Death in Kenya (24 page)

Her spate of words grew shriller and higher, but any idea of her returning home was forestalled by the arrival of Greg Gilbert, two CID officers from Nakuru, several police askaris and an anonymous individual in a brown suit.

Greg confined his greetings to a single comprehensive nod that embraced everyone in the verandah, but the two CID officers were more punctilious. And then the entire party, with the exception of Mr Hennessy and the askaris, moved into the drawing-room, preceded by Em who seated herself regally in the wing-chair.

Greg refused a chair and stationed himself with his back to the windows, facing the half circle of anxious faces. His own face was blankly impersonal and his voice as devoid of emotional content as though he were reading the minutes of a board meeting to an assembly of total strangers.

He said: ‘I imagine that you all know why I am here. An autopsy has been performed on Markham's body, and the doctor's report is quite definite. Gilly was not bitten by a snake, and there is the possibility that he was murdered!'

‘No!' Lisa leapt to her feet, white-faced and gasping. ‘You can't say that! You can't! It
was
a snake – we saw it!'

Mabel put out a hand and pulled her down again on to the sofa, murmuring: ‘Lisa, dear.
Please!
Let him speak.'

Greg said: ‘You may have seen it, but it didn't bite him.'

‘We saw the fang marks,' said Em quietly.

‘So Drew says; and Eden.'

‘And I say it – and Mabel, and Ken,' put in Hector. ‘Plain as the nose on your face!'

Greg shrugged. ‘You saw two punctures that may have been made by anything; one of those double thorns off a thorn tree, for instance. Or if they were made by a snake, it was a snake that had either outlived its poison or emptied its poison sac. The autopsy showed no trace of snake venom, and it's my opinion that the snake you saw was a dead one.'

‘But——' began Em, and checked; biting her lip.

Greg turned on her swiftly; ‘Can you swear to it being alive? Did you actually see it move?'

Em hesitated, frowning. ‘I thought I did. It moved when I hit it, but that might have been—'

‘Of course it was alive!' boomed Hector. ‘Why, I killed it! Dammit, I've got eyes!'

‘But you have to wear spectacles for reading, don't you? And strong ones,' said Greg. ‘And so does your wife, and Lady Emily.'

‘That's different! Look – I wouldn't have wasted my time bashing a dead snake. Broke its neck and smashed its head.'

‘And then threw it into the lake. A pity. If we could have got our hands on it, it might have told us quite a lot.'

‘But——' began Hector, and stopped, as Em had done.

There was a brief and painful interval of silence, and then Ken Brandon spoke, his voice a deliberate drawl: ‘
I
threw it away. And what of it? Are you by any chance suggesting that I did it to destroy evidence?'

‘Ken, darling!' begged Mabel in a strangled whisper. ‘Don't be silly.
Please
don't be silly, darling.'

Greg favoured the boy with a long coolly critical look and said softly: ‘No one is accusing you of anything – yet.'

Mabel caught her breath in a small sobbing gasp and Hector took a swift stride forward, his chin jutting and his hands clenched into fists. ‘Now look here, Greg,' he began belligerently.

Mr Gilbert turned a cold gaze upon him, and though he did not raise his voice it held a cutting quality that was as effective as the crack of a whip: ‘
I
am conducting this enquiry, Hector, and I will do it in my own way. All of you here are required to answer questions, not to ask them; and I would point out that there is a well-known saying to the effect that he who excuses himself, accuses himself. I have not, I repeat, accused anyone – yet. Will you sit down, please? No, not over there. Eden, give him a chair behind Mabel, will you. Thank you.'

Hector seated himself reluctantly, muttering under his breath, and Greg turned his attention back to Em:

‘You were answering a question when Hector interrupted you. Are you quite certain that the snake was alive when you hit it?'

‘No,' said Em heavily. ‘It may have been, and it never occurred to me that it wasn't. I suppose we were all too worked up about Gilly to notice details, and puff adders are often sluggish creatures. But I wouldn't like to swear to it, because——' She hesitated for so long that Greg said: ‘Because of what?'

Em sighed and the lines of her face sagged. ‘Because I realized later that whatever he died of, it wasn't snake-bite.'

‘Why?'

