Green City in the Sun

by Wood, Barbara

  "Rose," Grace said in a tight voice, "please come and sit down. I'm afraid there's some bad news."

  But she remained in the doorway. "What is it?"

  The inspector shifted self-consciously. He had glimpsed Countess Treverton on occasion—in her box at the Nairobi Racecourse or riding by in her chauffeured car. She was always beautiful and every bit the aristocrat. Her appearance now shocked him: the disheveled hair, half pinned up, half falling down; the rumpled dressing gown; the circles under her eyes; and that monstrous bruise.

  Grace said, "Rose, there's been an—" She stopped. She had been about to say "accident."

  "Is someone hurt?"

  Grace, unable to speak, turned to Sir James, who said, "Valentine is dead, Rose."

  Rose flinched, as if she had been struck.

  "Apparently he shot himself—" James's voice caught.

  Rose looked confused. "Valentine is dead?" she whispered. "He killed himself? But where?"

  "In his car, Your Ladyship," the inspector said. "On the Kiganjo Road. Sometime during the night. I offer my deepest condolences."

  She turned woodenly and moved to one of the dining room chairs. She put her hand on it as if to pull it out but simply stood, her eyes searching the polished surface of the table. "Valentine," she murmured. "Dead..."

  Then she buried her face in her hands and cried, "I hadn't meant for that to happen! Oh, Carlo!"

  After the inspector had gone, James and Grace helped Rose into the living room. "Rose," said Grace in a numb voice, "what happened last night? How did you hurt your face? And why haven't you gone away with Carlo?"

  Rose stared into her lap. "Valentine hit me. He came upstairs and said he was going to stop me from leaving him. We had a row. He struck me across the face."

  Grace waited. "And then what happened?"

  "I don't know. He knocked me unconscious. I only just woke up a few minutes ago. I didn't hear him leave the house—" Rose started to sob. "You must believe me! I hadn't meant for him to die!"

  "WELL," INSPECTOR MITCHELL said as he walked into the small, plain police station, "this'll be one for the gossips!"

  An African constable looked up from his Corona typewriter and grinned.

  Mitchell shook his head and hung his hat on a peg. "Nothing like a high society suicide to get the tongues wagging!"

  As he was about to sit down at his desk to his morning tea and toast, another constable came running in. "Bwana! Come quick!"

  With a sigh, and asking himself why he had ever left his peaceful Cheshire to emigrate to Kenya, Inspector Mitchell followed the constable outside and around back into the police yard. Lord Treverton's car was there, its door and trunk open, undergoing an inspection by two constables.

  When Mitchell came around to the rear, he stopped cold and looked into the trunk. "Good Lord! Who is it?"

  Third-Grade Constable Kamau said, "We don't know yet, sir. There appear to be no identity papers on him. But we haven't searched him thoroughly. I wanted you to see him like this before we moved him."

  "Dead, I suppose?"

  "And for a long time, I think."

  "Get the photographer out here."

  Mitchell gazed down at the body in the trunk and felt all appetite for breakfast evaporate. The victim, wearing only trousers and a white silk shirt, was barefoot and bound with rope at the ankles and wrists. He had been shot through the head.

  "EXECUTION STYLE?" SAID Superintendent Lewis of the Criminal Investigations Division in Nairobi. He had just arrived in Nyeri, after receiving a call from Inspector Mitchell, and was accompanying the inspector out to the police yard.

  "It looks that way," Mitchell said. "Trussed up like a sacrificial goat. Shot once, cleanly, through the head."

  "Any idea who he is?"

  "None at all. We've asked around. Appears to be a foreigner. No one knows him, and no one's been reported missing."

  They came to the car and looked into the empty trunk. Blood was spattered near the wheel well.

  "I reckon he was made to climb in," Mitchell said. "His hands and feet were tied, and then he was shot. The earl saved himself the trouble of trying to get a body into the trunk."

  Superintendent Lewis, a short, plump man with bifocals and a walrus mustache, stroked his chin in thought. He'd been called in on the Treverton case because it now involved a murder. "Are the pictures ready yet?"

