by JRL Anderson
Continuing his story, the sergeant said, ‘As soon as it was clear that we could do nothing about him, we concentrated on you. We got you to the village in a few minutes, but there’s only a dispensary there. The dispenser did what he could to stop your wound bleeding, but you had lost a lot of blood and it was obvious that we had to get you to hospital as soon as possible. With the radio-telephone link at the police post I got on to Fort Edward and asked for a helicopter. Mercifully they had one available, and they sent it out at once, with a doctor. I wanted you to go to the big hospital at Fort Edward, but when the doctor saw you he said that it would take too long, and that it would be better to go to the Mission hospital instead. He didn’t give much for your chances, but you must be very strong, I think.’
‘That wouldn’t have been any use without what you did. Thank you, and your paddlers.’
‘Well, you have done a lot for Mpuga. The diamonds in the bag alone will build several schools, or a big new hospital.’
‘What have you done about the diamonds?’
‘As soon as we’d got you to hospital here, I used the Mission R/T to call up Mr Sessini. He came out by helicopter the next day, with two geologists from the university. I took them to the trench where the man had been digging. Before that, though, I’d got a police party sent out from Fort Edward. We recovered the body of Miss Sutherland, and it was brought back here for burial. This was all done by helicopter – there was quite easy landing in the shallow crater round the trench. We left a police guard by the trench, and it’s been under guard ever since. The geologists are working there now. They think that the diamond-bearing clay extends for a considerable distance, and there are likely to be other diamond-bearing areas in the district. It seems to be the biggest strike that has been made for a long time, and it’s going to make an enormous difference to the economy of Mpuga.’
XII
Betrayal – and Something Else, Perhaps
SOME OF THE dark story of the diamonds became clearer when we searched Miss Sutherland’s things at the Mission. I could not do any of this myself because I was kept in bed, and I was not sorry, for poking and prying into that unhappy woman’s possessions was a distasteful job, necessary though it was. Sergeant Taskalu, however, who remained in charge, was as efficient at searching as he seemed to be at everything else, and he brought me a big brown envelope which he had found in Miss Sutherland’s suitcase. In it was the document which Mr Quenenden had deposited at the bank, and a loose-leaf notebook labelled Adamantifera.
The bank document was a letter addressed to Meredith Boscombe, with a covering note asking anyone who dealt with it in the event of his own death or incapacity to deliver it to Boscombe without reading it. Why Quenenden had not sent it directly to Boscombe was not clear, though the letter explained that there were still some scientific matters that Quenenden wished to determine, and that letter was to be regarded as provisional. I recalled that Quenenden had told the bank manager that he hoped soon to be in a position to dispose of the package himself, but was not yet ready to do so.
The letter, in Quenenden’s neat, small handwriting, recalled that he and Boscombe had met many years ago, and that he was writing to Boscombe now about a discovery in Africa because of his position at the Foreign Office. ‘It may be that the discovery has also some relevance to you personally, because it affects land that was once yours, and in which, for all I know, you may still retain an interest. You will agree, however, that the importance of the discovery is not personal, and that the overriding interest is that it should benefit the people of Mpuga, whom your father and I long tried to serve.’
The letter went on to give map references to an area of land about half a mile square by the crater just below the ridge, and said it seemed almost certain that a rich diamondiferous belt would be found within the area.
That explained how Boscombe came into it. In fact, he never got the letter, but Purbeck could not be absolutely sure that Quenenden had not been in touch with him directly. The blackmail was an ingenious scheme to try to make him worried sick, and keep him so. A letter to me from Seddon described how it was done. ‘Your guess about the telephone in the Maidstone house was a good one,’ he wrote. ‘A tape-recorder cassette was neatly wired into it, and when activated it played back one of the pre-recorded blackmailing messages. There was another neat device for the automatic dialling of Mr Boscombe’s home number. The tape-recorder and the automatic dialling device were controlled via an electric clock on the cooker in the kitchen. The electricity supply to the house was not switched off, so the clock kept going, operating a cam that closed an electrical circuit at irregular intervals, dialling Mr Boscombe’s number and delivering a message. What was particularly ingenious was that the system was devised to work only at long intervals – blackmailing calls some weeks apart would not suggest mechanical repetition. It was a very good shot of yours, Peter.’
‘Why did you think of it?’ Ruth asked after I gave her Seddon’s letter to read.
‘Initially, I suppose, because of Boscombe’s own remark that the voice seemed to go on “like a record”. It is the kind of thing that is noticed by the subconscious rather than by the conscious mind – something made him feel that there was a lack of living quality in the voice, though he did not offer this as a rational opinion. It stayed in my mind, and when I listened to the police recording of the latest telephone message there certainly seemed something mechanical about it. I can’t say just what – partly, I think, it was because Boscombe’s own interjections evoked absolutely no response. If you are talking to someone on the telephone, and he says something, it is hard not to react in any way at all, if only by an intake of breath. The fact that the recording was totally without anything like that made me think again about Boscombe’s original remark.’
