by M. M. Kaye
There was a light on in the hall, but the two long passages that led off it were full of shadows, and the house was as quiet as Crater Lake had been. Was it waiting for something to happen, as Crater Lake had waited? But that was absurd! thought Victoria impatiently. There was nothing wrong with the house; only with herself and her unruly imagination. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings – Gilly … Gilly had been fond of quoting Shakespeare, and Gilly was dead. What was it that Em had said? Nor steel, nor poison, malice domestic … nothing can touch him further. Yes, he was safe – if death were safety. But Eden and Aunt Em? and she herself, Victoria? – what about them?
Victoria shivered again, and setting her teeth, opened the dining-room door and groped for the light switches.
A single bulb in a red shade illuminated the sideboard but left the remainder of the room in shadow, and without waiting to turn on any more, Victoria collected a laden tray, and turned to see Drew Stratton standing behind her.
She had not heard him enter, and she was so startled that she would have dropped the tray if Drew had not taken it from her. He frowned at the sight of her white face and wide eyes, and said: ‘What’s the matter? Didn’t you hear me?’
‘No,’ said Victoria breathlessly. ‘You startled me.’
‘I can see I did. You ought not to have stayed up. I suppose you’ve been sitting around alone, frightening yourself stiff?’
‘Something like that,’ admitted Victoria with a wan smile. ‘What are you doing with that tray?’
‘Making quite sure that the contents are as advertised,’ said Drew. ‘Though as I see that it wasn’t only Eden who was expected, I imagine it’s safe enough. Who made this? You?’
He had put the tray back on the sideboard and was unscrewing the cap of the Thermos.
‘No. I suppose Zacharia did. Or the cook. Why?’
Drew did not reply. He removed the cork and poured a small quantity of coffee into one of the cups, smelt it suspiciously, and then put the tip of his finger into it and touched it cautiously to his tongue.
The import of the action was suddenly and horribly clear to Victoria, and she drew back with a gasp and put her hands to her throat: ‘You c-can’t— You can’t think——’ Once again she could not finish a sentence, for her breath appeared to have failed her.
Drew said: ‘Seems all right.’ He replaced the cork and turned his attention to the sandwiches, and after a moment or two said: ‘How many people did Em order coffee for?’
‘I – I don’t know. She just said that Eden might want something when he came back, but she spoke to Zacharia in Swahili, so I don’t know what she said.’
‘Hmm,’ said Drew thoughtfully. ‘They all knew that as Eden had gone in my car, I’d probably be bringing him back. But there are four cups. If the extra two were Zacharia’s idea, it shows that the old gentleman has more on the ball than one would imagine and had realized that someone from the police would come back with us. Which is interesting, to say the least of it.’
Victoria said huskily: ‘Why have they sent a policeman here? Why not to the Markhams’ bungalow? Why to us?’
‘It isn’t only to us. By this time there will not only be one at the Markhams’ bungalow, but another at the Brandons.’
‘Why? Is it— Was Gilly murdered?’
Drew replaced the sandwiches and looked up, frowning. ‘Now what gave you that idea?’
‘Aunt Em said you thought he h-had been. Was he?’
‘Yes,’ said Drew briefly, and picked up the tray.
Victoria had hardly slept at all during the previous night and had endured a harrowing day, and the effects were telling upon her. She began to shiver violently, and Drew put the tray down abruptly and took her into his arms.
It was an entirely unexpected action, but an astonishingly comforting one, and Victoria found herself clinging to him as frantically as though he had been a life line in a cold sea. His arms were warm and close and reassuring, and presently she stopped shivering and relaxed against him; feeling safe for perhaps the first time since her arrival at Flamingo, and suddenly and surprisingly sleepy. She turned her head against his shoulder and yawned, and Drew laughed and released her.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘this is painfully like one of those detective novels in which just as the plot is getting littered with clues and corpses, the heroine holds up the action for three pages with a sentimental scene. Are you coming into the drawing-room to drink coffee with us, or would you rather go to bed?’
