Vera’s skin went cold. The design he traced was that strange Egyptian-like one that was on the spear that had killed her uncle.
Embu smiled with glee. “The trader said that it was very old. I sold it for more rupees than I have ever had from that white man—Too-many-hats. He always wants to buy all the Maasai spears. What can he do with so many of them?”
Vera’s breath stopped. Too-many-hats was the Kikuyu name for Richard Newland.
12.
Justin Tolliver left his horse with Kwai Libazo in the shade of a jacaranda tree and approached the Buxton house in Parklands, the toney white residential district of Nairobi. The front door, with glass panels on either side, was far too grand for the size of the building. He pulled the cord for the bell and waited. There was no awning over the doorstep. At this hour, any caller waited in direct sunlight.
In a few seconds, a slender Somali, very grand in a red and blue turban with a brocade vest over a silk robe, opened the door. Tolliver would have expected to see such a creature in the entourage of the Sultan of Zanzibar. Once he had stated his business, the majordomo let him in. The door led through a tiny entryway and directly to a living room decorated with chairs upholstered in embroidered silk and the sort of sandalwood furniture that one found in the London parlors of men who had served in India.
The too-chic Somali left Tolliver standing there holding his pith helmet and disappeared to the back of the house. A few minutes later, Lucy descended the overly wide staircase evidently designed to lend drama to her entrances. She took full advantage of it by pausing halfway down and extending her lithe arms. The gesture might have had the effect she intended if she were wearing the light cotton frock she had sported at breakfast or that blue-beaded evening gown, instead of the rather dowdy usual uniform of European women in the Protectorate, too many layers of khaki twill. “To what do I owe the honor of this call?” She spoke as if she had never tried to drum up his suspicions against her husband.
“I am sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Buxton. I have just one question to ask you about what you told me this morning. I should have thought of it then, but as you know, my head was not right.” He did not blush. Not even when she responded with, “Your presence does disturb me, Mr. Tolliver, but you already know that. Can I give you something to drink?”
“No, thank you. I want only this one piece of information. How did Josiah Pennyman find out about Mr. Buxton’s dealings, that you say could ruin your husband if the word got out.” She frowned so deeply he thought he must reassure her. “By the way, I want you to know that I have not reported the details of what you said to anyone yet. I thought I had better not until—”
She put her fingers on his arm. At closer range, Tolliver could smell gin on her. “Don’t you understand?” she said earnestly. “I do not care if Kirk’s crimes become known.”
“Surely his being accused will make a great deal of difference in your life. It must matter to you.”
“He does not matter to me.”
Tolliver could not respond in any way—not as a policeman and certainly not as a well-bred man. In the silent moment that followed, he saw her motivation. She wanted her husband disgraced so she could divorce him. He ignored that suspicion. “It will matter,” he said. “If he loses his position, you will lose yours, too.” He looked down at the hat in his hand. “You must think about that.”
Still she said nothing.
“Was it you who—”
She stopped his words with a gesture and a tinkling laugh and completed his sentence for him. “—Who told Josiah. Of course it was. I thought it might get me free of Kirk, if he was punished and disgraced. Free to marry Dr. Pennyman. You see, that has been my downfall. For all his airs and graces and his endless rubbers of bridge with the aristocrats, Kirk is not one of them and never will be. He will never be my ticket into the upper classes. Since my disappointment in him, I have been looking for the real article.”
Everything she was saying surprised Tolliver. The women he knew at home might be scheming viragos, but they would never admit to their plotting—no matter how much gin they had drunk. Standing here listening to her made his blood itch. He could barely stand still for it. But he had to hear her out. There was something in what Lucy was telling him, something that could make a difference in solving the case of Josiah Pennyman. So he steeled himself against the intensity of his discomfort and let her prattle on, even smiled to encourage her.
His reputedly adorable boyish grin did not work its magic, though. Lucy must have read his thoughts in his face. Suddenly the stream of her complaints dried up. She clamped her rather prominent front teeth on her bottom lip, thought for a moment, and finally said stiffly, “I think I have answered what you said was your one question, Assistant District Superintendent Tolliver.” This was the first time she had ever addressed him by his title. Coming from a woman of her station, such as she was, it was not a compliment.
His only way to escape the silence that then fell was to run away.
As quickly as was seemly, he made for Libazo and the horses and sped on his way to Newland’s farm.
* * *
Like all settlers, Justin Tolliver and Richard Newland had more than a passing acquaintance. They did not know each other well, but they had met at cricket matches and club dances and dinners. Tolliver did not know much more about the man than one learned at such events and had never been to Newland’s farm. He let Kwai Libazo lead the way, which took them by a very hilly forest road on the north side of the rail line, slow going since they had to be careful of their horses on the uneven surface and wary of what might lurk among the trees on either side.
Tolliver began the trek by amusing himself trying to identify the birds that chattered and flew up on either side of them as they cantered along the flat stretches and picked their careful way up and down the gullies. The only creatures he spotted that he could name were a red-headed weaver and paradise fly-catcher, which he was sure were the easiest to tell, with their distinctive beak colors. He knew every bird in the whole of Yorkshire and had since he was in short pants. Here, so far, he was hopeless at this. He wondered if Vera McIntosh could teach him their names. Once she came into his mind, he wound up entertaining a fantasy about her that felt more like a honeymoon than a birdwatching excursion.
