One of the waiters removed her plate and set down a dish of chocolate ice cream. She started in on that immediately.
He leaned toward her. “Patty, of course I’m worried. So should you be. My God, you’re stuck in Kenya, in Africa, without anybody, no way home, no money—”
“That’s where you’re wrong. I’ve got lots!” She put down her spoon and shoved her hand into a pocket of her backpack and pulled out the dwindling roll. It was still ample. “See, Mr. Umbijawa is pretty rich and makes sure all of us kids have money. Just in case—”
“He loses you in Nairobi?” Melrose took another drink, a long one.
She mounded her spoon with ice cream, licked it and said, “I’ve just been with them two years, and I think maybe they haven’t tried too hard to find me because they’re just tired of the whole foster thing.”
Melrose pushed back. “Okay, that’s it. I’m ringing the police station.” He rose.
“Well, if that Van der Moot woman hears you she’s really going to wonder how come I’m missing. You know, me being your niece and all.”
Melrose turned and walked over to the waiter, who was clearing up dishes from the buffet. He got his message across and in return received a number, which he dialed as he went back to the table.
“Ah, yes, may I speak with someone who deals with—you. Of course. I want to report a lost child.” He looked at Patty, who clearly resented the description. “The family, name of—” He stumbled over it. “Umbijawa. What? Well, I guess it’s U, m, b, i or e, j, a w, a, h. Something like that. Umbijawah. Fred is the first name. The child is Patricia. What? The station?—” Melrose was beginning not to care for the suspicion that had come into the tone of whoever was at the other end. “Look, never mind. I’ll see she gets to the station. Thank—” The voice was raised, wanting to know his name, where he was calling from; it was a woman speaking very quickly. He raised his own voice, said, “Thank you.” He thought he continued to hear babble even after he rang off.
He just looked at Patty Haigh. “Tomorrow, we—Wait a minute! I know exactly who to call!” Jury. He’d know what to do. “What time is it in—Are we two hours ahead? Or behind the UK?”
“No!” She yanked down the hand that held the mobile. “Oh, please. Not the London police.” Her face started to crumple.
He frowned. “Why not? For heaven’s sake, your father, or rather Mr. Umbijawa, could very well have contacted—”
“You don’t understand. Freddie’s in trouble with the police. They’re looking for him.” Now she was crying. “I don’t want to get him in trouble.”
“For God’s sake, Patty, he appears to have abandoned you—”
Furiously, she shook her head. “I know there’s some reason. And they’ve really been good to me for the three, I mean two, years I’ve lived with them. I was in awful shape when they found me. Please don’t!” She wiped her eyes with her linen napkin. “I really like it here with you. Just for a couple of days, maybe? I’ve never been to Africa or ever seen wild animals. We might see a cheetah. Please.” She picked up the money roll again. “I’ll pay you back.”
He had to smile. “Patty, if there’s one thing I don’t need, it’s your money.”
“Oh, good.” Completely calm now, she stashed her money in her backpack. “Can I have some more ice cream?”
A child of such mercurial moods Melrose had never known. Holding up her empty dish, he signaled the porter.
“Finished!” Patty announced ten minutes later, wiping her mouth with her napkin. “Can we sit on the porch?” She picked up the Cracker Jack box and shook it.
“Hmph. I expect so. Why did thirteen of you decide to come to Kenya all at once?” They walked through the wide screen doors and took seats on two rocking chairs.
“For different reasons. Like my Aunt Monique—”
“You don’t have to detail the reasons. Where were you before you pulled up here?”
“Kibera.”
He recalled that name from having read a description of it just before she turned up. “But that’s the huge slum in Nairobi, isn’t it?”
“Uh-huh. I just got lost at one point and wound up there.”
“It sounds like you got lost at every point. That place is extremely dangerous.” From the continent’s worst slum to the wild savanna. My God, her hair should be white.
Melrose stood. “Come on, you’ll have to share my tent.” They started down the steps to the path, where the guide, Lumbai, waited in case any of the guests tried going it on their own.
