Death in Zanzibar

by M. M. Kaye

  The proceedings after that had been mercifully brief. The doctor’s verdict had confirmed their own, and it was only too easy to see how the accident had occurred.

  Miss Bates, descending the staircase in the dark, had either felt faint or misjudged a step and stumbled, and falling over the edge of the balustrade on to the verandah below had broken her neck. It was as simple, and as shocking, as that.

  Tyson had done most of the talking and shown them where the body had lain, and Dany had not been called upon to say very much. The doctor had seen Gussie and prescribed rest and, if necessary, another sedative, and he and the Inspector, having assisted in carrying Millicent’s body to the waiting ambulance, had expressed their sympathy and left.

  The moon was down and in the east the sky was already beginning to grow pale with the first far-away hint of dawn when Dany climbed in under her mosquito-net at last. Her sheets were crumpled and her pillow still bore the impression of Millicent Bates’ head. But no one had thought to suggest that she sleep anywhere else, and she was too tired to care very much that she must sleep where Millicent’s dead body had lain. Too tired to care very much about anything …

  She slept so soundly that she did not hear the gentle tap of the house-servant who attempted to bring her a tea tray at eight o’clock, or, an hour later, Lorraine’s voice outside her locked door, inquiring if she were awake yet. And it was, finally, Lash who awakened her.

  He banged on her bedroom door and went on banging with increasing loudness until she opened it, and when he saw her there, drowsy and bewildered, he said with inexplicable fervour: ‘Thank God for that!’

  ‘For what?’ asked Dany, blinking at him. ‘Is anything the matter?’

  ‘Apparently not,’ said Lash, who was looking oddly white and strained. ‘But when you didn’t come down, and Lorraine said your door was locked and she could get no answer out of you, I thought maybe I’d better come up and make sure.’

  ‘Of what?’ inquired Dany, puzzled.

  ‘That you were really only asleep. I guess that lousy business last night was an accident all right, but all the same____’

  ‘Miss Bates____!’ gasped Dany, recollection hitting her like a blow in the face. ‘I — I’d forgotten. She — Oh, Lash! Oh poor Miss Bates. Poor Mrs Bingham … Is she all right?’

  ‘Mrs Bingham? I guess so. She seems to have recovered enough to eat a fairly hearty breakfast, judging from the tray that went up. How about you? Are you thinking of coming down any time?’

  ‘Of course. Is it late?’

  ‘Just after ten.’

  ‘Ten! Good heavens!’

  The door slammed in his face, and a silvery voice from half-way down the verandah said: ‘Serenading your secretary, Lash darling?’

  Amalfi walked towards him and smiled sweetly up into his face; but above the lovely laughing curve of her mouth her green eyes were cold and steady and held no trace of amusement, and looking down into them Lash was conscious of a sudden sharp sense of shock, as though he had walked unwarily into some solid object in the dark.

  He had not known that Amalfi could look like that while smiling like that, and it left him feeling uneasy and strangely unsure of himself. He said defensively, answering her question: ‘Strictly in the way of business.’

  ‘Really?’ Amalfi’s voice was as warmly sweet as her smile. ‘And is a lace and nylon wrap her normal working dress? What fun you business men must have!’

  She laughed her lovely laugh, and Lash was startled to find himself angry in a way that he had never been angry before.

  He looked at Amalfi for a long moment; seeing her as someone he did not know at all, and noticing many things that he had never noticed before: the years that had been so skilfully held at bay; the ice that could glitter in those cool, mermaid eyes and the malice that could speak in that warm caressing voice. The steel that lay concealed behind that charming, irresponsible, childish sweetness …

  Amalfi’s long lashes fluttered and dropped, and when they lifted again her eyes were softly appealing and her voice coaxed. ‘I’m dreadfully jealous, darling!’

  ‘Are you?’ said Lash grimly. ‘It must make a nice change.’ He turned away from her and went down the curving stair to the courtyard without troubling to see whether she were following or not.

  Mr Cardew of the police, his peaceful Sabbath rudely interrupted, called again that morning at the House of Shade, and Tyson took him up to see the scene of the accident.

