by M. M. Kaye
‘But why? Why should anyone do that?’
Mr Stratton shrugged. ‘A Mau Mau gang attacked Flamingo during the Emergency, and your aunt stood them off and killed several. One of the dead men was rumoured to be a relative of the man who calls himself “General Africa” and who is still at large; so it’s just on the cards that this is a private vendetta on the part of the “General”. He was always one of the more cunning of the Mau Mau leaders, and there has been a story in circulation for several years that he was and still is employed on one of the farms in the Naivasha area.’
‘You mean – you can’t mean that someone, a settler, is deliberately hiding him?’ said Victoria incredulously.
‘Good lord, no! If it’s true, you may be quite sure that his employer hasn’t a clue as to his identity, and that he is using that as a cover. Playing the part of a faithful and probably dull-witted retainer by day, and organizing prison breaks and thefts of cattle, and planning bloody murder by night.’
‘Surely that isn’t possible!’
‘Why not? There is no photograph of him in existence and he wears a mask. A square of red silk with holes burned in it for eyes, nose and mouth. None of the men who have turned informer have ever seen his face, so that it’s quite possible that he might be going about openly and quite unsuspected. It’s also possible that he may have planned this poltergeist business at Flamingo as a prelude to murder, and intimidated someone into carrying it out. From all accounts he is intelligent enough to work out a really subtle revenge.’
Victoria shivered despite the hot sunlight, and said: ‘I don’t see anything subtle about murdering someone with a panga!’
‘It isn’t the method,’ said Drew impatiently. ‘It’s the murder itself, coming as the climax of a series of petty outrages. If Mrs DeBrett had been murdered out of a blue sky, so to speak, it would have been ghastly enough. But it wouldn’t have had half the impact that this has had. Especially on a woman of Lady Emily’s temperament. Em can take a straight left to the jaw and survive it, but there’s a kind of creeping, cumulative beastliness about this business that makes it all the more frightening for her. A sort of softening-up process. Starting in a small way and getting progressively crueller. She thought it was only an attempt to scare her into selling up and getting out, but when her dog was poisoned she ought to have been warned. That was what Gilly Markham called a “sighting shot”. It seems to have scared him all right! He’s manager at Flamingo.’
They were passing through the Kikuyu Reserve, and the scenery was at last vaguely familiar to Victoria: terraced hillsides and clusters of neat round beehive huts; fields of maize and small white patches of pyrethrum; the spiky foliage of pineapples and the vivid green of vegetables and banana palms. Mile upon mile of native shambas, bright against the red-ochre clay, and interspersed with plantations of eucalyptus. But Victoria had no eyes for the scenery. Even the sunlight had ceased to feel warm and gay, and she felt cold and a little sick. ‘A sighting shot…’
She turned sharply to look at her companion, and spoke a little breathlessly: ‘Is it the end? Or——’
She found that she could not finish the sentence, but Mr Stratton appeared to have no difficulty in translating her confused utterance. He said:
‘I imagine it’s that thought that is getting Em down. Ever since it started it’s been a case of “What next?” Now I should say it’s “Who’s next?”’
‘Eden!’ said Victoria in a whisper, unaware that she had spoken aloud.
Drew gave her a cold glance and said curtly: ‘Why do you think that?’
‘Who else would it be? Unless – unless it were Aunt Em herself.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Drew with deliberate brutality. ‘Anyone she liked – or who was useful to her. Or to Flamingo.’
‘I don’t believe it!’ said Victoria suddenly and flatly. ‘Things like that don’t really happen. Not to real people.’
‘They’ve happened this time,’ said Drew dryly.
‘Oh, I don’t mean that Eden’s wife hasn’t been killed. That must be true. But the other things. There must be some quite ordinary explanation. After all, things get broken in everyone’s houses. And the dog might have picked up poison that was meant for rats – or, something.’
‘Have it your own way,’ said Drew.
‘But don’t you think it could have been that?’