“I will have to accompany you, suh,” said Lumbai.
“Thank you.” Melrose turned to Patty. “See, that’s how dangerous it is. We can’t even walk to that tent alone. Then he said to Lumbai, “Tell me, how far is this from Kibera?” He was curious.
“That place? Well, as you know, it’s enormous.”
“Yes. But let’s say, as the crow flies. I mean, in a straight line. If we were to turn and walk to it from here. How far?”
The guide laughed. “One would have to be crazy to do that … but, I’d say, perhaps four kilometers.”
“God,” said Melrose under his breath. He was afraid to think about it.
Her Cracker Jack box tight under her arm, Patty was walking hard to keep up with them, they both being tall and with long legs. “I didn’t—”
“That’s right. You didn’t. Be quiet.”
But now he was really interested in the phenomenon of this little girl’s walking through lion-cheetah-leopard-infested territory unscathed. “Lumbai, tell me—” He stopped on the path. “You know a lot more about these animals than we do. Is it possible they would not attack if they felt absolutely no threat?”
Lumbai looked around. “Do they ever feel no threat? And are you forgetting hunger? That is a powerful reason to attack us. Between here and Kibera, walking? No, I cannot imagine any chance of not being attacked by something in all that distance. Impossible.” He shook his head. “Let us go on.”
They walked. But since it was not impossible—clearly she had come from somewhere on foot, even if she was lying about Kibera (and he didn’t see why she would be). “Surely not impossible, Lumbai. There must be some circumstance where it’s possible.”
“Well, there are always the spirits. Perhaps a person might be in the company of a malaiki.”
“What’s that?”
“One of the good spirits. Angels will sometimes be sent to help those in distress.”
Did he believe that? wondered Melrose. They were at the tent now. At the doorway—if one could call it that. Lumbai opened it and Melrose could see that the sofa on the left had been pulled away from the wall and made up as a bed.
“The partition has not been pulled down,” said the guide, who then put his fingers round a handle protruding from the ceiling and pulled. What had been a white pine ceiling—or rather a second ceiling—became a wall, splitting the room in two lengthwise.
“Oooohh,” said Patty.
Lumbai said, “Both sections have access to the bathroom facilities.”
“This is fine,” said Melrose. And it was; he still had more than ample space is his half of the huge room.
“I will say good night, suh. And miss.” He smiled at Patty and left.
“I need to unpack.”
That seemed almost euphemistic. What could she possibly have in that backpack?
He soon found out as she kept pulling clothes from it and smoothing them carefully over the chair and the bed. The jumpers and jeans were followed by a myriad of things like torch, combs, tissues, wigs—
Wigs?
Patty would have gone down a treat with Diane Demorney, who seemed to carry the whole of Fortnum & Mason in her big purse. He recalled one day in the Jack and Hammer when Scroggs had run out of vodka. Rooting around in this leather bag, Diane had dragged out combs and compacts, cigarettes and silver lighter, item after item until she came to the vodka miniatures. She lacked only vermouth, but that scarcely mattered.
> He wondered if Patty would yank out a half-pint of Talisker. No, the next things she brought out were notebooks in several different sizes. She plucked up the largest of these, a wire-bound one, and sat on the edge of her bed with a pen.
“What are you doing?” He thought he detected a crunching sound.
“Eating Cracker Jacks. It’s really good.” She offered him none. “And writing. I always travel with notebooks since I never know when I’ll need to make notes. Right now, I’m keeping a record for the police and so forth.”
The police and so forth. Should he ask?
Nairobi, Kenya
Nov. 5, Wednesday morning
21
They had been sent off like kids to summer camp by the Van der Moots with nothing but a cup of tea and the promise of a big breakfast at the end of it. That had been at five A.M. There were only four Attaboys, but that was still a swarm. Etta Attaboy had escaped this early morning ambush, claiming she was too old for a five A.M. safari drive.
