Murder on Safari (6 page)

clearness that he had been walking downwind in the thick bush with his rifle slung on his shoulder, making straight for a rhino that had just completed a mudbath in the river and was

standing in the open, in full view. He had

mistaken the rhino for an anthill.

Chris Davis was waiting at the bottom of the

gulley. He walked towards her slowly and reluctantly, his bare arms and legs criss-crossed with

scratches. No doubt about it, she had caught him with his pants down this time.

“Next thing you know we’ll be running into

Mrs Roosevelt,” he said heartily. “Plenty of

activity around here. How about getting back for some breakfast? The elephants will keep.”

“We certainly didn’t disturb them,” his

companion said. It was clear that she thought him either a fraud or a flop; and Vachell was afraid he knew which.

Breakfast was set in the shade of the giant

acacia. The tree was in flower, and the scent of its pale lemon-yellow blossoms was sweet and fresh.

Vachell decided that charging rhinos made you hungry. He ate a mango, a slice of pawpaw,

scrambled eggs and sausage, and a great deal of toast. De Mare and Chris were his only companions.

The Baradales, and sometimes Catchpole, it

seemed, had breakfast in bed, and Lady Baradale never appeared before ten or eleven. Her husband sometimes got up in time to photograph the dawn, and sometimes fooled around in pyjamas with his.

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films to noon.

“I’m going to take Catchpole out after lion this morning,” de Mare said. “There were two hunting down the river last night. I sent the trackers out first thing and they found a fresh kill about a couple of miles away. Catchpole is just too thrilled, my dear. He must have a beautiful lion with a proud, flowing mane. Uh.”

“There’s no justice,” Chris remarked. “Why

should a man like that be allowed to kill a good, honest lion? Or, rather, employ you to kill it for him, Danny. It ought to be the other way round.”

De Mare grunted and filled his pipe. He looked as spruce in a pair of khaki shorts and a bush shirt as he had in a suit in Marula. His shiny hair was brushed neatly off his forehead, and his clothes were carefully ironed.

“How many baronets would you give a lion on

its licence?” he mused. “Some people could be classed as vermin… .There’ll be a murder in this camp one of these days. Half the people are at each other’s throats, and the other half in each other’s beds. What with Cara Baradale and young Englebrecht disappearing into the long grass together all day, and our respected employer dallying with her sulky boyfriend, the camp’s practically a damned brothel.” He lit his pipe, picked up his felt hat, and rose to go.

“A couple of elephant watered below the drift this morning,” Chris said. “I thought I’d take the bus out later on and look for them.”

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“Good idea,” de Mare agreed. “Take Vachell

along too. Give him an idea of the lie of the land. I must go and butcher this wretched lion to make Catchpole’s holiday, I suppose. It’ll probably give him some new ideas for mural design in cocktail bars,”

“Good luck,” Chris said. She smiled at him, and Vachell noticed that it made her face look young and vivacious, and that her teeth were white and even.

“Thanks,” de Mare said. “Oh, and by the way

Ч watch your step if you see Lord Baradale this morning. He’s in a tearing rage. Cara kept her word, and went off to Malabeya with Englebrecht before dawn in one of the Plymouths.”

Vachell sat up abruptly in his chair. “She did?”

he asked incredulously. “She didn’t leave here with him in the car.”

“No; she used low cunning. She was waiting for him about a mile down the road, according to the driver, who was turned out and came back on

foot, Lord Baradale is not amused.”

Vachell leant back and lit a cigarette, his eyes on the morning sunlight sparkling on the river. He’d got away to a bad start, he reflected. Cara had outsmarted him already. She’d got away from the camp without being searched.

As he lay there, his muscles relaxed, it seemed to him that a cloud passed swiftly over the sun. He shivered, and goose-flesh rose on his arms. “A goose walking over my grave,” he said to himself, 53

and smiled at the superstition.

Afterwards he wondered if he had, for the first time in his life, experienced a premonition Ч a warning that before the sun had reached its zenith, death’s cold shadow would have fallen across these bright surroundings.

