by M. M. Kaye
‘But Mr Honeywood … Why should anyone murder Mr Honeywood?’
‘Because you can’t open a safe without keys. Unless you’re a professional cracksman. And whoever was after this, and didn’t realize that you’d got in ahead of him, expected to find it in the safe.’
‘But — but he had a gun. He could have made Mr Honeywood open it. He didn’t have to kill him!’
‘Suppose your Mr Honeywood knew the guy? I’d sure like to know what’s in this bit of paper.’ Lash balanced it in his hand thoughtfully and said: ‘I’m not sure we oughtn’t to take a look at it.’
‘But you can’t. It’s Tyson’s! And it’s sealed. You can’t go breaking the seal.’
‘Can’t I? What makes you think that? There’s something inside this that was worth a man’s life. Someone was prepared to murder Honeywood in cold blood in order to get it, and you don’t get many people risking the death penalty for peanuts.’
‘It’s Tyson’s letter,’ said Dany stubbornly, and held out her hand for it.
Lash shrugged his shoulders and passed it over. ‘I won’t say “Take better care of it this time”, because it seems to me that in your own cock-eyed fashion you haven’t done too badly. But for Pete’s sake don’t leave it lying around, because whoever was after it has got a shrewd idea who’s got it.’
Dany gazed at him appalled. ‘I — I didn’t think of that. That means____’ Her voice trailed away and she shuddered uncontrollably.
‘Exactly!’ said Lash dryly. ‘It’s someone who followed you from London and must have been on the plane with us. And what is more, it’s someone who knows quite well that you are not Miss Ada Kitchell from Milwaukee!’
8
The alarm clock rang shrilly, notifying the fact that it was now 5 a.m., and Dany awoke for the second time that morning; to find herself in possession of a bad headache and sharing not only the bridal suite but the bridal bed.
The proprieties had been observed by the slenderest of margins, and one which would hardly have been recognized as such by even the most broad-minded: Miss Ashton being inside the bedclothes while Mr Lashmer J. Holden Jnr, still wearing his dressing-gown, was disposed gracefully outside them.
Blinking at him in the pale light of early morning Dany recalled with painful clarity that it had been her own hysterical and un-maidenly insistence that was responsible for this scandalous state of affairs. She had, she recalled, refused frantically and flatly to be left alone. A combination of panic and whisky had drastically altered her sense of values, and the ethics involved had ceased to have any meaning for her when compared with the terrifying prospect of being left alone once more in that darkened bedroom.
Lash yawned and stretched, and having propped himself on one elbow, regarded her flushed cheeks and appalled eyes with comprehension and some amusement.
‘All in all, a very cosy and domestic scene,’ he remarked pleasantly: ‘I can’t think what the younger generation is coming to. Or what your dear Aunt Harriet would say if she could see you now!’
‘Or your dear “Elf”!’ snapped Dany. And instantly regretted the retort.
‘Puss, Puss, Puss!’ said Lash, unruffled; and rolled off the bed.
He stood up yawning largely and rubbing his unshaven chin, and announced that she had better stay where she was while he had the first bath and shaved: ‘And don’t go ringing for the room-waiter until I’m out of the way. The less publicity we get, the better.’
Dany occupied the time in wrapping the sealed envelope in a chiffon head scarf and then putting it back into her coat pocket as far down as it would go, and pinning the chiffon wrapping firmly to the lining with a large safety pin. That at least would ensure that no one could possibly pick her pocket without her knowledge.
Time being short, she took over the bathroom while Lash dressed, and as soon as she was in a fit state to answer any knock on the door he went away, leaving her to pack.
He had finished breakfast by the time Dany appeared in the dining-room, and had gone out into the verandah, where she could see him through an open door talking to Mrs Bingham, Millicent Bates and a pallid willowy man whose face was vaguely familiar to her. Amalfi, the Marchese, Larry Dowling and the Arab, Salim Abeid, were also on the verandah, standing together in a bored group just beyond them, yawning at intervals and making desultory conversation, while presumably waiting for a taxi, or taxis.
The sight of Salim Abeid was a shock to Dany. She had not realized that he too had been staying at the hotel, and she was digesting this fact, and its possible implications, when Lash came quickly back into the dining-room and over to her table.
