Death in Kenya

by M. M. Kaye

  Once again there was a strained silence in the room when he had finished speaking, but if anyone had intended to admit responsibility they were forestalled by Ken Brandon, who said loudly and scornfully:

  ‘Oh no, you’re not! You’re not asking anything of the sort. We’re not all fools, though you’re treating us as though we were. What you’re trying to do is to get one of us to implicate someone else. That’s it, isn’t it? Maybe there wasn’t anything wrong with that knife or the iodine. But someone thought there might be, and they must have had a damned good reason for thinking it. You’d want to know that reason, wouldn’t you? Well we’re not falling for that one. You can do your own dirty work! I’m going, for one. Come on, Mother, let’s get out of here.’

  Mabel stood up, pale and trembling, and behind her Hector too had risen; but slowly and reluctantly.

  Mr Gilbert moved deliberately and without haste, and placed himself between Ken and the door. He said quietly: ‘I’m sorry, Ken, but you can’t go just yet. Don’t make this any more unpleasant than it need be. Because if you try and leave, I shall have to put you under arrest for obstructing the police.’

  ‘Try and leave? I’m going to do more than try! I’m not putting up with this any longer, and that’s all there is to it. And just you try and stop me!’

  He whirled round and made a dive for the open window, and Drew rose swiftly and hit him once and scientifically.

  Ken Brandon crumpled at the knees and collapsed upon the floor, his nose bleeding profusely and a foolish smile fixed upon his face. And peace reigned.

  ‘Oh, thank you, Drew!’ gasped Mabel with real gratitude.

  15

  The remainder of the morning was as unenjoyable as the beginning, though less full of unpleasant surprises, and although Mr Gilbert and his entourage had departed shortly before one, the respite had been brief, for they had returned an hour and a half later.

  This time the two C.I.D. officers as well as Mr Gilbert faced their audience, while the unobtrusive gentleman in the brown suit sat behind them, and judging from the soft and ceaseless scratching of pen upon paper, occupied himself in taking down their replies verbatim and in shorthand.

  The questions that afternoon were mainly concerned with movements. They appeared to be merely routine ones, and often pointless, but one thing at least emerged from them. No one could produce an alibi that covered the period of time in which Gilly Markham could have been murdered, for the entire party, with the exception of Em and Mabel, had separated after luncheon. And even Em and Mabel could not alibi each other, since both at different times had vanished into the bushes for, as Em observed frostily, ‘obvious reasons’, and later both had slept.

  Eden and Lisa, who had departed together, had quarrelled and separated. Not that either admitted to quarrelling, but it took very little intuition on anyone’s part to fill in the gap in their respective stories. Lisa said she had ‘just strolled about’, and Eden said he had sat on a fallen trunk and ‘thought he might have dozed’.

  Ken Brandon asserted that he had left the crater to explore the far side of it, and had only returned just before the party reassembled, while Hector said that he had spent the best part of an hour searching among the rocks to see if he could pick up the track of the leopard whose pug marks they had seen at the lake edge.

  Drew also had left the crater and gone for a walk, and Victoria, answering endless questions as to the sounds she professed to have heard that afternoon, could only insist that she had seen no one for half an hour after his departure, and thought that they might have been caused by some animal.

  No one appeared to have paid much attention to time until well after three o’clock, and though Greg went over and over the details of that last twenty-five minutes of Gilly’s life, it had proved impossible to build up an accurate picture of exactly where everyone had stood, or who had been standing next to whom, for only Em, Victoria and Drew had remained in approximately the same position throughout, and they and everyone else had been far too intent on the life-and-death drama that was taking place under their eyes to note the movements or expressions of other people.

  ‘Can’t you understand?’ said Em, her voice flat with exhaustion. ‘He was dying! And we knew he was dying. It never occurred to any of us that it was murder. Why should it? Perhaps if it had we would have watched each other instead of him. But it didn’t.’

