The African Poison Murders

THE AFRICAN

POISON MURDERS

ELSPETH

HUXLEY

LflRGEPRINT

MAJNSTREAM SERIES

Oxford, England

Santa Barbara, California

FR1;Copyright Š 1939 Elspeth Huxley First published in Great Britain 1939 by Methuen Ltd. under the title Death of an Aryan First published in the U.S.A. 1940 by Harper & Row Publishers Inc.

Published in Large Print 1988 by Clio Press, 55 St. Thomas’ Street, Oxford 0X1 1JG, by arrangement with

Elspeth Huxley

All rights reserved

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Huxley, Elspeth

The African Poison murders.

I. Title

823’.912[F] PR6058.U8/

-r.-,/A> i.ir, scarborough

public library

BOAR?

ISBN 1850892091

Phototypeset, printed and bound by Unwin Brothers Limited, Old Woking, Surrey.

Cover designed by CGS Studios, Cheltenham.

FR1;CHAPTER

ONE

All the way up the rough, bumpy road Vachell wondered why the woman at his side had been so insistent. He judged that she was not the sort of person who generally pressed her point. Her manner was curiously detached, almost indifferent, as if her mind had windows of its own from which to stare at secret views. But there had been a note of urgency in her voice when she had invited him to spend the night on the farm. She lived alone there with her husband, Dennis West, raising cows whose cream, duly processed, travelled six thousand miles to its market on British breakfast-tables.

The car jostled and lurched over the rutted surface.

Headlights threw into sharp relief deep holes dug by ant-bears, ruts made by farm wagons sticking in the mud, and tufts of stiff grass between the wheel-tracks.

“Afraid our approach isn’t exactly a speedway,”

West, at the wheel, remarked.<(! ploughed it all up last year and it was fine for a bit. But it’s gone again now. Nothing you can do, short of spending a packet.”

“You don’t need to apologize,” Vachell said.

“There’s boulders on the main road a mountaingoat would puzzle over, and one swamp where you get leeches in the carburettor.”

The car skidded sideways around a sharp bend with a big acacia tree in the angle, and climbed steeply to reach the homestead. Clouds of dogs swarmed like giant red mosquitoes around the headlamps as Dennis West swung the car up to the front of the house, straight on to the lawn. The road petered out among the farm buildings behind in a shed shared by the car, two carts, some seed-boxes and an old incubator. Vachell got out clasping a six-months-old bull terrier called Bullseye. He had brought her with him from Marula, the capital, on his up-country tour. She was an impulsive dog, at the tomboy age, and he felt nervous about her reception; but the setters sniffed around amiably and flattened their bellies on the ground in apparent ecstasies of self-abasement. They seemed friendly, unsuspicious dogs, with no grudge against strangers.

Commander West led the way into the livingroom and began to pour out drinks. Vachell looked at him more closely in the strong light. He had never met his host until an hour before. West was a tall, broad-shouldered man with the unmistakable look of the naval officer about him — clean-cut, healthy-skinned face, clear eyes with wrinkles at the corners, tidy brushed-back hair. His face and arms were deeply sunburnt and he looked somehow incomplete without a pipe. But his dark, thick hair 2

was streaked with grey, although he could not yet be fifty, and there were deep lines in his face, as though worry or suffering had left a mark.

“Need a drink after listening to all that gup,” he remarked, handing a whisky and soda to his guest.

“God knows I don’t often agree with Munson, but he was plumb right this time. Norman Parrot’s a bloody fool. Doesn’t know the first thing about stock.”

“He only does it to annoy, because he knows it teases,” West’s wife remarked. “Give me a drink, please, Dennis. Mr Vachell must have thought he’d got into an insane asylum — or else been very bored.”

They had been to a meeting of the district farmers’

association at the local club. A debate on East Coast fever policy — to dip cattle and let the disease remain endemic, or to eliminate the infection —

had occupied most of the evening. Vachell wasn’t interested in cattle disease, but he was interested in the people who discussed it — in one of them, at least. He had come up from headquarters to find out more about this man. It was strange that he should have been asked to stay so pressingly by the people who owned the next-door farm, people he’d never even met before. The more he thought of it the stranger it seemed.

