Death in Kenya

by M. M. Kaye

  Victoria disregarded the offer and said, stammering a little: ‘I’m sorry that you should have heard w-what I said. About the notches. I didn’t mean to be r-rude.’

  ‘There’s no need to apologize for your views,’ said Drew gravely.

  ‘I’m not. Only for letting you hear them.’

  ‘My feelings,’ said Drew, ‘are not so easily wounded. So you think I’m appalling and barbaric because I allow the boys to cut a tally of their kills on my verandah rail, do you? You are not the only one. There are uncounted thousands of soft-hearted and fluffy-minded – and abysmally ignorant – people who would agree with you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Victoria sweetly.

  ‘Don’t mention it. Unlike you, I meant to be rude. You see, Miss Caryll, I get a little bored by people who broadcast views on something that is, to them, only a problem on paper, and one which does not touch them, personally, in any way. We each have something that we love deeply and are prepared to fight for and die for, and kill for! and I wonder just how many of the virtuous prosers, if it was the agony of their own child or wife or lover, or the safety of their own snug little surburban home that was in question, would not fight in their defence?’

  Victoria said: ‘I didn’t mean that. I meant this sort of thing – cutting notches. Making a game of killing.’

  ‘It wasn’t a game. It was deadly serious. The men we were after had deliberately bestialized themselves by acts and oaths and ceremonies that were so unspeakably filthy and abominable that the half of them have never been printed, or believed by the outside world. If any of us were caught – and a good many of us were – we knew just how slowly and unpleasantly we should die. You cannot conduct a campaign against a bestial horror like the Mau Mau with gloves on. Or you can! – if you have no objection to digging up a grave in the forest and finding that it contains the body of your best friend, who has been roasted alive over a slow fire after having certain parts of him removed for use in Mau Mau ceremonials.’

  Neither Drew’s face nor his pleasant voice had altered, but his bland blue eyes were suddenly as hard and blank and cold as pebbles, and Victoria was aware with a sense of shock that he was speaking of something that he himself had seen – and could still see.

  She said hesitantly and inadequately: ‘I – I’m sorry.’

  The blankness left Drew’s eyes and he tossed the end of his cigarette over the verandah rail and said: ‘Come here; I want to show you something.’

  He took her arm in an ungentle grasp, and turning her about, walked her over to the far end of the verandah and stopped before the upright post that supported the corner of the roof. There were notches on that too. Each one cut deep into the flat of the wood pillar.

  ‘Those are our losses,’ said Drew, and touched them lightly. ‘That one was Sendayo. We used to play together when we were kids. His father worked for mine when they were both young men. That was Mtua. One of the best men we had. They cut his hands and feet off and pegged him out where the safari ants would get him. That one was Tony Sherraway. They burnt him alive. This one was Barugu. He was a Kikuyu whose entire family – parents, grandparents, wife and children – were murdered in the Lari massacre, where the Mau Mau set all the huts in the village on fire and clubbed and panga’d the people as they ran out. Barugu worked for us for a year before they got him, and what they did to him is not repeatable.’

  He released Victoria’s arm with an impatient gesture and said: ‘Why go on? They won’t mean anything to you. Or to anyone else. But cutting a tally of kills helped the morale of the others. They also got a bit of satisfaction out of chalking up that score, and out of knowing that if one of them went, he would be amply avenged.’

  Drew turned away and stood looking out across the beauty that lay below and around him, his eyes narrowed against the sun glare, and presently he said: ‘It’s no good trying to treat Africans as though their processes of thought were the same as Europeans. That is the way of madness – and politicians!’

  Victoria said doubtfully: ‘But it is their country.’

  ‘Whose?’ demanded Drew, without turning his head.

  ‘The – the Africans.’

  ‘Which Africans? All this that you can see here, the Rift and most of what is known as the White Highlands, belonged, if it belonged to anyone, to the Masai. But it is the Kikuyu who claim the land, though they never owned a foot of it – and would have been speared if they’d set a foot on it! The place was a no-man’s-land when Delamere first came here, and the fact that cattle and sheep can now be raised here is entirely due to him and men like him. And even they didn’t just grab the land. The handful of Masai then inhabiting it voluntarily exchanged it for the enormous territory that tribe now holds.’