‘No, I don’t. I think someone was getting at your aunt. And very successfully, at that! This isn’t merely a question of getting rid of a settler. Even the Mau Mau dupes didn’t take long to drive up to the fact that if they killed one white settler another one – and not his Kikuyu servants! – would take over. If Em died tomorrow, and Eden the day after, another white settler would take over Flamingo.’
‘I should,’ said Victoria.
Drew’s blond eyebrows twitched together in a sudden startled frown and he said slowly: ‘Yes, I suppose so. I’d forgotten that you’d be the next-of-kin. Well, there you are, you see. That’s why I don’t believe that this poltergeist business was aimed at frightening a large landowner into doing a scuttle. In any case, anyone who knew the least thing about Em would know it wouldn’t work; and whoever is at the back of this knows a great deal about her, and just how to hit her where it hurts most. Which is what makes me interested in this “General Africa” theory. The average African gets no pleasure out of just shooting an enemy. He prefers to kill him slowly, and watch him suffer.’
It can’t be true! thought Victoria. And yet worse things had happened in this country; far worse things. And he was carrying a gun. He didn’t look the sort of person who would carry a gun without a good reason for doing so. She said abruptly: ‘What about the police? Surely they’ll be able to find out who did it?’
‘Smashed Em’s bric-à-brac?’ enquired Drew.
‘No. Who killed Mrs DeBrett. People don’t get away with murder!’
‘You’d be surprised what they get away with in this country!’ said Drew cynically.
‘But didn’t anyone hear anything? Surely she would have screamed?’
‘I expect she did, poor girl. But as luck would have it your aunt was playing the piano, and so no one in the house would have heard her. I should never have left her.’
‘You?’ said Victoria. ‘Were you there?’
‘Yes,’ said Drew bitterly. ‘In fact I was the last person, bar the murderer, who saw her alive. I knew she never carried a gun, and it was getting dark; but it was only a short distance to the house and it seemed safe enough. I could even hear that damned piano! Oh well – what the hell’s the use of making excuses for oneself now? It’s done.’
He wrenched savagely at the wheel as they swerved to avoid a stray goat, and accelerated as though speed afforded him escape from his thoughts.
‘But there must have been some clues,’ persisted Victoria. ‘Footmarks – tracks – bloodstains. Something!’
‘You’ve been reading detective stories,’ remarked Drew satirically. ‘Possibly in books the body is not moved and no one mucks up the ground, but it’s apt to happen differently in real life. Your aunt wasn’t thinking of clues when she found her grandson’s wife dead in the garden. All she could think of was that she might possibly be alive, and she tried to carry her to the house. She almost managed it, too! But she had to fetch one of the house boys in the end, and by the time the D.C. and the doctor and Greg Gilbert and various other people arrived, the “scene of the crime” had been pretty well messed up.’
Victoria said: ‘Didn’t they find anything, then?’
‘Yes. They found a blood-stained cushion, belonging to one of the verandah chairs, in the long grass about twenty feet or so from where Mrs DeBrett’s body was found. It looked as though it had been thrown there. And they found some marks among the bushes that seemed to suggest that someone had been standing there for quite a time, presumably watching her. There’s a track that runs through the bushes and that links up at least three of the lakeside estates. It’s a
n unofficial short cut that the labour use, and that the Mau Mau undoubtedly used during the Emergency.’
‘So it was a gang murder after all!’ said Victoria with a catch of the breath.
‘Perhaps,’ said Drew. ‘But not on that evidence. Whoever had been watching from the bushes had never left them. The ground just there is pretty dusty, and it was obvious that he had merely turned and gone back the way he came.’
5
The car had been singing down a long straight stretch of road when it brought up suddenly with a screech of tortured tyres, and an abruptness that jerked Victoria forward and narrowly missed bringing her head into violent contact with the windscreen.
‘Sorry,’ said Mr Stratton, ‘but I believe that was a friend of mine.’
He put the gear lever into reverse and backed some fifty yards through a dust cloud of his own making, to draw up alongside a stationary car that stood jacked up on the grassy verge where an African driver wrestled with a recalcitrant tyre.
