The Leopard's Prey

by Suzanne Arruda

  “And you are privy to that?”

  “I know he attended Purdue University in the United States, where he studied mechanical engineering. He was a pilot in the American Expeditionary Forces during the war, and he lost his lower right leg as a result of shrapnel in the ankle.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “He told me.” As she said it, Jade knew her reply sounded flimsy. If Finch believed Sam had some mysterious past, he certainly wouldn’t take her word for the truth. But maybe he’d believe a higher source. “You might cable Lord Avery Dunbury in London. Sam and he are friends. He’ll verify all this.” As an afterthought she added, “The Dunburys can vouch for me as well.”

  “I already have,” said Finch. “Yesterday afternoon, in fact, but I have not received any such reply, which makes me question that alleged friendship. I must instruct you not to speak of any of this to either of the Thompsons or to Mr. Featherstone.” He stood and motioned for her to follow him to a corner table. “I shall need a set of your fingerprints, if you please.”

  There on the table was a shallow copper tray, thinly inked and smudged. He took a roller and carefully ran it back and forth over the tray, smoothing out the ink film to a uniform layer. “Spread your fingers, if you will.” Without asking for her permission, he took her right hand firmly but gently pressed each digit on the tray, then repeated the action, one finger at a time, across a clean page in a notebook. “And now with your left hand,” he said. Jade complied. “If you would please sign your name and the date in the corner, then you are excused.”

  Jade signed the notebook and wiped her fingers on a proffered towel. Why, she wondered, hadn’t Avery replied immediately to Finch’s inquiry? Normally she would suspect he and Beverly had gone on holiday and weren’t reachable, but Beverly was over seven months pregnant; they weren’t going anywhere. Had something happened? Jade stepped out of the office. Her gaze immediately sought out and found Sam’s. The intensity of his expression told her that they were in more trouble than she cared to admit. What did Finch get him to reveal? Is he worried that he incriminated me or himself? She knew they hadn’t committed any crime, but that might not matter if Finch believed they did.

  Madeline, on the other hand, seemed much more cheerful than when Jade had entered Finch’s office. She stood and hurried to Jade, waving the newspaper in front of her.

  “Jade, wonderful news. Neville and I are going to adopt a little baby boy.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Ask anyone living in Kenya Colony to name the tribe that exemplifies Africa

  to them, and most will say the Maasai. This is a tribe of warriors, strong in

  their belief that Engai, God, made them. And then, almost as an afterthought,

  He made everyone else.

  —The Traveler

  IT TOOK A minute for Jade’s brain to switch from being a murder suspect to Madeline’s revelation. “What? Adopt a baby boy?” She looked at Neville, who stood by his wife, a wide smile on his weather-beaten face. “How can you be so certain?”

  Madeline held up the newspaper. Jade recognized it as a copy of the Leader of British East Africa by its unmistakable header showing herds of zebra. Maddy turned the page and pointed to a particular notice in the classifieds. “Here,” she said. “Read this.”

  Jade read aloud. “Would someone please adopt a four-month-old baby boy of Dutch origin? Reply voucher 975, the Leader.”

  “And that’s it?” asked Sam. “You just claim the child and it’s yours?” His tone was skeptical.

  “Why not?” asked Maddy. She seemed genuinely confused by Sam’s question.

  Jade, more familiar with life under rustic conditions back home in New Mexico, hastened to explain to Sam. “It might be different in your Indiana, Sam, but this is still the frontier to some extent. The governing bodies have little time or resources to devote to orphans. Anyone willing to take one is welcome to the child.”

  Sam scratched his head. “Back home the orphanages all tend to be run by some religious order, like as not. And if you don’t have any here—”

  Madeline hastened to reassure Sam that the citizens of Nairobi did care about children. “Lady Northey established a splendid home for the children left without care because of the war, but now it is primarily a place for settlers to board their children while they attend school. But this little boy in the paper needs someone. It’s heaven-sent, don’t you see?”

  Jade looked at Maddy’s beaming face and smiled. “That’s wonderful, Maddy, Neville. You’ll be marvelous parents.” Jade handed the paper to Neville. “Makes one wonder what happened.”