  ‘But——’ began Victoria, and was interrupted.

  ‘All the chatter about “It belongs to them”,’ said Drew, ‘makes me tired. Sixty years ago Americans were still fighting Red Indians and Mexicans and grabbing their land; but I’ve never heard anyone suggesting that they should get the hell out of it and give it back to the original owners. Our grandfathers found a howling wilderness that no one wanted, and which, at the time, no one objected to their taking possession of. And with blood, toil, tears and sweat they turned it into a flourishing concern. At which point a yelping chorus is raised, demanding, in the name of “Nationalism”, that it be handed over to them. Well, if they are capable of running this on their own, or of turning a howling wilderness into a rich and prosperous concern, let ’em prove it! There’s a hell of a lot of Africa. They can find a bit and start right in to show us. But that won’t do for them. It’s the fruit of somebody else’s labour that they are after.’

  He flung out a hand in the direction of the green lawns and gardens, the orchards, outhouses and paddocks: ‘There was nothing and nobody here when my grandfather first saw this. This is the fruit of his labour – and of my parents’, and my own. I was born here, and this is as much my home as Sendayo’s. I want to stay here, and if that is immoral and indefensible Colonialism, then every American whose pioneer forebears went in a covered wagon to open up the West is tarred with the same brush; and when U.N.O. orders them out, we may consider moving!’

  He turned to face Victoria and for the first time since she had met him, he smiled. It was a disquietingly attractive smile, and despite herself she felt a considerable portion of her hostility towards him waning.

  He said: ‘I apologize for treating you to a grossly over-simplified lecture on the Settlers’ point of view. Very tedious for you. Here’s the tea at last. Come and pour out.’

  He kept up an idly amiable flow of small-talk until Eden returned, and after that the conversation took a strictly technical turn, and Victoria allowed her attention to wander.

  ‘An over-simplified viewpoint.’ Perhaps. Yet she could still remember her father telling her tales of her grandfather’s early days in the great valley. The gruelling toil under the burning sun. The laborious digging of wells and the struggle to grow grass and crops and to raise cattle. The first glorious signs of success – of the ‘wilderness blossoming like a rose’. The years of drought when first the crops and then the cattle died, and ruin faced them – and was stared down and outfaced by men who refused to be beaten. The first roads. The first hospitals. The first railway. The first schools … It could not have been easy, but the sweat and the toil and the despair and determination that it had cost had made it doubly dear, and Victoria found herself remembering a line from the theme song of Oklahoma! – that exhilarating musical about another pioneer state which barely a century ago had also belonged to ‘painted savages’.

  ‘We belong to the land, and the land we belong to is grand.’

  She was aroused from her abstraction by Eden saying: ‘Look, Drew, if you’re driving over to see Gilly, why not come back in the launch with us, and let your driver take the car round to Flamingo? Then you can have a word with Gran about the deal. Just as well to get it settled.’

  Mr Stra
tton, having agreed to the suggestion, went off to change out of his riding clothes, and Eden cocked an interrogatory eyebrow at Victoria and said: ‘How did you get on with the detestable Drew? Sorry I had to leave you like that, but you wouldn’t have enjoyed inspecting cows and calves, and I took it that you wouldn’t actually come to blows! Do you mind having him as a passenger on the way home? I want him to have a word with Gran, and this seems a good way of seeing that he gets it.’

  ‘Of course I don’t mind. Why should I?’ enquired Victoria loftily. ‘I’m not so prejudiced that I can’t sit in a boat with him. And in any case you will be far too busy discussing milk yields and foot-and-mouth for either of you to notice whether I am there or not.’

  Eden laughed and reached out to pull her to her feet. ‘Did we bore you? Forgive me, darling. I promise to keep off shop in future whenever you’re around.’

  Something in Victoria flinched at his casual use of an endearment that had once meant so much but which now came so easily and so meaninglessly to his tongue. She removed the hand that he still held, and said lightly: ‘If I’m to be of any use to Aunt Em, the more I know about milk yields and foot-and-mouth the better. So don’t let me put you off. Do you suppose the police will have gone by the time we get back?’

