The African Poison Murders (24 page)

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“A doctor will be here in about an hour. He’s coming from Karuna.”

“A doctor! Whatever for?”

“In a few hours’ time you’ll be attacked by a fit of vomiting, by cramps in the stomach and maybe dizziness, and tingling in the feet and hands. This will be a symptom of mild arsenical poisoning, but I believe it will pass off and there’s no cause for alarm. You haven’t taken a fatal dose. You —”

A cross between a gasp and a groan came out of 247

Anita Adams’ throat. She stepped back a pace and put her hand on the doorpost for support.

“You’re making this up!” she exclaimed. “You’re playing some sort of joke.”

“Jokes are out, just at present,” Vachell said. “I’m giving you this warning so you won’t get too excited when the sickness hits you. I reckon the doctor will be here by then, anyway.”

“I don’t understand,” Anita said. Her voice was faint. “Who’s done this? How could I… you mean … in the sherry?”

“Yes.”

“I thought it tasted funny.” She was talking excitedly now, hurrying on, almost in a whisper. “It had a sort of bitter taste, but I thought that must be because it had been kept so long. But we all had it.

Are they poisoned too — Ted Corcoran and Mrs Munson?”

“Yes, they’re poisoned too. But there isn’t any danger. I’d go in and lie down. I reckon the doctor will be here before you start to feel anything, and he’ll fix you up right away.”

“Will it… hurt very much?”

Vachell shook his head. “Most likely the doctor will use a stomach-pump, but anyway it isn’t bad.”

She took her hand away from the doorpost and shivered a little in the sharp night air.

“The children,” she said. “They’re all right?”

“It was in the sherry.”

“I’ve been thinking. I want to get them away. It’s terrible for them here, they’re scared to death.

248

Besides, I’m frightened — it isn’t safe. Everyone here’s been jittery for days, and now this … Can I take them away from here? Will you back me up against Mrs Munson, say they ought to go?”

“Sure. This isn’t any sort of atmosphere for kids.”

She sighed deeply, as if a great weight had slid off her mind. “Thank God. At last I’ll be able to get them away. Have you told Mrs Munson yet; about the arsenic, I mean?”

Vachell shook his head.

“Well, someone had better. Would you like „.,_ ťť

me….

“No,” he said. “You needn’t bother. I guess she knows.”

249

The doctor, who arrived about midnight, found the arsenic poisoning case of great interest. Three people had taken, presumably, doses that were equal, or very nearly equal; yet the reactions were widely different.

“An excellent example of the dangers of dogmatism,”

he commented. “One doesn’t often get what almost amounts to a controlled experiment, on humans. Look at the result. One guinea-pig nearly dies and another’s only slightly affected. The third’s midway between. You see? Now try to tell me the precise effect of x grains of arsenic on the human system! Like to have Sir Bernard Spilsbury here.”

Corcoran was much the worst of the three.

Vomiting and pains went on all through the night, and in the morning Dr Lawson insisted on taking him to hospital in Karuna. Anita Adams had a bad three or four hours, but by morning she had got the poison out of her system and fell into a refreshing sleep.

Mrs Munson was affected least of all. It seemed as 250

if her will-power could control her lumpy, ungainly body even to the length of resisting the ill-effects of poison. Vachell, watching her face harden with anger when the doctor entered her room, wondered if an intense, unreasoning distaste for having a doctor touch her, a pathological horror of the physical, might in some way have given her an armour against illness. At any rate, she was barely sick, and Dr Lawson thought it very remarkable.

There was no doubt, Vachell assured him, that she’d had her fair share of poisoned sherry.

It was the strangest dawn he could remember.

He came out on to the lawn to watch it break in a long streak of red over the black hills beyond the valley. The grass was grey and sopping wet under his feet, and the air as cold as iron. He shivered uncomfortably, in spite of an old raincoat wrapped closely around him. The ashy sky flushed as he watched it, the birds twittered eagerly in the trees.

Everything, the uneasy events of the night, the sick patients, the startled sullen natives, seemed nightmarish and unreal.

Mwogi, frightened into silence and work, brought breakfast for Dr Lawson and Vachell in the livingroom.