  “I suspect his parents both succumbed to some illness,” said Neville. “We’re heading to the Leader office right now to answer the ad.”

  “If the authorities want any references, be sure to have them apply to the Dunburys. That should secure you,” suggested Sam.

  “Good idea,” said Jade, hoping that Beverly would answer this query at least. “You also have a letter from Beverly with you to prove your friendship.” Only don’t tell them you know us.

  Maddy’s smile grew, and her eyes sparkled. “Only just think, Neville, how neatly everything has come together. If we hadn’t had to come in this very morning, we might never have seen this advertisement in time, and now Jade has delivered our reference to us.”

  Yes, thought Jade, if Martin Stokes hadn’t been murdered and we hadn’t been suspects, we might have missed this issue. She kept such macabre thoughts to herself. “Well, then you two had better get a move on.”

  “Meet us at the New Stanley Hotel at one and we’ll have a celebration lunch together,” said Maddy. Then she and Neville hurried out the door.

  Jade and Sam stepped out of police headquarters and crossed the street. Jade didn’t have any particular destination in mind and doubted that Sam did either. She simply wanted to distance herself from Inspector Finch. One glance at her blue-black fingertips told her that would not be easy. She pulled out her handkerchief and wiped them again.

  They walked to bustling Sixth Avenue with its Theatre Royale, post office, and the Standard’s office with its stationery store. Nairobi had changed so much since the war. The population had increased to an unheard-of three thousand Europeans and another eight thousand Indians. The British tended to live in the fringes in Parklands and Muthaiga districts, leaving the inner city by Swamp Road to the Indian population, which first came to build the railroad. Consequently, the colonists were more concerned with ensuring they had better streetlights and traffic signs so that they could drive unimpeded from work to their clubs for their evening scotch-and-soda sundowners, rather than with the overall health of the city. If cases of plague were a problem in the Indian slum, then the general consensus was to keep the Indians in the slum so the plague didn’t spread. The colonists cared even less about the few native slums on the southern fringes.

  Jade saw the bustling city as a veneer of civilization laid over the old Africa. At times the veneer was so convincing that the citizens forgot that the old Africa still struggled to survive. She wondered what some of the pioneers, like Lord Colridge or Harry Hascombe, thought of Nairobi now. Hascombe with his charming smile and less than scrupulous nature now had to take his safari customers farther afield to find game.

  “I should see if the new rolls of film I ordered have arrived,” Jade said.

  Sam raised his eyebrows. “That wouldn’t happen to be at Stokes and Berryhill, now would it?” he asked. Jade nodded. “I’ll go with you.”

  Stokes and Berryhill Ltd., purveyors of farm equipment, kitchen needs, and chemical supplies, occupied a two-story stone building on Sixth Avenue, across the avenue and three shops down from the New Stanley Hotel. The first floor looked to Jade like a general store gone berserker, carrying everything farmers could want, as long as they didn’t desire fine silk dresses and the latest fripperies. The second floor was home to Winston and Pauline Berryhill and their son, Harley, aged sixteen. The store’s truck, a bat
tered black Ford with the words STOKES AND BERRYHILL LTD. painted in red on the sides, was parked in front. Jade wondered who would drive out to all the farms and settlements now that Stokes was dead.

  Once inside, Sam and Jade wended past racks of canned goods, bolts of fabric, and cans of boot black. To their left, rakes, hoes, and pitchforks hung against the wall next to bins of nails and racks of saws and hammers. On the right were shelves of men’s shirts and work trousers. Behind the shirts, glass-fronted cases displayed ladies’ shirtwaists and handkerchiefs, combs, mirrors, and shelves of toiletries. Jade spied boxes of Eucryl tooth powder, Yardley’s hair tonic, and Palm Olive soap. Against the far wall were home remedies and assorted chemicals, everything needed to cure croup, kill rats, treat livestock, or bolster one’s overall vigor. The scents of leather harnesses and sacks of meal collided midway with a recent test spritzing of lavender toilet water.

