The Crocodile's Last Embrace (38 page)

Neville put his hand on Harry’s and pushed it from his arm. “I don’t know what I can tell you, Hascombe. Jade said she wasn’t certain who she could trust.”

“The hell you say!” shouted Harry, then quickly lowered his voice before anyone else overheard. “Jade knew she could always count on me. Who was after her?”

“She had some old enemy, a woman with connections in the colony.”

“Worthy’s widow?”

Neville nodded. “You knew of her?”

“There was talk of it when Jade first came to Africa, after that business with the native witch doctors and the man-eating hyenas. And you think this Worthy woman is here in Kenya?”

“We don’t know that,” said Neville, “but we do know she had an accomplice. He’s dead now.”

“Who?”

“Dr. Dymant,” said Neville, after a moment’s hesitation. “But his real name was Pellyn. Just before he died, someone started a fire on my farm and tried to take my son.”

“If he’s dead, then who was Jade running from?”

“Hell, Hascombe. If we knew that, we’d have the bastard brought to book.”

Harry stepped away, one hand rubbing his chin stubble. “Someone hiding around in the colony then.” His shoulders slumped. “Ah, Jade,” he murmured. He hung his head and swayed on his feet. From his right, he heard Finch call to Thompson. Then to his left, as from a distance, he heard the reporter from the
Standard
make an offhand comment.

“I wonder if this had anything to do with a strange personal notice running in this morning’s newspaper? Someone claimed to have taken care of the lioness. Wasn’t Miss del Cameron called ‘lioness’ by the natives?”

Harry lunged for the reporter. “What did the notice say?”

The reporter’s sunburned face turned a deeper red. “I picked up a fresh copy of the paper on my way out. It’s in my Austin.”

Harry ran to the reporter’s car. He found the notice and read it silently. “Who is this O. Fairley?” he demanded, his voice low and menacing.

“An Australian,” said one of the other searchers. “I heard from my kitchen boy that Dunbury hired him to help with his—”

Harry didn’t stay to listen. He strode rapidly to his car.

Dr. Mathews ran after him. “Hascombe, stop. You look apoplectic. I know you were close to Miss del Cameron. Stay here for now. Allow me to give you something to calm yourself. Something to help you sleep when you get home.”

“I don’t want any of your damn pills,” growled Harry. He swatted the doctor like he would a mosquito. “I want to get my hands around the neck of whoever pushed Jade to this end.”

“As would I,” said Mathews. “She was a fine woman, but this is something for the police to handle.”

“Finch is probably just as relieved to be rid of Jade,” Harry said, his anger taking control. “She is . . . She was too clever by half for the likes of him. I’m going to find this Fairley, and when I do . . .”

The rest of his words disappeared behind the roar of his engine.

 

BOTH HARRY’S AND ROGER FORSTER’S HOUSES had stood at the edges of their property, so they were, at most, two miles apart. Jade and Sam hiked silently, pushing the motorcycle, leery of alerting anyone to their presence. As they neared Forster’s, Sam held out an arm to halt Jade. Then he quietly laid his cycle down in the grass, unshipped his Colt revolver, and took a few steps forward. After he’d gone forty yards, he motioned her to follow.

Jade joined him, Winchester in hand, keeping her eyes and ears on the surrounding landscape. A striped skink raced across their path, the minuscule lizard scurrying for cover. A few red-billed firefinches squeaked and chittered in the trees, which went a long way toward easing Jade’s fears that the shed on Forster’s property was occupied. Silence from the woods would have been more worrisome. A clump of swallowtail butterflies exploded in a spray of gold at their approach, revealing a broken well base near where the house had once stood. The pump and handle lay rusting to the side, partly blackened from the fire.

They paused in front of the shed, taking in the tall sapling and the smaller scrubby brush in front of the bare wood door. The entire structure was no wider than eight feet. “Doesn’t look like much,” whispered Sam. “Does the door open out or in?”

An interesting question.
Jade mentally chided herself for not thinking of it herself. All of Neville’s and Avery’s buildings opened out, as did Harry’s doorway, and she’d assumed this one worked the same way. That was why she’d dismissed the building as unusable.