‘Bed,’ said Victoria; and yawned again.
Drew accompanied her down the dark passage to her room, and having turned on the light for her, subjected the room to a careful scrutiny.
‘No one in the cupboards or under the bed. And Bill Hennessy and I will be in the next room, and Eden only a few doors off. So you’ve nothing to panic about. I must get back or I shall have the police after me. You all right now?’
‘Yes,’ said Victoria, and smiled sleepily at him.
Drew took her chin in his hand and bent his head and kissed her quite casually and gently, and went away down the long dark passage, leaving her looking blankly at the panels of the door that he had closed behind him.
* * *
It was well past eight o’clock when Victoria awoke to the sound of knocking on her door, and unlocked it to admit an aggrieved Majiri who had apparently made several earlier attempts to rouse her.
The day, thought Victoria, blinking at the sunlight, could hardly be a pleasant one, but it was difficult to believe that horrible and frightening things could happen while the sun shone and the breeze smelt of geraniums and orange blossom, and the lake glittered like a vast aquamarine set in a ring of gold and emeralds. And yet Gilly was dead.
Duncan is in his grave …
She dressed hurriedly and went out to the verandah to find that Eden, Drew and the young policeman were already half-way through their breakfast, and that Em was having hers in bed.
Lisa and Mabel, both looking white and exhausted, arrived just as the breakfast things were being cleared away, escorted by a police officer who left them at the verandah steps and disappeared round the back of the house.
Mabel was wearing the same crumpled cotton frock that she had worn on the previous day, and she did not look as though she had slept at all, while for the first time in anyone’s recollection Lisa Markham had paid little or no attention to her personal appearance. It was also equally evident that she was frightened.
Victoria had offered her some black coffee, and she had gulped it down thirstily, her teeth chattering against the rim of the cup, and replacing it clumsily on the table had let it fall to the ground, where it had smashed into half a dozen pieces.
It had been one of the Rockingham cups, but Lisa had offered no apology or even appeared to notice what she had done. Em, appearing on the verandah arrayed like Solomon in all his glory, had glanced at the broken fragments and made no comment. She had nodded at Mabel, Lisa and Drew, bestowed an affectionate kiss on Victoria and a more perfunctory one on Eden, and ignored Mr Bill Hennessy, who blushed pinkly and looked acutely uncomfortable. And then Hector and Ken had arrived with a third policeman who, after a brief colloquy with Mr Hennessy, also departed round the back of the house.
‘I suppose you will all be staying to luncheon,’ said Em morosely, surveying the assembled company without pleasure. ‘If we are going to spend the entire morning being interrogated, we had better——’
She was interrupted by Lisa, who stood up abruptly and announced in quivering tones that she did not feel at all well: certainly not well enough to answer any questions today from Greg Gilbert or anyone else. That she had only come over because Mabel had said she must, but if she had known that Greg was going to be so inconsiderate and unfeeling as to expect her to undergo a police grilling when——
Her spate of words grew shriller and higher, but any idea of her returning home was forestalled by the arrival of Greg Gilbe
rt, two CID officers from Nakuru, several police askaris and an anonymous individual in a brown suit.
Greg confined his greetings to a single comprehensive nod that embraced everyone in the verandah, but the two CID officers were more punctilious. And then the entire party, with the exception of Mr Hennessy and the askaris, moved into the drawing-room, preceded by Em who seated herself regally in the wing-chair.
Greg refused a chair and stationed himself with his back to the windows, facing the half circle of anxious faces. His own face was blankly impersonal and his voice as devoid of emotional content as though he were reading the minutes of a board meeting to an assembly of total strangers.
He said: ‘I imagine that you all know why I am here. An autopsy has been performed on Markham’s body, and the doctor’s report is quite definite. Gilly was not bitten by a snake, and there is the possibility that he was murdered!’
‘No!’ Lisa leapt to her feet, white-faced and gasping. ‘You can’t say that! You can’t! It was a snake – we saw it!’
