‘They’re a bit late,’ he said. ‘We’re bang on my E.T.A.’
Twenty minutes later, when the cocoon had finally resolved itself, they could see that it consisted of two cars—an open tourer with a flag on the front and the dark-blue Amimbo Police wagon. The two convoys drove on as though oblivious of each other and, when the leading drivers drew up, they were almost radiator to radiator.
Aimimbo’s head policeman was the first to get out. He jumped down from the tourer and came over to them, brushing the sand from his uniform as he walked forward. Compared with Major Mills and Harold in their khaki with the dark brown sweat stains between the shoulder-blades, the man looked disturbingly smart, even dapper.
He made straight for Major Mills, and saluted.
‘Well, Major,’ he said, ‘I believe you’ve got a prisoner for me. Like me to take him off your hands, I expect.’
Major Mills took the salute while he was still seated.
‘All yours,’ he replied. ‘Last truck but one. Have to ask you to sign for him, of course.’
Then he turned to Harold.
‘Strange lot these policemen,’ he said. ‘Only think of one thing. Didn’t even enquire about Lady Anne.’ He paused. ‘Surprised the CO. didn’t send out a gun-carriage. Been a nice touch. Made more of it, you know.’
Book III
The Trial
Chapter 31
It was now three weeks since they had been back in Amimbo; and the weeks had been busy ones.
Sir Gardnor’s obsequies—including the memorial service which necessarily had somewhat post-dated the interment—were over, and traffic arrangements down Queen Victoria Avenue had returned to normal. Old Moses had come up before the Chief Magistrate, and been committed for trial in the High Court—October the 3rd was the day set aside for the opening. The CO. had expressed incredulity that Major Mills had not insisted on posting a day-and-night guard outside the Governor’s marquee and the Major had, in consequence, been temporarily relieved of his more warlike duties. He was, at the moment, doing an indefinite spell as Station Adjutant.
The A.D.C., for his part, had not visibly been disciplined; indeed no one knew exactly what to do, except not to be seen mixing with him. The young man, in a state of official limbo, lived a solitary, cloistered life inside the Residency reading back numbers of The Sphere and Country Life, and waiting for his arrest, reprimand, replacement, or whatever it was that the authorities had in mind for him.
One thing, at least, had been settled: Mr. Frith was now confirmed in the post of Chief Secretary; but his other and cherished secret dream— the one which he confessed to no one—had been abruptly shattered by the announcement that a new Governor, name still to be announced, would be coming by the end of the month.
There was one unexpected turn of events. Mr. Talefwa, in his paper recently re-named War Drum, had accused British secret agents of having arranged the murder of Sir Gardnor because of his well-known sympathies for the exploited and over-toiling natives, and was demanding a Royal Commission. Also, on Harold’s desk, there was a whole trayful of letters, telegrams, postcards, telephone messages from Mr. Ngono requesting an instantaneous appointment on a private matter of the most delicate urgency.
As for Harold himself, he had been round to the Methodist Hospital where they had given him eye-drops to use night and morning, the address of an excellent oculist three hundred miles away, and a celluloid eye-shade to wear in place of all that clumsy bandaging.
He had seen Lady Anne; it was Sybil Prosser who had arranged it.
She phoned Harold at his desk, asking if he could leave at once and come over. When he enquired if it was Lady Anne who had asked to see him, Sybil Prosser replied simply that Lady Anne was too ill to ask for anything, and hung up.
Over at the Residency it was a muffled and twilit sick-room that Harold was shown into. Drugget had been laid over the parquet flooring, and the curtains as well as the shutters were across the windows.
But even in the half light, he could see enough. Lady Anne was lying there, quite still and apparently unconscious. It was only after he had watched for a moment that he could see that she was still breathing: it was fast and very shallow—so shallow that it did not even disturb the line of the sheet drawn up below her chin. Her hand which lay outside the bedclothes looked dead already.
Her face was almost unrecognisable because they had dragged her hair flat back from her forehead, tying it indifferently in tight bunches on either side. Her mouth, too, was different: the lips were cracked and broken, and they had been smeared with grease that had begun to cake already at the corners. Across her forehead, little droplets of perspiration glistened.
