Murder on Safari (5 page)

“Why did you fire Englebrecht?”

“I should have thought that was obvious, Mr

Vachell. My stepdaughter has gotten herself into a very foolish state of mind about that young man.

It’s nothing serious, of course, but both Lord Baradale and I feel that in Cara’s own interests it would be best to dispense with his services.

Although he has not behaved honourably, I have no reason to suspect him of theft.”

“I shall search his baggage before he leaves, of 40

course,” Vachell said, “but if I use a microscope on everybody’s kit it isn’t likely to do any good. If the thief has any sense he buried the stuff a foot deep in the bush an hour after he took it. If he left any prints on the safe, which isn’t likely, they’re all mussed up by now. Will you help me out, Lady Baradale? Do you have any suspicions?”

Lady Baradale kept her attention fixed on her nails. The mask was still without expression, but her nostrils and the muscles of her mouth

contracted slightly.

“None that I can substantiate — yet,” she said.

“I’d prefer that you use your own judgement. I’d like to make one thing quite clear. I want my jewels back, whoever took them. If your inquiries lead you to some — well, distasteful results, go right ahead and don’t spare any feelings.”

“The police aren’t very squeamish over feelings,”

Vachell said.

He said goodnight and walked thoughtfully

back across the grass, the clinging scent of Chanel No. 5 still in his nostrils. One thing, at any rate, he thought, was clear. Lady Baradale had made her own guess as to who had stolen her jewels; and she was reluctant to admit the truth of her suspicions.

41

Kimotho, a smiling, sturdily built native with the usual close-cropped woolly head, flat nose, and prognathous lips of his kind, brought his master’s tea at five o’clock next morning. Through the triangle formed by the end of his tent Vachell could see night and stars and a faint thinning of the blackness that meant that dawn was spreading behind the hills.

“It is very early,” Kimotho remarked in

Kiswahili. He spoke with feeling. “But you told me to wake you when the other bwana was called.

He has had his tea, and now his boy is packing his bed. Why does he want to leave before the lions go to sleep?”

Vachell extricated himself from his mosquitonet and gulped his steaming tea. He slipped into a shirt and shorts, pulled on a couple of woolly sweaters, and stepped out of the tent. The sky was oyster-grey behind the towering hills to the right.

Shapes of trees began to loom mysteriously in the 42

half-light. There was a heavy dew and the grass felt chilly through the soles of his shoes. The air was sharp and cold in his lungs.

He found Englebrecht loading the last of his

possessions into one of the Plymouths by the light of a safari lamp. Vachell explained the situation briefly. The hunter’s face was invisible in the darkness, but his surprise at the news of the jewel theft seemed to be genuine. He raised objections, however, when he heard that his luggage, his person, and the car would have to be searched.

“It will take too long,” he protested. “I am no thief.”

“What’s the hurry? You haven’t a train to

catch,” Vachell observed.

Englebrecht shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, well, all right,” he said. “You’d better be satisfied.”

He stood by, scowling, while Kimotho held up

a lamp and Vachell opened bags, gun-cases,

bedding, and boxes and spread every item on the ground. The hunter’s armoury consisted of a

Westley-Richards .318, a 9.3 mm. MannlicherSchonnauer, and a shot-gun. Vachell asked him,

casually, why he hadn’t a heavy rifle.

“I’ve got a .470 like yours,” Englebrecht

answered. “I’ve lent it to Rutley, though. The clients on this safari are so mean they never let him do any shooting, and he hasn’t got a rifle of his own, so he borrowed mine. I’m not sorry to be leaving.”

The bright stars faded and the dark night paled 43

to a rich blue as the hunt proceeded. Vachell took his time, searched carefully, and found nothing.

Inspection of the car and of the hunter’s clothes yielded no more. Englebrecht grew more and

more impatient.

“Okay,” Vachell said at last . “You’ve nothing to declare. Hope I haven’t made you late for an appointment.”