  Mr Cardew commented unfavourably on the extremely inadequate balustrades, pronounced the staircases to be dangerous and suggested that iron rails of a reasonable height should be added at the earliest possible moment, and returned to the city taking Tyson, Dany and Gussie Bingham with him, where there had been certain depressing formalities to be gone through in connection with the death of Millicent Bates.

  His office was in a tall, square building, four storeys high and facing the sea, with magnificent carved doors and a clock tower. The Bet-el-Ajaib, the ‘House of Wonders’; once a palace built by the famous Sultan, Seyyid Barghash-bin-Saïd, and now doing duty as the Secretariat.

  The House of Wonders had been built many years later than the House of Shade, and though on a far larger scale, its design was similar: the rooms with their tiers of verandahs being built about a central courtyard. Except that here the courtyard was not open to the sky, but closed over with a glass roof in the manner of a railway station.

  Dany had left Tyson and his sister talking to Mr Cardew, and had gone out to stand on the steps and look out towards the harbour where the clove ship for Pemba lay at anchor, and to gaze at the three ancient guns that stood before the Bet-el-Ajaib: cannon that were stamped with the arms of Portugal, and were part of the booty taken by the Persians at the fall of Ormuz.

  She had been tracing the worn inscriptions on the old sun-baked metal when a shadow fell across the cannon, and she looked up to see the Arab who had been on the Nairobi plane with them on the previous day, and whom Nigel had introduced as Seyyid Omar-bin-Sultan.

  Seyyid Omar’s excellent teeth flashed white in his olive-skinned face, and he bowed and said: ‘Good morning, Miss Kitchell. How pleasant to meet you again so soon. You have started your sight-seeing already, I see. Are you admiring our guns? They are very old. Perhaps four hundred years and more.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Dany. ‘I read about them before I came here. What does that inscription on them say? It’s Arabic, isn’t it?’

  ‘Persian,’ said Seyyid Omar; and traced the graceful characters with one slim brown finger …

  ‘In the Name of God and by the Grace of Mahomed and Ali, convey to the True Believers who have assembled together for war, the Good Tiding of Success and Victory … During the reign of Shah Abbas, Sajawi, King of the Earth and of Time, whose Power is ever increasing…’

  His finger slowed and stopped, and he did not read the rest of the long inscription, but looking down at it, repeated in a low voice that held a curious thrill of awe (and perhaps of envy?) that magnificent, arrogant title: ‘King of the Earth, and of Time…’

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ said Dany, charmed by the cadence of the words. ‘Thank you.’

  Seyyid Omar dropped his hand swiftly and smiled at her, and his voice was casual and polite again.

  ‘Yes, that is a fine title, is it not? But there are none to hold it now. Our great days have gone — and our court poets — and who knows when they will return again? But what are you doing alone here, Miss Kitchell? Do you go sight-seeing by yourself?’

  ‘No. I’m afraid I’m not sight-seeing this morning. We — that is Mr Frost and Mrs Bingham and myself, had to come in on — on business.’

  ‘Oh?’ Seyyid Omar’s expressive brows lifted. ‘That sounds dull. I had hoped that your first day in Zanzibar would be more entertaining. I wish that I might offer to show you something of the town, but I myself am also here to keep a business appointment. With the police.’

  ‘The police?’ Dany looked startle
d. ‘Why — why so are we. With Mr Cardew.’

  ‘Ah! You too. It is because of the death of an acquaintance of mine, I think? Salim Abeid, who died at Mombasa Airport yesterday. Well, I do not expect that you can give them any more assistance than I can.’

  Salim Abeid … Dany heard the name with a sense of shock, for Millicent’s death had pushed that other tragedy into the back of her mind. But now she was reminded of it again; and reminded too that she had seen Salim Abeid talking to this man in the shadow of a wing of the Nairobi West Airport barely an hour before he had died.

  ‘Probably a political murder,’ Tyson had said. Jembe had made many enemies among the aristocracy and the rich land-owners — such men, presumably, as Seyyid Omar-bin-Sultan. And Seyyid Omar had been on the same plane …

  The midday sun that beat down upon the entrance to the House of Wonders was very hot, but a little cold shiver prickled down Dany’s spine, and she remembered innumerable stories that she had read of the cruelty of the East: stories stretching from the Arabian Nights down to the recent atrocities of the Mau Mau.