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A little before ten o’clock Chris and Vachell drove in the remaining Plymouth to the roughly cleared airfield just outside the camp. The blue two-seater Miles Hawk looked a flimsy little object for such tough conditions Ч more like an outsize locust, Vachell thought, than anything else. He climbed up on to the wing, pulled a flying-helmet over his head, and settled into the front seat. Chris swung the propeller and clambered into the pilot’s seat behind. There were two rifles, a heavy one and a light, by her side Ч a wise precaution, he

imagined, in case of a forced landing. A native guard kicked the blocks away from under the

wheels, the engine roared, and they bumped

forward over the veldt and into the wind.

They flew first down the river bed, a dark green ribbon on a speckled light green field, at about five hundred feet. When they came to the drift the plane banked and started to climb to the left. That was funny, Vachell thought; the elephants were on 55

the right bank of the stream. A herd of antelope in the thin bush just below looked like a swarm of red ants. He wished that he knew what they were.

The plane rose higher and Chris took up a pair of field glasses and peered down at them through the open window.

They swung away from the river in a wide

sweep to the south. The country below was

rolling, fairly open bush. Chris kept on banking the Hawk slightly to the left so that she could examine the ground beneath. They came to a dark patch of trees and she circled over it, using the glasses. Then she switched off the engine and they drifted silently down towards the splodge of vegetation.

“There they are,” she said.

Vatchell lent out as far as he could and saw what looked like a collection of grey boulders scattered about in some thick bush. Each boulder had two white knobs at one end. As the plane swooped

lower the lines of the spinal cords and the huge flapping ears became visible. The Hawk’s shadow glided silently over the backs of the herd, but they noticed nothing. The plane went on past them, losing height, until it was skimming over the tops of twisted acacias and the dark fleshy arms of euphorbias. One wing-tip missed a tall ant-heap by inches, and then the engine roared. The plane gave a jump like a startled horse and leapt

forward, climbing sharply.

“I didn’t want to scare them,” the pilot

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explained into the speaking-tube attached to Vachell’s helmet. “They were feeding. They’ll stay where they are now all day, unless anything disturbs them.”

“That’s swell,” Vachell said with feeling. “We don’t want to risk disturbing them again.”

The country looked like a grey-green rug

thickly dotted with dark knots. They flew on at about two thousand feet, swooping down at intervals to inspect a family party of giraffe and two

rhino; herds of Grevy’s zebra, kongoni, and

Grant’s gazelle; a group of animals resting in the shade that Chris identified as oryx beisa and eland; and some black objects in a ravine which caused her to exclaim: “Look, buff.” There seemed to be no end of it, Vachell thought; it was like a lesson in zoology.

Half an hour later Chris turned and headed for home, setting a course to pass over the elephants.

She located the right patch of bush and flew low, but the herd was no longer there. She circled widely, using the glasses, but they were nowhere in sight.

“Something must have alarmed them,” she said

into the tube. “They looked settled in for the day.

I’m going to have a look.”

The Hawk turned eastwards, towards the hills, and flew low in big circles. Five minutes later Chris spotted something, pulled back the throttle, and swooped down to have a look.

“There they go,” she said. “They’re moving in 57

towards the hills. Something must have scared them all right.”

This time they looked like grey lice crawling over a flat surface. An aerial view, Vachell

thought, robbed elephants of all their majesty.

They looked undignified and insignificant.

“They’re doing eight or nine miles an hour, I should think,” Chris added. “They’ve travelled five or six miles and it’s now nearly half past eleven. That means they must have started moving about a quarter to. So it wasn’t us that disturbed them, thank goodness. We flew over them about half an hour before that.”

Chris swung the plane back on to a northern

course and in a short time the dark band that marked the Kiboko river came into sight. The

heat-haze below gave it the illusion of wriggling slightly, like a snake. Each of the countless specks of bush seemed to waver like black stars in an inverted dust-white sky.

