The African Poison Murders (10 page)

No trace of poison had been found in the alimentary tract, stomach or liver, but the doctor refused to commit himself on the subject of poisoning.

The common toxins such as arsenic, strychnine, hydrocyanic acid or compounds of the barbituric group could, he believed, be ruled out, but labora-94

tory tests of a more elaborate nature than he could apply might reveal traces of less obvious poisons, such as members of the alkaloid group. Prettyman, therefore, was dispatched at once for Marula, with a cargo of sealed jars in the back of the car, and instructions to return immediately and check up on Wendtland’s movements for the last few days. The Government pathologist promised, on the telephone, to get to work on the specimens first thing next morning.

“About all I can tell you,” the doctor said disgustedly, “is that the fellow died from cessation of the action of the heart.”

Vachell took the report of the autopsy to read it carefully through. Munson seemed to have been in excellent health. The spleen was enlarged, but that was due, presumably, to malarial infection in the past; in the war he fought in the East African campaign. The report mentioned an old fracture of the knee; two deep lacerations on the right forearm, sealed now with scar tissue, such as might have been caused by the claws of a leopard or lion; a fresh puncture on the instep of the right foot; and a small cut on the chin.

An unsatisfactory report, Vachell thought; until the cause of death was established an investigation was like firing bullets into the dark. And unnecessary, too, very likely; the man might have died of natural causes after all. No one seemed to think so, from Mrs Munson to the native boys, who — according to the police corporal he had left out 95

at the farm — believed that some disgruntled exemployee had done the job in revenge. But there was nothing to go on, nothing definite and clear.

Prettyman had even drawn a blank in the shed where the body had been found. In his childhood Vachell had believed the truth of a pious saying to the effect that even the longest river flowed somewhere to the sea. Africa had taught him that this conclusion was entirely false. Only the exceptional river, in Africa, flowed as far as the sea; most of them petered out in swamps or sand-banks on the way. It was the same, he reflected, with this Munson tangle. Everything seemed to peter out in a swamp of irrelevance or a sand-bank of blank ignorance and lack of clues.

The Wests’ house seemed peaceful and secure, after the jagged atmosphere of the Munson farm, when he arrived back just after dark. Red setters swarmed over him in ecstasies of welcome, and Bullseye, who had apparently made herself quite at home, almost broke her lower jaw with smiling, and lay on her back and waved her legs in the air. A wood fire was blazing on the big stone hearth and bottles winked invitingly from a side table. The Wests greeted him solicitously, and Norman Parrot emerged from the depths of a chair whose sagging springs made it seem even larger than it was. He waved his pipe in a friendly greeting, and subsided again.

“Come and give us the lowdown,” he said. “We’re discussing Munson, of course. Did one of his Nazi 96

rivals spray the pyrethrum flowers with cyanide gas?

Or did Mother Munson let loose a deadly tarantula?

Or did Corcoran pay the boys’ wages on time, and the poor old boy just pass out from shock? We’re all agog to hear the official theory, to be enshrined in the Secretariat files and dispatched to Downing Street for consideration by the assistant deputy Under-Secretary of State, who is unfortunately away visiting the Gonococcus Islands just at present, but will deal with it on his return.”

“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Janice said.

The excitement with which Vachell looked at her changed to surprise; there was something different about her face. Her eyes were laughing, almost dancing, tonight. She looked younger, more vivacious, as though a heavy care had released her mind from its oppression. “Now you’ve come we can talk about something else, so as not to break all those rules you have about not speaking of cases until they’re over and no one is interested any more.”

“Oh, we don’t worry about rules like that in Chania,” Parrot said cheerfully. “There was a case the other day when they didn’t discover till it was all over that the prisoner’s brother-in-law was on the jury. He was the only one who insisted on a guilty verdict, and he talked the others round till he got it, too. I was just saying, my theory is.that Munson was done in by one of these native poisons.

There’s half-a-dozen growing round here that would kill us all in two shakes of a lamb’s tail if the cook 97

chose to put a leaf in the salad. The only thing that surprises me is that they haven’t done it before.”

“Rot, Norman,” West said. “Half this native poison business is hot air, in my opinion. Most of them are perfectly ordinary herbs, but by the time some witch-doctor’s muttered a lot of spells over them, the natives think they’re as deadly as hell.”