A tall European in shirtsleeves and wearing a green pork-pie hat jammed on the back of his head appeared from the other side of it, wiping dust and sweat off his face with a handkerchief, and came to lean his elbows on the window of Mr Stratton’s car:
‘I might have known it,’ he remarked bitterly. ‘My God, Drew, the next time you do that I’ll have you up for dangerous driving and get you sixty days without the option if it’s the last thing I do! Didn’t you see me flagging you?’
‘No,’ admitted Mr Stratton, unabashed. ‘My mind was on other things. Greg, you won’t have met Miss Caryll. Miss Caryll, this is Mr Gilbert, our local S.P. – Superintendent of Police, Naivasha.’
Mr Gilbert reached across him and shook hands with Victoria. He was a long, lean man who except for the fact that his hair was streaked with grey at the temples did not appear to be much older than Mr Stratton. His square, pleasant face was less deeply sunburnt than Drew’s, and he possessed a pair of sleepy grey eyes that were anything but a true guide to his character and capabilities.
‘You must be Lady Emily’s niece,’ said Mr Gilbert. ‘She told me you were coming out, but I understood that she’d sent a cable to stop you.’
‘Yes, I know. I didn’t get it. I——’
‘Do you want a lift, Greg?’ cut in Mr Stratton, brusquely interrupting the sentence.
The S.P. threw him a quick look of surprise. ‘Are you in a hurry?’ he enquired.
‘Not particularly, but Miss Caryll could probably do with something to eat. Her plane was late. Where do you want to be dropped?’
‘Same place as Miss Caryll. Flamingo.’
‘Oh. Anything new cropped up?’
‘Not much,’ admitted the S.P. climbing into the back of the car. He called out a few instructions to his driver and sat back, urging Mr Stratton to abstain from doing more than fifty: ‘My nerves are shot to pieces. I thought we’d finished with this sort of thing for the time being, and I find it pretty exhausting when it crops up again. Old James has gone straight in off the deep end. I’ve never known him to be in such a bad temper. He bit my head off this morning for making some innocuous remark about the weather.’
‘Where was this?’ asked Drew, re-starting the car.
‘Up at the Lab. They’d been doing a test on that ruddy verandah cushion.’
‘Any results?’
‘Oh, Alice’s of course. Or same blood group, anyway. It was unlikely to be anyone else’s. But it was just as well to make sure. Odd, though.’
He tilted his hat over his nose, and closed his eyes. Victoria twisted round in her seat to face him, and as though he were aware of the movement he opened them again and said: ‘I must apologize for talking shop, but I’m afraid you’re in for a lot of this. In fact you couldn’t have chosen a worse time to arrive, and I wish I could suggest that you turn right round and go back again; though I can see that it is hardly practicable.’
‘I wouldn’t go if it was,’ said Victoria with decision.
‘Why not?’ enquired Drew shortly.
Victoria turned her head to look at him, aware for the first time that his antagonism was personal and not a mere matter of irritation or bad temper. She said coldly: ‘I should have thought it was obvious. If my aunt needed someone to help her before, she must need it even more now.’
She met his gaze with a hostility that equalled his own, and then deliberately turned her shoulder to him and gave her attention to the view.
The road wound and dipped through hot sunlight and chequered shadows, and swinging to the right came out abruptly on to the crest of a huge escarpment. And there below them, spread out at their feet like a map drawn upon yellowed parchment, lay the Great Rift. A vast golden valley of sun-bleached grass, speckled by scrub and flat-topped thorn trees, and seamed with dry gullies; hemmed in to left and right by the two great barriers of the Kinangop and the Mau, and dominated by the rolling lava falls and cold, gaping crater of Longonot, standing sentinel at its gate.
Nothing has changed! thought Victoria. But she knew that was not true. The passing of a handful of years might have made little difference, superficially, to the Rift, but everything else had changed. And looking out over that stupendous view she was dismayed to find that her eyes were full of tears.
At the foot of the escarpment the road ceased to wind and twist. The forests of cedar and wild olive fell away, and the car touched ninety miles an hour and held it on the long straight ribbon of tarmac that the Italian prisoners-of-war had built in the war years, until at last they could see the shining levels of Lake Naivasha.