He forced his mind to concentrate on his investigation. Picturing the nearly apoplectic district commissioner during their meeting that morning drove away any pleasant ideas of what it would be like to make love to Vera. Cranford was losing all patience. Justin could not keep on insisting they eliminate anyone else who might have murdered Pennyman. To Tolliver’s way of thinking, the whole business was a terrible muddle. He was supposed to be proving exactly what happened. But how could he do so positively. He could not find a reliable witness among the natives to give him facts for or against Mbura. He had taken the route of process of elimination. A foolish choice since there was no way he could eliminate everyone in the Protectorate, black and white. He was traveling—very like this trip on his horse, sometimes fast, most of the time painstakingly slowly, and he feared he was on a dead-end street.
Each new piece of information, rather than driving away doubt, complicated matters. Libazo’s theory that it could have been young Otis McIntosh seemed absurd. The gangly ginger-haired boy was an earnest and studious sort. There was no sharp edge on him.
Tolliver had no idea what to make of Lucy Buxton’s latest revelation, nor how he might find out any information that would confirm or negate her latest theory that Buxton had paid someone to do it. Given the scarcity of European women, and Lucy’s obvious charms, he imagined that half the male population in Nairobi, married or not, would love to see the voluptuous Mrs. Buxton free, which she certainly would be if her husband turned out to be the murderer. Tolliver tried to push his mind away from any thought of his own libido in that regard, but her willingness to throw herself at … His picture of Mrs. Buxton’s lovely derriere suddenly evaporated. A passing notion from the c
onversation he had just had with the lady now blazed in his mind. No one would be happier to see Lucy free of Kirk than Lucy herself. Justin was just beginning to see clearly the real reason Lucy would want to point one of her pretty fingers at her husband, when he heard a crashing sound to his right. Libazo simultaneously stopped in the road in front of him, raised his right arm, and then drew his index finger to his lips. He signaled Tolliver to go back and to his left. Without taking their eyes off where the noise was coming from, they moved behind a sausage tree, where they could still see the road.
“Rhino,” Libazo whispered long before Tolliver made out its distinctive shape. Kwai held out his arm in front of Justin’s chest. “She has her baby with her.”
Two huge animals, not all that different in size, emerged onto the road. The larger, the mother according to Libazo, stopped and waited; the smaller one stopped, too. They did not look around them, but just stood completely still for several minutes. Justin gripped the stock of the rifle in the holster attached to his saddle. He doubted he could stop one charging rhinoceros with it, let alone two. Slowly, hoping not to make a sound, he drew the weapon, but before he had it free, the lead rhino nodded twice, just as a person would do to signal that all was clear, and walked a few yards up the road. The smaller beast followed, and they soon disappeared into the woods on the left side.
Libazo did not lower his arm and Tolliver did not return his rifle to its holster until the crunching sound of the animals’ passage disappeared.
The rest of their journey passed without incident, if Tolliver did not count the six giraffes they saw walking away from them when they emerged from the woodland road. They did not stop to watch. He smiled to himself. There was a time when seeing one giraffe, even in a zoo, would have been momentous. He wasn’t an old Africa hand yet, but he had taken a step closer.
Before long, they saw Richard Newland’s house in the distance. Newland grew sisal. His spread looked like no farm Justin Tolliver had ever seen before. Row upon row of tall spikey plants, the leaves of which gave fiber that could be made into rope, twine, mats. It was hard to believe that such an endeavor could make enough profit to sustain an upper-class English family, but it did. Many families in the Protectorate were doing quite well out of sisal.
The farmhouse was a rather plain affair, long and low with a thatched roof, at the crest of gentle slope surrounded by the croplands that stretched almost to the blue gray hills that looked miles away.
Tolliver and Libazo moved carefully through the rows and dismounted on the scraggly lawn. The inevitable native houseboy in white, with a red fez, came down the few steps from a porch that ran the length of the house. “Mr. Richard is away from home, B’wana,” he said in excellent English.
“I understand that,” Tolliver said. “Is there no one from the family that I can speak to.”
“Only Miss Wilson and the little girl, sir. Mrs. Newland has gone to visit the neighbors. We are expecting her home well before tea.”
“I would like to speak to Miss Wilson, then,” Tolliver said, though he did not know the woman at all. “And may I trouble you for some water.”
“Very good, sir.”
Once the houseboy had gone, Tolliver turned to Kwai Libazo. “Do you know who this Miss Wilson is?”
“The governess,” Libazo answered, but he pronounced it gun-ver-ness.
“Do you think you can find the people you spoke to when you came on Sunday, who told you when the shooting party set off?”
“Yes, sir.” Libazo seemed to be imitating the clipped tones of the houseboy’s English.
“Go and find them, then, so I can ask them my own questions, and take the horses and water them while you are at it.”