“You’re wrong about that, old boy,” Parrot insisted. “If you don’t believe me ask neighbour Jolyot Anstey. He’s a tremendous dab at them —

he’s analysed them all and tried them out on frogs and God knows what. The other day we were playing golf at the club and I sliced into a patch of thick stuff at the sixth. There was a sort of bush with a mauve flower there and Anstey said: ‘See that bush over there? One leaf chopped up would kill five men.’ He said that the Wahuba used it a lot in the old days, and wasn’t it tragic how all the old native arts were dying out. I said, yes, we ought to have a stall for native poisoners at the next Arts and Crafts Society Show with demonstrations at eleven and three, and the old boy wasn’t at all pleased.”

“There you are,” West said to Vachell. “We’ve found your murderer for you. Look for a Wahuba of not less than sixty, who has a down on Munson and a relation who caddies at the club, and you’ve got your man.”

Vachell sipped his drink, leaning against the mantelpiece, his eyes fixed on the crackling logs in the fire. He had to make an effort to keep them 98

away from Janice. She sat in silence, stroking a dog, her face still and yet alive and happy, half shadowed by the soft light. “I’d like to see this Jolyot Anstey,”

he remarked. “He sounds to be quite a guy.”

“He’s a priceless old bird,” Parrot said. “Used to be a surgeon, one of the Harley Street bigwigs with a knighthood and a good ‘Citadel’ racket, before he came out here. Now he lives on top of a mountain and broods. He’s got a perfectly good, or at least a perfectly cock-eyed, theory about practically everything on earth, from what diseases the inhabitants of Chania died of in ten thousand B.C. — he digs up bones all over his farm — to the causes of rust resistance in wheat in nineteen thirty-nine. Most people think he’s a crank, but I must say I rather like the old boy.”

“He has a perfectly lovely daughter,” Janice said.

Parrot glanced across at her over his glass and Vachell, watching him, was conscious of a look of admiration mixed with a sort of wistfulness in the other man’s rather comic, snub-nosed face. Parrot’s eyes were round as buttons, and a very bright blue.

“Her neck’s too long,” he said. “I don’t like long necks. They remind me of a tame swan I kept on the Bosphorus — one of the Abbotsbury swans. She came to a very sad end. I left her shut up in the bedroom of my lodgings one day — I always locked her up when I went away, for fear of Turkish grebes — and she was kidnapped by some cut-rate eiderdown manufacturers from Constantinople. I never heard of her again, and since then I can’t 99

stand people who remind me of swans. Besides, I wouldn’t like to put our Ted out of the running.”

Janice looked across at Vachell and smiled. “Just to bring you up to date on our local gossip, Sir Jolyot Anstey has a beautiful daughter —”

“So-so,” Parrot put in.

“—Daphne, and young Ted Corcoran fell for her in a big way. But Sir Jolyot would break in pieces if he knew his daughter was thinking of marrying into the Munson family, and I guess Karl Munson would have fed Teddy to the hogs if he’d thought the boy’s mind was on anything but keeping smut out of the oats and couch out of the pyrethrum.

Old Anstey was just rat-poison to him.”

“It doesn’t sound the sort of love-affair likely to burn up the town,” Vachell remarked.

“I wouldn’t be too certain,” Parrot said. “You never know what may go on over the boundary fence. I’ve an idea….”

“Let’s talk about something else,” West broke in abruptly; and added in a mumble: “One gets sick of village gossip.” He looked ill and nervy, Vachell thought, and the lines in his face seemed to have deepened.

Dinner quite unexpectedly took on a sort of festive nature. West, alone, was abstracted and out of the mood. As the meal went on Vachell got an impression, impossible to analyse or confirm, that some unspoken understanding existed between Norman Parrot and Janice West. They were both gay and full of laughter, as though they shared a 100

common cause for celebration. It made Vachell uneasy; he had struck another current that wasn’t on any chart.