The room looked sordid and unswept in the quickly strengthening sunlight. Soon afterwards Lawson took Corcoran away in the back of his car, done up in blankets and cushions. The young man’s face was pale as paper and his eyes were full of fear.

He had been retching and vomiting all night.

“He’ll be all right,” Lawson said. “No danger 251

now, but he needs nursing. Besides” — the doctor looked around him in distaste, and made a small grimace — “this place seems to be about as healthy as the heart of the yellow-fever belt. Hope those eggs weren’t cooked in Coopers and seasoned with Woolman’s salts. What was it — cattle-dip?”

Vachell nodded. “Guess so. I never realized what dangerous lives farmers led. Poison lurks in every corner, it seems.”

Dr Lawson grunted. “Well, I hope you catch your murderer before he does any more harm. By the way….”

“Yes, doctor?”

“Those children. I don’t think they ought to stay here. It’s too — well, after all, there have been two sudden deaths and an attempted poisoning in the last three days. The Adams girl will be fit enough to move today. Tell her to get them away —

anywhere will do. Can you bluff it through, do you suppose?”

Vachell nodded. “I guess so. I’ve no authority, but she wants to go herself.”

For the first time since the trouble started the Munson farm was disorganized. The boys seemed to have lost their heads. The leopard had taken a calf out of the homestead of a native headsman; the man had heard it breathing through the cracks of the hut walls during the night. That seemed to frighten all the labour as much as, or more than, the extraordinary happenings among the whites.

The leopard trap, erected in a game path running 252

up into part of the forest that had escaped burning, would be ready for use that night.

| Vachell strolled up to inspect it after breakfast, 2 when Corcoran and the doctor had gone. It was H made of big cedar logs hacked from the surrounding i forest and sunk well into the ground to make a sort of cage. The headman explained the working with enthusiasm. The bait, a hunk of meat raw and preferably high, was tethered inside, and when the leopard came its weight would depress a stick which, in turn, would release a string that supported the heavy log door. Then the door would fall behind the leopard, penning it in, and next morning a European would come to shoot it with a rifle.

When Vachell reached the office, later in the morning, Prettyman reported no sign either of Parrot, who seemed to have vanished like a cloud, or of the mole-catcher Arawak, for whom a search was still being made. The young inspector observed at once that the C.I.D. chief was in a different mood. The lassitude he had noticed the day before was gone; now Vachell was brisk and decisive. He was unusually forthcoming, too.

“Well,” he said conversationally. “I guess the case is in the bag. I’d like you to make an arrest today.”

“Me?” Prettyman inquired.

“Sure. I have to go down to headquarters for a conference with the Commissioner this afternoon.

This case has some side issues that need to be 253

cleared up. I’ll be back this evening, but I want you to make the arrest at once.”

“Okay, sir,” Prettyman said. “May I ask whom I’m to drag off to jug?”

“Mrs West.”

Prettyman looked at his superior with a mixed expression. He was not surprised, exactly, but he was upset, and the superintendent’s convenient conference in Marula struck him as a dirty trick.

“You’ll make out the warrant, sir, of course,” he said, a little stiffly. “I’ll execute it whenever you instruct me to. Malcolm, the magistrate here, is a bit of a tiger. I suppose, sir, you’ve got all the evidence taped?”

“No,” Vachell replied. He tipped his chair back, put both feet on the edge of the table and lit another cigarette. “The police case has as many holes in it as a mosquito net. I’m hoping she’ll break down and give.”

Prettyman raised his eyebrows, and rolled a pencil about on the desk. “Aren’t you a little optimistic, sir? She’ll see a lawyer at once, of course — Clara Innocent, I expect. Our Clara’s hot stuff at tying everything up in legal knots.”

“We can make a case. Then we’ll go in and sew it up for the High Court. When we pull in Parrot and this mole-catching guy we can go to work.”

“I suppose she did do it,” Prettyman said doubtfully.

“The motive doesn’t seem very strong. She may have loathed Munson and got fed up with his making passes at her, but you wouldn’t think she’d 254

have to bump him off. And West — I suppose she wanted him out of the way. It seems a bit coldblooded, I must say. Is she in with Parrot, do you think?”

“Sure, she had him on a string.” Vachell tilted his head back to rest his neck against the back of the chair and stared fixedly at a corner of the ceiling.