‘That out there,’ said Lash without preamble, ‘is your dear step-father’s secretary, Ponting. So just watch your step, will you, and keep your mouth shut. He may look like the popular idea of an underdone Interior Decorator — and choose to talk like one — but there’s nothing much the matter with his little grey cells, and don’t you forget it!’
‘So that’s who it is!’ said Dany, relieved. ‘I knew I’d seen him somewhere.’
‘Holy Mackerel____! Say, I thought you said____’
‘Oh, I haven’t ever met him before,’ said Dany hastily. ‘I’ve only seen his photograph. He was in some snapshots that Lorraine sent me.’
Lash exhaled noisily. ‘Thank God for that! For a moment I thought we were going to run into more trouble. Well, if you’ve seen photographs of him, it’s an even bet he’s seen plenty of you, so for Pete’s sake be careful. His hobby is ferreting out information and gossiping about it, and in that line he can give points to any women ever born! He was being infernally inquisitive last night. It seems that there should have been a Miss Ashton on that plane, and he can’t figure out why she hasn’t come.’
‘Oh dear!’ said Dany guiltily. ‘He hasn’t done anything about it, has he?’
‘Nothing much he can do, is there? Apart from ringing the Green Zero office, and he did that yesterday. They came right through with it and said that Miss Ashton had cancelled her passage only twenty-four hours before the flight, so he had to be satisfied with that. But he’s still making quite a song and dance about it, and but for that providential goddam tooth of his he’d have fetched up at the airport yesterday when I was in no condition to deal with the situation. It’s a pity his dentist didn’t give him an overdose of gas while he was at it, and save us his company this morning as well. But I suppose one can’t have everything. Don’t be too long over that coffee. We leave in ten minutes.’
They drove through Nairobi in the cool of the early morning, and once again there was the ordeal of passports and officials to be faced. But at last they were in the departure lounge, and the worst was over. The last lap____
Larry Dowling appeared at Dany’s elbow, and relieving her of her typewriter, asked with some concern if she were feeling all right. Larry’s eyes, thought Dany, were like a Kentish trout stream with the sun on it. Clear and cool — and friendly. Looking at them, she felt again that he was a dependable person — in a way that Lash was not. And yet …
Gussie Bingham, smart in a suit of lilac-blue linen that toned admirably with her blue-rinsed hair, said briskly: ‘You look tired, my dear. I hope you don’t allow Mr Holden to keep you working too late. Personally, I had an excellent night. But then I am thankful to say that I always sleep well wherever I am. It’s all a matter of control. I don’t think you have met Mr Ponting yet, my brother’s secretary? Mr Ponting____!’
‘Dear lady?’ said Mr Ponting, hastening to obey that imperious beckoning finger.
Dany turned quickly so that her back was to the light, and shook hands with Mr Ponting. His hand felt limp and boneless and as soft as a woman’s, and his voice was high and light and affected.
‘Ah!’ said Nigel Ponting gaily. ‘A fellow wage-slave! A toiler at the oar! You and I, Miss Kitchell — mere downtrodden secretaries: hard-working honey-gatherers among this decorative swarm of holidaying drones. They toil not, neither do they spin, while we are com
pelled to do both. Gross injustice, is it not? We must form ourselves into a Trades Union. Ah____! Eduardo. Buon giorno! I didn’t see you at the hotel. How are you? You look deliriously fit. I suppose you all know each other madly well by now____ No? Oh dear! I’m so sorry. Miss Kitchell, this is the Signor Marchese di Chiago, a fellow guest bound for Kivulimi. Miss Kitchell is Holden’s confidential secretary, Eduardo, so we are Birds of a Feather.’
The Marchese bowed over Dany’s hand and gave her a long observant look that tabulated her admirable physical assets, added the spectacles, fringe and curls, and subtracted the number he had first thought of.
He was a slim, dark man, handsome in a typically Italianate manner, and although he was not much taller than Nigel Ponting, he gave the impression of being twice the size. The willowy Mr Ponting, thought Dany, would have made quite a pretty girl. And possibly he thought so himself, for he wore his butter-coloured hair far too long, and allowed a single artistic lock to fall carelessly across his white forehead — apparently as an excuse for a frequent graceful tossing of the head that would temporarily return it to place. His eyes were a limpid and unblinking blue like the china eyes of a Victorian doll, but nevertheless they conveyed a disturbing impression that very little escaped them, and Dany was more than relieved when he took the Marchese affectionately by the arm and walked away, talking animatedly of mutual friends in Rome.