  ‘If they haven’t, I don’t suppose we shall get any supper,’ said Eden with a laugh. ‘The staff are apt to get a bit disorganized on these occasions. I can’t tell you how many times during the Emergency we were reduced to bread and cheese because Greg’s chaps had been asking questions and the cook was too upset to concentrate on such mundane matters as meals. Here’s Drew. If you’re ready, let’s go.’

  9

  Day was withdrawing reluctantly from the valley, and the gardens of Flamingo were noisy with the chatter and chirrup of birds coming home to roost. But the house itself was silent, and the police had apparently gone.

  Conversation during the return journey had been desultory, but now it had ceased altogether, and Victoria, looking round to see why Eden’s steps had slowed, surprised an expression on his face that startled her. He was staring at the house as though he hated it, or was afraid of it, and was walking slowly to delay the moment when he must enter it again.

  An unexpected and icy little shiver ran down Victoria’s spine, and Mr Stratton, who had been strolling beside her with his hands in his pockets and his face blank and apparently unobservant, said: ‘Are you cold? Or was that someone jumping over your grave?’

  Victoria started as though she had been sleep-walking, and was suddenly angry with an unreasoning and defensive anger born of the sharp unease that had momentarily possessed her.

  ‘Must you mention graves after what has happened here? I should have thought we could at least have kept off——’ She stopped and bit her lip.

  Drew’s eyebrows lifted and his blue eyes were unpleasantly satirical, but his voice remained unruffled. ‘I stand corrected. Very tactless of me. My apologies, Eden.’

  ‘What’s that?’ said Eden, jerked out of abstraction as Victoria had been. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t hear what you said.’

  ‘Nothing of any importance. It doesn’t look as though your grandmother is in, does it? Or else she’s locked the dogs up.’

  ‘More likely that the police have locked up all our labour!’ said Eden bitterly. ‘There don’t seem to be any cars about, so at least Bill and his boys have pushed off – which is some comfort!’

  At the top of the verandah steps he paused to listen, his head lifted and his face strained and intent. But no one moved in the silent house, and the normal cheerful noises from the kitchen and the back premises were conspicuous by their absence.

  Something of his disquiet communicated itself to Drew Stratton, who said with unwonted sharpness: ‘There’s nothing wrong, is there?’

  Eden’s strained rigidity relaxed and he gave a short and rather uncertain laugh. ‘No. No, of course not. I was only wondering where everyone had got to. Place seems a bit deserted this evening. I’ll go and rout out Zacharia and some drinks.’ But he made no move to go, and the hand that he had laid on the verandah rail tightened until the knuckles showed white through the tanned skin.

  Somewhere in the house a door slammed and Victoria jumped at the suddenness of the sound.

  ‘Somebody appears to be at home,’ observed Mr Stratton dryly. ‘Unless that was your poltergeist.’

  Eden’s hand dropped from the rail and he turned an appalled face. ‘But it couldn’t be! – not now. I mean——’

  He whirled round and had started for the nearest door at a run when Em appeared at the far end of the verandah:

  ‘Eden! Thank goodness you’re back! I’ve been worried to death.’ Her voice sharpened as she took in his expression. ‘What’s the matter? You haven’t – heard anything have you?’

  ‘No,’ said Eden with a crack of laughter that held more than a trace of hysteria. ‘Not a sound. That’s what was worrying me. The whole place was as quiet as a tomb and I suddenly got the horrors, wondering if anything had happened to you. Where is everyone? Don’t tell me that young Bill Hennessy has arrested the whole boiling – live stock included? What have you done with the dogs?’

  ‘Locked them up,’ said Em and sat down abruptly and heavily in one of the verandah chairs. ‘They didn’t take to the askaris.’

  She appeared to notice Drew and Victoria for the first time and nodded absently at them. ‘Good evening, Drew. Didn’t see you. Eden brought you, I suppose? Well, I can’t talk cattle with you today. It’ll have to wait. I’m too upset. Did you have a nice trip on the lake, Victoria? Eden, go and tell Zacharia to bring the drinks. I need something. Brandy, for choice!’