Melrose felt too old for a five A.M. anything. He was seated in the back of the Range Rover between Patty (and her journal) and Rose Campanelli, finding it rather remarkable that this woman from Outer Otter would brave the dawn when the supposedly sturdier American couple and Mrs. North and her son Jefferson had avoided it. So there were nine of them, besides the driver Montre and the tracker Danglo. They had been riding for two hours through the bush, across half-washed-out bridges and muddy streams, past gargantuan baobab trees and spiky sage, acacia trees so flat-topped he could have danced across them. They glimpsed brilliant things on the wing and fleet things on four feet; sleek cats of several species with spots; scores of impala; a leopard draped on a black branch like a window display for Liberty’s fur department; the dark shadow of a herd of wildebeest thundering across the land like the Birmingham-Leeds express—
What were these inane analogies to Britain? What on earth had he ever seen in his daily jaunts to the Jack and Hammer or his bimonthly ones to Boring’s in Mayfair that could possibly compare to this Kenyan savanna?
He sat next to Patty and was surrounded by Attaboys.
Melrose was aware that he was self-centered and self-absorbed (he didn’t need to be reminded of it by Patty, who at the moment was writing furiously in that damned notebook she hauled everywhere), but he really couldn’t get his mind round this five A.M. ride out to watch a pride of lions run down a warthog. How unsporting. The whole country struck him as an uneven playing field. The warthog escaped the lions, Melrose was relieved to see, but his fellow travelers did not appear to share his relief. He inferred they were expecting that one of the safari perks was at least one good bloodbath. Patty still wrote while some sort of lizard crept across the path of the stopped vehicle. It was quickly routed by a small wildcat appearing out of nowhere. My God, things moved fast out here. There’s your carnage, Little Mitchell, but the boy had missed it because he was fooling around with his camera.
Higher the sun rose, throwing bronze and orange shadows across the land, and they were into the vast emptiness of what Melrose had always supposed to be Africa. But the color, on a short-term loan from Hollywood, faded and left behind the daily sweep of drab shrubs and grass bleached by the sun to near-transparency, where it wasn’t the color of straw, and the veldt in general rose only to variations in neutral tones—tan, ochre, ivory.
Yet despite all of this color neutrality, the land was still oddly vibrant. It was more vivid than his own gardens surrounding Ardry End, spurting their intense reds, purples, yellows and blues. His garden struck him now as unalive, as if, rather than growing, the flowers had been painted there.
Bursts of light happened somewhere out there, lightning it must have been.
He stood and stuck his head above the rolled-back top of the Range Rover. Danglo was already leaning on the canvas, arms crossed.
“Very dry, need rain, that rain thirty miles away. Too dry.”
“But it’s the season for all that, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Danglo nodded. “But not pretty.”
Not pretty. One of the strangest descriptions he had heard of Kenya. He stood there looking at the same scene as the guide, at the stubble, the dry ash-colored shrubs, grass stiff as straw, the distant line of black flat-topped acacia trees, the same scene and yet it was different to him. The difference was that they were present, seen or unseen. The veldt wasn’t empty. It was full of blood.
The vehicle’s radio crackled, and a scratchy voice came through, emitting another flood of information that no one could understand until Montre turned and said, “Lions with kill. Buffalo.” He turned to the tracker, pointed and said a lot in Swahili as he bumped off-road, heading for a stand of acacia trees a hundred meters away.
“Vultures!” yelled Little Mitchell. “Vultures!” He barely missed Melrose’s chin as he whipped his binoculars up to his eyes. “And a couple of storks.”
Danglo said, “Marabou storks. And buzzards, many buzzards.”
The Range Rover found what the birds were waiting for: their turn at the table, the carcass of an animal—according to Montre’s source, a buffalo—that had clearly been killed many hours ago by the three lions that were feeding on it. The feeding seemed almost casual, the male lion yanking at a piece of hide, the two females drifting off and lying down.
Theirs wasn’t the only vehicle. On the other side of the lions sat another filled with people from the camp, one of them, Sally Sly’s husband, grinning ferociously as if he’d been in on the kill and was waiting, like the buzzards, for his turn.
