Murder on Safari (31 page)

“With Rutley out and Catchpole dead, that left Lord Baradale or Englebrecht, with Cara Baradale as an accomplice. Things didn’t look so good for Englebrecht, at one point. He had a swell motive.

Lady Baradale had fired him, and he wanted to marry a girl who inherited a big slice of her dough.

The most damning thing of all was Cara’s attitude.

She thought he’d done it. She was scared to beat hell. That meant that either he’d admitted he’d knocked off her stepmother, or that he’d been away on his own when the shooting was done, and she suspected the worst.

“Then we come to the noble Lord. If ever there was a cagey old buzzard, it’s he. He lied like a politician, and up till yesterday evening he was my 317

number one suspect. I’d intended to book him for murder, and by God it’s no more than he

deserves.”

“Ah,” Peto interrupted, coming to life again.

“There, I think, is where I can contribute a

chapter to this saga. I intend shortly to expel Lord Baradale from my district, only unfortunately God and Nature seem to be united in a conspiracy to prevent him from obeying my orders. Let’s hear your version first.”

Vachell refreshed himself with another drink

and lit a fresh cigarette. “Lord Baradale was a very careless liar.” he continued. “He lied the first time when he said he’d been in camp all morning, and when I caught him out in that he lied again, and said he’d been taking pictures at the pool. I asked him to show me a movie he claimed to have shot while the murder was going on, more or less, and he ran through a reel which he’d taken on some previous occasion. There were hippos in it, all right, but from the way the shadows fell you could see it was shot around five in the afternoon instead of between ten and eleven in the morning. Lord Baradale would make a lousy criminal. He’s too darned sure of himself to take any trouble.

“Well, the question was, where had Lord

Baradale been? One of the cars had an extra

twenty-nine miles to its credit that no one knew anything about,1 so it was a pretty safe guess he was out in that. I could fix the direction, too, by a 1. See p. 99

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bunch of elephants I flew over with Chris the morning of the murder. Someone threw such a

scare into them around 10.45 that they made

tracks for the hills as fast as they could travel.2 So it looked as though Lord Baradale had made a trip to a spot about fourteen miles south-west of the camp. Chris checked time and distances, and they fitted. Then a boy came forward to say he’d seen Geydi driving a car out of camp that morning; so Geydi was in it too. And Geydi had been seen

holding a secret conference with some Timburu braves who fitted the description of the gang of poachers you’re interested in. So it was pretty clear that Lord Baradale was mixed up with some shady business with a bunch of Timburu gangsters who were wanted for murder.

“It was right here that I jumped the tracks. I thought out a pretty fancy theory. I figured that Lord Baradale, working through his servant

Geydi, had hired these Timburu thugs to bump

off his wife. One of his rifles was missing after the murder, so I reckoned that was part of the price. I had it all figured out — how Lord Baradale had fetched the Timburu in his car and taken them to the drift, and then returned to camp while they shot his wife with the rifle, according to instructions, and dragged her body closer in to camp so

that the boss would find her and know they’d

filled their part of the bargain. It was a swell theory, and nothing was wrong with it except the 2. See p. 57

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detail that it was cockeyed from start to finish. I still don’t know what monkey business old man Baradale was up to with these poachers, but I guess it was something to do with his movies he’s crazy about.”

“I congratulate you,” Peto remarked. “Never

again shall I accuse the police of lack of imagination.

You ought to sell that story to Hollywood.

Compared to that, I’m afraid the truth will be milk-and-water to your Chateauneuf du Pape.”

Peto shouted loudly for his boy, who in turn

summoned two natives to the D.C.‘s presence.

One was the stalwart tribal policeman, dressed in a dark blue blanket and knitted cap, and carrying a rifle. The other was the young Timburu prisoner, a thin and reedy lad, with a scared expression like that of a wild animal newly taken into

captivity. His woolly hair was cropped short and his body was smeared with earth and sheep’s fat so that it gleamed like polished copper. He wore a single white feather stuck into his thick hair, and carried a light spear.

