The Idol of Mombasa

by Annamaria Alfieri

  “I will be back as soon as I can,” he said.

  He found Kwai in the front garden, fairly dancing with excitement. The askari saluted and stood at attention. His shirt was damp. Obviously he had run all the way in this heat. “Sir,” he said urgently, “they told me you had come home briefly.” He paused to take a breath. “Sir, it is very bad, sir. It may upset the Grand Mufti.”

  “Out with it, Libazo.”

  “You must come to the bazaar forthwith. It is the ivory dealer. Majidi. He has been found dead on the floor of his store.”

  “Good God,” Tolliver exclaimed. He started for the Arab quarter at a dead run.

  Vera, having pulled on a robe and crept out to listen to the news, slumped against the wall on the other side of the door. She did not want to believe what was screaming in her brain—that the person who most despised Majidi, enough to kill him, was Robert Morley. It seemed impossible that her father’s friend would commit such a sin. He was fiery in his antislavery sentiments, but everything else she had seen of him showed him to be a rather prissy man. She could imagine him shrinking from the sight of a mouse much more easily than wielding a murder weapon. Yet it was undeniable that he might have. What would her father say then?

  ***

  A.D.S. Tolliver jogged down the hill toward the bazaar, but soon slowed his pace. The afternoon sun was sinking over the mainland.

  “Who is guarding the body?” he asked Libazo. If the policeman on duty had a brain in his head, they would not need to move so quickly through this soupy air.

  “Sergeant Singh.”

  Tolliver slowed his pace. Singh could be trusted to treat the murder scene properly.

  They commandeered a canvas-roofed trolley at the corner of Kimathi Road and careened down the hill toward the fish market at breakneck speed. Once they reached the waterfront, however, they had no choice but to thread through the sweat-stinking crowd that thronged the narrow streets toward the bazaar.

  As they moved, Libazo told Tolliver all he knew, which was not much. He had been at the souk himself and noticed nothing untoward, but almost as soon as he got back to the station next to the fort, a boy had come running at double time from the market shouting about bloody murder. The Goan lieutenant on duty had sent Singh with four constables to Majidi’s shop and sent Kwai to fetch Tolliver.

  Tolliver suppressed a niggling thought that had fallen into his mind almost immediately, one he abhorred. His best suspect was Vera’s dear father’s friend, the missionary Robert Morley.

  When they entered the bazaar, the scene of the murder was easy to find and almost impossible to get to. The aisle was jammed with men clad in bright brocades. The cheeriness of the colors belied the mood of the crowd. The onlookers were all talking at once in angry voices, and ignoring the two policemen who fairly towered over them and commanded them, “Make way,” in English and Swahili. No one moved.

  Tolliver and Libazo had to elbow their way through to the shop door where two constables held the boisterous gawkers at bay. Inside, two more askaris were standing at attention before the curtain that led to the back. One of them moved to part it, revealing Sergeant Singh squatted on his haunches, examining the body that lay on the floor. The heavy air of the space reeked with the sweetish smell of blood.

  Singh rose and revealed the victim’s head. “He has been bashed,” the Indian said.

  “Move back, please,” Tolliver ordered. “Have you touched anything?”

  “No, sir. Absolutely nothing.”

  Khalid Majidi lay on the floor on his left side, his torso and legs on the carpet, his head resting on bare tiles. His face in profile looked undisturbed, but there was a horrid gash, deep and gruesome, in the crown of his skull. His legs were drawn up. A pool of blood surrounded his head and some of it had soaked into the brocade of his jacket and the edge of the carpet. There was a large black marble box on the floor near the corpse. It was inlaid with ivory and silver and bloodied on one corner. The top was ajar, and there were coins scattered on the carpet next to it. The most surprising thing about the scene was the open safe before which the body lay. Inside were piles of rupee notes and several folded documents. The bottom shelf held what looked to be quite a number of British banknotes. Tolliver leaned over so that he could see the contents better. There were seven thick stacks of English money, each tied up with string. The one nearest the front had a five-pound bill on top, which alone amounted to what Tolliver earned in a week. If the rest of the money in the stack were the same denomination, that one bundle would contain more than all the king’s administrators in this city earned in a year.