It was Mrs West who’d invited him. He looked at her as she took her drink and walked over to the fire to warm her hands. Again he felt the faint disturbance in his blood that had come over him

when he first saw her in the meeting-room at the club, standing silently amid the hum of talk and the haze of tobacco smoke, her face white and grave, but her eyes so startlingly alive. She was very slim, dressed in navy corduroy slacks and a white silk shirt, open-necked, and she moved as lightly as a dancer. Her cheekbones were wide and high, her chin pointed. There was something of the Slav, he thought, about the shape of her face. But she was American; her voice told him that. It was her eyes that fascinated him most. They were the colour of dark honey, very large, and they affected him in a way he could not classify or describe. It was as if they held a personal message for him that he could not read, but whose purport he had known a long time. He lit a cigarette impatiently. Africa was giving him a lot of dumb, screwy ideas.

They talked about the meeting for a little, and he listened with only half a mind while West explained how East Coast fever could be cleared off a farm by grazing the land for eighteen months with native oxen who’d recovered from the disease. After that the ticks would no longer be carriers of the infection. It was something to do with the lifehistory of the parasite and the blood of immune cattle, but Vachell had forgotten it all by the time he had finished a hot bath and put on an old flannel suit for dinner.

After his bath and a change he took a quick look at the lay-out of the place, to get it fixed in his mind. It resembled most East African farmhouses: 4

it looked as if it had reproduced by budding, like certain kinds of bacteria. The nucleus was the livingroom, with a stone veranda in front: a long untidy welcoming room, warmed by a big open fire stacked with cedar logs. At one end was a large round table where all meals save breakfast were served. The whitewashed walls of the house were made of timber, wire-netting and mud, which had flaked away on the outside to leave bare brown patches.

They were plastered inside with a mixture of skim milk and flour, and distempered a bright cream. The roof was corrugated iron, concealed from within by a celotex ceiling. The room was full of sagging easychairs, red setters, old magazines, fishing-rods and tins of cigarettes, and the floor sprinkled with skins of leopards and bushbuck.

The kitchen quarters were out at the back, and a series of thatched mud huts of varying shapes and sizes was dotted inconsequently about, like weavers’

nests around the crown of a tree. One of them was connected by a covered way and a cement path to the veranda of the livingroom; this was the Wests’

bedroom. The other and unconnected huts might be bedrooms, offices, or stores. Vachell’s own room was a square, roughly-plastered hut equipped with homemade furniture and electric light. It was clean and comfortable, with bright printed curtains and bare white walls. While he was dressing a native servant brought a plate of meat and rice for Bullseye, and a basket for her to sleep in. He was glad that hospitality was extended to dogs.

For some reason that he could not analyse he began to feel a queer sort of excitement, as he had as a child when confronted at a party with a bran pie. The whole thing was strange: the sudden invitation, his acceptance, the feeling of constraint he had already sensed between the Wests. He could not take his mind off her eyes. They seemed to be looking at him, while he fixed his tie, from the open window, from behind his shoulder in the room. She had a curious deep voice, slow and a little husky; she spoke as if a subtler meaning lay behind the words. Vachell frowned as he folded a clean handkerchief into the breast pocket of his grey suit. It was dangerous for a policeman to imagine things.

At dinner West did most of the talking, replying to questions about his farm with a mixture of enthusiasm, bitterness and resignation common to men on the land. The food was excellent, with more thought behind it than was usual in a farm meal.

There was a salad of a crispness and subtlety that Vachell could not remember meeting since he left America. You could always tell a British colony by its salad, he thought (if they existed at all): flabby lettuce, sliced tomatoes, saddened beet.

