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X is for Xmas: Christmas Mysteries
THE AFRICAN FISH MYSTERY, by James Holding
Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, April 1961.
It was merely a chance remark of their driver’s that led to what King Danforth and Martin Leroy later described as one of the most stimulating exercises in deduction they were privileged to enjoy during their entire round-the-world vacation trip with their wives. And unlike The Norwegian Apple Mystery it was not a case of sudden death that precipitated their discussion, but a case of sudden wealth—which, as any good gossip columnist can tell you, is far from intriguing.
The two mystery-story writers, known to millions of fans simply by their collaborative name of “Leroy King,” had left their cruise ship Valhalla at Cape Town and embarked with their wives on an inland tour of Southern Africa by car, intending to rejoin their ship at Durban. And they were sixty miles out of Pretoria on the smooth road to Machadadorp when their driver, Ralph Muir, making idle conversation, remarked to King Danforth in the front seat beside him, “I hope you’ll turn out to be as lucky as a passenger I drove earlier this year, Mr. Danforth.”
“How’s that?” Danforth asked.
“When we got back to Johannesburg from the trip I drove him on, he came into
a great fortune and went home to live in England.”
“I could stand the fortune,” Danforth said wryly, “but Scarsdale is okay with me.”
“What was his name?” Carol Danforth inquired from the back seat. Her dark eyes sparkled with interest.
“A Mr. Duke Carrington,” Ralph replied.
“Duke.” Helen Leroy laughed. “That puts him a little lower in the scale of royalty than you are, King.”
Leroy nudged his lovely blonde wife and grinned. He was small and dark and intense. “Don’t flatter King, dear,” he urged. “He’s all but insufferable now.” But there was affection in his voice.
Carol said idly, “What kind of fortune, Ralph?”
“Some relative in England,” said Ralph, “died and left Mr. Carrington a large estate. There was a letter of notification waiting for him when we got back to Joburg. Everybody in town was talking about his inheritance within a day or two.”
“A likely story,” Danforth said idly, too. “I suppose he mentioned his rich relatives to you during your trip together?”
“No, he didn’t,” Ralph said. “On the contrary, I gathered the impression he was quite alone in the world.”
Leroy squinted out the side window at three almost naked black children who were patiently watching over a herd of cattle beside a gaily decorated Ndebelc village. “Tell me, Ralph,” he said. “Did Mr. Carrington seem very flush after you got back to Johannesburg?”
“He was the talk of the town,” Ralph said. “Living very high off the hog, for him. I understood the solicitors in England advanced him a bit of his legacy.”
Danforth turned his head and met Leroy’s eyes. He rubbed a speculative hand across his crew-cut. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Mart?”
Leroy grinned. “I am. Was there ever a hoarier chestnut than the sudden wealth bit after taking a trip somewhere?”
“Please watch your language, Martin,” Helen said with dignity.
He ignored her. “We’ve used it ourselves, King, a dozen times. In The Color of Blood and The Baronet’s Bullet, to mention only two.”
Carol pretended to groan. “Here we go again,” she said. “More plotting by the world’s champions. Are we in for another busman’s holiday, Helen?”
Leroy said penitently, “We’ll forget the whole thing, Carol. Fishy as it sounds, eh, King?”
“Fishy as it sounds,” Danforth agreed solemnly.
“It doesn’t sound fishy to me,” Helen said. “What’s fishy about a man inheriting a fortune? Happens all the time.”
“So soon after taking a mysterious trip? And telling people ostentatiously that he has suddenly become the lucky heir of some vague relative in England?”
“Why not? Anyway, there wasn’t anything mysterious about the trip, was there, Ralph?”
Muir grinned. “Not a thing.”
At this point the black sedan in which they were traveling breasted the slope of one of Africa’s rolling green hills, and the engine sputtered for a moment, misfiring several times before resuming its purr of power.
“Whoops,” Danforth said. “A fouled spark plug.”
Leroy said, “Sounds like a little dirt in your carburetor, Ralph. Or your gas line.”
Carol said, “For my money, we’re about to run out of gas.”
“It’s nothing to worry about,” Ralph reassured them. “Happens every once in a while, like a chronic cough. There’s nothing wrong with the plugs, carburetor, or feed lines that I can find. And we aren’t running out of petrol, cither, Mrs. Danforth. If we do, I have an extra five-gallon can stowed in the boot. So rest easy.”
“All right,” Carol said. “But I’m sorry Mr. Duke Carrington’s fortune was a phony.”
“Who said it was a phony?” Leroy protested.
“All we imply is,” Danforth said, “that the inheritance gag was a phony. Not the fortune.”
Carol sighed with mock resignation. “Well, go ahead and figure it out, boys. Helen and I will sit here and admire your cerebration along with the scenery.”
Leroy leaned forward and tapped Danforth on the shoulder. “Begin, my dear fellow,” he said encouragingly.
“Very well,” Danforth said with a quick smile that made his battered features very attractive. “First, Ralph, did Mr. Carrington take the same trip we’re taking? Johannesburg, Pretoria, Kruger Park, Hluhluwe, and so on?”
“Oh, no. It was a different trip entirely—not a regular tour like yours.” Ralph looked through his windshield into the sunny distance of the high veldt, and his eyes took on a reminiscent gleam. “My instructions were to pick up Mr. Carrington at the Carlton Hotel in Johannesburg and drive him anywhere he wanted to go for as many days as he paid the car hire. I was to take a tent, sleeping bags, mosquito nets, and some food supplies in case he wanted to camp out in the bush as we went along.”