  ‘Oh, yes it did!’ Greg contradicted grimly. ‘Three of you at least thought that it might be murder. Otherwise Stratton would not have hunted for that broken needle, or Mrs Markham refused to drink the brandy. Even you knew that something was wrong!’

  Em said wearily: ‘But I didn’t think of murder until much later. Not until Drew started asking questions about the knife and said we must go back and look for it. I’d thought it was a heart attack, and that I’d killed him.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of you when I said “three people”. The third was whoever removed the knife and the iodine bottle. Or if two people were involved in that, then that makes it four. Four people out of seven suspected that Markham had been murdered, and I’d like to know why. Perhaps you can give me your reasons, Mrs Markham? Why did you think that your husband might have been murdered?’

  Lisa clutched the arms of her chair and half rose from it. ‘I didn’t! You can’t say I did. You’re just trying to get me to admit things I never said. You’re twisting things! I – I’d seen Gilly die. Drew gave him brandy, and he died. I wasn’t thinking straight. I didn’t mean it that way. I only didn’t want to drink because – because Gilly had drunk from it – and – and died.’

  Greg shrugged his shoulders, and somewhat unexpectedly did not press the question. He turned instead to Drew and demanded his reasons for suspecting murder, but was interrupted by Eden who observed with some asperity that considering Drew had, to his certain knowledge, already answered that question at length on the previous night, and had, moreover, been asked to sign a typed copy of his statement, it appeared to him to be a pointless question and a waste of time.

  ‘I never ask pointless questions,’ said Mr Gilbert without heat. ‘Well, Drew?’

  Drew said. ‘I knew it couldn’t be snake-bite for the same reasons that Em gave you. I’ve seen men die that way. I’ve also twice seen a man die from the effects of a poisoned arrow, and as I did not know that the symptoms of heart attack were similar, heart did not occur to me, but msunguti did. Gilly had been perfectly well, though a bit tight, an hour earlier, and now he was dying. That was all there was to it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Greg briefly.

  The remainder of the afternoon was merely a repetition of the beginning, with the sole difference that the questions were asked again, and answered, individually and behind the closed door of the dining-room.

  It was well after five when Greg had finished with Victoria, who had been questioned last. He looked tired and grim and driven, for excepting only Victoria, these were all his personal friends: people he had known for years, and had dined with and danced with, and suffered with during the harsh years of the Emergency. But he faced them now with the bleak impersonal gaze of a stranger, and his voice was as detached and unfriendly as his eyes:

  ‘I shall probably have to see you all again during the next few days, and until this business is settled I’d be grateful if you’d arrange not to be out, or anywhere where I can’t get in touch with you at short notice.’

  And then he had gone.

  ‘Well thank goodness that’s over!’ said Em with a gusty sigh. ‘And at least he isn’t likely to be back tomorrow, which means that with luck we should have one peaceful day.’

  But the following day could hardly have been termed peaceful.

  Gilly’s body had been brought back for burial, and having notified Mr Gilbert of their intentions, they had all attended the funeral, which had been marred by the behaviour of Lisa and, in a lesser degree, Ken Brandon. Lisa had gone off into screaming, shrieking hysterics and had had to be forcibly removed,
and Ken Brandon had quietly and unobtrusively fainted.

  Drew had caught him as he fell, and had driven him back to Flamingo, together with Mabel. And Em, Eden, Hector and Victoria had returned some twenty minutes later, with the information that Lisa was back in her own bungalow under the care of the doctor’s wife, and had been given a strong injection of morphia.

  ‘What was it all about?’ demanded Mabel, pallid and shivering. ‘You – you don’t think she can possibly have … No! No, of course not! One should not even think such things!’

  ‘That Lisa might have done it?’ supplied Drew. ‘Who is to say what anyone else is capable of under certain pressures? Or even where one’s own breaking point lies? But personally I’d cross Lisa off any list of suspects, because unless she’s a remarkably good actress, that performance of hers at Crater Lake was genuine. She thought someone had murdered her husband all right, whatever she says now, and she thought the stuff might be in the brandy. Q.E.D. – she didn’t do the job herself!’

