 page)

“Geydi, of course.”

“Quite right. We’ll hear the rest of his story later, and you’d better take friend Geydi back to Marula under arrest. The case doesn’t seem to be over yet.”

“You’re darn right, it isn’t,” Vachell said. “I should make three arrests to-day — apart from Geydi.”

“Three?” the D.C. queried. “You’ll have to

send the Commissioner back for another load of handcuffs. What for?”

“One for accessory after the fact and burglary; one for conspiracy to evade the Firearms Act and 296

connivance in offences against the Game Preservation Act, and one for common assault.”

“Safaris have changed a lot since I was a boy,”

Peto remarked. “In those days Simba Ltd didn’t have much of a criminal clientele. Where did this party start from — Pentonville?”

“This is a screwy sort of a case altogether,”

Vachell said. “The crimes weren’t premediated, they just developed naturally. And all because —

so far as I can figure out — de Mare borrowed a footpump from one of the trucks when he went

down toMarula.”

“Come to my tent and spill the beans,” Peto

invited. When Vachell had swallowed the last of his coffee they settled themselves in the shade of the small veranda of the D.C.‘s tent, which faced the river and the plains beyond. Peto crossed his muscular legs, leant back in the canvas chair, and closed his eyes. “Where do we begin?” he asked.

“I suppose the jewels are at the bottom of it all.”

“They were at the bottom of it all^’ Vachell

agreed. “I had to keep my mind fixed on that.

After I got up here, in amongst the Baradale

crowd, it seemed as though most every one had a good working motive for wanting Lady Baradale out of the way — money, sex, and just plain

hatred. She was one of those women who go

around inviting murder: she had money, gobs of it; she wanted to have affairs, and she didn’t have a very pleasant nature. But that’s the way it always is, I guess. When a person gets murdered and you 297

start to dig into their past and the state of their personal relationships, you find plenty of people who benefit in one way or another from their

death. But these jewels were different. They were a red-hot motive, the real thing. They’d been stolen, and Lady Baradale hinted to me that she knew, or suspected, who’d pulled the job. The next day she was bumped. You don’t get coincidences like that in real life. The jewels were the

key to the murder, so the first question I had to ask was, who stole them?”

“Well, who did?” Peto asked.

“Rutley. I know it, but I can’t prove anything, and it’s not likely he’ll turn sissy all of a sudden and dump a signed confession in my lap. Why

should he? He knows he’s sitting pretty. He hasn’t got the stuff, and what’s more he doesn’t know where it is, so we can only guess he took it. The whole of this goddamned case is surmise at that. If Danny de Mare walked into this tent right now, I couldn’t hold him. I’ve got nothing on him. I’m telling you, this is the damnedest case I ever saw.”

“In that event,” Peto said, “how do you know

that Rutley took the jewels?”

“Because no one else could have,” Vachell

answered. “Except, maybe, the maid. No one else could have swiped the key without knocking Lady Baradale unconscious first. She slung it around her neck all day, and slept on top of it all night.

But, for Rutley, that was no problem. He could slip it out from underneath her pillow any night he 298

reported for duty, and burgle the safe when he knew she was sleeping. He had a swell motive, too. He wanted to break away, but he didn’t want to lose the pay. If he could get the jewels he could quit his job and go to town with Paula in a big way. And he thought up a dandy little gag to keep them hidden and get them safely out when the

time came to pack up and go home.”

Vachell paused to light a cigarette. Peto

remarked that talking was almost as thirsty work as listening, and called loudly to his boy for beer.

“This is all very confusing,” he remarked. “If Rutley has the jewels, why did Danny de Mare kill the hag-faced Lady Baradale? Not pure altruism, surely?”

“I’m coming to that,” Vachell said. “The night I got here with de Mare, Rutley came out to meet us just as soon as we got in, and the first thing he asked was, where was the footpump that de Mare had taken with him to Marula?1 De Mare said

maybe the garage in Marula had swiped it from the car, and Rutley raised hell. At the time I thought nothing of it, except that Rutley was a lousy-tempered guy, but looking back on it, I guess that was the key to the whole situation.