His face, leaner than ever with fatigue, looked as though it had been carved out of wood, and his light blue eyes were pin-points of concentration.

“She had enough of Munson,” he went on.

“Munson was only a fill-in — maybe a little different from the rest. When she wanted to give him the air, he kicked. Munson was no gentleman, most likely he threatened to go to West to shoot the works, anyway to raise hell all over the district if she didn’t behave. He could have made things tough. So she decided to stop Munson in the only way she could be sure he’d stay stopped. She knew about the Acocanthera, Sir Jolyot Anstey explained it all one day, so she teamed up with this mole-catcher guy and stewed the poison and went over one evening to stick a nail through Munson’s shoe.”

“So far, sir, you’ve no proof.”

“No, except that we found the gasolene can used to make the poison hidden in a shed on the Wests’

place. I’m counting on this Arawak guy. Most likely he’s been paid to scram to the mountains somewhere, it’ll be tough to pull him in. Mrs West has no alibi for the time when the nail was taken out of Munson’s shoe. If you step on it you can make 255

Munson’s place from West’s in ten minutes flat.

The others have pretty good alibis for that halfhour —

Mrs Munson, Corcoran, Anita Adams, Wendtland and Norman Parrot. They were all working on their own jobs, in full view.”

“You were staying at the Wests’ then, sir. Didn’t you see Mrs West at all?”

Vachell shook his head. “Not until around eightthirty.

She was supposed to be taking care of the poultry, but there’s no way to check that. She made a date to meet Munson in the pyrethrum shed, maybe at sixthirty or seven o’clock. Seems like a tough hour, but probably she told Munson she was having trouble in shaking West, but that was the time he had chores to do, so she could slip over with no questions asked. She never intended to keep the date. She figured his death would be put down to heart failure or asphyxiation or something, due to the charcoal fumes. That’s where she slipped. If Munson had just dropped dead in a milking-bail or somewhere we’d never have been able to tie it up with Mrs West, but as it turned out, the fact that Munson entered the shed at all points directly to her.”

“How about that note from Daphne Anstey you found in Munson’s things?”

Vachell shook his head. “No dice. That was written to Corcoran. Munson intercepted it and kept it by him, meaning to raise hell with Corcoran. You missed a trick there.”

256

“That’s only an assumption…” Prettyman began, and checked himself. “Yes, sir. I’m sorry.”

“All of this case is assumption. It’s a hell of a setup, we haven’t even got medical proof that Munson died of arrowpoison or anything else. So far as the facts go, he’s still alive, and West fell into the fire and got burnt to ashes. We won’t get to first base that way.”

“No, sir. But how about the dog-slashing and blood-letting and so forth? Do you blame that on Mrs West, too?”

Vachell was silent for a little, leaning the back of his head against interlocked hands. His face was quite without expression when he spoke.

“There’d been no rain the night the Wests’ ducks got their heads pulled off and Bullseye’s throat was nearly slit. The Wests’ bedroom is connected with the livingroom by a concrete path. Mrs West swore she hadn’t been out of her room, but the soles of her mules were wet. There was an impression of her foot in the mud by the duck-pond, near where the bodies were found. The night the Wests’ own setter was killed, Mrs West was out of the room. All these incidents, except for some pigeons, took place around West’s farm.”

“And the bushbuck in the forest fire. She could have done that, of course.”

“And West could have found her. He caught her bloody-handed, and so he was through. He had to go. I guess she’d been planning something like that, anyway. She’s crazy for Parrot, and West stood in 257

the way. A jab with a knife or a pointed stick near the heart, and he’d be out in a couple of minutes.

Then Mrs Munson got suspicious. She started to broadcast pretty obvious hints around, so her turn came next. We’re up against a maniac, remember; not a sane individual at all. A shot of arsenic in the sherry, what does it matter if you get three dead bodies for the price of one. The quicker they come the better the sport, when you see ‘em wriggle. Mrs Munson is ready to testify she found Mrs West alone in the livingroom with the sherry in an unlocked cupboard, and the next thing she knew, three people who drank the liquor got a shot of arsenic in their stomachs. We have to pull her in. She’s about as safe to leave around as a barrel of dynamite on top of a fire.”