Death in Kenya (25 page)

No one spoke, and the silence lengthened out and filled with sullenness and strain and taut emotions, until suddenly and unexpectedly Eden laughed. It was an entirely genuine laugh and therefore the more startling. He leant back in his chair with his hands in his pockets, and said lightly:

‘“Hands up the boy who broke that window!” It's no use Greg. This isn't the Fifth Form at St Custards, and you can't gate the entire class for a month if the culprit won't own up. Maybe that knife really was Gran's.'

‘Maybe,' said Greg sceptically. ‘Very well, then. If it was, let's have a description of it.'

‘Certainly,' said Em briskly. ‘It was a three-bladed knife that once belonged to Kendall. It had a horn handle with his initials cut on it, and the small blade had been broken off short. I often take it with me when I go picnicking or shooting. It's very useful. I had it in my pocket.'

‘I see,' said Greg through shut teeth. ‘Can you confirm that, Eden?'

Eden had been looking at his grandmother with an expression that was something between doubt and the effort to recall an elusive memory, and he started slightly on being addressed, and said hurriedly: ‘Yes. Yes of course I can. It generally stays in the hall drawer. I've seen it a hundred times.'

‘And it was the knife your grandmother cut Markham's arm with?'

Eden's face changed as though a mask had dropped over it, and he said in an entirely expressionless voice: ‘I'm afraid I don't remember. If she says it was, then presumably it was. We were all looking at Gilly at the time.'

‘Were you!' said Mr Gilbert grimly. And he turned again to Em: ‘What did you do with it after that?'

‘I put it down – or else I threw it on one side. I'm not sure.'

‘And poured iodine on the wound? I'd like to hear about that.'

Em described the incident in some detail, but professed not to remember what she had done with the bottle.

‘Then you didn't hand it back to Mrs Brandon?'

‘I don't think so. I probably just dropped it too. It was empty.'

Mabel Brandon dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief and blew her nose with determination, and looking across at Em she smiled a little tremulously and said, ‘Thank you, Em. I – I know you do remember, and that you're only saying that to keep me out of it. But I'm not going to hide behind you. She did give it back to me, Greg. I took it from her and put it down somewhere, and I didn't think of it again until Drew asked me what I'd done with it.'

Greg turned slowly and looked at Em, and it was noticeable that she returned his look with less assurance.

‘Well, Em?' said Greg softly.

Em's mouth twisted into a wry and somewhat shamefaced smile.

‘I'm sorry Greg. Yes, I knew Mabel had taken it. But I also know that she didn't kill Gilly, and I can't see that she need get mixed up in this horrible business just because she always carries around a bottle of iodine in case of accidents.'

‘That,' said Greg, still softly, ‘is the point. She always carries one, and everyone knows it. And that is why this may be a Mau Mau killing after all.'

‘What!' The exclamation came loudly and simultaneously from half a dozen throats, and in a flash the atmosphere in the room changed as though a current of electricity had been switched off, and muscles that had been tense with strain and apprehension relaxed in sudden relief.

‘I knew it!' cried Lisa; and began to sob loudly. ‘I knew it would be all right!'

Em turned to gaze at her in disapproval, and observed coldly that she was glad that Lisa considered that everything was now all right: it was at least an original view of the case.

‘I didn't mean Gilly being dead,' sobbed Lisa. ‘Of course that's awful. It's just that I thought Greg might find out——'

‘Lisa!'
said Drew sharply and compellingly.

He had not spoken before, and his intervention checked Lisa, who gulped and turned to look at him.

‘Whatever you were going to say – don't,' said Drew; and grinned at Greg Gilbert's furious face. ‘Sorry, Greg, but I'm against shooting sitting birds. And in any case, from your last remark I gather we may all be out of the red, though I don't quite see how you can involve the Mau Mau in this one.'

Mr Gilbert said ominously: ‘If you prompt anyone, or interrupt anyone again, Stratton, I shall get you ten days in the cells, if I get the sack for it!'

‘And I'll go quiet,' promised Drew equably. ‘What is this Mau Mau angle?'