“For Rutley, I believe, hid the jewels in one of the footpumps. There’s a place you could pack them at the end of the cylinder, between the end of the plunger and the base of the cylinder in which the plunger slides up and down. It was a 1. See p. 24

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cagey place to pick, for Rutley was in charge of all the cars and no one else was likely to go snooping around among the tools. Nobody would think of looking inside a footpump if a search was made, so he’d be able to get the jewels away all right when the safari ended. While the safari was in camp the trucks were almost never used, so he picked a pump belonging to one of the Chevs and left it in the truck, figuring it was the safest place in camp.

“It sure was a tough break for Rutley when de Mare, starting out for Marula early in the morning, found the footpump of the Ford was missing,

and borrowed another from one of the trucks1 —

borrowed the one pump that happened to have a king’s ransom in jewels hidden in its innards. It was sheer chance, and it touched off a whole flock of fireworks. If de Mare had taken the footpump out of a different truck, I guess Lady Baradale and Catchpole would have been alive to-day, and

Danny de Mare a famous hunter instead of a

murderer that’s being hunted.”

A boy placed a large bottle of beer on the table between them and Peto poured them each a

foaming glass. He pushed one across to his

companion and remarked:

“So then de Mare found the jewels, I take it.”

“He had a flat tyre on the way down,“2 Vachell said. “When he tried to put air into the spare tyre he found the pump wasn’t in proper

1. See p. 24 2. See Ibid 300

shape. He investigated, I guess, and stumbled on the jewels that Rutley had concealed inside it.

“We’ll never know what went on inside of him, then. He’s a guy who’s always getting into jams about money,3 and he said himself that lately he’s been pretty low. 4 I got the impression he was getting sick of his profession and wanted to quit.5

I guess the temptation was just too strong. De Mare would never plan a theft, I don’t believe he ever plans ahead at all. He’s an opportunist, the sort of a guy who takes what the gods send him, good or bad. So when they dumped a surprise

packet of jewels in his lap, probably he figured that fate had given him a break and that he’d be a fool not to take up the option.

“You see, he knew who stole the jewels Ч it

didn’t need much cogitation to work that out. He figured the way I did, that Rutley was the only one with lots of opportunity; besides, he was the only guy who was a smart enough mechanic to fix the pump. And he figured Rutley’s tongue would be tied, since to admit he knew the jewels were in the footpump was to admit he put them there. So de Mare couldn’t see that there’d be any danger. It looked too good a chance to miss.

“Anyway, whatever he thought, I know now

what he did. He kept the jewels, and hid them somewhere in Marula.

“And this, I think, is where he slipped Ч he

didn’t hide them well enough.

3. See p. 9 4. See p. 108 5. See p. 212

301

“If he had, no amount of police investigation would have bothered him. But it’s pretty hard to conceal a package so well that the police can tear everything apart and find nothing, especially if you’re a novice at the game for one thing, and you have only one day to do it in for another. De Mare hasn’t a home; he lives at the country club when he’s in town. He couldn’t hide them there. I don’t know where he did hide them, but I have a pretty good notion that we’ll turn them up without a lot of trouble when we get to Marula Ч in his

baggage, maybe, or on deposit in the bank.

“That was his first mistake. His second was a miscalculation. He felt safe because he’d figured that Rutley wouldn’t squawk, but he hadn’t

reckoned on that baby’s temper. It was temper that made Rutley indiscreet.”

The monologue was interrupted while its

declaimer drank half a glass of beer. It was straight out of the ice-box, and it slid deliciously down his throat. Peto, his head tilted back and his hands interlocked behind it, gave every appearance of being asleep. He opened one eye and said: “This is the best story I’ve heard since little Audrey’s day. Please continue.”

“Sure,” Vachell said. “Well, as soon as de Mare got back to camp from Marula, Rutley found the footpump was missing and he was mad as hell.