  Jade’s and Sam’s boots echoed hollowly on the plank floors over the hum of subdued conversation. Pauline Berryhill, a sturdy-looking woman of five foot, five inches, was quietly proclaiming the virtues of Aertex cellular underwear to a female customer, while her husband, Winston, pointed out the finer qualities of the newest pruning shears to a male shopper. Jade kept an ear to the conversations while she and Sam stood waiting their turn.

  “I’m very sorry to hear about Mr. Stokes,” said the woman customer to Mrs. Berryhill. “Such a shock! You must be devastated.”

  Mrs. Berryhill nodded once. “Yes, we’re saddened beyond words.” She tallied up the purchase and took her customer’s money. “Do come again whenever you need anything.”

  “Which one do you want?” Jade whispered to Sam.

  “I’ll take Mr. Berryhill, if you don’t mind.”

  “What? You aren’t going to try to work your daredevil charm on the missus?”

  Sam nodded discreetly at the wife. “I’m not sure she likes me.”

  Before Jade could ask for clarification, Mrs. Berryhill finished reshelving the unsold undergarments, and spying Jade, she smiled and nodded. “Miss del Cameron, how nice to see you. How may I be of assistance? Oh, and Mr. Featherstone,” she added when she saw Sam. “How nice to see you again, too.” Her tone, while not hostile, didn’t sound warm.

  “Hello, Mrs. Berryhill,” replied Jade. “I ordered a shipment of roll film a month ago. I’ve come to see if it has arrived yet.”

  “Yes, I believe it came in earlier this week. If you have a moment, I’ll check and see.”

  Mrs. Berryhill pulled a ledger from the shelf and leafed through the pages. In the meantime, Sam strolled closer to Mr. Berryhill and examined one of the pith solar topees for sale next to a rack of suspenders. Jade had no doubt that Sam intended to pry as much information out of Mr. Berryhill as possible and left him to it.

  “Yes, it’s right here. Roll film for your Kodak and a box of sheets for a Graflex.” She picked up a medium-sized wooden box from the bottom shelf and set it on the counter. Then her fingers ran across the adding machine buttons, pausing only to pull the tally lever. Mrs. Berryhill jotted down the numbers on a receipt book and handed the top copy to Jade, keeping the carbon for herself. “The total is forty-seven rupees,” she said.

  “Did the price go up again?” asked Jade. “That’s much higher than what Mr. Berryhill quoted to me.”

  “No, but it’s the import duties, you see. They have increased,” explained Mrs. Berryhill.

  Jade opened her pocket purse and counted out the money. “I’m very sorry to hear about your partner, Mr. Stokes. I’m sure this sounds rather heartless, but I imagine it puts a bigger burden on you and Mr. Berryhill, doesn’t it? Will you take on a new partner or just hire another assistant?”

  Mrs. Berrryhill looked up, her hazel eyes wide with surprise at this turn of questions. “You’re quite right. It has put a strain on us. You’re the first to make the observation. Everyone else expects us to miss his companionship.” She snorted. “I don’t know how we’re supposed to handle the store and the deliveries or manage a booth at the agricultural fair. Harley will help during the weekends and holidays, but he must finish his schooling.”

  “Mr. Stokes must have been a very important part of your store, then. Someone you and your husband thought you could rely on.” Jade emphasized the word “thought,” hinting that it might not be true.

  Mrs. Berryhill rolled her eyes and glanced to see if her husband was listening. Then she leaned closer to Jade. “He was certainly handy at reaching out to the farmers by making personal trips to them, and I suppose that has brought us a lot of business that might have gone elsewhere, but I won’t miss him here. We will do our best to find a strong man to do the deliveries for us. Someone who can do what he’s told and mind his business. But I doubt there’s a man anywhere who could manage that!”

  Jade decided that Sam was only partly right in his assessment of Mrs. Berryhill. It wasn’t him personally that she disliked; she just didn’t have a very high opinion of men. “Did I understand correctly that he was married? I never met his wife.”

  Mrs. Berryhill’s lips tightened. “That poor thing. I’ve no doubt she’s left for good. Alice deserved better than him. She was such a lovely little creature. I knew her when she was a girl.”

  “When did she leave? Where did she go?” asked Jade, leaning on the counter.

  Mrs. Berryhill shrugged. “I wish I knew.”