  "Not yet, Superintendent. But I've told the man to hurry with the developing."

  Lewis walked around to the left side of the car and looked in. Directly across, on the driver's door, he saw a small bloodstain, just about on level, he estimated, with where the earl's head would have been as he sat behind the wheel.

  "The motor was running, you say?"

  "Yes, Superintendent. The way I see it, Lord Treverton put the man in the trunk, shot him, then drove off with the intention of dumping the body where animals could get at it or of burying it. But somewhere along the way, on the Kiganjo Road, he was overcome with guilt and remorse, pulled over, and put the gun to his own head."

  "Has the pathologist arrived yet?"

  "He's on his way up from Nairobi."

  Superintendent Lewis looked all over the inside of the car, noted the few things scattered about—a pair of men's gloves, an old magazine, a blanket neatly folded—then settled his small, intelligent eyes on the passenger seat. There were flecks of dried mud on it. Stepping back, he looked down at the running board and saw two big smudges of mud, which might or might not be taken for footprints.

  "Does the family know about this development yet?" he asked Inspector Mitchell.

  "Not yet. I informed them of the earl's death this morning. I thought I'd wait until you took a look at the situation before I followed up.

  The superintendent looked at Mitchell over the rim of his bifocals and said, "If you don't mind, Inspector, I'd like to be the one to break this news to them."

  Inside the police office the two men sat over the newly developed photographs. Superintendent Lewis lingered a long time over the shots of Treverton, his head, in profile, leaning against the window, a small round hole with powder burns in his left temple. There was also a photograph of the gun in his hand, resting on the seat at his side. In the picture bits of mud on the passenger seat could be seen. And the mud appeared to be fresh.

  THEY WERE SITTING at the breakfast table with cold cups of tea before them when Rose came in and said, "He's not there!"

  James got up and helped her into a chair, while Mona poured from a fresh teapot and pressed the steaming cup into her mother's hands. But Rose didn't drink. "Carlo isn't in the greenhouse!" she said.

  "Where could he be?"

  Tim Hopkins got up and went to the window. He looked out at the deserted coffee fields, listened to the silence from the river, where the processing machinery stood idle, and heard, far away, the song of mourning in the Kikuyu village. The earl, he knew, would be greatly missed.

  But not by him.

  "Where would Carlo have gone to?" Mona asked, sitting next to her mother and laying a hand on her arm.

  Rose shook her head as tears gathered in her eyes.

  "Perhaps he got worried because you hadn't shown up as planned," James said. "Maybe he's at the train station."

  Tim said, "Someone's coming. Oh, it's that police inspector again. Got another bloke with him this time."

  "Grace," said Rose, seizing her sister-in-law's wrist, "I don't want to talk to them! Please keep them away from me!"

  "Don't worry, Rose," Grace said bleakly. Her face was white and drawn; she hadn't touched her tea. "James and I will see to everything."

  But Superintendent Lewis wanted in particular to ask Lady Rose a few questions. His first was how she had come by the bruise on her face.

  She twisted her hands in her lap and didn't meet his eyes as she said, "I fell."

  "You fell?"

  "Last night. I tripped on the edge of the carpet and hit my jaw on the edge of the dressing table."
/>   "Do you know what time your husband left the house last night?"

  "No. I was—sleeping."

  "Do you know why he left the house in the middle of the night?"

  "Superintendent," said James, "is this really necessary? Lady Rose has suffered a terrible shock. Surely I can answer your questions. I was in the house last night, too."

  His bushy eyebrows rose. "You were? Well then, perhaps you can help." He pulled a small notepad out of his breast pocket, flipped it open, and said to James, "You were close friends with the earl, were you not?"

  "We've known each other for years."

  "Was Lord Treverton right-handed or left-handed?"

  "He was right-handed. I say, what is this all about? And why has CID been called into this?"

  "Because, Sir James, there has been a serious development in the case since the earl was found this morning."

  "What sort of development?"