While he stood by the bedside one of the nurses began dabbing at her with a swab of cottonwool.
Then Sybil Prosser touched him on the arm.
‘Well, there she is,’ she said. ‘You’d better go now. You can’t do any good here. It’s just that I thought she might have liked it.’
All that was before Professor—or Papa, as he preferred to be called— Fernandez had arrived. The Coronation Flyer, with a badly leaking cylinder had broken down on the way. In consequence, Papa Fernandez was a full thirty-six hours late.
And eagerly awaited as he was, no one took very kindly to him at first sight. That was because he was so squat; and, after the long journey, so dishevelled. He plopped, rather than got out, onto the platform. There were other drawbacks. Not the least was language. He could be precise only in Portuguese. And, to make things harder, his voice, naturally low and husky, was rendered practically inaudible by the long, wet panatella that he carried dangling from his lips. He was practically never without one.
When he went into the sick-room he left it still burning in the ashtray on the table outside; and, on his return to the corridor, he would examine it carefully, brushing off the ash at one end and smelling at the other, the chewed one, to see if any of it was still smokable.
His diagnosis, too, was elementary: he uttered the single phrase ‘brain-fever’, and left it at that. His recommended treatment was equally elementary. He advocated ice-packs, bleeding and a herbal concoction unknown to the Western pharmacopoeia and obtainable only in the native quarter. He was also a great believer in the qualities of burning sulphur, and advised a saucer of it on either side of the bedhead.
His two British colleagues—Dr. Alexander’s junior partner and a Dr. Simmons, now retired—were frankly dubious; even suspicious of him. But his self-confidence was enormous. In his quiet, laryngitic whisper, he assured them that it was a perfectly familiar type of case which he had treated, by the hundred, back in his own convent asylum in Nucca.
‘Widow’s Madness,’ he explained, was what it was sometimes called, and he was a trifle surprised that two qualified medical men should not immediately have recognised it as such.
Turning philosophical, he added that it struck down low-born and high-born alike, and that the treatment was the same for both.
Even though it was Sir Gardnor who had always invented the work— new surveys, forecasts, three-year plans, reorganisations, and so forth, it had always been on Mr. Frith that the resultant paperwork had eventually descended; and Sir Gardnor had been at his most fertile just before he had left Amimbo. In consequence, Mr. Frith had never had so many unread papers in his in-tray. His new room, large as it was, looked more like Central Registry than the Chief Secretary’s.
Mr. Frith, too, was under considerable personal strain. During the first few days of Sir Gardnor’s absence, he had naturally eased up a bit allowing himself two late nights in succession at the Milner Club; and he had only been halfway through his second ease-up when Harold’s telegram about Sir Gardnor’s death had reached him.
The tragedy had, in fact, come at an awkward moment for him. Mr. Frith was nearing his fifty-seventh birthday, and the timing was critical. With retirement little more than three years away, he was just too old for anything really nice to happen to him and too young to allow himse
lf to go entirely to pieces. The middle course—the one which he saw so clearly he would have to follow—seemed singularly without attractions.
He had been particularly nice to Harold about his handling of things, telling him more than once what a pleasure it was to find someone who wasn’t afraid to accept responsibility. The whole episode, he said, had been fully reported back to London: it was on his file there, and that was all that really mattered.
Harold had just left Mr. Frith when he found Mr. Ngono waiting for him at the bungalow. His motor-bicycle was propped up against the gatepost; and Mr. Ngono, a broad black mourning band around the short sleeve of his flowered shirt, was beside it.
Mr. Ngono came forward, hesitated, stopped and came forward again. And then, when he was within arm’s reach of Harold, he suddenly shot out his hand.
‘You will most absolutely forgive my intrusion?’ he asked. ‘You will not detest me for it?’
It was a slithering, indecisive kind of handshake. But it more than contented Mr. Ngono. He revelled in the embrace, seeking to cling to Harold’s finger-tips as they slid past him.