It was one of Patty’s opportunities to object. She managed to stand up, as if facing an audience of reprobates. “Who do we think we are?” Patty barreled on. “Who are we to come into the animals’ space and watch them eat as we grin, grin, grin—” Here she pointed to the other vehicle, where Mr. Sly sat straight as a statue, the grin carved on his face. “What do we think this is? A fucking zoo?”
Little Mitchell yelled, “She said the f-word!” As if he objected.
Interest in language dissipated in the wake of the Attaboys’ camera-maneuvering: they broke out every kind of photographic enhancement imaginable, as if the ghost of David Lean were beckoning across the veldt.
The morning ride ended with a fancy breakfast cooked up by one of the lodge chefs, who had followed their little party in a large van. Was this what safari-goers, Europeans and Americans, expected? That they be followed in a van with bacon and eggs? Not even Henry James could have thought that up.
The breakfast was elaborate, featuring a half dozen different sausages that neither Melrose nor Patty partook of (Patty because she wouldn’t eat sausages, Melrose because he wouldn’t eat sausages he couldn’t identify); eggs in various combinations; pancakes of corn, buckwheat and other grains; muffins the size of parasols; quiche, toast, biscuits; and a dozen different beverages, including mango juice and passion fruit, several fizzy things and, of course, coffee and tea. The spread made Melrose sigh for the lions trying to make a meal of one warthog. And not succeeding even at that.
No wonder they ate everything they could lay their paws on. How had Patty made it all the way to Mbosi Lodge on foot for four kilometers?
She sat beside him, eating an egg sandwich she’d constructed and writing with her free hand.
“Why are you always writing?”
“To keep the Attaboys from talking to me.”
“There’s so much going on out here, I don’t think they’d bother you.”
Patty did not answer, only closed her notebook and stuffed her pencil down her sock, then continued eating her egg sandwich.
“Did you enjoy the lions, dear?” Mrs. Attaboy had sprung from nowhere.
“More than the warthog did,” said Patty.
Mildred Attaboy laughed uncertainly, as she was joined by a bored-looking Mona.
Mona, meaning to discredit Patty, asked, “What are you always journaling about?”
“Is that a word?” said Melrose.
“I
’m not ‘journaling.’ I’m making notes.”
“Yeah?” said Little Mitchell, springing up between them. “What’sa difference?”
“You don’t know?”
Mouth full, he shook his head. Mouth still full, he said, “Looks the same.”
“A journal is for itself.”
Mr. Attaboy had now moved into the circle around Patty, whom they all seemed to regard as Delphic.
The oracle continued, “A notebook is for something else.”
“What else?” said Mr. Attaboy, his wide forehead creased in a deep frown.
Patty looked at Melrose, opened her notebook, pulled the stub from her sock and started writing.
One by one the Attaboys drifted away.
Patty Haigh could read a room.
Nairobi, Kenya
Nov. 6, Wednesday afternoon
22
A couple of hours later and without further incident, they were back at the camp and walking into the lodge.
There, Trish Van der Moot presented Melrose with a written and verbal message. The verbal was full of excitement prompted by the written, which stated that a Scotland Yard superintendent, Richard Jury, wished him to call. “By all means, use the lodge phone. I know your mobile might not get a decent connection.” She led him to the phone.
“What artist?” said Melrose, trying to balance phone and the small paper pad he was writing on.
“Masego Abasi.” Jury spelled it out and explained. “I wired photos to Nairobi police and told a chief inspector named Kione you’d pick them up. Don’t forget you’re Lord Ardry. Kione liked that. British colonialism is apparently still viable. When you show them to Abasi, show him the one of the painting first; see if he remembers who bought it. Then show him the photo of Rebecca Moffit. She’s also in the one of the gallery. See if he can identify her; it could be she’s been to his studio.”
The Knowledge: A Richard Jury Mystery (Richard Jury Mysteries) Page 16