  He reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a photograph. "It seems a murder was committed as well."

  Lewis watched their faces as he told of the body in the trunk and of his theory that Valentine shot the man and was on his way to disposing of the body when he, too, was killed.

  "We are trying to identify the victim. Perhaps you know him?"

  They bent their heads over the grisly photograph. Mona turned away, her hand pressed to her mouth. Tim said, "Jesus Christ," while James and Grace looked at it, stunned.

  But when Rose leaned over and saw the body of Carlo in the trunk, bound hand and foot with a bullet wound in his head, she suddenly screamed, "Valentine, you monster!" and collapsed to the floor in a faint.

  "RATHER AN INTERESTING reaction," Superintendent Lewis said back at the police station. "Wouldn't you say?"

  Mitchell sipped his tea, his eyes focused on the bare block wall of his office. "I'd say that Lady Rose knew the chap."

  "That was my impression. The others reacted predictably enough. I didn't see any sign of recognition on their faces. They were simply looking at the shocking photo of a dead body. But Her Ladyship ... now there was a reaction."

  "Superintendent?" Dr. Forsythe, the young pathologist sent up from Nairobi, came in. "I've just started the autopsy you ordered on the earl, but I had to stop because there's something you must see."

  "What is it?"

  "You won't believe it. You had better come see for yourself."

  The police "mortuary" was actually an all-purpose room adjoining the one barred cell. The body of Carlo Nobili lay under a canvas on top of some packing crates; Valentine Treverton was lying stretched out on a table, naked.

  The pathologist didn't have to point out to the superintendent what had caught his attention. The detective had seen stab wounds before.

  It was very neat, just to the left of the breastbone, and practically bloodless.

  "This is what killed him," Dr. Forsythe said, "not the bullet in the head. I'd stake my reputation on it."

  Mitchell whistled. It looked so harmless, just a slit in the skin, about an inch and a half long, with a trickle of dark blood.

  But Lewis knew how deadly that insignificant-looking mark could be. Stab wounds, especially those that entered body cavities, such as the belly or chest, rarely produced a lot of blood. The damage was done internally. He had no doubt that the knife had cut a major vessel, possibly even the heart itself, and that when the earl's chest was opened, they would find it filled with blood.

  "You definitely say this is the cause of death?" he asked the doctor.

  "I'll be more positive when I look inside, but judging from its location, I'd say yes. And when I look closely at the head wound, it appears to me to have been inflicted after death."

  "To make a murder look like suicide!" Mitchell said.

  The man from the CID turned on his heel and strode back into the office, where he retrieved the police photographs from Mitchell's desk. He studied in particular the ones of the passenger seat, showing mud. When the inspector joined him, Lewis said, "The car was at the side of the road, as if the earl had pulled over for a reason, and he left the motor running as if he hadn't intended on staying parked for long. Do you know what I think? I think someone caught up with him and got him to pull over. Someone who was carrying a knife."

  "You know," Mitchell said as he picked up the case file and thumbed through it, "now that I think of it, the woman who discovered the car, Nurse Billings, said something in her statement about bicycle tire tracks around the car. Where is it? Here."

  Lewis read the nurse's report of the tracks leading up to the passenger side of the car and then doubling back toward Nyeri. He put the paper down and said, "I've got another scenario for you, Inspector. Tell me what you think of this. The earl shot the bloke in the trunk. We'll figure motive when we've got the victim's identity, and we can go to Lady Rose for that. Ballistics in Nairobi will tell us if the same gun fired both bullets. No doubt the earl did do the trunk murder and was, as you say, on his way to getting rid of the body. But then, let's say..." He began pacing the small floor; he stopped and turned to Inspector Mitchell. "Let us say that someone followed the earl and caught up with him on the Kiganjo Road. He flagged him over, and the earl stopped probably because he knew the person on the bicycle. That person then walked to the car, climbed into the passenger seat, tracking mud because it had just been raining, and stabbed the earl once, through the chest. Then the person panicked and, seeing the gun His Lordship had used on the man in the trunk, decided to make it look like suicide."