Gussie Bingham, hailed by Miss Bates, hurried off to see to some question of luggage, taking Larry Dowling with her, and Dany retired to a seat near the window and struggled with another attack of panic. Officials came and went, appearing suddenly in doorways and glancing keenly about the room, and each time she was sure that she was the one they were looking for. Every stranger was, or might be, a plain-clothes detective, and every idle glance that came her way turned her cold with apprehension. They could not stop her now! Not now, when she was almost within reach of safety. Her head ached and she felt chilled and sick and taut with the strain of trying not to think of the happenings of the last few days, or the dreadful thing that Lash had said last night: ‘It’s someone who must have been on the plane with us.’
But that was absurd and impossible. It was out of the question that it could be anyone who had travelled out from London with them. Dany turned restlessly to look out across the vast, dun, dusty expanse of the aerodrome, and as she did so a man passed by on the other side of the window. It was the Arab, ‘Jembe’ — Salim Abeid — who had been on the plane from London. She saw him stop not far away in the shadow of an adjoining building to speak to a man who seemed to have been waiting there. An olive-skinned Arab in a well-cut white suit.
Salim Abeid seemed to be speaking with the same fervour that he had displayed at Naples, and Dany wondered if his conversation was still confined to politics. His hands waved, his shoulders shrugged and his eyes flashed, but his companion showed little interest, and apart from an occasional surreptitious glance at his wrist-watch, remained gravely impassive.
Salim Abeid turned and gestured in the direction of the glass-fronted departure lounge, and for a moment it seemed to Dany as though the Arab in the white suit looked straight at her, and once again panic attacked her. Perhaps he was a policeman. An Arab policeman. Perhaps this man ‘Jembe’ was telling him about her: that he had seen her in the hall of the Airlane in London. Or worse — far worse! — was he the one who had murdered Mr Honeywood, and searched her room at the Airlane — and meant to chloroform her last night?
Dany felt her heart begin to pound and race again, and she looked wildly round for Lash — or for Larry. But Lash was at the far side of the room being monopolized by Amalfi Gordon, and Larry, looking faintly resigned, was collecting a cup of coffee for Mrs Bingham. He smiled at her across the crowded room, and her panic unexpectedly diminished. She was imagining things and behaving, as Lash had said, like some hysterical heroine in a soap opera. Surely her situation was parlous enough without her manufacturing turnip-lanterns with which to scare herself further. And yet …
‘Will passengers on flight zero three four, proceeding to Mombasa, Tanga, Pemba, Zanzibar and Dar-es-Salaam, please take their seats in the plane,’ announced a sepulchral and disembodied voice.
* * *
The orange earth of Africa slid away beneath them. A waste of sun-baked earth and flat-topped thorn trees, dotted with slow-moving specks that were giraffe and zebra, wilde-beeste, lion, and drifting, grazing herds of antelope — for this was the Nairobi Game Park.
A lone white cloud, faintly tinged with pink, lay in the cool blue of the early morning sky, and as they neared it Dany saw that it was not a cloud, but a mountain. A solitary snow-capped mountain faintly reminiscent of a Japanese print of Fuji-Yama. Kilimanjaro, the ‘Mountain of Cold Devils’, looming lonely above the enormous, dust brown plains: a gaunt, burnt-out volcano whose snows defied the burning African sun.
A voice from the seat behind Dany’s, a man’s voice, fluting, high-pitched and seemingly a deliberate parody of an announcer on the B.B.C.’s Third Programme, said: ‘Yes — rather spectacular, isn’t it? And they say that there is the corpse of a leopard in the crater, frozen into the ice. No one knows how it got there, or why. Deliciously intriguing, don’t you think? I adore mysteries!’
Dany made a movement as though she would have turned to look at the speaker, but Lash’s hand shot out and closed warningly on her wrist. ‘Ponting,’ he said soundlessly and Dany turned hurriedly back to her contemplation of the view.