‘I should have thought it was obvious enough,' said Greg coldly. ‘Hector is still doing a lot of useful interrogation work, and someone may have been laying for him – or for his wife or son. It would have been easy enough to substitute a solution of arrow poison for the iodine, and the next time any of them had a cut or a scratch Mabel would have doctored it from that bottle, and that would have been that. It's a possibility that we can't ignore.'

‘And the knife?' enquired Em crisply.

‘Same thing. Except – if it
was
your knife – it might conceivably have been a trap laid for either you or Eden.'

‘No. Not for us,' said Em thoughtfully. ‘The dogs. I have often used it to cauterize sores on the dogs, and it would have got one of them. Like – like Simba.'

Mabel said: ‘So Gilly was killed by mistake. It should have been Hector or Ken – or me! Or one of Em's dogs.'

‘Or the first person you happened to doctor with iodine or who happened to cut themselves on my knife – and who might just as well have been an African,' pointed out Em dryly. ‘It sounds very far-fetched to me, and it still doesn't explain the disappearance of the knife and the bottle. Where does that fit in?'

‘It doesn't,' confessed Greg. ‘It doesn't even fit in with my own theory of the crime.'

‘And what is your theory? Or do you prefer to keep us in the dark?' enquired Em acidly.

Greg looked meditatively at the carpet for a minute or two without speaking, and then allowed his gaze to travel with deliberation along the half circle of intent faces that watched him so anxiously. And it is doubtful if he missed even the smallest change in any one of them.

He said slowly: ‘No. There is no reason why I should not tell you, for although I believe that I am right, I can't prove it. I think that Gilly Markham died from the effects of arrow poison, and that his murder was carefully planned in advance. Everyone here, and everyone in the Rift for that matter, knew that he drank too much and could be trusted to drink too much even at a picnic, provided the drink was there; which it was. I believe that someone took a dead puff adder to Crater Lake yesterday, and sometime during the afternoon, while Gilly was asleep, placed it beside him and gave him a jab in the arm with some sort of pronged instrument that had been liberally coated with arrow poison. Something that would leave a wound similar to the mark of a snake's fangs.'

Lisa was the first person to speak. She said in a strained voice that was barely a whisper: ‘But – why that way? The snake?'

‘Because although arrow poison is not detectable in an autopsy, there might well have been some of it left outside the wound. Enough to prove that it had been used. But the first thing anyone does when dealing with a snake-bite is to make a deep cut on or just above it. That's why it had to be a snake; because the murderer could count on someone removing the evidence in double quick time. It would not matter who did it as long as it was done – and of course it was done. That disposed of any superfluous poison, and the snake was an equally easy bet. No one stops to see if a snake is alive if it is found lying curled up in a life-like attitude beside a sleeping person. They take a bash at it with the first thing that comes handy, and the blows would have made it appear to be moving. Also, no one is going to pay very close attention to it when there is a dying man to attend to. So you see, it would have been fairly foolproof.'

‘But you said it could have been the knife,' whispered Lisa. ‘Or the iodine. You
said
so!'

‘It could have been. Because those two things have inexplicably disappeared. But it is far more likely that the poison was administered at least half an hour before either of those things were used. Acocanthera frequently produces vomiting, and your husband had been sick. He was also found in a state of coma just after three-thirty.'

Mabel's hands twisted together against the skirt of her crumpled cotton frock, and she said distressfully: ‘Oh no! – Oh, I do hope not! I mean – I heard him. Being sick. If I had gone to him at once I might have been able to do something. But I thought – well, he
had
had too much to drink, and I thought it would be better to keep away. If
only
I had gone!'

‘It wouldn't have done any good. Not if my theory is correct. There's no antidote.'

‘But you can't be right!' said Mabel, suddenly sitting bolt upright. ‘No, of course you can't be. You can't jab someone in the arm without waking them up. He would have cried out. I should have heard him. And,' she concluded triumphantly, ‘I didn't! I didn't hear a
sound,
and neither did Em. Did you, Em?'

‘I'm afraid I was asleep,' confessed Em reluctantly. ‘I didn't even hear him being sick, and I certainly wouldn't have gone to him if I had.'