Mabel put out a hand and pulled her down again on to the sofa, murmuring: ‘Lisa, dear. Please! Let him speak.’
Greg said: ‘You may have seen it, but it didn’t bite him.’
‘We saw the fang marks,’ said Em quietly.
‘So Drew says; and Eden.’
‘And I say it – and Mabel, and Ken,’ put in Hector. ‘Plain as the nose on your face!’
Greg shrugged. ‘You saw two punctures that may have been made by anything; one of those double thorns off a thorn tree, for instance. Or if they were made by a snake, it was a snake that had either outlived its poison or emptied its poison sac. The autopsy showed no trace of snake venom, and it’s my opinion that the snake you saw was a dead one.’
‘But——’ began Em, and checked; biting her lip.
Greg turned on her swiftly; ‘Can you swear to it being alive? Did you actually see it move?’
Em hesitated, frowning. ‘I thought I did. It moved when I hit it, but that might have been—’
‘Of course it was alive!’ boomed Hector. ‘Why, I killed it! Dammit, I’ve got eyes!’
‘But you have to wear spectacles for reading, don’t you? And strong ones,’ said Greg. ‘And so does your wife, and Lady Emily.’
‘That’s different! Look – I wouldn’t have wasted my time bashing a dead snake. Broke its neck and smashed its head.’
‘And then threw it into the lake. A pity. If we could have got our hands on it, it might have told us quite a lot.’
‘But——’ began Hector, and stopped, as Em had done.
There was a brief and painful interval of silence, and then Ken Brandon spoke, his voice a deliberate drawl: ‘I threw it away. And what of it? Are you by any chance suggesting that I did it to destroy evidence?’
‘Ken, darling!’ begged Mabel in a strangled whisper. ‘Don’t be silly. Please don’t be silly, darling.’
Greg favoured the boy with a long coolly critical look and said softly: ‘No one is accusing you of anything – yet.’
Mabel caught her breath in a small sobbing gasp and Hector took a swift stride forward, his chin jutting and his hands clenched into fists. ‘Now look here, Greg,’ he began belligerently.
Mr Gilbert turned a cold gaze upon him, and though he did not raise his voice it held a cutting quality that was as effective as the crack of a whip: ‘I am conducting this enquiry, Hector, and I will do it in my own way. All of you here are required to answer questions, not to ask them; and I would point out that there is a well-known saying to the effect that he who excuses himself, accuses himself. I have not, I repeat, accused anyone – yet. Will you sit down, please? No, not over there. Eden, give him a chair behind Mabel, will you. Thank you.’
Hector seated himself reluctantly, muttering under his breath, and Greg turned his attention back to Em:
‘You were answering a question when Hector interrupted you. Are you quite certain that the snake was alive when you hit it?’
‘No,’ said Em heavily. ‘It may have been, and it never occurred to me that it wasn’t. I suppose we were all too worked up about Gilly to notice details, and puff adders are often sluggish creatures. But I wouldn’t like to swear to it, because——’ She hesitated for so long that Greg said: ‘Because of what?’
Em sighed and the lines of her face sagged. ‘Because I realized later that whatever he died of, it wasn’t snake-bite.’
‘Why?’
Em threw him a look of impatient contempt and said irritably: ‘There is no need to treat me as though I were senile, Greg. You must know quite well that I have seen people die of snake-bite – and before you were born! It is, to say the least of it, an unpleasant death. Gilly didn’t die that way; and if you want to know what I think, I think he had a heart attack; but because we saw the snake we jumped to the conclusion that it was snake-bite – and killed him.’
‘By giving him that injection?’
Em nodded. ‘Drew said it was probably the last straw, and he may have been right. If we’d left him alone he might have pulled through: people do survive heart attacks. But he didn’t have a chance. It was seeing the snake – I didn’t even think of it being anything else.’
‘It wasn’t your fault, Gran,’ said Eden roughly. ‘If you hadn’t done it, someone else would. We all thought he’d been bitten. What did he die of, Greg?’
