Strange Gods

by Annamaria Alfieri

  At that second, another thought occurred to Tolliver. The Indian jailer was watching these proceedings with great interest. It was not every day, thank goodness, that the man heard a discussion of an execution. “Libazo,” Tolliver said, choosing his words very carefully, “tell Gichinga Mbura that what you have been telling him about must happen very soon.”

  Libazo’s eyes communicated complete understanding. When they left the jail, the Sikh had taken the bait. He said he would begin to prepare the paperwork for the court case and begin the preliminary work to arrange for the hanging afterward.

  Tolliver pretended insensitivity. “I’ll go to the club for a meal and then I will come back and sign the court forms,” he said.

  When Tolliver had finished luncheon, he did not go to the police station but sent Libazo to check on the prisoner. Libazo returned looking properly dismayed. Gichinga Mbura, it seemed, had taken ill, could not or would not eat any of the food that was brought to him for his noon meal and lay on his pallet barely moving.

  Tolliver marched quickly to the district commissioner’s office and told his superior of the turn of events and managed to convince Cranford that there would probably be no need to arrange Gichinga Mbura’s death. All the government of the Protectorate now needed to do was wait. Mbura was in the process of arranging his own demise, by dying of imprisonment, as all understood that African savages certainly would. The district commissioner smiled broadly and allowed as how that would be the best of all possible outcomes. “Save us the trouble of having to justify ourselves to those bleeding hearts in the colonial office.”

  “That was excellent,” Tolliver said to Kwai as they left Government House and started across the street toward the stables. “And now for the next step in my plan.”

  “What will that be, sir,” Kwai asked, but before the captain had a chance to answer, he collapsed in the middle of the street.

  * * *

  At that very moment, having taken the train back to Athi River and returned home, Vera McIntosh was in the throes of discussing Captain Justin Tolliver with her mother. She had decided to engage her mother’s sympathy by revealing that her heart had been broken by Justin Tolliver. When she started the conversation, it was a ruse. Had she known that he was collapsing in the street for the second time in less than ten days, she might have thought better of accusing him to her mother. As it was, she revealed what she had heard about him while she was in town. In the course of her lifetime, Vera had never spoken to her mother in such intimate terms.

  “I have thought he wanted— That he was— Oh, Mother, how could I have been so wrong about his feelings for me. I have seen so many signs that he—” In planning this talk, Vera thought she would have to hide her face and fake tears. To her surprise real ones flowed. She never wept in front of her mother. She always went to her father or to Wangari for solace. But today, she knew it was her mother’s sympathy she would need if she was to get permission to go away. Otherwise, her plan to be gone would never work at all. What Vera did not expect was that what had started out as playacting would bring her to such a state.

  Her mother put aside her sewing and further surprised Vera by taking her daughter’s hand. “This business with Lucy Buxton may just be a fling, darling. Men do that sort of thing, even if their real feelings lie elsewhere.”

  Vera lost control and sobbed in earnest. “That is an idea I cannot accept. That he could be falling in love with me and still—” Nothing that Vera was saying at this point was purely for effect. She was so overcome with sadness she could not go on. She could not let herself think of what Tolliver was doing with Mrs. Buxton. Proper unmarried Scottish girls, even those of nineteen like her, were not meant to know what men and women did together. But Vera had not grown up in some chilly, cavernous great house in Glasgow. She grew up here, and the Kikuyu girls who were her playmates at three and four were making sex with boys before they were fully grown. All of them were married now and had babies of their own, some as old as four. They had told her everything. She was not supposed to listen to their giggly conversation. The ordinarily stern woman beside her would have been appalled if she knew how detailed were the descriptions of the love act her daughter had heard. But Vera knew about sex. And until yesterday, it was what she wanted to do with Justin Tolliver. But not anymore. The thought of taking the place that that odious Lucy Buxton had occupied in his arms disgusted her. Her dream of him was completely lost. She took out her handkerchief and dried her eyes. “You see, Mother, why I want to get away for a little while to visit Frances?”