Englebrecht only grunted in reply. He and the driver, who was going to Malabeya to return the Baradales’ Plymouth, threw the luggage into the back and jumped into the front seat. (The hunter had left his own car in Malabeya.) Englebrecht let in the clutch with a bang and the car shot at high speed into the bush.

“Luke seems in a hurry to leave us,” a woman’s voice said. “Are you ready to go?”

Vachell turned to greet Chris Davis, the gamespotting pilot. She had been instructed by de Mare

to take the newcomer out to look for elephant before breakfast. This was part of the second hunter’s job, and it had been agreed that Vachell had better act the part as realistically as he could.

He had hardly had a chance to speak to Chris

Davis at dinner the night before. Like de Mare, she was quite different from the picture that he had unconsciously built up in his mind. He had heard, vaguely, of her history, and knew that it was not a happy one. She had been married very young and her husband, a local farmer, had been killed in a motor smash on their honeymoon. She 44

had struggled, singlehanded, to carry on his farm, but bad luck and bad seasons had forced her out, and for a time she had made a living by capturing wild animals for American zoos. She had learnt to fly, and become obsessed with aviation; and now she supported herself precariously by taking any flying job she could get. She had operated her second-hand Miles Hawk for a while as an air taxi, and had once held a job as a parachutist in an air circus in England. Vachell had expected someone masculine and hardboiled and weather-beaten; but there was nothing tough about her outward appearance. She was slight, slender and fair, with thick corn-coloured hair and a pale clear complexion.

Her thin, rather delicate-looking face wore a grave expression, but there were little puckers at the corners of her mouth and eyes which

suggested indulgence in a private amusement at the world.

The ball of the sun was rising over the hilltops as the Baradale Plymouth rattled along a rough track that de Mare had cut through the bush to connect, the camp with the main road. The car twisted and turned among stunted thorn trees and lurched up and down rocky gulleys apparently at random, but Chris, who was driving, seemed to know exactly where to take it.

A five-mile shadow lay across the bush-covered flats like an immense dark stain, and beyond it the open plains were flooded with sunshine. Below them Vachell could see the shadow rolling up like 45

a carpet and the sunlight racing after it up the slope. A few minutes later the sun burst over the summit, and suddenly he felt warmth on his bare arm and saw the car’s shadow in front. Birds twittered excitedly in the green acacias, and steam

started to rise out of the bush as the dew evaporated.

They crossed the drift, abandoned the car, and plunged on foot into the long grass on the righthand side of the river. Vachell stripped some grass seeds and florets off a handful of stems and threw them into the air to test the wind. They floated gently down to his right.

Their intention was to search for spoor around the drinking pools along the river. Vachell led the way, gripping his new .470 in one hand. The grass reached nearly to his waist and he was soaked to the skin in the first few minutes. He followed the swing of the river, moving with caution and

straining his eyes to see round each clump of bush.

The grass swished against his knees as he walked.

After ten minutes he caught sight of something grey moving behind a bush to his left. He stopped dead in his tracks and watched an animal about the size of a donkey stalking majestically across his field of vision. It must be a waterbuck, he

decided. It was a fine male, holding its forwardcurved horns high and sniffing the air with soft

black nostrils.

A little farther on his eye caught a movement to the right and he stopped again, this time with 46

more abruptness. Thirty yards away, through the long grass, he saw a face: the tips of two tawny ears, a black nose. The rifle went up to his

shoulder in a flash. A lioness! She had seen them, and was staring fixedly in their direction. He felt his heart pounding quickly, and he pressed the stock into his shoulder. It looked as though she might be crouching for a charge. His finger tightened on the trigger. Then the face moved: disappeared.

It bobbed up again through the grass to

the right and he swung the rifle round and sighted again. No, it was all right: she wasn’t coming. He lowered the rifle in relief and watched the grass wave as she lolloped away.

“I’m glad you didn’t shoot the poor little waterbuck calf,” a low voice behind him said.

Vachell experienced a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. For crying out loud, he thought, a waterbuck calf!

“Just trying out the sights of a new rifle,” he mumbled. They moved forward again, slowly.