He didn’t know whether or not de Mare’s story of leaving the pump at the garage was true, but he suspected that de Mare had found the jewels. He 302

has a temper just about as explosive as a load of T.N.T., and the more he thought about it, the more it burnt him up. This is mere guesswork, and it will stay guesswork unless I can turn the heat on Rutley some way and make him kick

through. All I know is, when I talked with Lady Baradale that night at eleven, she hinted that she had some inside dope on the burglary, and that she suspected some guy who’d be a big surprise to every one concerned.1 She couldn’t have meant Rutley, because he wouldn’t have been a big

surprise to anyone.

“My guess is, some time between six and

eleven, Rutley went to Lady Baradale and told her that he suspected de Mare of stealing the jewels. I reckon he got so mad he thought: “This guy isn’t going to get away with the jewels I risked a tenyear stretch to steal. If I can’t have them, then by God that bastard isn’t going to have them either.”

So he told her, maybe, that he’d seen de Mare acting suspiciously before leaving for Marula Ч

slipping a package into the car with a furtive air, or something. Anyway, I figure he sold her the idea that de Mare was the thief, without, of

course, giving away his own part in it. It wasn’t a smart thing to do, but then I don’t reckon Rutley’s a smart guy; in fact I think he’s dumb as the devil, and has altogether too quick a temper to make even an average criminal.

“Now here’s another part that’s merely

1. See p. 41

303

guesswork. Some time between six that evening, when we hit the camp, and ten o’clock next morning, when the lion hunt began, de Mare found out

that Lady Baradale suspected he had the jewels. I know that’s so, because he shot her, but I don’t know how he found it out. I think most likely she sent for him and said she’d had some information which implicated him. He denied it, of course.

Then she said — this is more guesswork — “I’m glad to know this story is a lot of hooey, but at the same time it’s true you are the only guy who’s left camp since the theft and had a chance to get the stuff away, so I think it would be fair to all if the police in Marula were to search your kit and check up on the movements while you were in town. I intend to tell the story to this cop we’ve imported, and suggest he get his men at headquarters to search the kit you left in Marula, so we can prove that the mud some one’s trying to throw is mud and nothing more, and clear your name

completely.”

“Of course de Mare had to agree, That put him on the spot. He’d counted on Rutley keeping

silent, and the fact that Rutley had lost his head upset all his calculations. And when Lady

Baradale said she’d spill the story to the police, she meant it. If they searched his stuff in Marula, there was more than a chance they’d find the jewels and he’d find himself behind the bars. He must have got a hell of a jolt, and felt in pretty bad shape next morning. It began to look as though swiping

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jewels wasn’t so easy after all. I’ll bet he was desperate as hell by the time he came to take Catchpole out on the lion hunt.”

“So he planned to do her in,” Peto said.

“I don’t believe so,” Vachell answered. “I don’t believe he ever planned it at all. He couldn’t have, because he couldn’t have known that Lady Baradale would be walking back to camp along the river at just about the time he was hunting lions with Catchpole, and that their paths would cross.

De Mare’s a man who always acts on impulse. I think that when he caught sight of her in the bush that morning the impulse came on him to shoot her, and he acted on it without another thought.

“Now, here’s the part of the story that puts me on the spot.Within a few hours of the shooting I held the proof that de Mare was guilty in my hand; and I never saw it. I didn’t see it until I was standing beside a lion’s kill yesterday afternoon close to Englebrecht’s camp, and I opened the breach of my rifle to see everything was all set in case I met a lion. I noticed that it was loaded up with solid bullets, and I remembered then what de Mare told me in Marula when I bought the rifle —

that you always use a soft-nosed bullet to kill a lion.“1

“Of course you do,” Peto said, opening his eyes as the narrator paused to renew his attack on the beer. “They come under the heading of softskinned game. What on earth has that got to do

1. See p. 13

305

with it?”

“Everything,” Vachell answered. “De Mare

shot that lion with a solid bullet. Japhet dug it out and gave it to me afterwards, in the messtent.2 I checked it with de Mare’s cartridges right away Ч

that was easy, because it hadn’t lost its shape Ч

and found it was fired from his gun all right; but it never occurred to me that an experienced hunter who was following a lion’s trail wouldn’t have loaded his rifle up with solid bullets.”

“You mean he reloaded his rifle with solids in order to shoot Lady Baradale?” Peto asked.