“Camp out? Then I suppose you drove a Land Rover or Jeep?” Leroy suggested.
“No. We drove this car. He didn’t expect to get into really trackless country.”
“Where’d you go?” King asked.
Ralph said, “It turned out to be a fishing trip. Mr. Carrington told me to keep as close to the Vaal and Orange Rivers as the roads allowed, as far as the mouth of the Orange, while he did a little river fishing. Something he’d wanted to do ever since he’d been in South Africa.”
“Pardon me if I parade a bit of erudition,” Danforth said, “but there’s something slightly fishy with that fishing story, I think. According to a large pamphlet on the Transvaal I recently read, there’s much better fishing in any number of places than in the Vaal and the Orange.”
Ralph shrugged. “I was told to drive him anywhere he wanted to go.”
Leroy said, “Did Mr. Carrington go fishing every time you camped near the river?”
“Yes, if he thought it a likely spot.”
“Did he stay long at any one place?”
“No. We did our regular hundred and fifty to two hundred miles a day in the car. Mr. Carrington only went fishing after we stopped for the night.”
“I see,” Leroy said. “Or rather, I don’t see. Why all the rush to make two hundred miles a day, just for a couple of hours’ fishing in the evening?”
“We had a long way to go,” Ralph explained patiently, thinking his American passengers a strange lot. “The mouth of the Orange is nearly a thousand miles from Joburg.”
“Why,” asked Helen, “go so far—just to fish in the evenings?”
Ralph shrugged again.
Danforth asked, “What did this Carrington do for a living? Did he have a job?”
“Yes,” Ralph said, skillfully nursing his car through another small fit of chronic coughing, “in Johannesburg. He worked at one of the gold mines on the Rand.”
“Ah,” Leroy said complacently. “Gold. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”
“It does,” said Danforth. “It makes me think that perhaps Carrington was mixing some gold prospecting with his fishing. And struck it rich.”
Ralph entered into the spirit of the game. He shook his head. “I don’t think so, Mr. Danforth,” he said. “He never brought any ore samples back from the rivers. Just fish.”
“The absence of ore samples wouldn’t mean anything,” Leroy muttered. “Not if he was looking for placer gold. That he would find in the river itself—in the form of nuggets or dust.”
That sounded quite logical to Helen. “I’m proud of you, dear,” she complimented her husband. “And now that we’ve got that settled, let’s stop for lunch some place before I suddenly starve to death before your eyes.”
“Only a few more miles to Machadadorp,” Ralph promised. “We can eat there, at the Hydro-Baths Hotel. It’s very pleasant.”
When they re-entered the car after an excellent luncheon, Danforth was clutching a large Mobilgas road map of South Africa. And haying exchanged places with Leroy at the noon break, he now sat between the girls in the back seat.
He spread his map and studied it conscie
ntiously for several miles as Ralph Muir headed the car down the road to Nelspruit and White River. Finally, Danforth addressed his partner blandly, “You were saying, Mart, that perhaps Mr. Carrington discovered a pocket of placer gold while fishing?”
“Could be,” Leroy said.
King said, “It occurs to me that a gold prospector—supposedly Carrington in this instance—always uses a miner’s pan of some sort to separate the gold from the river gravel?”
Leroy nodded thoughtfully. “Ask him,” he said magnanimously. “You thought of it.”
Danforth said, “Well, Ralph, did your Mr. Carrington have, among his personal effects, a miner’s pan or batea, as I believe the device is sometimes called?”
Ralph said, “Sorry to disappoint you, but no. Not a sign of one.”
“There goes an excellent theory,” Leroy mourned.
“However,” Danforth persisted, “I have another avenue to explore with Ralph that may prove productive.”
Carol said, “Move your map a minute, darling, so I can see out the window. We’re coming to orange groves, I think. How heavenly!”
King folded the map obligingly. “Ralph, did you actually reach the mouth of the Orange River?”
“We did, sir. And stayed there for four days. Camped on the south shore of the outlet. Mr. Carrington fished and I loafed.”
“Was the fishing very good?” Danforth asked.
“It wasn’t anything special,” Ralph replied.
Danforth took a deep breath. “Didn’t it strike you as peculiar, Ralph, that Carrington should want to drive two hundred and fifty miles out of the way merely to reach the river’s mouth where, by your own testimony, the fishing was nothing special? And then should want to stay there four days?”
Ralph looked a bit taken aback. Leroy said, “What do you mean, ‘two hundred and fifty miles out of the way’?”
“The map shows no auto roads along the Orange River west of Pella,” Danforth explained. “The only way you can get near the river’s mouth by car is to take a big detour south through a town called Springbok, and then north again along a dead-end coast road to the place where the Orange empties into the Atlantic.”
“And thank you, Mr. Lowell Thomas,” Carol murmured admiringly, rolling down the car window the better to sniff the delicious fragrance of orange blossoms that permeated the countryside.
“That’s right, Mr. Danforth,” Ralph admitted. “That’s exactly the route we took.”
King said, “Are you sure Carrington did nothing but fish at the river’s mouth? It seems evident to me that he went there for some other purpose.”
The Third Mystery Page 2