Em threw him a look of impatient contempt and said irritably: ‘There is no need to treat me as though I were senile, Greg. You must know quite well that I have seen people die of snake-bite – and before you were born! It is, to say the least of it, an unpleasant death. Gilly didn't die that way; and if you want to know what I think, I think he had a heart attack; but because we saw the snake we jumped to the conclusion that it was snake-bite – and killed him.'

‘By giving him that injection?'

Em nodded. ‘Drew said it was probably the last straw, and he may have been right. If we'd left him alone he might have pulled through: people do survive heart attacks. But he didn't have a chance. It was seeing the snake – I didn't even think of it being anything else.'

‘It wasn't your fault, Gran,' said Eden roughly. ‘If you hadn't done it, someone else would. We all thought he'd been bitten. What did he die of, Greg?'

‘Heart failure,' said Mr Gilbert calmly.

14

‘What!' bellowed Hector, bounding to his feet and stuttering with wrath. ‘Then what in thunder do you mean by interrogating us in this fashion? By God, Gilbert, I've a good mind to take this straight up to the Governor! You have the infernal impertinence to post one of your men in my house, and another to keep an eye on my wife and on poor Gilly's widow, when all the time Markham died a natural death from heart failure!'

Mr Gilbert waited patiently until he had quite finished, and for at least a minute afterwards, and his silence appeared to have a sobering effect upon Hector, for he said with considerably less truculence and a trace of uncertainty: ‘Well? What have you got to say for yourself?'

‘Quite a lot,' said Mr Gilbert gently. ‘For one thing, most deaths are due to failure of the heart. What we do not know is
why
Markham's heart stopped beating. It is of course just possible that he was suffering from a heart attack when you found him. He drank fairly heavily – I'm sorry, Lisa, but that's true, isn't it?'

‘Yes,' said Lisa. She had ceased to slump in a frightened heap in a corner of the sofa, and there was a look on her pale face that was curiously like eagerness. ‘He always drank too much, but in the last few months he seemed to be much worse. I told him we couldn't afford it, and – and that it would kill him if he went on like this; but he only laughed.'

Greg nodded, but said: ‘All the same, I don't believe he had a heart attack.'

‘But surely – the doctors,' urged Mabel distressfully.

‘The doctors say that his heart was flabby and full of blood, and that the symptoms described by Drew and Eden square with a heart attack. But they also square with something else – Acocanthera.
Msunguti.
'

Once again the words meant nothing whatever to Victoria, but in the sudden silence that followed them she became acutely aware that they held a meaning – and a singularly unpleasant one – for every other person in the room. Knowledge and shock – and wariness – was written plainly on six faces. Only Drew showed neither surprise nor wariness, but it was quite clear that he too knew the meaning of those two words.

Greg Gilbert looked round the room as though he expected someone to speak, but no one moved or spoke. They did not even look at one another. They looked at Greg as though they could not look away, and their bodies were still with a stillness that spoke of tensed muscles and held breath.

Greg said slowly: ‘I see that you all know just what that means. Except Miss Caryll; which is possibly a good thing for her. For your information, Miss Caryll, I am talking of arrow poison. Something that is only too easy to come by in this country and which produces death – by heart failure – in anything from twenty minutes to two hours. Unfortunately it also produces no detectable symptoms, so unless we can produce other evidence the autopsy verdict on Markham will have to stand as “heart failure due to unknown causes”. A verdict with which I, personally, am not prepared to agree.'

‘Why?' demanded Em harshly. ‘He might well have had a heart attack. He'd been drinking far too much, and he was three parts drunk by lunch-time yesterday – the autopsy must have shown that, too! And he was too thin and too highly strung. He lived on his nerves. Why do you have to believe the worst, when there is no shadow of proof to support it?'

‘But there is a shadow of proof,' said Greg gently. ‘The fact that three things which might have proved that it was a heart attack are all missing. We had a squad of our men down at Crater Lake at first light, and they went over the ground with a small tooth comb – and a magnet. But though they found the broken half of the needle, they didn't find the knife you slashed Markham's arm with, or the bottle of iodine you doctored it with. Or the snake that may or may not have bitten him. Odd, to say the least of it.'