  “The safe was open like this when you entered here?” Tolliver asked, without turning around.

  “Yes, sir, just as you see it,” Singh answered.

  That fact was astonishing. Why would the murderer have left all this cash? Clearly the motive was not robbery. A glance around the shop confirmed that. Another fortune in silver and ivory items was stored on these shelves and in the front room. Even if the murderer did not want to risk disposing of stolen goods, there was enough here in cash to tempt all but the saintliest conscience.

  Tolliver straightened up and turned to face his men. “Who found the body?”

  “An English lady,” Singh said.

  “Where is she? I want to question her.”

  “We don’t know, sir. She sent a boy from a nearby stall to fetch us. By the time we got here, she was gone.”

  “Do we know her name?”

  “No, sir. As I said, she was—”

  Tolliver stopped Singh’s words with a wave and bit back a curse. He glanced at Libazo and saw his own disappointment reflected in Kwai’s downcast expression. “Surely you kept the boy nearby so we can question him,” Tolliver said to Singh.

  Singh glanced from Tolliver to Libazo and back again. “As I said, sir, his family has the stall next to this shop, where the women buy their shoes.”

  “Libazo, go and find the lad and bring him into the front. I need to find out exactly what he saw, but I don’t want to subject a youngster to this horror.”

  Kwai saluted and left.

  Tolliver took out his handkerchief and with it picked up the elaborately decorated black marble cask. More coins spilled out as he did, some rolling away under the furniture. The box was extremely heavy. Even for him, with his large hand and arm strong from swinging a tennis racket and a polo mallet, it was impossible to lift the box with one hand. It had undoubtedly been used to make that gash in the ivory trader’s skull.

  Tolliver placed the box on top of a stack of ledgers piled on a chair. There was an empty space in the corner of the desk just big enough to hold the cask. “Have we called for a squad to take away the body?” he asked Abrik Singh.

  “They should be here very soon.”

  Tolliver went to the front room. It was atypical of places of business in the souk. Ordinarily, every inch of space would be jammed helter-skelter with goods for sale. This one was lined with glass-fronted vitrines, each held closed with a small brass lock. They contained obviously precious objects—smaller than, but otherwise much like the ones in the back room—casks, vases, small jewelry boxes, all of black marble decorated with inlays of silver and ivory. The workmanship was superb. A waist-high counter stood facing the door. Its top was also inlaid, with a floral pattern of many colors of stone—like the ones Justin had seen in the galleries of Florence. But all the rich objects on the shelves were covered with a fine layer of dust. No one had picked them up to examine them recently. Tolliver had begun to suspect that none of the cash in the safe came from selling the objects before him.

  Kwai soon returned with a frightened-looking boy of about twelve—a chubby Indian lad with a nervous smile that showed a broken front tooth. Two askaris quickly followed, carrying a stretcher. Tolliver bid the boy to sit on a stool in the corner, and blocked his view while they carried out the corpse, which they had, at any rate, covered with a black cloth. “Shall I go with them to the clinic in the
fort, sir?” Libazo asked.

  Tolliver wondered how his sergeant already knew the procedure, since Libazo had been in town less time than he had, and he had not known it. “No,” he said. “You stay here with me. Sergeant Singh, you go with them. And take the box that I left on the chair in the back.”

  Singh started to part the curtain.

  “Oh,” Tolliver said to him, “and don’t touch the box with your bare hands. Do you have a handkerchief?”

  “No, I do not.”

  “Here take mine. And tell the doctor we want to take the fingerprints of the corpse. Then take the box to Inspector Patrick. Tell him I will speak to him about it in the morning.”

  When Singh escorted the corpse out into the corridor, the crowd outside the shop windows grew even more raucous, but soon dispersed as it became clear that the dramatics were over.