  “Yes, I see that very well, my dear.”

  Vera looked at her mother. She seemed a different person in these past weeks. Her grief over her brother’s death had softened her more than Vera thought possible. She moved to clinch her mother’s approval. “Denys Finch Hatton has been calling very often, too, and he is wonderfully charming, but I do not find him—”

  Her mother smiled sadly. “I wondered about that. I think half the women in the Protectorate are in love with him, married or not. And he is lovely and extremely well connected. Perhaps, if you get away for a while, as you suggest, you will learn to think about both of those men in a different way. I would like you to have a choice in the matter of marriage.” Her voice had a wistful note Vera had never heard in it before.

  “I wish Captain Tolliver had been the hero I wanted him to be.”

  “Perhaps he will in the end,” her mother said, but her tone said she doubted it. “Men like to feel like heroes. That may be particularly true of a man like him who had the possibility of a much easier life but chose to be a policeman.”

  “I’ll go soon if you don’t mind, Mama. I was thinking I would take Wangari’s brother.”

  “Yes. Good, and take one of Wangari’s girls and three or four of the plantation boys as bearers.”

  The affection Vera felt when she kissed her mother was sincere, but she felt like a traitor. She wished she could have told the truth, but she comforted herself with the thought that it would be worse for her mother to learn about Newland’s buying the murder weapon. How her mother would suffer knowing that their precious Otis had been given into the care of the man who had murdered Uncle Josiah. There was no point in communicating her fears for Otis. Better to let her mother go along in ignorance for the time being.

  “Shall I go then and talk to Wangari, Mama, and pack?”

  “Fine,” her mother said.

  Vera sped to her nanny’s hut. If luck was with her, she would be off first thing in the morning.

  14.

  Early the next day, while Vera was bidding her parents good-bye, Justin Tolliver was an hour away in Nairobi dealing with the doctor and Cranford, who stood at the foot of his bed. “Yes, doctor,” he said, “but I insist on being taken to the Scottish Hospital. Nurse Freemantle is the one who cured me the last time, and I feel she is the best person to help me now.”

  At first, both the doctor and the district commissioner looked quite doubtful, but after half an hour of tedious conversation, Tolliver succeeded in convincing them that he could make the journey by train to Athi River, where Kwai Libazo would meet him and take him the rest of the way in a horse trap.

  “Have you any news about the condition of Gichinga Mbura?” Tolliver asked Cranford, once the other matter had been settled and the doctor had left.

  “Bad off,” Cranford said. “Evidently, being told he will be properly punished has done for him.” He spoke as a man completely satisfied with himself. “I must say again, this is the best of all possible outcomes. No need to make an airtight case against the savage. No worries about inquires from London, no excuses to give. We can say with perfect conviction that we justly detained the mumbo-jumbo man and he upped and died on us.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.” Tolliver tried to look appropriately sad and sick.

  “I’ll be off then.” D.C. Cranford took his hat from the chair in the corner.

  “On your way out, sir, I wonder if you would mi
nd having Kwai Libazo sent here so I can give him his orders.”

  “Certainly, my boy.”

  “And I wonder, sir, if I might take a bit of time to recover. I think I returned to duty too quickly last week.”

  Cranford looked doubtful.

  “That new chap, Oliver Lovett, is coming along quite well, and he speaks Urdu, so he can communicate much better with the Indian clerks. Since the laws are Indian colonial, the Indian deputy inspectors run things on a day-to-day basis, really. And as they write everything in Urdu, Lovett will soon be completely up to snuff.”

  The D.C.’s caterpillar eyebrows knit.

  Tolliver shot his last salvo. “He served in the Indian Army, in Queen Victoria’s own corps.” This fact placed the new policeman in India’s most elite unit. Tolliver hoped it would be the icing on Lovett’s cake.

  Cranford breathed a sigh. “I suppose, if you must. When is District Superintendent Jodrell returning?”