‘Might I suggest,’ said Mr Gilbert gently, breaking a silence that had lasted for some considerable time, ‘that you slow down to sixty before you take the turn? I have no wish to provide Naivasha with two funerals within twenty-four hours, and neither am I in any hurry to meet the mourners.’
Drew removed his foot from the accelerator, and as the car slowed down and swung left-handed into an unmade side road that branched off the tarmac of the main Nairobi road to circle the lake, Victoria said huskily: ‘When is it – the funeral?’
‘Eleven o’clock. Didn’t Drew tell you? That’s why none of them could meet you. But they’ll have got back by now. How long is it since you last saw your aunt?’
‘Six years,’ said Victoria.
‘Then I’m afraid you’ll notice quite a change in her. This business has hit her pretty badly. She always seemed to me like a bit of the Kenya landscape – eternal and indestructible. But now she’s suddenly an old lady. It’s like seeing a landmark crumble. Poor old Em!’
‘I can’t see why you have to bother her, today of all days,’ said Mr Stratton disagreeably. ‘You might at least spare them a further grilling on the day of the funeral. It’s going to be bad enough for them to have to— Oh, well. It’s none of my business.’
‘None,’ agreed Mr Gilbert equably. ‘For which you can be devoutly grateful. Asking personal questions on this sort of occasion, and of people who are your friends, is not exactly a pleasant task, I assure you. But the fact that we now know for certain whose blood was on the cushion opens up a new field of enquiry. It’s an odd facet of the case, that cushion. What was it doing there, and why?’
Drew said: ‘No one heard Alice screaming, and she must have screamed. I know that was probably because Em was playing the piano, but there might be another explanation.’
‘You mean the cushion might have been used to smother her? I don’t believe it. It would have been damned difficult to hold a cushion over the face of a struggling woman while hacking at her with a panga. Unless there were two people in it. But— No, somehow I don’t think that it was that. I can’t get it out of my head that that cushion ought to tell me something if I weren’t too stupid to see it. It doesn’t fit.’
‘With what?’ demanded Mr Stratton, swerving to avoid a pothole of unusually outrageous dimensions that added to the hazards of the dusty, unmetalled road.
‘With any of the obvious theories. That cush
ion was removed from the verandah and carried to the spot where Alice was killed, and then thrown away into the long grass. Yet no one will admit to having touched it that day.’
Drew said: ‘I suppose it hasn’t occurred to you that Mrs DeBrett might have taken it down herself to sit on, and was merely carrying it back? Or is that a too simple solution for you and your sleuths to contemplate?’
‘You should know the answer to that one,’ said Mr Gilbert amiably. ‘You were the last person to admit to seeing her alive. Was she carrying a brightly coloured cushion?’
‘No,’ said Drew, ‘but——’
‘But you think that despite the fact that the sun had set, and that it is apt to get a bit chilly around dusk, she went all the way back to the house in order to fetch one off the verandah? I doubt it! Yet someone took it out there, and I’d like to know why. If I did, I imagine we’d be a lot further on. But as it is, I don’t know what to think, and all the things I do think of are decidedly unpleasant. I don’t like anything about this case, and I wish to God I could wash my hands of it!’
‘Why not hand it over to the C.I.D. squad from Nakuru?’
‘I’ve tried that one, but this time it won’t work. They happen to have rather a lot on their plate just now, what with the Hansford case and that Goldfarb business, and James says I can dam’ well handle it myself – even though half my personal friends are involved.’
‘You mean because half your personal friends are involved,’ said Mr Stratton dryly. ‘You know us all very well. Too well!’
The S.P. made no reply; which might have meant anything – or nothing.
The cold shadow of a cloud drifted across the sunlit scene, draining the colour from the grass and the flat-topped thorn trees and lending the landscape a fleeting suggestion of aloofness and hostility, and Victoria shivered again and was suddenly afraid: afraid of the valley and of Africa, and of arriving at Flamingo, the house that was Eden’s home and where Eden’s wife had died a horrible death.