“I’ve only got about twenty milking-cows,” West wound up. “With cream at eighty cents that doesn’t bring in much. It takes so long to build up a decent herd. One needs capital — always capital. If I could only buy in fifty high-grade heifers … It’s fellows like Munson, who do things on a big scale, that 6

make the …” West checked himself abruptly and switched the conversation on to the well-worn tracks of the European situation. There had been bitterness in his voice.

Mention ofMunson seemed to bring a new tenseness into the air. Vachell saw Janice West — he had heard someone at the club use the name —

glance at her husband over a low bowl of red Barberton daisies in the table’s centre, her face expressionless and yet strained. He tried not to look too obviously at her thick black hair lying in soft waves back from her forehead, and at her cool carved face.

“Let’s have coffee by the fire,” she said. “It gets cold up here after dark.”

Her voice was deep and husky; the words fell into silence like drops of ice-cold water on to a hot stove.

They moved over to share the sofa and chairs with the dogs. Janice West pushed a sleepy animal off the well-worn settee and told Vachell to sit down quickly before another one took the place. After the coffee had come West said suddenly: “It’s really about Munson we — my wife —

wanted to talk to you. To ask your advice. That is, if you don’t mind. If it isn’t asking you to do something unprofessional, I mean.”

Vachell stretched his lanky legs and squinted at the fire. “I hope it is,” he said. He leant back and prepared to listen with more attention than he showed.

His host gulped down a cupful of hot coffee and filled a pipe. He was obviously ill at ease.

“It’s a bit difficult to explain,” he began, hesitation in his voice. “God knows there’s enough gossip in this district already without my weighing in. All the same … the law protects everything here but the poor bloody fool on the land. You mayn’t touch the hair on the tail of an elephant, or say boo to a wild goose, but there’s an open season on farmers. Anyway on those who live next door to Karl Munson.”

Vachell nodded, and dribbled cigarette smoke out of his nostrils. His lean, bony face remained impassive, his eyes fixed on the crackling wood fire.

Karl Munson was the man he’d come up to the district to find out about. A good deal was known already, recorded on the file at C.I. D. headquarters in Marula. All aliens had a dossier of sorts. Germans and Italians in particular had been carefully investigated, and as Munson was not only a German but high up in the hierarchy of the local Nazi Bund, his activities had been checked by the C.I.D. as closely as possible. That, in the circumstances, was not closely enough. Vachell was very much in the market for information about Munson.

“You reckon the guy’s anti-social but keeps within the law?” he asked.

“No, I don’t,” West said bluntly. “I think he breaks the law. But you know yourself that a working farmer can’t spend half his life in the magistrate’s court bringing petty cases.”

8

“What’s the trouble?” N^ell luired.

West hesitated a littkiu if u^rtain where to begin, and then dived ini^ streaof explanation.

“I could go on all atl^ ^g about Kad Munson. Not personally ,^ugh fre isn’t a bloke in the district who doesiiii%ink ‘s a tick, but as a neighbour. He does eiOtb^hingc can to “^ake things difficult for all ofiH ^g ^i’t keep up his fences, for instance. So la cattl^ander off into other people’s crops and faoc^olishe111-A year ago they ruined forty acres o::‘i^ mai Last year they walked into Jolyot Anstfltxl beared cleared off the lot, a week before hatt.,)^. Ar”y has the ^siTm above Munson’s, you kni-^ _ h< another of the suffering neighbours. Wiiio^g ,course, but the cattle break the fences —iM^luns says. Of course they don’t. His boys pilp^p thť>osts. I’ve seen evidence myself.”

“You could bring an ani^n foiiat.”

“Oh yeah? Ask Jolyot An^ey. ptried. I dare say we could if we could cili^ Mu011^ cattle redhanded, or red-hooved, ieitther. ]t when you go down there in the mormi(JH^u yoiee is a trampled waste of maize stalks, ortaateve:^ is, and a lot of hoof-marks. How the hAsi^g y( going to prove it? One of Anstey’s boyPi^aughhem at it, and recognized Munson’s hitaisman^d what happened?