  “He is due back in just over two weeks.”

  “Very well, then.” Cranford picked up his sun helmet and squared his shoulders. “Now, buck up. I am sure everything will be shipshape and Bristol fashion before very long.” And he was gone.

  Kwai Libazo arrived within seconds.

  “How did you get here so fast?”

  “I was waiting in the hall for news of you, sir? I was so afraid of Mbura’s curse.”

  Tolliver laughed. “No such thing. I made it look as if I was ill on purpose.”

  The flabbergasted look on Libazo’s face was the most emotional expression Tolliver had ever seen there. “You are not sick, B’wana?”

  “No. It suddenly occurred to me that if Mbura could fake illness, so could I.”

  “Why, sir?”

  “So that we can go after Newland without the district commissioner knowing what we are doing.”

  “How?”

  Tolliver explained his plan for getting them to the Scottish Mission and setting off from there.

  “Sir, how will we take enough men without the district commissioner missing them?”

  “I doubt the D.C. knows the details of anything that happens here, nor cares when Jodrell is on duty. It’s only because the district superintendent is away that he is putting his nose in so deep.”

  Libazo liked the way the English said things like that, drawing a funny picture of what people were doing. But he did not let himself smile. Tolliver’s deception worried him.

  Tolliver got out of bed. He was wearing his uniform trousers with his nightshirt. “You will lead a squad out to the Scottish Mission. Take the same men who went with us to the Masonic Hotel two weeks ago. The new man, Inspector Lovett, will hold the fort here. He’s had as much training as I ever did when they left me to my own devices. And I daresay the D.C. will not be over here counting heads in the next little bit.”

  “Will we hire a tracker?”

  Tolliver was taken aback. He knew very well that the Nairobi station’s best tracker was out with District Superintendent Patterson from the Kiambu Station, hunting a man-eating lion at Tsavo.

  “You will have to be our tracker.” Tolliver heard the doubt that had crept into his own voice.

  Libazo now looked frightened. “Sir, I cannot. I have no idea how to do that.”

  “You grew up here. You must know this area like the back of your hand,” Tolliver insisted.

  “No, sir. I do not. I have never gone toward Mount Kenya in my life.”

  “Bugger all. Well, whom can we get? You must know someone who would be able to show us the way. We need a first-class tracker.”

  “I know Kinuthia, sir. He is like me, half Maasai, half Kikuyu. He knows all about traveling through the bush.”

  “Perfect. Get him. He will be our guide.”

  “I am not sure I can. He serves an Englishman.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one called Finch Hatton, that the Kikuyu call Bird-with-a-hat-on.”

  “Good God!” Tolliver had been trying until that moment to keep his voice low, so that anyone passing in the hall would imagine he was too weak to go about his duties. He had to bite his lip to keep from continuing to shout. “There must be someone else.”

  “There are only the men who work for the safari outfitting companies,” Libazo said. “The ones who work for Hilton’s or Tarlton’s. If we wanted one of them we would have to hire him from the outfitters and pay their price.”

  Tolliver could not hide his annoyance. And it only got worse when Libazo revealed the gossip the natives were passing about him and Finch Hatton.

  “Kinuthia says that you and B’wana Finch Hatton were enemies in your country, sir.”

  “What nonsense is that?”

  “He said that your schools had a contest every year and that you and B’wana Finch Hatton were in the same contest.”

  Tolliver shook his head. It was absurd that anyone this far away should have heard of something that happened that long ago. It was a cricket match at Lord’s nearly ten years ago—Finch Hatton had played for Eton, Tolliver for Harrow. The spectators on both sides had been taken with Finch Hatton’s grace and style, though he had not been the top scorer. There was another chap who had claimed that honor. “Yes, well my school won,” Tolliver said. The more he thought about Denys Finch Hatton—the hero of one and all wherever he went—the more annoying he found him. He told himself that this was separate from his upset over Finch Hatton’s attentions to Vera, though he knew full well he would not care a fig for any of the other differences, if it hadn’t been for Vera.