Greg said: ‘Markham was sleeping off a fairly outsize dose of alcohol; and before the discovery of anaesthetics it was the accepted thing to give a man half a bottle of whisky to drink before an operation or an amputation – to deaden the pain. If the jab was a quick one it might have done no more than jerk him awake for a few seconds, and the chances are that he would have dozed off again at once. What is it, Miss Caryll?'

‘N-nothing,' stammered Victoria, startled. ‘I d-didn't say anything.'

‘But you thought of something, didn't you?'

‘Yes. I – it was nothing, really. It was only that while I was standing by the lake yesterday I heard someone snoring, and then they made a noise as though they had been woken up suddenly. You know. A – a sort of snort. I thought it was Gil – Mr Markham. But after a bit the snoring started again.'

‘Hmm,' said Greg. ‘What time was that?'

‘I've no idea. Somewhere between half-past two and three I suppose.'

Greg turned to Mabel and asked her if she had also heard such a sound, and Mabel, looking a trifle conscience-striken, admitted to having dozed, though she had been woken later by hearing Gilly retching. ‘But I didn't do anything about it. I remember thinking “
Really!
Poor Lisa.” Or something like that, and the next thing I remember was Hector telling me to wake up because it was time we were going.'

‘Hmm,' said Greg again, and was silent for so long that the tension became too much for Ken Brandon. His control cracked under the strain of that silence and his voice cracked with it:

‘It's no good looking at me! I didn't go near him. I swear I didn't! I didn't even touch him. None of us did – only Stratton and Lady Emily. I'm not going to sit here and be accused of – of things, just because I threw away a dead snake! Dad was quite right. You haven't any right to do this. We aren't under arrest, and I'm going!'

He stood up clenching and unclenching his hands, and looking, for all his nineteen years, less like an Angry Young Man than a small boy who has flown into a temper to hide his fright.

‘Oh
no,
Kennie darling!' moaned Mabel, wringing her hands. ‘
Don't
talk like that. Of course you didn't go near Gilly, darling. Greg knows that. We all know it. Stay here, darling.
Please!
'

Greg said patiently: ‘Sit down, Ken. You're only making an ass of yourself, and I haven't accused anyone of anything.'

‘Yet!'
mimicked Ken savagely. ‘That's what you said before, isn't it?
“Yet!”
But you will, won't you? Even though you haven't a shred of evidence! Even though you admit yourself that Gilly may have died of a heart attack. And what do you base your precious theory on? The fact that a knife and an empty bottle have been lost or mislaid. Why, they're probably both still there, trodden into the grass by your flat-footed, bone-headed askaris!'

‘Oh no, Kennie. Don't, dear,' sobbed Mabel in a monotonous moaning whisper. But Ken Brandon was beyond listening to reason or his mother's pleas, and the words poured out of him in a childish spate of nervous rage:

‘What the hell does it matter if they aren't found? You've as good as admitted that there's nothing wrong with either of them, haven't you?
Haven't you?
And that if Gilly was poisoned, it was done half an hour before anyone used the knife or the iodine on him, which means that it doesn't matter a damn if they're found or not. And yet you can produce a footling thing like that and call it evidence of murder! If that's all the evidence you've got, then you haven't got a case at all. Not a shadow of a case! – and no right in the world to haul us in here and talk like this to us.'

He paused for breath, and Greg said mildly:

‘I told you that the disappearance of those two things didn't square with any theory. But that is why I am interested in them: or rather, in why someone thought fit to remove them, and is now lying about it. There must be a reason for that, and it is my guess that whoever made away with them suspected murder – and the murderer – and having a shrewd idea as to how it had been done, jumped to the same conclusion that both Stratton and Lady Emily arrived at: that if it was Acocanthera, it was either on the knife or in the iodine bottle – and therefore hid them. But if it
was
murder, then the one person who would
not
have done that is the murderer; because such an action could only lead to suspicion of murder in what might possibly have passed as death from snake-bite, or, if questions were asked and an autopsy performed, from a heart attack due to heavy drinking. I am quite sure in my own mind that there was nothing wrong with either the knife or the iodine, and when we eventually find them we shall be able to prove it. That is why I am asking whoever made away with them to own up to it now. It must be one of you, and as it cannot possibly be the murderer, all that you are being asked to do is to clear yourself. And at the same time to help clear whoever it was that you suspected of doctoring either of those two things.'