  Jade took a different tack. “Still, he must have loved her to have been so heartbroken over her leaving him that he’d kill himself. And such a dreadful way to do it, too.” She deliberately left the method unspoken, hoping Mrs. Berryhill would fill in the gap.

  She didn’t. “I’m sorry he saw fit to do it in Mr. Thompson’s dryer,” Mrs. Berryhill said. “He seems to be a decent sort of man, at least.”

  “Did Mr. Stokes beat his wife?”

  “Not physically. But there are marks a man’s words can leave on a woman’s soul. She could do nothing to please him,” said Mrs. Berryhill. “He rarely let her leave home. I’m one of the few people who ever saw her. Oh, he was all slap-you-on-the-back friendly with the settlers, and I’m sure they considered him a fine fellow, but I never trusted him. I could see it in his eyes.”

  There it was again, Jade thought. The idea that an inner evil was revealed in a look. She could actually believe it with people. Nuances of expression were hard to hide, even for the best poker player. Everyone had his telltale look or twitch when he had something to hide, and it was possible that Mrs. Berryhill had caught on to Martin Stokes.

  “If Mr. Stokes was so horrid to his wife, it makes me wonder whatever possessed her to marry him in the first place.”

  “Ah, well, that’s it, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Berryhill. “Alice was such a beautiful creature, so fair, rather like a wax doll. Who couldn’t fall in love with her? Her parents doted on her, but they both died of typhus near the start of the war. Alice was only nineteen and completely orphaned. No other family. I would have taken her in, but Martin declared for her immediately, before some of the other men in the area had a chance.”

  “She sounds lovely,” said Jade. “Have you a picture of her?”

  Mrs. Stokes hesitated and shot a sideways glance to her husband, who was still busy with Sam. “In my desk.”

  She hurried over to it, unlocked a lower drawer, and returned with a small photograph of a dark-haired woman in her late twenties and a beautiful young girl. Jade recognized the younger face as the same one in Chalmers’ picture. The other woman was plainly Mrs. Berryhill six or seven years ago. Jade thanked her and handed the photo back.

  Mrs. Berryhill slipped the photograph into her skirt pocket and returned to her desk. Jade turned to see Sam, who had resorted to purchasing a new pair of work gloves and a leather-bound ledger, waiting near the front for her to join him. Once they were outside, she asked what he had learned.

  “You don’t suppose we’ll get in trouble with Finch for this, do you?” asked Sam.

  Jade shrugged. “
He told me not to discuss my police interrogation with you or the Thompsons. I didn’t. And currently I’m discussing my shopping experience with you.”

  Sam grinned. “You are a devious woman, Jade.”

  “Not at all. I simply took him at his literal meaning. And if I should talk to Biscuit about the terrors of police headquarters and any of you just happen to eavesdrop, I cannot help it.”

  “I plan to write everything down in a journal.” He waggled the newly purchased ledger. Of course, if I left it lying around and someone chanced on it, I can’t stop them from reading it.”

  “Exactly. Madeline will probably insist on writing her experience up as part of another one of her novels. Since they’re usually about me, I think I should read any early drafts.”

  “Maybe Maddy can convince Neville to start talking in his sleep,” said Sam.

  “By the way,” said Jade, “I don’t think Mrs. Berryhill likes men at all, although she made allowances for Neville. But Stokes must have browbeat his wife. I should have asked if she thought he killed her. She was very unhelpful as far as knowing when or where Alice went.” Jade related what she learned.

  “I wonder, did Stokes run an ad looking for her to throw everyone off the scent? Make it look as though she ran away?” asked Sam.

  “We’re assuming, Sam, that Stokes placed the ad. That box number was too new to make the directory. I’d like to stop at the Standard office after we meet the Thompsons and see if I can find out. Did you learn anything?”

  “I spent some time looking at the farm implements first and saw that he had a few of those corn knives. I said I’d seen them back in the United States and they seemed to be a handy device. Berryhill said Stokes had been going around to all the farmers that grow maize, trying to sell them on it. Then Berryhill made the cold remark that at least this suicide will serve to let people know how sharp the blade is.”