Nigel Ponting’s neighbour was apparently Mrs Bingham, and with the object of instructing the ignorant — or possibly because he was addicted to the sound of his own voice — he embarked on a lengthy verbal tour of Kenya.
‘And you have simply no idea how primitive those up-country roads are,’ fluted Mr Ponting. ‘Mere tracks, I assure you. Torture to the tyres! Not, of course, to mention one’s spine! Though actually, when one gets there, it is quite deliciously stark. The natives — the animals — the scenery! Intoxicatingly primitive. Such an improvement on down-country Kenya and the Settler Belt, which is so painfully Pre-World-War-One, I always think. Too Poona, don’t you agree? But the Northern Frontier now…’
His voice tinkled on and on like water trickling from a faulty tap, interspersed at intervals by vague noises from Gussie Bingham (herself no mean monologist but at present patently out-classed) and it would have been a soothing enough sound had he not changed to the subject of Dany.
‘I can’t understand it,’ said Nigel Ponting fretfully. ‘I simply cannot understand it. No word at the hotel, and her room reservation not even cancelled. One hopes that the Frosts have had a cable, but really — one didn’t know whether to go or stay! I suppose the wretched girl has been smitten with some form of spots. Measles, or some similar schoolgirl affliction.’
Lash turned his head and grinned maliciously at Dany, but she did not share his amusement. She was getting tired of hearing herself referred to as though she were a school-age adolescent, and in any case she could see nothing comic, in the present circumstances, in having to listen to this particular form of conversation.
‘Actually,’ said Nigel, ‘it was on Miss Ashton’s account that I was over here at all. Your brother thought that it would be a graceful gesture to have her met at Nairobi, and probably save you trouble if I could see to her and show her the town. So he kindly arranged for me to take a little holiday at about this time to fit in with the date, and now the wretched girl has not arrived! Too tiresome of her, as I fully expect to be sent back to meet her when she finally does so. And I detest air travel. I may not show it, but I’m always simply terrified in a plane. Aren’t you?’
‘No,’ said Gussie Bingham, firmly seizing her chance. ‘I can’t say I am. But then I am a fatalist. I feel that if fate intends me to die in an air-crash, I shall die in an air-crash: and that is all there is to it. And if it does not then there is nothing to worry about. Everything, dear Mr Ponting, is pre-destined. Everything! There is no such thing as chance. Once
one has grasped that simple but essential truth, life becomes far less complicated. One ceases to worry.’
Mr Ponting uttered a sharp cry of disagreement. ‘Oh no, no, no, no No, Mrs Bingham! I cannot agree with you. The doctrine of pre-destination, even if it were proved right, must be wrong. So spineless. Surely one should grasp opportunity and mould it to one’s will?’
‘That’s what Millicent says. We have such arguments. But it is my contention that when we think we are grasping an opportunity we are merely doing something that we were ordained to do, and cannot avoid doing. For instance, when we left Lydon Gables for London we were half-way to the station when I remembered that I had taken my passport out of Millicent’s bag to show to a friend (a really laughable photograph!) and left it on the piano. So of course we had to hurry back, and what do you think! We found that a live coal had fallen out of the drawing-room fire, and the carpet was already smouldering! Mrs Hagby might not have had occasion to come in for several hours, and had we not returned the house might well have burned down!’
‘Very lucky,’ conceded Nigel Ponting.
‘Lucky? No such thing. We were meant to return. I was meant to leave that passport behind, and so could not have avoided doing so.’
Nigel gave a little tittering laugh. ‘And supposing you had missed your train and had not been able to reach London, and the airport, in time? Would that also have been meant?’
‘Oh, but we were not meant to miss it! It was fortunately running late. Though even if it had not been we should not have missed the plane, because we came up to London two days early, on the afternoon of the twelfth, and stayed at the Airlane, as Millicent had some shopping to do and____’
Dany was aware of a slight movement beside her, and she saw that Lash’s hands had tightened suddenly on the newspaper he held so that it’s outer columns were crumpled and unreadable. But surely he had known that Mrs Bingham and Miss Bates had been at the Airlane? And surely he could not think — Someone on the plane … Gussie Bingham … No, that at least was not possible!