The tribal retainer brought his heels together and saluted with the maximum amount of

flourish. Peto settled himself back in his chair, one brawny leg thrown over his knee, tilted his head back, and fixed his bright blue eyes on the prisoner’s face.

“Tell this Timburu youth again,” he said to the tribal retainer, “that he will not be eaten, but given food and treated well — provided that he 320

speaks the truth. If he lies he will be punished by the Government. He will be sent a long way away from his people and kept there for many years, so that he will not be circumcised and will therefore be unable to buy a wife. Ask him what has become of his poacher friends.”

A rapid cross-fire of talk in the liquid, flowing tongue of the Timburu followed. Then the tribal retainer stood to attention and translated into Kiswahili in crisp and military style.

“He says that he is not a poacher,” the

policeman began. “He has been with some

warriors, who are members of his clan, hunting rhinos with the spear. When the rhinos are killed, the horns are taken and sold to Somalis who travel here on camels…”

“Tell him I want to hear about the white man

who gave them a rifle,” Peto said.

After more talk in Timburu, the retainer

resumed the tale. “There is a man who is

employed here called Geydi, who took as wife a Timburu woman who is a sister of one of the

warriors who came here to hunt. These warriors saw the fires of the white men’s camp, and came secretly to see whether the Government had sent askaris to catch them. They found that there were no askaris, but when they came at night and called to each other in the darkness like birds, Geydi heard them and answered, for he knows the secret calls, and they saw and spoke with Geydi.

“Several days later Geydi saw them again and

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told them that the camp belonged to a very rich white chief who was greater than the Government, and that this chief wished to see how the Timburu hunted rhinos with spears. Geydi promised them a very powerful rifle if they would show this chief; and they agreed. Three days ago they found a

rhino with a big horn, and one of their number went to the camp to tell Geydi to fetch the white chief. Geydi gave them money, and said that the chief would come the next morning.

“Next day they waited for the white chief, and when he came in a car he had a strange box in his hand which he held up to his head, and it made strange noises like a lizard. The Timburu thought it was a kind of magic and were afraid, but Geydi told them that it was all right, and they hunted the rhino and killed it while the white chief watched with the box held up to his head. Then Geydi gave them the rifle, and the white chief went away.”

“There’s your mystery,” Peto said to Vachell.

He dismissed the retainer and the Timburu boy, and added: “Thanks to the Lord Baradale’s unbridled passion for photography, those murdering

poachers have wounded my favourite corporal.

He’s not going to be allowed to get away with that, peer or no peer. I’m going to get his blood for violation of the Firearms Act. You can get five years for smuggling arms to natives in a closed area. I suppose he’ll appeal and get the sentence commuted to a fine, but I hope it’s such a big one that they take fifty cents off the income tax in the 322

next budget Ч or, more likely, appoint five new assistant deputy colonial secretaries in the

Secretariat.”

“No wonder he wouldn’t tell me where he’d

been that morning,” Vachell reflected. “He knew darned well he’d committed a very serious offence, one he could go to jail for. And all to get a picture of a Timburu rhino hunt. He sure is hipped on this movie business. Seems to me he’s a little crazy.”

“Just conceited, I think,” Peto said. “It’s a mild form of megalomania. He thinks those sort of laws are a lot of red tape, and if they interfere with his wishes he just disregards them. He wanted

pictures that no one else in the world had got, and broke the law to get them. Worse things than that have been committed in the interests of a hobby, I suppose. I’m going to have a little chat with his Lordship. And if it’s any consolation to you, I’m going to make him squirm.”

He stood up and picked his hat off the table.

“Are we going to catch Danny de Mare?”

Vachell asked.

“We’re going to try,” Peto answered. “A week

ago either we’d have caught him or he’d have died of thirst. We can always watch the wells. But that rain has given him a chance. A pretty thin one, but he knows the country backwards, and if he can find rainwater pools and avoid the wells, there’s just a chance he may slip over the border into Abyssinia somewhere. That’s where he’s aiming 323

for, of course. It’s one chance in twenty, I should think. I can’t help hoping, in a way, that he pulls it off.”