‘Heart failure,’ said Mr Gilbert calmly.
14
‘What!’ bellowed Hector, bounding to his feet and stuttering with wrath. ‘Then what in thunder do you mean by interrogating us in this fashion? By God, Gilbert, I’ve a good mind to take this straight up to the Governor! You have the infernal impertinence to post one of your men in my house, and another to keep an eye on my wife and on poor Gilly’s widow, when all the time Markham died a natural death from heart failure!’
Mr Gilbert waited patiently until he had quite finished, and for at least a minute afterwards, and his silence appeared to have a sobering effect upon Hector, for he said with considerably less truculence and a trace of uncertainty: ‘Well? What have you got to say for yourself?’
‘Quite a lot,’ said Mr Gilbert gently. ‘For one thing, most deaths are due to failure of the heart. What we do not know is why Markham’s heart stopped beating. It is of course just possible that he was suffering from a heart attack when you found him. He drank fairly heavily – I’m sorry, Lisa, but that’s true, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ said Lisa. She had ceased to slump in a frightened heap in a corner of the sofa, and there was a look on her pale face that was curiously like eagerness. ‘He always drank too much, but in the last few months he seemed to be much worse. I told him we couldn’t afford it, and – and that it would kill him if he went on like this; but he only laughed.’
Greg nodded, but said: ‘All the same, I don’t believe he had a heart attack.’
‘But surely – the doctors,’ urged Mabel distressfully.
‘The doctors say that his heart was flabby and full of blood, and that the symptoms described by Drew and Eden square with a heart attack. But they also square with something else – Acocanthera. Msunguti.’
Once again the words meant nothing whatever to Victoria, but in the sudden silence that followed them she became acutely aware that they held a meaning – and a singularly unpleasant one – for every other person in the room. Knowledge and shock – and wariness – was written plainly on six faces. Only Drew showed neither surprise nor wariness, but it was quite clear that he too knew the meaning of those two words.
Greg Gilbert looked round the room as though he expected someone to speak, but no one moved or spoke. They did not even look at one another. They looked at Greg as though they could not look away, and their bodies were still with a stillness that spoke of tensed muscles and held breath.
Greg said slowly: ‘I see that you all know just what that means. Except Miss Caryll; which is possibly a good thing for her. For your information, Miss Caryll, I am talking of arrow poiso
n. Something that is only too easy to come by in this country and which produces death – by heart failure – in anything from twenty minutes to two hours. Unfortunately it also produces no detectable symptoms, so unless we can produce other evidence the autopsy verdict on Markham will have to stand as “heart failure due to unknown causes”. A verdict with which I, personally, am not prepared to agree.’
‘Why?’ demanded Em harshly. ‘He might well have had a heart attack. He’d been drinking far too much, and he was three parts drunk by lunch-time yesterday – the autopsy must have shown that, too! And he was too thin and too highly strung. He lived on his nerves. Why do you have to believe the worst, when there is no shadow of proof to support it?’
‘But there is a shadow of proof,’ said Greg gently. ‘The fact that three things which might have proved that it was a heart attack are all missing. We had a squad of our men down at Crater Lake at first light, and they went over the ground with a small tooth comb – and a magnet. But though they found the broken half of the needle, they didn’t find the knife you slashed Markham’s arm with, or the bottle of iodine you doctored it with. Or the snake that may or may not have bitten him. Odd, to say the least of it.’
Ken Brandon leant forward, his hands gripping the arms of his chair so tightly that his knuckles showed white, and said in a high strained voice that had lost all traces of a drawl: ‘Why do you keep harping on that snake? What would you have done with it? Put it in your pocket? I didn’t even know that it would fall in the lake! It was a fluke, I tell you! I——’
Hector said brusquely: ‘Shut up, Ken! I’m not letting you say anything more without a lawyer. And if the rest of you have any sense you won’t answer any more questions either! If Gilbert is accusing one of us of murder – and it looks damned like it to me! – then he’s got no right to expect us to answer questions until we have had legal advice.’