  ‘Bill been giving you a bad time, Gran?’ enquired Eden. ‘You should have let me stay and deal with him. Come on, tell me the worst. Are half our staff behind bars? Is that why the place is so quiet this evening?’

  ‘No. Nothing like that. He only wanted to ask a lot of silly questions, and I let him get on with it. It isn’t the police. It’s Kamau.’

  ‘Why? What about him? Don’t tell me he really does know something after all?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Em tiredly. ‘Eden, do go and call Zach! I’m sure we could all do with a drink.’

  Eden departed, and Drew said: ‘Kamau? Isn’t he the one who scuppered that Mau Mau “Brigadier” and scooped in a fat reward? Do the police think that he knows something about the murder?’

  ‘No. I mean, yes, he’s the one who killed Gitahi. Lisa thought he might know something…’ Em recounted the tale, adding that Kamau had failed to meet her on the previous night. ‘And when I sent for him this morning – Oh, mzuri, Zacharia. Put it down there. No, no, the Bwanas can help themselves.’ She waved the old man away, and Eden dispensed drinks.

  ‘Go on,’ said Drew. ‘You sent for him this morning?’

  Em accepted an exceedingly stiff brandy and soda from her grandson and gulped down half of it before replying. ‘They said they thought he’d gone off to cut lucerne, and now it doesn’t look as if he did.’

  ‘Bolted, I suppose,’ said Eden succinctly.

  Em lowered her glass and looked at him sharply. ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Well, it’s the obvious conclusion, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s what the Police say. In fact they said just what you said yesterday: that he might have done the murder himself, and now that this girl, Wambui, has told on him, he’s lost his nerve and run for it.’

  ‘But you don’t believe that,’ said Drew slowly.

  ‘No.’

  Eden banged his glass down on the tray with such violence that the bottles jumped and rattled. ‘Why not? The same old reason I suppose. “My Kukes are loyal!” My God, they ought to have that written up in letters of gold right across the Rift – and headed “Famous Last Words”! Why shouldn’t it be the answer? Someone did it, and it all ties up with the other things that happened in the house – the poltergeist and the poisoning of Simba. Whoever was responsib
le for that must have been employed here, or working with an accomplice who was, and if Kamau had no hand in it why has he run away? Tell me that!’

  ‘Because he may think he knows who did it, and is afraid.’

  ‘Afraid of what?’

  ‘Of his own life, of course! Really, Eden, you’re being very stupid today. Suppose he was watching from the bushes and saw everything? Suppose he even recognized the murderer?’

  ‘In the dusk? At that range?’ said Eden scornfully. ‘Don’t you believe it, Gran! The distance between where he was standing and the spot where Alice was killed is well over fifty yards. And it was getting dark. For all we know, the marks he left may have been made hours earlier – or else they were made by an accomplice keeping cave. If Kamau really knows anything about this business it’s either because he himself did the murder or connived at it!’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Em obstinately. ‘That’s just the sort of conclusion the police jump at – and Gilly and Hector and Mabel. Because it’s the easiest one that offers. It’s my opinion that Kamau did know something, and was sufficiently frightened by what he saw to keep his mouth shut, but couldn’t resist throwing out hints to his girl. But I didn’t think he’d run away, or that the police would immediately leap to the same silly conclusion that you appear to have leapt to!’

  She sipped her drink and glared indignantly at her grandson over the rim of her glass. ‘Men!’ said Em scornfully, and directed a speaking glance at her niece. But Victoria’s attention had been momentarily distracted by the behaviour of Mr Stratton.

  Drew had been sitting on the verandah rail within a foot of her, leaning back lazily against one of the pillars. He looked relaxed and at peace with the world, and appeared to be taking no more than a polite interest in the discussion, until something in Em’s last sentence had jerked him to attention. Victoria did not know why she was so sure of this, for he had made no noticeable movement. Nevertheless she was aware that he was no longer relaxed but had abruptly stiffened into alertness, and that he was sitting very still.