  The Isle of Cloves, as its history showed, was not unacquainted with violence and cruelty, and the murder of a rabble-rouser would probably be considered as of little account today as the death of a dozen slaves in the days when the dhows of the slave traders had moored where the little Pemba-bound steamer now lay at anchor, and their crews had tossed out the corpses from among their human cargoes on to those same beaches.

  Dany shivered, and Seyyid Omar, observing it, said solicitously: ‘It has troubled you. I am sorry that your first morning in our island should be spoiled by such a thing: the death of a man you had probably not even met. Though I believe he was a fellow-passenger of yours from London, was he not?’

  The question was asked quite casually and as though it were a matter of no account, but he waited for an answer.

  Dany said: ‘Yes. But I didn’t actually meet him.’

  ‘But Mr Dowling did,’ said Seyyid Omar gently. ‘And of course your — host’s secretary had met him before. Mr Ponting. I am surprised that Mr Cardew should not have wished to see them, rather than you and Mrs Bingham.’

  ‘Oh, but we aren’t here about that,’ Dany hastened to assure him. ‘There was a dreadful accident at Kivulimi last night. Mrs Bingham’s companion, Miss Bates, fell from one of the staircases in the dark, and broke her neck.’

  ‘You mean — she is dead?’ inquired Seyyid Omar sharply.

  ‘Yes.’

  The monosyllable had a flat finality, and suddenly Millicent was dead. Really dead. Until then it had been unreal: a tale that someone had told her and which she had not quite believed. But now it was true …

  She heard Seyyid Omar draw in his breath with a little hiss between his teeth. ‘That is terrible! I am sorry. I am most sorry. This has been a sad arrival for you indeed. An ill-omened one. I can only hope that it will not give you a dislike of our island and make you wish to leave.’

  Dany had no time for a reply, for at that moment Tyson and his sister joined them, and Seyyid Omar offered condolences and sympathy.

  They stood in the white glare of the sunlight against a tropical background of flame trees, hard shadows and sauntering white-robed men with ebony faces, and spoke of Millicent: Tyson, burly, bearded and frankly impatient; Gussie looking suddenly ten years older — a lined, shocked, shrunken shadow of the assured and talkative matron of yesterday; Dany with her dyed hair and spectacles, and Seyyid Omar-bin-Sultan, suitably concerned and gravely sympathetic. Requiem for a British Spinster …

  Seyyid Omar refused an invitation to accompany them to the English Club for lunch, and Tyson, Gussie and Dany returned to the car, and were driven through the narrow streets to a tall old building that fronted the sea and managed to epitomize all that is conveyed by the words ‘Outposts of Empire’.

  ‘The doors of all these houses are so lovely,’ said Dany, pausing to look back along the white-walled street down which they had come. ‘All that carving, and those huge brass spikes.’

  ‘Those were to keep the war elephants from battering in the doors,’ said Tyson. ‘Useful, as well as ornamental.’

  ‘Elephants? What nonsense! You couldn’t possibly squeeze an elephant into one of these streets, let alone turn it end on to a door!’

  ‘Yes, there is that,’ said Tyson. ‘But it’s a pretty story all the same. And that really is why Arab doors had those spikes on them once. The days of the war elephants have gone, but the design has persisted. And you’re right about the streets. Hell to drive through. In most of ’em, if a car is coming one way and a kitten the other, one of them is going to have to stop. And as this is Zanzibar, it’s the car that would give way to the kitten. A pleasant crowd. A very pleasant crowd.’

  Nigel joined them at the Club, and they ate a sturdy British meal that made no concessions to the climate, sitting in a huge, echoing, sparsely populated dining-room under the ceaseless whirr of electric fans.

  Neither Gussie nor Tyson had much to say, and it fell to Nigel and Dany to sustain some semblance of conversation. But as Nigel was as voluble as ever, Dany’s share was mercifully limited to adding an occasional yes or no at reasonable intervals.