  Tolliver sent Libazo into the back room to search around for anything that might tell them something about who had killed the ivory dealer.

  He then turned to the boy—who stared with wary eyes and worried his broken tooth with the tip of his tongue. His skin was the color of coffee with milk. “Tell me,” Tolliver said, trying his best to adopt a threatening tone, “about the English lady you say sent you for the police.”

  The boy looked at the floor and spoke in a whisper. “Her skin was very white and she wore a hat like the ones all the English ladies wear.”

  “What about her clothes?”

  “She wore tan clothes, like the ones the English ladies wear.”

  “Was she tall? Was she fat?” Tolliver was becoming exceedingly impatient. It was always this way across races. Witnesses often remembered telling details about the appearance of members of their own group, but almost no distinguishing characteristics of someone very unlike them.

  “She was taller than my mother, but not as tall as the Somali women. Her skin was very white. She did not have any bracelets.” Since native and Arab women sported so many, this must have seemed to the boy to be the most unusual part of the lady’s attire.

  Tolliver had to give up before he exploded, which would not have been helpful. His approach of frightening the child into giving up information had backfired. He had made the boy too intimidated to think clearly. He moderated his tone. “You may go, but I want you to think hard. And to watch for her. If you see the lady again, ask her name. A policeman will come back tomorrow to ask you if you have remembered anything more or if you have seen her again.” He smiled at the lad and gave him a rupee coin.

  The boy’s eyes looked up in disbelief.

  “Try to remember her more clearly.”

  “I will, Mr. Police,” he said, and sped away.

  ***

  While Tolliver was questioning the Indian boy, Kwai Libazo gave the back room of the shop a thorough going-over. He began with the floor, which except for the bloody part was cleaner than the floors of most places he had searched in his two years as a policeman. Only a bit of dust. The assailant had not dropped any clues. There was a pair of threadbare slippers under the desk. They were small to be a man’s. They were smaller than a Maasai woman’s feet, but Kwai imagined they had belonged to Majidi. He had not noticed if the corpse had worn shoes. He felt a wave of disappointment in himself. A.D.S. Tolliver was always warning him that he must observe every detail if he was to make a good policeman. But he had not looked at the dead man’s feet. Only at the nasty gash in his head.

  He scanned the shelves of goods, looking behind the larger objects, opening all the richly decorated boxes, and turning over the vases. But he did not touch the contents of the safe. He was sure Tolliver would prefer to do that himself.

  He started in on the drawers of the desk and in the first one, the top left, he spied an object that caused him to catch his breath. He picked it up and examined it carefully. It was the sheath of an Arab dagger. Without its knife! Silver and curved as were the sheaths of all the janbias. But this one was familiar to Kwai. It was set with a large emerald that in design and cut matched exactly the large emerald embedded in the hilt of the knife that young Haki had found in the mangrove swamp! The realization sent a chill over Kwai’s scalp and down his spine. He took the sheath into the front of the shop where Tolliver was inspecting the display cases.

  “Sir,” Libazo said. “I have found something of great interest.” He held out the sheath for Tolliver to see and explained how the dagger that almost certainly went with it had come to be in the police station near the ramparts of Fort Jesus. He expected to receive one of Tolliver’s looks of approval and pride, but instead he got a frown.

  “You’ve touched it with your bare hands.” The tone of dismay in Tolliver’s voice troubled and puzzled Libazo. Touching evidence had never been a problem in Nairobi. But Kwai had seen Tolliver pick up the murder weapon today with a handkerchief, and he had advised Abrik Singh to do the same. Singh had known what that meant. Kwai did not want to be the only one who did not know what this meant. Without really understanding the significance of it, he did his best to defend himself. “I don’t have a handkerchief.”

  “Do you know then, about fingerprints?” Tolliver looked surprised.

  After a second’s hesitation, Kwai gave in and admitted ignorance. Once Tolliver explained what fingerprints were and what they could do, Kwai was glad he had not pretended to understand. He could never have imagined the truth of them. In fact, he looked down at his own fingertips and wondered that they could be so completely different from someone else’s. It seemed more magic than real.