“Only one way to find out,” she said, and quickly marched up to the door, bullying her way past the brush. She turned the knob and pulled. The door opened four inches before hitting the sapling. “Out,” she announced. “No one could get in here.” But as she turned, she paused and studied the brush to the side. In this light, she could make out a faint path. It might be only a game trail made by a small antelope but its deliberate skirting of the shed looked more purposeful.

A blue-eared starling burst out the door.

Jade shut the door and rejoined Sam. “I can imagine rodents gnawing their way inside, but a bird? How did it get in there?”

“Hole in the roof?”

“Then why not fly out that same way? I think it got trapped in there the last time this building was opened. And that had to be relatively recently for it to be alive. I found what looks like a path to the back.”

Sam leaned his angular body so as to catch the same shadows that had first alerted Jade. She heard a soft click as he cocked the hammer on his Colt. He moved onto the trail, Jade right behind him. The trail had been well hidden with brush piled in front to obscure it. She turned and walked backwards, covering his back with her Winchester. Jade felt her pulse accelerate and took a deep breath, forcing her body to calm down.

Lilith won’t be in there
, Jade told herself.
She’d have shot through the door at us by now.

Or would she?
This was a woman it didn’t pay to underestimate. She could still be lying in wait, hoping for a better chance at a more certain shot.

The shed was larger than it appeared from the front, nearly fifteen feet deep, and the back seven feet was a more recent construction than the front. To the casual eye, the rear wall was covered in fallen debris, but Jade detected the outline of another door under the limbs.

“I’ll be dipped,” said Sam. “Very clever.”

“Can’t be anyone home,” said Jade. “Otherwise the brush would be shifted aside. Unless . . .” She found a latch made to look like a branch and pulled the door open. The rest of the limbs followed with it. “The branches are fastened to the door itself.”

“She’s clever. You’ve got to give her that.”

Jade wished she’d brought her flashlight as she peered into the gloomy interior, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dim light. She heard Sam rummage in his pockets and soon a bright beam pierced the blackness. “Good going, Sam.”

They went inside, leaving the door open so as to hear if anyone approached. Sam played his light over a well-stocked hideaway complete with a cot, a spirit stove, a small table and chair, and shelves nailed to the wall. A threadbare rug lay beside the cot and the shelves were stocked with canned goods and a coil of rope hung from a nail.

“Plenty of food,” said Sam. “Water’s another issue, though.”

“The well at Harry’s still works. When I found Holly there, I noticed that the pump had been primed recently.”

“So someone’s using that for their water source.” Sam looked around the floor. “There’s a tin bucket. Dry now.”

“Over here,” said Jade, directing Sam’s light to a heavy sheet of canvas on the far wall. “Let’s see what she’s got here.” She pulled aside the curtain to see rows of metal boxes, not unlike ammunition tins. Slinging her rifle onto her back, she reached for a box when Sam stopped her.

“Wait,” he called. “Use your handkerchief if you touch something. We don’t want Finch finding our prints all over everything.”

Jade nodded and fished out her large, white handkerchief, wrapping it around her right-hand fingers. She opened one of the boxes and whistled. “Saint Peter’s little fishes, will you look at that!” Inside were large nuggets of gold, winking back in the light’s beam. A paper inside identified them as coming from Katanga province in the Belgian Congo.

“Open another,” said Sam.

Jade complied and, one by one, looked into each of the eight boxes. Five held gold nuggets, but others held papers. Jade leafed past maps, many of the northern territory. Underneath was a mining claim form, with the location penned in, deeded to some as yet unpicked name.

“This must be for her mining scheme.” Jade opened yet another box. “Pellyn filled in some names and then he had Waters look for someone to invest in it with him. We found a few of those in Pellyn’s medical office. Look, here’s a pile of business contracts they’ve accumulated over the years. They go back three years at least.” She did a quick tally. “Fourteen! That’s a lot of partners. Some went in for a hundred pounds, some for five hundred, others more. What do you bet they’re all dead, too?”

“Of convenient accidents,” added Sam. “Lilith was in prison for some of that time. Pellyn must have been running the game from here. This place is too rough for Lilith, I should think,” said Sam.