*
Seddon’s letter also described the outcome of investigations into cars and vans. ‘The Rover was in the garage at Maidstone, a black Rover just as it had been described. He had gone to the airport in a Sharpe and Wilberforce car, arranged quite openly through the transport manager because he was officially going to the United States on business. In fact he went to Africa instead – we’ve been able to trace the booking. The car driver wouldn’t know anything about this. We interviewed him, and he said he’d just delivered Purbeck to the main passenger terminal, and Purbeck had urged him to get back because they were always short of cars.
‘The use of the vans was also arranged openly, and when the arrangements are related to the dates of Quenenden’s murder and Miss Sutherland’s move, the evidence is damning. It was quite natural for Purbeck to use the firm’s vans from time to time – he was a technical rep. and sometimes for a big customer he’d want to take along several hundredweight of seed, or some piece of machinery. He explained why he wanted new, unpainted vans, by saying that he’d got a difficult customer who had been displeased with some Sharpe and Wilberforce products he’d had in the past. Purbeck was hoping to win him back by taking along some of the firm’s interesting new products, but he didn’t want to be recognised as a Sharpe and Wilberforce rep. until he’d had a chance of talking about them. He was a senior man, and all this was accepted without question. It was ingenious, like all his other planning, but a bit over-ingenious in a way. He’d have done better to hire a van from one of the van hire firms with the obvious precaution of giving a false name and address, and paying in cash. That might have led us to suspect the van, but it wouldn’t have helped in getting on to Purbeck.
‘More damning even than the evidence of the vans was the fact that we found Quenenden’s tea-chest, still about three-quarters full of earth, in his garage. He’d have found that impossible to explain away if he’d ever come to trial.’
‘It seems largely chance that you did get on to him,’ Ruth said.
‘Not quite. Going to see Sharpe and Wilberforce was routine. There was already a link between them and Quenenden because they’d marketed some of his plants, and since we knew so little about Quen
enden’s background it was obvious that they’d have had to be interviewed. Perhaps it was luck that Purbeck’s own African background cropped up in that interview. But it comes under the heading of the one per cent of luck you can hope for after ninety-nine per cent of routine.’
*
Mr Quenenden’s letter to Meredith Boscombe explained the blackmail of the Minister of State, but Quenenden was dead before the blackmail started, so it did nothing to explain his murder. The Adamantifera notebook was infinitely more revealing. It went back over twenty years, and a note on the first page explained why it was being kept separately, and not included in his diaries with his other botanical work. ‘Quite early in my career in Africa I came across references to a magical – and at first I thought mythical – plant called in the Ga-Otaro dialect seslili. My interests then were primarily linguistic, and I was particularly interested in the language of the Otaro region of the Ga river because it was richer and more complex than most of the other languages of Equatorial Africa. There are persistent legends of an ancient Ga civilisation, once rich and powerful but long extinct. Little or no archaeological work has ever been done in the region, and I know of no physical evidence to support the legend, but the linguistic evidence is strong. Running through all the stories of the legendary Ga empire is a belief that its rulers had some magical way of acquiring diamonds.
‘The rich diamond finds in Tanganyika make it geologically quite possible that a diamondiferous belt extends elsewhere into Equatorial Africa, but apart from the ancient Ga legends I know of no record of diamonds having actually been found.
‘One day a very old puraji (sometimes translated “witch-doctor”, but more properly it means “wise man”) whom I had got to know asked me if I had ever seen the seslili plant growing. I said I hadn’t, whereupon he said that he could show me some seslili flowers, and if I came back next day his son would take me to see them growing. I was fascinated by the flowers – they were unlike any botanical family I had ever met, and it struck me as quite possible that they represented a hitherto unrecorded genus. I went back to meet the old man’s son – himself, I should say, nearly 70 – and he took me into the hills to show me a patch of seslili plants in flower. These, he said, were not the best seslili – they had certain magical qualities which, with knowledge, could be invoked, but the most magical of all seslili were very rare, and distinguished by a small yellow dot at the base of each petal. He knew, he said, where some of these “best” seslili grew, but it was a long way off, and he could not take me there. I asked why they were more magical than other seslili. He replied that he did not rightly know because it was part of ancient knowledge that had been forgotten, but if gathered in a particular way they were known to bring riches and other good fortune.
‘I made journeys to study the seslili plants in situ as often as I could, and their extreme preference for particular types of clay became noticeable. Suddenly it occurred to me that the rarest variety of seslili, the most magical of the whole family, might grow only on a diamondiferous clay, and would therefore indicate where diamonds are to be found.
‘The more I thought about this the more possible it seemed. Pollen-studies to indicate the presence or absence of particular forms of prehistoric vegetation are important in the search for oil, and there seems no reason why vegetation should not indicate the presence of other minerals – as, indeed, it does, and such knowledge is widely put to agricultural use in identifying elements in particular soils. In my mind I renamed the seslili family Adamantifera, and the effort to prove or disprove their diamond-indicating qualities became one of the major purposes of my life.