Tolliver mounted the steps. The porch was pleasant, wide and set with rattan benches covered with cushions in native cloth and lined with ferns on stands. The houseboy returned carrying a glass and a carafe on a silver tray, quickly followed by Miss Wilson—a thin woman who looked about fifty. Behind her was an extraordinarily pretty little girl of about six, with pale skin, sky-blue eyes, and black curls. Two beautifully groomed collies accompanied them. The dogs took no notice of Tolliver.
He introduced himself but did not state his business.
“How do you do?” the governess said. “I am afraid you have come when the family—”
“Are all away,” Tolliver said in unison with her.
She smiled, but her eyes held suspicion, which deepened with Tolliver’s first question. “I believe Mr. Newland is away on a shooting safari. I wonder if you can tell exactly when he left.”
Smoothly as if she had rehearsed the evasion ahead of time, she indicated a chair and said, “I am forgetting myself, Lieutenant. May I offer you some tea?”
“I am an assistant district superintendent of police,” he said. “No, thank you.” Tolliver would have loved a cup of tea, but he wanted answers even more. When she didn’t speak, Tolliver repeated his question. She made a too dramatic pretense of trying to remember and then said, “I am not sure. Excuse me. Wait here, Ella.” She let go of the little girl’s hand and went indoors.
“My brother and Otis McIntosh have gone with Papa,” little Ella said. “They always get to go away, and I never do. Joseph said you are a policeman.” She knit her brows. They were as shiny black as her hair.
“Joseph?”
“Our houseboy. His name used to be something else, but the blasted French priests made him a blasted Catholic. Now we have to call him Joseph. That’s what Papa says. Are you a policeman?”
“Yes, I am.” Tolliver tried as hard as he could to look as if he were taking her seriously.
“Then can you make Papa and Dickey—that’s my brother— can you make them take me with them when they do interesting things and not leave me here with boring Nanny Wilson?” She glanced over her shoulder to make sure her boring nanny hadn’t heard. “It isn’t fair that Dickey gets to do all the things that are fun and I get to do all the things that are boring.” Tolliver thought of Vera, who had the same complaint and had expressed it in the same open and ingenuous way.
“I understand completely,” he said. “I have an older brother who gets to do all the interesting things, too.”
“Isn’t being a policeman interesting? I should think it is ever so interesting.”
Her nanny came out carrying a large white hat, which she tied under the little girl’s chin with a length of tulle. “Go then and play on the lawn,” she said.
Ella stamped her foot and folded her arms across her chest.
Miss Wilson clamped her hands together in front of her as if she were holding herself back from doing more than scolding the girl. “Now, please young lady.”
“You see,” Ella said to Justin. She marched down the steps stamping her foot on each one. The dogs followed her.
Once Ella was out of earshot, Miss Wilson indicated a chair for Tolliver and took one herself. “I did not want her to hear any of our discussion. She is a very precocious little thing.”
Now I am going to get somewhere, Tolliver thought. He realized that all he wanted to hear was that the hunting party had gone off on schedule and that there was no reason to think that Vera McIntosh’s family was withholding anything from him.
“I think I know why you are here,” Miss Wilson whispered, though the little girl had gone to the bottom of the lawn and was sitting on a swing that hung from a tree at the edge of the sisal fields. Rather than swinging, she was turning, twisting the ropes around and then letting them unwind so that she spun.
“Can you answer my question?”
“I would rather leave that to Mr. and Mrs. Newland,” she said, “but I will tell you what they will not.”
The conspiratorial tone in her voice hit Tolliver at the base of the back of his neck and ran a pulse down his spine. He sat very still, not tensing, as his body wanted him to. He waited.
Nanny Wilson looked around again and leaned toward him. “No one in the house will ever tell you this but
me, but I feel it must be known at least to you. But before I divulge this, you must promise me that if you must use the information, you will never reveal that it came from me.”
“I am not sure that I can do that, if it is evidence you are giving.”
She gripped her hands together as she had with the child. “Then, I shan’t tell you. If it was to get out that I had revealed a family secret, I would be dismissed and I would never find another position in the Protectorate. I must have your word on this before I proceed.”
Tolliver was torn, but the knowledge, whatever it was, might be the answer to all the riddles that had been plaguing him. He made his promise very specific. “Very well. You have my word that no one will ever know that I got it from you.” He looked into her pale eyes as he said it.
She nodded curtly to show she accepted his assurance. “That doctor, Pennyman?” She paused as if she wanted Tolliver to acknowledge that he knew who Pennyman was.
“Yes?”
“You do know that he was in an awful scrape in Edinburgh before he came out?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, Mrs. Newland’s family has hushed up exactly what happened. They started a rumor that it was some young wife that he went after.” She waited again.
“Yes?” he said softly, trying to hide his impatience.
“Well, that was just a smoke screen to protect the reputation of the person who was—er—accosted by Josiah Pennyman.”
A woman rode up to the foot of the lawn. Before she was able to dismount, a native boy in khaki drill shorts and a short-sleeved shirt came running from behind the house to take the reins and lead her horse away. “Darling,” she shouted to the girl on the swing, and took her up in a piggyback. Followed by the two collies, she jogged around in circles for a minute and sent the child into peals of laughter before she started across the lawn toward the house.
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