‘So there is no offence caused?’ he continued. ‘Just extremely renewed feelings on both sides?’
He paused, and gave a rather embarrassed little giggle.
‘You will mock me for it when I tell you, but twice or more times I nearly turned back. I was afraid of disturbing your esteem. And now everything is on the bloody old cheerio basis again. That is undeniably so, is it not?’
‘Come in and have a drink,’ Harold told him.
But Mr. Ngono was not to be rushed.
‘First, I must say my sentiments about our late Governor.’ Mr. Ngono dropped his head reverently at the mention of the word. ‘A man positively without equal in our lifetimes. Kind but stern—like a great Emperor. No argument about it: just damn well so. I have kept the Order of Service and the newspaper cuttings so that my children after me can honour his historical memory.’
He had removed his handkerchief while he was speaking, and he blew his nose loudly. Then he glanced up.
‘And his notable successor, our new Governor?’ he asked. ‘Are you permitted to mention his distinguished name yet—in the extremest confidence, of course?’
‘I don’t even know it myself,’ Harold told him.
Mr. Ngono did not believe him. But he was suddenly afraid that he might have gone too far, have over-stepped the mark in a way which might invite a snub. Mr. Ngono was terrified of snubs.
He turned the conversation into safer social channels.
‘And you thought the memorial service was a success?’ he enquired. ‘Personally I thought it was the most absolutely successful I have ever known. Those around me were full of the warmest congratulations. Nothing but top enthusiasm.’
He paused.
‘Once again I was in the last row but one,’ he said. ‘And behind a pillar this time. A disappointingly inferior seat altogether. But I am no longer thinking about the slight. I have forgotten it already.’
They were going up the stone-bordered pathway towards the front door while they were talking. And, as they approached, one of the house-boys came forward to open it for them. Mr. Ngono remembered with disappointment that, coming as he had done on his motor-cycle, he had nothing to hand to the boy as he went in; no hat, no umbrella, no brief-case, nothing.
It was pleasant all the same to have his drink brought to him on one of the electro-plated salvers that were on the inventory of the bungalow. And he was feeling better already.
‘Chin, chin,’ he said as he held the whisky-and-soda up in front of him. ‘Very happy days. Many more safaris.’
He took a sip, and then remembered his manners again.
‘And her Ladyship?’ he asked. ‘We have all been praying for her recovery most fervently. She is like a mascot to us.’
Mr. Ngono was enjoying himself. He felt suddenly enlarged and carefree, like an undergraduate again.
Harold wondered how much to tell him.
‘Lady Anne is much better,’ he said.
‘Then you have seen her?’ Mr. Ngono asked.
‘Only for a moment,’ Harold replied. ‘She isn’t well enough for visitors.’
Mr. Ngono brought his hands together in delight.
‘But she made an exception for you,’ Mr. Ngono reminded him. ‘Isn’t that absolutely top-hole? Altogether the most gracious kind of compliment any sick invalid can possibly think of.’
Mr. Ngono was, indeed, pleased to hear the news. By itself, it had made his visit to the bungalow worthwhile. Apart from the Residency household, Mr. Ngono was now the only man in the whole of Amimbo to know positively that the affair was still going on.
‘And there is another matter also,’ Mr. Ngono went on. ‘Upon her Ladyship’s complete recovery, which is a foregone conclusion, her friends deeply and earnestly hope that she will continue to live here in Amimbo among them. It would be a most popular wheeze, also of the utmost democracy.’
‘Is that what you have been wanting to see me about?’ Harold asked him.
But Mr. Ngono was still playing for time.
‘It was to request an interview with Mr. Frith, our new Chief Secretary no less,’ he said, glancing over his shoulder. ‘I wrote to him extending cordial and happy congratulations from all my staffs—those at the bar, at the dance-hall, at my import business and at the other various enterprises with which I am connected. Also on behalf of my father’s tribe and his numerous villages. Very proud and well-deserved, I told him. He will most undoubtedly be Sir Frith before one can say Jack Robinson. But I have received only a most formal reply.’