Parrot talked, almost continuously, about odd corners of the world in which he claimed to have travelled, and strange experiences he had certainly never had. If he’d been in half the countries he talked about, Vachell reflected sourly, he’d need to be twice the age he looked and even more unsuccessful. No one would move around so much unless they couldn’t hold down any job. He said he had been a surveyor, but even that was hardly a good enough excuse. He claimed to have discovered a gold-mine worked by the ancient Persians in Portuguese East Africa and a new species of deepsea fish in the Antarctic, to have spent six months with an Arab sea-captain who smuggled slaves up the Persian Gulf and an unspecified period in a lamasery in Tibet. By the end of the meal Vachell had put him down as one of the three most prolific liars he had ever met.

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FR1;CHAPTER

NINE

A little before ten o’clock Parrot said goodnight and rattled off down the road in an eight-year-old Model A Ford, the wings fixed on with wire and with very little body left. West took a lantern and went out to make a last inspection of the stock, and Vachell could no longer dodge a duty already too long postponed. It was obvious that he couldn’t go on staying under the Wests’ roof any more. He made his excuses as tactfully as he could.

“I’ve no right to persuade you,” Janice said, “but all the same I wish you didn’t feel the way you do.

I’m — well scared, I guess. It sounds silly, I realize that. I’m worried about Dennis, too. You know he was a prisoner in the World War, and he gets terrible nervous attacks sometimes. Lately he’s been worse and now this … this accident to Rhode has shaken him apart. I shouldn’t say these things, it’s my worry, not yours. But it helps a lot to have someone to rely on here, someone you can trust, from outside.

…”

Vachell experienced a wave of irrational pleasure, 102

accompanied by a dryness in the throat. He cursed himself inwardly and walked to the door to recover composure.

“It’s swell of you to say that, Mrs West,” he said evenly. “But it isn’t true. If I were more reliable maybe I’d be able to stay.”

She took a fresh cigarette out of a box and put it into the holder without speaking. His hand was shaking a little when he held the match.

“You see,” he went on, “when a guy’s working on a case he has to forget he’s dealing with human beings. He has to act like a chess-player studying the pieces on the board. He can’t decide to capture a knight because he hates the way it moves crabwise, or let a rook go free because he likes to root for rooks. And if he found he had to bring up his pieces to make an attack on the queen…” He shrugged his shoulders and left the sentence unfinished.

“It would be a social predicament to be her guest at the time,” Janice concluded. “I won’t say any more. Go ahead and bring up your pieces.” He had killed the laughter in her eyes; they had gone cold.

She tilted her head back and drew on her cigarette.

Her attitude had changed insensibly; all the hardness had returned.

“I’ve had a swell visit,” Vachell went on, “and now I have to pretend I’m a social columnist. That’s no way to act, but I’m in a jam. This district raises fine crops of gossip, and even policemen get a little blown into their long, furry ears.” He paused to 103

kick a smouldering log back on to the fire. Janice said:

“I guess it irritates them so they get mad and take it out in beating around the bush. What you want to know is: did Karl Munson make a pass at me and if so what did I do about it, and what attitude did Dennis take up?”

Vachell drew a deep breath and said: “Thanks a lot. You ask all the questions while I sit back and make a note of the replies.”

“There isn’t much to say.” Her voice was without warmth. She spoke a little briskly, as if she was reciting a lesson she had rehearsed before. “Karl Munson was — well, the Victorians had a word for it: he pursued me with his attentions. You saw him — not an attractive man. I was afraid that if I just walked out on him and left him cold it would make him so mad he’d jump the tracks. You know, he was a dangerous man. He hated Dennis anyway, but he didn’t do anything about it because of me. I was scared he might let everything go if he got mad with me as well. So I stayed friendly, and all the time I had to stall. It wasn’t very amusing, and I can’t pretend I don’t thank God it’s all over now.”

“Thanks,” Vachell said. “Did you often meet him alone, without other folks knowing, and where were meetings like that held?”

Janice smiled, but only with her lips; her eyes had gone hard as stones.

“If I had, I shouldn’t tell you,” she said. “But I didn’t, because I didn’t care for Munson and had 104

no wish to see him alone. Do you expect women to give truthful answers to questions like that?”

“No,” Vachell said. “No, I’m not that dumb. But I have to ask them, so the Commissioner can read about it and see how hard I work for my pay. Do you happen to know if Munson’s wife was wise to the…”

West’s step sounded on the veranda and he came in, walking heavily, three setters at his heels. He put down the lamp, and its light gleamed blackly on the barrel of a shotgun that he held in his other hand.