A few hundred yards farther on they came to a pool in the river with a game path leading down to it. The wet sand around the edge was pitted with spoor. They examined it silently, bending over the criss-crossed tracks. Vachell felt a fresh wave of misgiving. They all looked the same to him. How was he to know an impala from an oribi? There was the mark of a pad with five toes. Was it a lion or only a hyena?

A low whistle came from his companion. She

47

was bending over a large, clear impression in the sand, about twenty inches across, with a slightly corrugated surface. Well, he could recognise that.

There wasn’t anything else that could look like an elephant.

He bent over it, nodded, and tried to look

knowing. De Mare, he reflected with envy, could probably tell the animal’s age, sex, and size of its tusks from that spoor. The hunter had explained a bit about tracking on the way up. You could tell sex from the size and age from the imprint, he had said — the corrugations on the sole of the foot were sharper and deeper in the case of a young animal than with an old one. And sometimes a

heavy tusker could be distinguished by the deeper imprint of his toes. Hell, Vachell thought, that guy could probably tell the colour of its eyes and its views on the Chinese war and whether it goes for blondes or brunettes by looking at its footprints.

“Two big bulls,” Chris said in a low voice.

“We’d better see which direction they’ve taken.”

There was a steep sandy bank above the righthand margin of the pool, and Vachell had no difficulty in picking out the marks the elephants had

made in scrambling up it. On top of the bank a game track led back into the bush. He could make out the great round impressions distinctly in the dust. A little way along he came to a pile of droppings, still slightly warm. He wondered how long

droppings kept their heat, and how you told their 48

age. Chris, behind him, turned over part of them with a stick and he observed a number of large beetles rolling the inside dung into neat balls.

“About two hours old,” she whispered.

He led on, wondering whether the bulls were

feeding just ahead. If only they’d keep to the sand it would be all right. But of course they didn’t.

Soon after they passed the droppings he lost the spoor. He cast about in the bush ahead and found a faint trail which led over a patch of dry grass and then petered out in a rocky gulley. Although he searched for ten minutes he couldn’t pick it up again. The stony ground seemed to stare back at him blankly, utterly uninformative.

How could any one, he asked himself, spoor an animal over a lot of rocks and stones? There just weren’t any traces. In the back of his mind he knew that a native tracker could follow those bulls as easily as a passenger changing stations on the London Underground could follow the red light for Piccadilly. Where animals had walked, there must be traces Ч crushed grass stalks, torn-off leaves, little stirrings in the dust; invisible to the unskilled eye, but crying aloud to the initiated.

That was the way a detective went to work. Where a man had committed a crime, there must be

traces Ч imperceptible, probably, to any eye but the trained one. This jewel theft, now …

He jerked his mind back to the elephants. That damned woman was watching him. She seemed

pleasant enough, quiet, didn’t say much, but she 49

was just a shade too observant.

“They’ve gone up the gulley and down towards

the plains, I guess,” he said. He tried to make his voice sound confident.

She looked at him in a peculiar way, half

puzzled, and he thought he saw her mouth twitch a little.

“I expect they have,” she said.

For some reason her tone annoyed him. To hell with the elephants, he thought. He decided to climb to a rocky knoll on top of one of the gulley’s shoulders. There was just a chance that they might be visible from there, if they had halted nearby.

There was a red anthill near the crest that might serve as a lookout post. He clambered up a bank covered with thick bush, cursing all elephants as he went, and steering for the anthill.

He emerged into an open grassy space on the

edge of the knoll and saw the anthill a little way ahead. Then, suddenly, a violent crash made him jump convulsively and jerk the rifle up to ready.

Simultaneously it occurred to him that he must have gone crazy. The anthill had apparently

detached itself from the knoll and was crashing towards him with the noise of a thunderbolt and the velocity of a shell. He flung himself sideways into a bush and the object hurtled on into the gulley like a big tank run amok.

He disentangled himself slowly from his thorny refuge and emerged cursing, pulling thorns out of his bleeding legs. He realized with devastating 50