Jade nodded. “I saw a photo of Lilith with a work gang. She brought gold out of the Congo—illegally, I would imagine. I don’t think old Leopold would have let anyone take anything out of his private realm.”

“There was always a lot of graft and backstabbing involved with the men he left to run his fiefdom,” said Sam. “Especially soon after he died. It might have been easier than you think to mine illegally. As long as you were willing to use the native labor ruthlessly, you could get hired on to manage an area. The more brutal, the better.”

“Leaving the manager free and clear to skim off the top,” concluded Jade.

“But recently, the new Belgian government changed some of the rules. Pellyn and Lilith probably lost their opportunity. That’s when they went to falsifying documents to dupe would-be investors in a Kenyan mine.”

“How did she get the form?” asked Jade. “Could she have had a contact in the land office?”

Sam shrugged. “It would only take one form,” he said, “and it might even have been from a genuine claim. After that, they could find someone with a press to make a master and forge copies. But I think if you look at this, you’ll find another answer.” He pointed to some bottles on the shelf and a signed contract bearing Waters’ name. The name was barely visible now, the ink having been lifted with the various solvents in the bottles.

“So they could’ve reused a deed once they got rid of Waters’ name and filled in some other name.”

“Lilith has lost both her partners now,” said Sam. “Pellyn killed Stockton for cheating on him and now he’s dead, too. I don’t doubt she’ll soon find another.”

“What’s in here?” Jade asked as she pulled down a wooden chop box. Sam held the flashlight over her shoulder as she opened the lid. “Son of a biscuit!”

“They could’ve poisoned all Nairobi with this,” Jade exclaimed as she examined the array of bottles, each labeled as some drug.

“Quite a pharmacy,” said Sam.

“Arsenic!” exclaimed Jade as she lifted a bottle.

Sam took out his own handkerchief and held up several bottles, reading them off. “ ‘Antimony, potassium iodide, chaulmoogra oil.’ ” He carefully lowered the last one into the box. “Wait a minute. I don’t think these are meant to be poisons. I recognize that last one.” He paused, eyes closed as though he were searching his memory. “It’s a leprosy treatment. All of these are leprosy treatments. Chaulmoogra was first found in India, I believe.”

“Dymant—I mean Pellyn—was a physician,” said Jade. “He said he’d worked in India. If he went into the Congo to smuggle out gold, he might have gone in as a doctor rather than as a mine overseer. He’d need to carry the tools of the trade to pass. That would include leprosy treatments.”

She lifted out a square tin and carefully pried it open. The spicy scent smacked her nostrils and she broke into a cold sweat. “This is my tea! It always seemed a bit too coincidental that I managed to get a gift of spiced red tea and then someone drugged it. This proves that the gift didn’t come from Avery’s friend. It was sent already poisoned.”

Sam took the tin and sniffed. “Hard to say what all is in this. The spices would disguise a lot, I should think. I smell nutmeg. In strong enough quantities, it’s a poison, too.” He started to close the lid. “Look at the design burned into the bottom. Isn’t that Lilith’s symbol?”

Jade gingerly touched the moon eclipsing the sun. “This is where Mutahi saw it.”

“And why he had to die,” added Sam. “We have plenty of evidence here to link Pellyn to your hallucinations, the gold mine scheme, and with the murders, but very little to link Lilith. She covers her tracks well,” said Sam. “And I’m sure she learned from her mistakes in Morocco.”

“If we only had an idea of where she’s been hiding. Surely not in here.” Jade tried to run through everyone she’d had contact with in Nairobi and came up blank. “I can’t recall anyone with a scar.”

“Lilith would be subtle, Jade.” Sam smiled and stroked her smooth cheek with the back of his fingers.

Jade felt something akin to an electric tingle. Then she realized what Sam was driving at. “Of course. She probably disguised the scar with some face paints or creams. Good heavens, after that last safari with the actors, I should be used to makeup being used as a deception. You can do anything with it. Appear young, old. Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Because you don’t use any artifice. Large glasses might hide much of it, too.”

“Sun protectors! Of course,” said Jade. “Cyril said his kidnapper had
very
big black eyes.”

Sam touched her cheek again, then pulled his hand back. “I’d bet my plane, if I still had it, that Lilith is in the search party for you.”