  “Here,” Tolliver said, taking a sheet of brown wrapping paper from under Majidi’s sales counter. “Put the sheath here. We will take it to Inspector Patrick for analysis. You will have to give him your fingerprints, so they can be distinguished from any others on the object.”

  It was well past sundown when they locked up the shop. Tolliver had taken the money from the safe and left two armed constables to guard the shop’s remaining contents. The bazaar was relatively quiet, except for the food shops. The town must have been abuzz with gossip, given the murder of a powerful man, but wherever those words were being spoken, it was not here. Not in public.

  Tolliver also took the sheath. “Right now, we have to deliver the cash to Mr. Smallwood at the Treasury.” He took out his watch. “We will have to rush to get to him before he locks up for the night.

  Once the money was in the Treasury safe, Tolliver bid Libazo good night. “Meet me tomorrow morning first thing at police headquarters—on the top floor, at the door that says Inspector C. W. Patrick.”

  After eating his evening meal at the barracks, Kwai Libazo toyed with the idea of going to find Aurala Sagal, but he could not bring himself to chance finding her with another man. As he lay in his bunk, the only thing that distracted him, even momentarily, from thoughts of her was this new thing he had learned about: fingerprints. Good as his eyes were, he could not see anything particularly special about his fingertips. Still, he gazed at his hands in wonderment when he thought that the patterns on them were his and his alone and would distinguish him from every other person in the world.

  9

  The next morning, Kwai arrived at Inspector Patrick’s room a few minutes before A.D.S. Tolliver. The office seemed to Kwai to be too small to house a whole department. It was about half the size of a railway carriage. The walls on two sides were lined with cabinets with narrow drawers. A few of them carried white labels with the letters of the alphabet written on them in black. A–C and so on. At the far end, in front of the window opposite the door, stood a table that was painted white on the top.

  “Good morning, Inspector Patrick, sir,” Kwai said. He saluted and then stood at attention, wondering whether Inspector Patrick would, like most officers, treat him as if he were an idiot. He had learned on joining the force to turn himself into a statue, showing not the least emotion.

  After a cursory glance in Kwai’s direction, the inspector held up one finger and continued to pour some kind of powder into a small bo
wl. Libazo was reminded of the powders that the tribal medicine men kept in pottery containers in their huts and used for their magic. This studious-looking Englishman must be their kind of witch doctor.

  Inspector Patrick was a slight man of medium height, wearing not the typical police uniform, but a tan linen suit and starched collar. His bald head shone in the bright light coming through the window. His eyes were pale blue, and his light brown mustache was bushy and thick, as if it were trying to make up for the lack of hair on his head.

  When Inspector Patrick had finished what he was doing, he looked enquiringly at Kwai and said only, “Well?”

  “I have touched a piece of evidence, sir.”

  Patrick scowled as if he had caught Kwai pissing in public. “Come here, boy. Show me your identification card.”

  When Kwai obliged, he took a white slip of paper from a box on the table. On it, he wrote Sergeant Kwai Libazo, and copied 23972, Kwai’s askari number, which was printed on Kwai’s identification card. He then took out a flat tin box with a wet-looking black cloth inside. “Give me your right hand.” He took Kwai’s fingers and one by one placed them on the black pad and then pressed them on the paper. Kwai saw very clearly the swirls and lines that A.D.S. Tolliver had described. But seeing them did not make the idea of solving a crime by reading them any less wondrous. In fact, it made it even more intriguing.

  Tolliver soon arrived and gave Patrick the sheath that Libazo had found in Majidi’s desk drawer. “Have you fingerprinted the corpse?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” Patrick answered. “Dr. Sutton stayed late examining the victim. He was not in yet when I arrived this morning. It won’t be long, I imagine, before he calls me over there. You can wait here if you like.”

  “I have to meet D.S. Egerton,” Tolliver said. “Sergeant, you go and get the dagger that the boy found. I imagine it is still locked in the evidence storage at the citadel station.”