  Her mind was on other things than Roman society scandals, and she did not perceive their trend until Nigel said: ‘____the old Marchesa, that’s Eduardo’s grandmother, pulled every string within reach — and has she a reach! And so of course that was that as far as poor Eddie was concerned. Too frustrating for him. And then darling Lorraine asks him to look up Elf in London, and here we go again! Another grande passion that is doomed to crack on the same old rocks. Too awful for both of them, when you come to think of it.’

  ‘Why?’ inquired Dany perfunctorily.

  ‘Oh, but my dear! It’s obvious. Poor, poor Elf — so romantic and unbusiness-like! Throwing away the substance for an utter shadow; did she but know. There she was, all set to bridge the dollar gap by rushing Holden Jnr to the nearest registrar, when who should happen along but Eduardo. All Latin charm, a Marquis to boot, and apparently solid with lire. Naturally the poor sweet began to waver. Well, I mean — there is a certain glamour about being able to embroider authentic little coronets on one’s smalls, and plain “Mrs Holden” doesn’t carry quite the same simple charm as “the Signora Marchesa di Chiago”. Provided the lire and the lovely green-backs balance, of course! But then they don’t. Someone really ought to break it to darling Elf.’

  ‘Someone has,’ said Tyson briefly, entering the conversation for the first time.

  Nigel registered surprise. ‘You? Now that is a relief — though I did begin to wonder last night if someone hadn’t perhaps dropped the merest hint. I hope you mean to do the same for poor Eddie. Just a whisper of warning?’

  ‘Eddie,’ said Tyson shortly, ‘can look after himself.’

  Gussie helped herself to a solid wedge of suet pudding, and said: ‘What are you two talking about? Warn who about what?’

  ‘Eduardo;’ said Nigel, ‘about our dear Amalfi. That she may look stimulatingly solvent, but that it’s all done by mirrors. Or should one be really catty, and say paste? Excellent imitations of course — she had them made in Paris. But I happen to know that she popped the diamonds and all Chubby’s emeralds. The family were furious — my dear, furious! But of course there was nothing they could do about it. And after all, one does sympathize with the poor sweet. She had every reason to believe that she’d be left madly well off, and it must have been too infuriating to find an absolute regiment of assorted relatives all queueing up for their cut — and getting it! Too soul-curdling. One wonders if it was worth it? No thanks, I don’t feel I could face suet pudding. I think I’ll try the cheese____’

  Millicent was buried late that afternoon, and the entire house-party attended, with the exception of Amalfi, who complained of a headache, and added that in any case she was allergic to funerals.

  It was a brief enough service; and to Dany, at least, a tragic one. Not because
she had taken any special liking to Miss Bates, who had been almost a stranger to her, but because she could not forget that Millicent Bates had despised all things Oriental and had so disliked the East. Yet now she would never leave it. Alien and alone she must lie in this hot foreign soil, within sound of the surf and the trade winds and the rustling palms, until the Day of Judgement. Poor Miss Bates, who had been so deeply rooted in the life of one small English market town, and who had not wanted to come to Zanzibar.

  15

  It was a silent and distinctly subdued party who assembled for dinner that night, and afterwards they had gone out to sit on the terrace and made desultory conversation, and no one had suggested dancing.

  Amalfi appeared to have recovered from her headache, and in deference to the memory of Miss Bates she wore a deceptively simple dress of black chiffon which lent her a frail and wistful look and made her white skin appear even whiter by contrast.

  Both Lorraine and Gussie also wore black. Presumably for the same reason. But as Dany did not possess a black dress (Aunt Harriet having held pronounced views on the unsuitability of black for the young), she had put on the same grey magnolia-appliquéd one that she had worn the previous evening. And it was while Abdurahman, the head houseboy, was clearing away the coffee cups and liqueur glasses, and Nigel was languidly inquiring whether anyone felt like a game of bridge, that she thrust an idle hand into one of the wide pockets that decorated the skirt and touched a crumpled piece of paper.

  Dany drew it out and regarded it with faint surprise, wondering how it had got there. It was a half sheet of writing paper, roughly torn along one edge, and flattening out its creases she held it so that the moonlight fell full on it, and read the few typewritten words it bore without at first comprehending their meaning.