  “Kwai,” he said. “I have to stay in bed or my ruse will be found out. I need you to take a message to Finch Hatton for me. He is in town, is he not?”

  “I saw Kinuthia yesterday. B’wana Finch Hatton does not go about without him.”

  Tolliver took a paper and pen and scribbled a quick note. “Take this to Finch Hatton right away. I want to see him here in town before I go to the Scottish Mission.” Tolliver would not be an excuse for Finch Hatton going anywhere near Vera McIntosh.

  * * *

  It would have been hard for either Justin Tolliver or Vera McIntosh to imagine how they might have reacted to the events of those days had they known what the other was doing and thinking at that moment. Many days later, Clement McIntosh said, in retrospect, that it was not in the Creator’s plan for those two young people to know. Sometimes it was very difficult for the missionary to accept what he thought to be his God’s will.

  As it was, by the time Tolliver sent for Finch Hatton, Vera had already set off with a retinue: five bearers, including Wangari’s brother and also Wangari’s youngest daughter, Muiri, for female company.

  Neither the Reverend nor Mrs. McIntosh had the slightest inkling that their daughter was heading northwest, not east as they had given her permission to do. She traveled with money enough to cover what they thought she was going to do. Vera had estimated what her real costs would be and prayed she had enough.

  As soon as she had traveled a few kilometers from her parents’ house, she told her Kikuyu companions of her plan. The way toward Fort Hall would have taken her in approximately the same direction as the Athi River Station. If her parents had followed her progress they would have seen no deviation until she detoured to the railroad, bought a second-class ticket for herself and third class for her followers, and space for the bundles the bearers carried.

  The 10:21 up train, with a long layover at the Nairobi Station, would take until nearly five in the afternoon to reach Naivasha Station. There she would find Wangari’s uncle, the legendary tracker Ngethe Meru, who had gone with the American president Theodore Roosevelt on his journey into the interior.

  15.

  When Denys Finch Hatton entered Justin Tolliver’s room, he looked sincerely dismayed. “Good God, man. What are you doing out of bed? Cranford seems to think you are at death’s door.”

  Tolliver, knowing he needed Finch Hatton, had prepared to ingratiate himself to the man he could think of only
as a rival, and a rival with too many advantages. “A bit of overacting on my part I am afraid.”

  Tolliver offered Denys a chair and explained to him what he wanted, giving only as many of the details as he needed to be convincing. He did not reveal his suspicions about Richard Newland, only emphasized that he needed to find young Otis McIntosh. “I wonder then, if your man Kinuthia can guide us and help us track the Newland party.”

  Finch Hatton’s famously expressive eyes took on a calculating cast. “I take it Ms. McIntosh has told you about our visit to the Kikuyu blacksmith.”

  Tolliver bit back rising anger over any such traipsing around the countryside Vera might have done in the company of Finch Hatton. Concentrate on the task at hand, he told himself. “No. What has that got to do with my request?”

  “The blacksmith described a very unusual Maasai spear that he had gotten from an Arab trader. A very old one. He said he sold it Richard Newland not long ago. Miss McIntosh thought it was the very one used to kill Josiah Pennyman. Miss McIntosh said she was going to get word to you of this.”

  Tolliver’s skin turned hot, as if he were running the fever he had been feigning. “I know nothing of this.” This was his investigation. It galled him that Finch Hatton had a critical piece of evidence that he did not know. How could Vera not have reported it to him?

  “I am sure Miss McIntosh had intended to tell you about it. She did not?” Finch Hatton’s words made Tolliver feel worse.

  “I have not seen her for days.”

  “Well,” Denys said, “you can ask her. We can stop at the Scottish Mission, on our way to track Newland. We better find out everything the Reverend and Mrs. McIntosh know about exactly where Newland planned to hunt.”

  Tolliver stood up. “I don’t think you need to involve yourself in this. If we can have Kinuthia to show us the way, I will handle the trip.”