‘It had, though, to be treated with the greatest caution – I was in Africa to serve the African people, and it would be no help to the forest people of the Otaro region of the Ga to have prospectors tearing up their bush and destroying much of their livelihood in a ruthless search for a particularly rare plant. In my Flora, therefore, while including the seslili for its botanical interest. I was careful to give no location for it, and, indeed, to imply that it might not be a family on its own at all.
‘My instinct for caution was reinforced by the arrival in my district of a young officer of the Agricultural and Forestry Service called Robert Purbeck. He had some geological training, and firmly believed that the diamondiferous system of Tanganyika was likely to be repeated in Equatorial Africa. He was, I think, more interested in prospecting for diamonds than in helping the forest people with their crops, and I had news of him at various times from the far edge of the district from Otaro Falls to the frontier, an area which is almost uninhabited. He was subordinate to me while in my district, but as a technical officer he was not directly under my command, so I was unable to find out much of what he was doing. He did ask me whether an officer of the Colonial Service could obtain a licence to prospect for minerals, and I told him that he would have to leave the Service first, and even then might be subject to restrictions about the use made of knowledge acquired while in the Service. We spoke no more of the matter, and when I met him from time to time I found him curiously secretive. He was transferred from my district later, and I was somewhat irritated to learn from the Otaro bushmen that he returned for several trips without informing me. I took no official action about this for it would have seemed petty, though at the least it was ill-mannered on his part. His sustained interest in the region, which I felt was personal rather than prompted by Service reasons, made me determined to risk no accidental disclosure of the potential properties of the seslili or adamantifera. All my working notes on the plant are therefore kept separately.’
When this was written I don’t know, but the appearance of the ink indicated that it must have been a good many years ago. The loose-leaf pages could have been inserted as an introduction to the rest of the book at any time.
The rest of the work, a substantial total of some 200 pages, contained dated diary entries of work on adamantifera. In the earlier sections he referred to the plant by its native name seslili more often than not, but as time went on his own classification of adamantifera replaced the local word. The diary was mostly dry and laconic records of scientific work, but every now and again there was a more philosophical entry. Quite early on he wrote:
I am severely torn between the sheer botanical interest of adamantifera and my fear of encouraging, or even suggesting, the activities of prospectors. Am I wrong to give it the name adamantifera? I can’t remove this from my own mind now, and I hope it doesn’t matter: the slight diamond-shape of the petals should be enough to explain the term. When the time comes for my work to be published, the full significance of adamantifera will emerge, and I wish it to be known as a fact of scientific importance that my work was concerned from the start with the diamondiferous qualities of the soil in which the plant grows.
Much of the earlier diary recorded his attempts to find a growing example of the yellow-flecked seslili. ‘My old puraji has shown me a few pressed petals of the flecked variety, but he will not tell me where they came from. Nor will his son, nor have I ever been able to discover this from anybody else. I have taken roots and cuttings from the patch of ordinary seslili that I was taken to see growing. They have grown readily enough for me in soil taken from the site. I have analysed it, and I have been able to grow the plants in synthetic soils containing the right proportions of clay and other substances. But no attempt at selective breeding has ever produced a yellow-flecked variety.’
Another entry recorded, ‘Triumph! One of my village friends today brought me a living slip of yellow-flecked seslili. He professed not to know whence it came, but said that it had been gathered to bring luck to a bride.’
A year later he wrote, ‘By mixing rather more clay with the soil I have succeeded in growing adamantifera with a faint trace of yellow at the base of the petals, but nothing like the distinct yellow flecks of the original plant given to me. I have been able to reproduce it well enough, but it just reverts to the ordinary pure white flowers.’
Independence for Mpuga and his own retirement from the Colonial Service interrupted his studies, but as soon as he had established himself, and his greenhouse, at Newton Blaize they began again. He had brought seeds and cuttings of his plants from Africa, and he was able to grow them readily in his greenhouse. Later he experimented with transplanting them to the garden. ‘Adamantifera is an extremely tough fellow,’ he wrote, ‘and by following the normal principles of adaptation I believe I can make it grow out of doors in England. These experiments are important to me to try to estimate the height up to which the plant will live in Central Africa. I believe that it will grow at considerable heights in the African highlands, and adaptation to a temperate climate will give most useful indications of this.’
Professor Huntingford, asked about this letter, could say only that he was completely puzzled by it. ‘Eustace Quenenden was a genius, no less,’ he added. ‘How he learned what he did about his plants must remain, alas, an enigma. His murderer robbed science of techniques that will perhaps never be rediscovered.’
As the diary went on, Quenenden became more confident. ‘I am getting somewhere,’ he wrote. ‘I have given Hilda a root of adamantifera, and she reports that it is surviving well in her Lancashire garden. Mine grow plentifully in Berkshire, but always pure white flowers.’