‘But why do you want to see him?’
‘To pay those same profound compliments by word of mouth in person,’ Mr. Ngono replied. ‘Why else should I want to bother anyone so extremely over-busy and fussed with affairs as our Chief Secretary? It was my father’s express wish, you get it?’
The house-boy had come in with more ice, and then withdrawn again. He was somewhere behind the bead-curtain—still listening Mr. Ngono did not doubt; that was if the boy were not back already in the kitchen repeating what he had just overheard.
Mr. Ngono could afford to take no chances, and he acted brilliantly.
‘Your gramophone,’ he said. ‘Manufactured, I see, by no other than His Master’s Voice. I am exceedingly closely interested—with a view to securing the exclusive agency, of course. Either that, or Columbia. If I might be permitted to hear the tone for the purposes of comparison. Something loud and jazzy to be preferred. I shall represent the catalogue of all new records, too, most naturally.’
It was the Signals Officer, in an effort to keep up the friendly atmosphere of safari, who had insisted on lending the gramophone. Harold had not used it once since it had been left there. Mr. Ngono turned the machine at right angles so that the full blast of the music would be directed towards the bead-curtain.
Then he came over and put his mouth down close to Harold’s ear.
‘It is urgently essential, real life-and-death in fact, that we speak where no one can hear us. The simultaneous moment the record stops it will be too late. I shall return to my chair and we will again loudly discuss the bloody weather.’
‘Then what do you want me to do?’
‘Invite me, I beg, to walk in your garden without being followed. Take a constitutional stroll with me, in fact. Shake up the jolly old liver before dinner. Then I will most certainly tell you all the dirt. Full dirt, and most alarming.’
It was pleasant enough outside. The sun was getting low by now, and the bank of flame trees beside the red gravel path was lit up only on the further side. Shoulder to shoulder, Harold and Mr. Ngono walked across the zebra pattern of yellow sunlight and thick shadow.
‘It is always most extremely unsafe to speak before the houseboys,’ Mr. Ngono said reprovingly. ‘They repeat everything. Diabolical mimics, some of them, too. They take off everybody—you, me, the whole damn lot of us.’
They were twenty-five yards from the bungalow by now, and Mr. Ngono felt safer.
‘Exclusively, it is about the trial that I wish to speak to you. Already there are plots and counter-plots of immense wickedness being cooked up. They are saying that Old Moses is entirely innocent. They will seek to prove it so.’
‘Well, isn’t that for the judge to decide?’ Harold asked him.
Mr. Ngono shook his head.
‘By then it will be too late. Every single goddam witness will have been bribed. In terms of great profitability, too. And certain most distinguished people, absolute top rung in all respects, will have been exposed to the very common gaze.’
‘You always get rumours before a big trial,’ Harold told him.
This time Mr. Ngono had kept his voice quiet and level, but Harold could see that his hands were trembling.
‘These are not rumours and inventions,’ he said. ‘Damn well, they’re not. They are the most severe and practical facts. There is one wicked and evil man, entirely without conscience, working night and day making them come true. I am here at the most considerable bodily danger to give you warning.’
‘And where would I find this man?’ Harold asked.
‘In the offices of War Drum’ Mr. Ngono replied. ‘Seated in the editorial chair itself. He is the one in charge of all arrangements; extremely ingenious arrangements some of them. A most violent press campaign has been planned. And he has large sums of money. More than enough for all purposes. Entirely in notes, too.’
‘How do you know all this?’
Mr. Ngono hung his head for a moment.
‘He told me,’ he said simply. ‘You see we were friends. Most intense personal friends. But unfortunately for entirely other reasons we have quarrelled. Everything I am now saying to you was confided under a vow of the closest sworn secrecy. Vows and everything. Absolutely sacred, in fact.’
‘You realise that I shall have to report this?’ Harold asked.
‘But most naturally,’ Mr. Ngono replied. ‘It is precisely to the very bloody letter what I have been trying to fix up for some time. Then Mr. Talefwa will undoubtedly be arrested and most severely punished, and he will regret very much having quarrelled with me.’
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