  ‘My dear Drew,’ said Em with asperity, ‘all women are excellent actresses when circumstances force them to it; and the sooner men realize that, the better! But of course Lisa did not murder her husband – though I have no doubt there were times when she wanted to. There were times when I myself felt like it, and I, let me point out, was not compelled to put up with Gilly’s company as Lisa was. She could quite possibly have been another Mrs Thompson. Someone who might talk or dream about doing away with an unwanted husband, in the way a child will invent long and improbable stories, but who would never really mean it.’

  Drew said softly: ‘They hanged Mrs Thompson.’

  He refused an invitation to stay to luncheon, and left, followed shortly afterwards by the Brandons; and Em, watching them go, had expressed a hope that they – and the police – would stay away from Flamingo for at least a week.

  But it was a hope that was not to be realized.

  Eden and Victoria had spent the afternoon out on the lake, and had returned in the peaceful, pearl-pink evening to find both Drew and the Brandons in the drawing-room again, and the house once more full of policemen. For Kamau, the lover of Wambui, had been found.

  ‘It was the dogs,’ said Em looking oddly shrunken in the depths of the big wing-chair, and hugging a woollen shawl about her shoulders as though she were cold. ‘They’ve been kept shut up for days and only taken out on a leash, because of Lisa’s bitch. But I – I couldn’t keep them shut up for ever, could I? I suppose they smelt him…’

  It had happened barely half an hour after Eden and Victoria had left. Em had heard the barking and had gone out with a whip and tried to beat them off. The dog boy had run out with the leashes, and Em had sent him for the askaris, and having left them on guard had returned to the house and telephoned Greg.

  Mr Gilbert and several policemen had arrived within the hour, and what the ants had left of Kamau had been disinterred from a shallow grave among the charcoal kilns.

  Greg’s temper had not been improved by the discovery that Eden was out in the motor launch and could not be reached, and he had sent for the Brandons and for Drew, who had been questioned severally and separately as to their movements on the night of Kamau’s disappearance.

  ‘But why you and the Brandons?’ demanded Victoria of Drew.

  She had spent an unnerving half-hour in the dining-room answering endless questions, and had come out into the twilit verandah to discover Drew Stratton leaning against one of the creeper-covered pillars and smoking a cigarette.

  Drew said sombrely: ‘Because whoever killed Kamau presumably killed Alice DeBrett – and then killed Kamau because he had not only seen it done, but had talked about it.’

  Victoria said in a small, shaken voice: ‘But – but that’s just what makes it so pointless. It would have been different if he’d been killed to stop him talking. But he’d talked already. He said it was Aunt Em!’

  ‘I know. But we didn’t hear that until the next day, did we? And by that time he was dead. If his girlfriend had only come clean straight away, instead of pretending that he’d merely hinted at knowing something, he might still be alive – though I doubt it. As it was, someone evidently thought it was worth while stopping his mouth permanently, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that by a fluke, and because he was no mean pianist, Gilly was able to blow a hole through Wambui’s story, your aunt would have been left in a very sticky position. She won’t be in too good a one now. Not now that Gilly is dead.’

  ‘Why not?’ demanded Victoria anxiously.

  ‘Because Gilly giving evidence on the one subject that he was really at home in would have been able to convince any jury that he knew what he was talking about. But the same evidence, given at second hand by Greg, isn’t going to sound nearly so convincing. And now there’s this business of Kamau. God, what a mess!’

  Victoria said: ‘But they couldn’t think Aunt Em had killed Kamau! No one could!’

  ‘Why not?’ enquired Drew impatiently. ‘She had the best opportunity of anyone. She was meeting him that night by the gate into the shamba.’