  "Surely he'd know the stab wound would be detected."

  "Not necessarily. There was no blood on the earl's clothing. And if no autopsy was going to be performed, it could very easily have been missed. And it damn near was missed, because I ordered the autopsy only after you discovered the bloke in the trunk."

  "Which means," Mitchell said slowly, "that chances are the person with the knife didn't know about the man in the trunk."

  Lewis's eyebrows arched. "Maybe"—he stroked his chin—"maybe that person thought he was preventing the earl from committing the murder, not knowing he was too late."

  The two policemen stared at each other. The enormity of the case, which had taken place in Mitchell's normally peaceful and uneventful district, started to settle upon the inspector's shoulders. He developed a pronounced stoop within minutes.

  "I want every possible witness rounded up," Lewis said abruptly, pulling out his notepad and starting to write. "I want every lead, no matter how insignificant, to be traced. I want that bicycle found. I want the knife found. But I'll tell you one thing, Mitchell. Things aren't quite right in that big fancy house on the hill."

  GRACE PAUSED ON the veranda of Bellatu to pull the black veil of her hat down over her eyes. Today was the second time she had worn black since her service in the navy, twenty-six years before.

  She watched as everyone got into the line of cars waiting to go to the Treverton family plot, where Valentine was going to be laid to rest next to Arthur, his only son. Grace was shaken. She desperately needed James's arm to lean on.

  Morgan Acres, the banker's eldest son, was the Treverton family lawyer, and he had just told Grace the most astounding thing.

  Valentine's will had been read that morning, revealing no surprises: Rose was left a rich widow, heiress to the Bellatu coffee estate plus the ancestral estate, Bella Hill, back in England. But after the others had left, Mr. Acres had taken Grace aside and told her that regrettably, because of His Lordship's death, the annual contribution to her mission bank account, which had been started years ago, would now end.

  Grace had been so stunned that she had had to sit down. "Valentine?" she had said. "My brother was the anonymous benefactor? I had always thought it was James...."

  After all this time, Val, she thought sadly. And I never got a chance to thank you.

  James finally came out onto the veranda and took Grace's arm. They climbed into a limousine, which they shared with Rose and Mona, and the procession moved out. T
im Hopkins rode at the end in his own truck, thinking of the grave he was about to visit, which he had not been to in eight years—Arthur's grave.

  The line of cars moved slowly down the dirt road that skirted the vast estate toward the lonely spot where a section of ground had been fenced off. Africans stood along the road, waving a sad good-bye to their bwana. David Mathenge was there, with his mother, watching silently as the grieving white people went to put another of their kind into the ground.

  SUPERINTENDANT LEWIS WAS studying the photos pinned to the bulletin board—pictures of Lord Treverton's car and of the earl's body—and the map of the murder scene, with a dotted line showing the route Nurse Billings claimed the bicycle had taken, when Inspector Mitchell came breathlessly in.

  "We've got it!" he said, and held out a large envelope to the detective.

  Lewis took it and hefted it thoughtfully. He was tired. The two policemen had been five days at the investigation, using every available man on the small Nyeri force and borrowing forensic specialists from Nairobi. They had had little sleep, too much coffee, and both men had red eyes. The contents of this envelope were the culmination of their five-day search.

  Yesterday they had found the bicycle.

  It had been abandoned in the bush approximately halfway between the earl's car and the town of Nyeri, tossed on its side with a punctured rear tire. The detectives surmised that when the tire had blown, the murderer had dragged the bike into the bush and then made the rest of the way home on foot. The bicycle had been identified as belonging to the Treverton plantation.

  Their interrogations had been thorough and intense. Both had gone out with a pair of askaris, talking to anyone, no matter how remotely connected with the earl, who might give a shred of evidence, the tiniest clue. They had even questioned the Africans who worked and lived on Treverton's land, including the medicine woman, Wachera, who just kept saying something about a thahu. But the most telling interviews had been with the family members themselves.