They crossed the river and turned, and Chris

switched off the engine. They floated down

towards the camp, crossing the river again above a pool that lay about a mile downstream and shone beneath them in the sunlight like a new shilling. It was said to be the haunt of hippos. Vachell lent out as far as he could and gazed down at the fat, sleek back of one of the huge beasts standing, oblivious of inspection, by the pool’s edge. It raised its head and gave him a clear view of its round pink nostrils. They reminded him ofphoto-58

graphs of craters on the moon. As the plane flew over the water the engine started up again with a roar, spat two backfires in rapid succession that smacked against the air like rifle reports, and settled into its steady drone. The hippo plunged wildly into the water with a splash and a snort and disappeared from sight. The Hawk rose to clear the trees around the camp, skimmed over the neat symmetrical rows of tents, and drifted gently to earth on the bumpy airfield beyond.

It was noon when they landed, but they did not reach camp until half an hour later, for Chris announced that she had to clean out the jets. She crouched on a wing and went to work on the

engine, the hot midday sun beating down on her bare head and causing her thick, windblown hair to gleam like honey. Vachell waited for her, strolling around in the biting heat, his thoughts

veering between elephants, jewel thefts, and the involved personal relationships between the principals of the safari. Being a white hunter, he

decided, wasn’t all gravy from any point of view.

Chris finished her job on the plane and stood for a moment wiping her hands on a wad of cotton

waste and looking down at him, curiously.

“Have you done a lot of hunting?” she asked.

Vachell’s heart sank. Now it’s coming, he

thought. He tried to sound offhand.

“Fair amount,” he said.

“Had much to do with elephants?”

“Sure, I did some elephant control for the

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Tanganyika Govenment.”

Chris threw the cotton waste into the Hawk’s

cockpit, jumped lightly off the wing, and walked over to the car. Vachell followed, carrying the two rifles.

“The Tanganyika elephants,” she remarked,

“must be very queer in their habits.”

“What do you mean, queer? I once saw a bull

that had red lacquered toenails, but that was in Billy Rose’s circus in New York. These were standard models.”

“I thought perhaps they all walked backwards,”

Chris said.

Vachell gulped, and it seemed as though the

earth had quaked beneath him. He stood still, engulfed in a wave of dismay. He felt as small as a lost field-mouse in a desert.

Chris threw back her head and laughed uproariously.

Vachell’s usually impassive face turned

pink. He could think of no retort. He felt his mouth go dry and his palms moist with an unexpected wave of anger, and at the same time he

noticed that when Chris laughed her rather solemn face looked as young and carefree as a seventeenyear-old’s “I’m

sorry,” she gasped, “but it was funny. You

mistook a waterbuck calf for a lioness, you walked downwind into a rhino that you thought was a anthill, and you spoored those elephants backwards.

It’s a bit unconventional for a white hunter, you must admit.”

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“I admit everything,” Vachell said, climbing into the car. “I was a dope, I guess, to think I’d ever get by. I’m a policeman.”

“In disguise,” Chris said, letting in the clutch, “but without false whiskers. Another illusion gone. Now I’ll test my detective skill. You’re here to investigate the theft of Lady Baradale’s jewels.”

Vachell felt a slight shock of surprise. “How did you know?” he asked.

Chris laughed again. “For three weeks Lady

Baradale appears at dinner every night glittering like a Christmas tree with priceless gems — lovely ones, some of them I must say, even if they did look ridiculous on safari. One night she appears without them. The following morning Danny

rushes off mysteriously to Marula, and turns up again on the next day but one with a new white hunter that I’ve never even heard of, who has the original habit of tracking elephants backwards. It isn’t very difficult.”

“You’re a smart girl,” Vachell said, “and very observant.”

They parked the car and found de Mare and

Catchpole in the messtent, drinking gimlets. The lion hunt was just over and Catchpole was celebrating a new triumph.

“Come and drink with me to the great Danny!”

he invited, waving a gin bottle in the air. “I asked him for a beautiful lion with a proud, flowing mane and he found me one — but a beautiful beast, with the flowingest mane you ever saw. And 61

now his pride and beauty are no more. Let us drink to the destructive element in man!”