“I feel that way too,” Vachell said, “although I shall get a hell of a black eye from the Commissioner for letting him escape. But I don’t know

what we’d have done if he hadn’t. We haven’t any proof. “

Vachell sat on for a little after Peto had left, sipping his beer and gazing out at the sun-flooded landscape across the sparkling river. Trees swam in the misty midday heat, and he felt pleasantly drowsy. A couple of clear fine days like this, he thought, and the safari would be able to strike camp and go home.

Then he thought of de Mare and of the strange phenomenon of a woman’s loyalty to a man who

neither sought nor wanted such assistance. A

queer, self-contained, amoral cuss, he thought; unsatisfactory to love, dangerous to hate.

Presently he strolled over to Chris’s tent and found her writing letters in the shade of a tree outside. Her left arm was in a sling, and she looked forlorn and pale. She was, as usual, hatless, and patches of sunlight trickled through green leaves on to her corn-coloured hair. She looked up when she heard his footsteps.

“Have you come to arrest me?” she said. “I

suppose I’m an accessory, or something. Sounds so like a handbag. Well, I’ll go quietly. I don’t much mind.”

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“You’re wrong,” he answered, and sat down on the grass beside her. “You’re wrong about a lot of things. I can’t book you on a charge of accessory until we’ve brought de Mare to trial.”

“You’ll never do that,” she said quietly.

“Maybe,” Vachell said.

“I owe you an apology, I think. When you

asked if you could fly my plane alone, I imagined it was because you didn’t trust me Ч you believed I was the murderer, or something. I think I know the real reason now. You were frightened, weren’t you, that the plane might be damaged somehow?

You knew the flight would be dangerous?”

“I guess so, in a way. I didn’t see how the plane could be got at, but I knew that someone was

gunning for me, and Ч well, you never know. I still don’t know. The motor just stalled and died.”

“I think I know. There’s one thing he could

have done that would have that effect Ч sugar in the petrol.”

Vachell whistled and nodded his head. “I hadn’t thought of that. Easy to slip in a handful of sugar in the dark, maybe when the guards were taking shelter from the rain. I guess that must be the answer.”

“It crystallizes on the jets,” Chris went on, “and blocks them; the effect’s much the same as

running out of petrol.”

“It isn’t an effect I go for,” Vachell remarked.

“From de Mare’s viewpoint, it was darned nearly effective. I hope the Government doesn’t soak 325

Lord Baradale so heavily he can’t afford to buy you a new plane.”

They sat in silence for a while, watching a pair of kites wheeling lazily over the river, black against the dazzling blue of the sky. Their

shadows slipped easily to and fro over the white sand.

“You know I took those thing out of your tent?”

Chris asked, a little later “I suppose that’s a crime too. I was so terrified you’d see the significance of that bullet of Danny’s, and I got it into my head that if I took it, you wouldn’t have any proof. I know it was silly, but it was so awful waiting and wondering what was going to happen, and I think I simply lost my head. I kept on seeing that bullet lying in your hand. It became a sort ofobession.”

“You sure had that guy on your mind,” Vachell said gently.

Chris ran her hand wearily through her thick

wavy hair, and stared out into the white sunlight that enveloped their cool oasis of shade. “I’m afraid I made my feelings very obvious,” she said.

“It was silly, because Danny was always Ч well, out of reach. He never let anyone get too close.

I’m sorry I was hysterical and stupid, last night. I was afraid Danny would attempt to Ч to shoot

you, so I went down to the pool to try to stop it, I didn’t quite know how. I was half crazy with the suspense and the Ч well, it isn’t much fun when someone you’re very fond of turns out to be a murderer and a thief. It was rather a nightmare, 326

you know.”

Vachell reached over and put a long, bony hand over hers. “It’s all over,” he said. “There’s only one thing you can do now Ч forget it. And there’s only one way you can manage that.”

“Is there a way, do you think?”

“Sure there is, Chris. I’ll tell you: take an interest in some other guy. De Mare isn’t the only man if Africa who’s got personality. Next time, play for safety Ч pick on someone who won’t turn out to be a murderer or a share-pusher or even a confidence man, someone right outside of the