Ken Brandon leant forward, his hands gripping the arms of his chair so tightly that his knuckles showed white, and said in a high strained voice that had lost all traces of a drawl: ‘Why do you keep harping on that snake? What would
you
have done with it? Put it in your pocket? I didn't even know that it would fall in the lake! It was a fluke, I tell you! I——'

Hector said brusquely: ‘Shut up, Ken! I'm not letting you say anything more without a lawyer. And if the rest of you have any sense you won't answer any more questions either! If Gilbert is accusing one of us of murder – and it looks damned like it to me! – then he's got no right to expect us to answer questions until we have had legal advice.'

Greg surveyed him thoughtfully, and then turned to look at Em. ‘That your opinion too, Em?'

‘No, of course not,' said Em crossly. ‘I'm no fool. Or at least, not so big a fool as Hector is making himself out to be. Lawyers!
Bah!
The only useful advice that any lawyer could give any of us is to speak the truth and stop behaving as though we had something to hide.'

‘If that is to my address,' flared Hector, ‘I have nothing to hide!
Nothing!
But I still say——'

‘Be quiet, Hector.' Mabel had not raised her voice, but the three softly spoken words were drops of ice, and they froze Hector's torrent of words as ice will freeze Niagara.

No one had ever heard Mabel use that tone before; or had believed her capable of it. And Hector's instant and instinctive reaction to it was equally surprising. He stood for a moment with his mouth open, looking like some large and foolish fish, and then he shut it hurriedly and sat down, and thereafter only spoke when he was spoken to.

Mabel said composedly: ‘You must forgive us, Greg. We are all a little upset. Of course we will answer any questions that we can. We all know that you are only here to help, and that it cannot be any less unpleasant for you than it is for us. I suppose you want to know all about the picnic? Why we went and how we went, and when. And what we ate, and things like that.'

Greg shook his head. ‘I know that already. I heard it last night from both Drew and Eden. No. I want to know about the knife. And about the bottle of iodine. Em, you used the knife on Markham's arm, didn't you? Whose was it?'

Em met his gaze squarely and with composure, and replied without the least hesitation. ‘My own.'

The two words were as coldly and quietly spoken as Mabel's had been, but they produced an even more startling effect. There was an audible and almost simultaneous gasp from several throats: a sound that might have been relief or apprehension or shock, and Eden spoke for the first time since they had entered the drawing-room:

‘Gran, are you sure?'

‘Of what?' enquired Em, continuing to look blandly at Greg Gilbert. ‘That it was my knife, or that I know what I'm doing? The answer to both is “yes”.'

For the first time that morning Mr Gilbert lost his calm. A flush of colour showed red in his tanned cheeks and his mouth and eyes opened in angry astonishment. ‘Then why,' he demanded dangerously, ‘did you say yesterday that you didn't know whose it was?'

‘Did I?' enquired Em blandly. ‘I can't have been thinking. We were all a bit——'

‘Upset!'
interrupted Greg savagely. ‘So I have already heard. Now look here, Em, I'm not going to have any of this nonsense. That wasn't your knife, and you know it. Whose was it? You won't do any good to anyone by playing the heroine and telling lies to cover up for someone else.'

‘You mean for Eden,' said Em calmly. ‘But he never carries a knife. Only a silly little gold penknife arrangement on a chain that Alice gave him one Christmas. And I doubt if you'll find any bloodstains or arrow poison on that.'

For a moment it looked as though Mr Gilbert were about to lose his temper as explosively as Hector Brandon had done, but he controlled himself with a visible effort, and said quite quietly: ‘I am not going to warn you of the consequences of deliberately obstructing the police, because you must be well aware of them. You also don't give a damn for the police or anyone else, do you? You're like too many of the Old Guard in that. You think that you can be a law unto yourselves. But that's where you're wrong. You can't have your cake and eat it too.'

He looked round at the ring of strained faces and added grimly: ‘And that goes for all of you. You cannot let a murderer escape justice just because you happen to know him, or he is a relative or a friend. I do not believe that knife belonged to Lady Emily. The way I heard it, she asked for a knife and was handed one. Quite possibly she did not notice at the time who handed it to her, and she certainly told Stratton yesterday that she did not know whose it was. She has now, for reasons of her own, decided that it was hers. But there were half a dozen of you watching her, and one of you must remember where she was standing and who was next to her; and if the knife was not her own, one of you must have given it to her. That person had better speak up at once.'