  ‘How can you say that!’ blazed Victoria, stiff with anger. ‘You haven’t any right to! You’re just being s-stupid and – and——’

  ‘Shh!’ said Drew with the flicker of a grin. ‘There’s no need to fly off the handle. You’re not looking at this from the police viewpoint, which is purely concerned with hard facts and is not swayed – or is trying not to be – by the personal angle. You are only thinking of your aunt as someone you know and are fond of. But they have got to think of her as “X”, who allied to B, or minus Z, may equal Y.’

  Victoria said scornfully: ‘Then they’re just being stupid too! Suppose she did meet Kamau that night, and kill him? All right, how did she carry him from the gate right up to the place where they found him? And when she got him there, how did she manage to dig a grave and bury him? She’s over seventy!’

  ‘Seventy-two, I believe – and as strong as a carthorse. But that’s beside the point. You’re not using your head, Victoria. If Em had done it she wouldn’t have needed to kill him by the gate. She could have invented a dozen excuses to get him to walk with her to the kilns, and dealt with him on the spot. And she wouldn’t have needed to dig a grave. There were several there already. It must have been only too easy to topple a body into one of those trenches and cover it up with some of the loose earth that was lying around, and the fumes from the charcoal kilns would have interfered with the scent if tracker dogs were used.’

  ‘But it was Aunt Em’s dogs who found him!’

  ‘Ah, that was different. He’d been underground for quite a few days by then.’

  Victoria flinched, and Drew said quickly: ‘I’m sorry. This is a beastly business for all of us, but the rest of us have at least seen or heard or worse things in our day. The Emergency wasn’t a picnic! – though now I come to think of it, that’s an unfortunate simile, isn’t it? But you’ve been pitchforked into this from a safe and orderly existence, and it must be pretty unnerving for you. Wishing you hadn’t come?’

  ‘No – o,’ said Victoria hesitantly. ‘I don’t think I could ever wish I hadn’t come back to Kenya. But I wish I hadn’t…’

  She did not complete the sentence, but come to lean on the verandah rail beside him, looking out into the deepening dusk. There was something about Drew’s mere physical presence that was reassuring, and as long as he was here the house seemed less frightening. She turned to look at him and said abruptly:

  ‘Are you staying here tonight?’

  ‘Yes. Greg wants all his suspects under one roof. Or rather, under two: the Brandons are reluctantly parking out at Lisa’s. Just as well really, as he seems to have roped in our respective house servants for questioning, and turned all our labour lines into the nearest thing to a concentration camp that I’ve seen outside one.’

  ‘Then he does think it may possibly be an African after all?’

  ‘Of course he does. He’s no fool. They’ve been
getting a far stiffer grilling than we have. You mustn’t think that just because Greg has been hauling us over the coals that he hasn’t had a squad of his boys doing exactly the same thing to every single African who works on this estate, or on mine or Hector’s. There were even two of them who might have pulled off that picnic business. Zach and Samuel were actually down in the crater. And there is still “General Africa” – who is still at large and still unidentified, and who may yet turn out to be the snake in the grass. I don’t believe that Greg has lost sight of that possibility for a moment. In fact he’s quite capable of making all this display of suspecting one of us with the sole object of confusing the issue and making it look as though the enquiries in the labour lines are merely routine, and that it is the Bwanas who are really under suspicion.’

  Victoria gave a little sigh that was partly relief and partly weariness. ‘I didn’t think of that. You must be right. After all, we couldn’t really be suspects. Not you or the Brandons, anyway.’

  ‘Why not? We all happened to be here or hereabouts on the night Mrs DeBrett was killed. And on the night that Kamau disappeared.’

  ‘But the Brandons weren’t even here then!’

  ‘No. But they called at the Markhams’ bungalow that evening. Gilly was out, but Lisa had just got back from here, and it seems that she spilt the works. Which means that any one of them could have got over here in time to head off Kamau. It’s no distance at all by the short cut between Flamingo and Brandonmead, and there was a moon that night.’

  Victoria said: ‘But they wouldn’t have got him to go with them. You said that Aunt Em could have made an excuse to get him to walk to the kilns, but he might not have gone with one of the Brandons.’