The African Poison Murders (12 page)

Vachell dismissed the corporal in a reflective mood, and then called him back.

“There is a man here who catches moles,” he instructed. “A Dorobo whose name is Arawak. I 115

wish to talk with him; see that he is here when I return.”

The corporal saluted, and Vachell climbed thoughtfully into his car. There was nothing much to be done until reports came in from the Marula labs and from Prettyman. A feeling of curiosity about Sir Jolyot Anstey, the Harley Street surgeon who had retired to the top of an African mountain to farm and brood, recurred in his mind. Anstey had a grudge against Munson, and a knowledge of native poisons. He was worth a visit, it seemed.

The road to Anstey’s farm mounted a series of precipices through dense green forest; the rough surface would clearly become quite impassable in the rains. Few of the tree-stumps had been removed, and jagged protrusions struck the underneath of the car with repeated whangs. Somehow the car staggered uphill like a drunken traveller, on second mostly, but sometimes on first. Three stops had to be made to fill the radiator, which boiled protestingly, unused to such ordeals.

Huge rib-trunked cedars rose up into the sky on either side, and lesser trees with graceful foliage stood between. The ground was thickly covered with a deep green waist-high plant, and creepers with brilliant orange flowers entwined themselves among the lower bushes. Here and there, where the road curved, the eye could catch a view of the blue valley below, sun-flooded and immense.

He must have climbed, he reckoned, at least fifteen hundred feet before he came out of the forest 116

and saw the first cultivation, a field of young wheat.

Anstey’s farm lay on windswept heights above the forest, in the cold open glades. It was a wild piece of country, with a feeling of being on top of the world, of having nothing between the treetops and the depths of the sky. He supposed that the altitude must be between eight and nine thousand feet.

The homestead was built of cedar posts with a shingle roof, like a large log cabin; it was strange to a Canadian to encounter such a familiar yet now unaccustomed sight. Near at hand was the usual growth of sheds and shanties run wild, and a number of tractors and farm implements stood scattered around. He passed some rough-coated Hereford steers in a paddock, and a small mill by the side of a swift-running mountain stream.

The door of the house was open, and Vachell walked in. He found himself in a big barn of a room with no ceiling, so that he looked up into a forest of beams. In the centre stood a fine old refectory table of English oak, covered with a welter of papers and books. Copies of Nature were stacked high between the Journal of Experimental Psychology and Farming in South Africa. Cases crammed with books lined the walls on either side of the fireplace.

The remaining three walls, of bare logs, were incongruously hung with ancestral portraits of the blackest and most varnished kind. Vachell wondered what the Elizabethan gentlefolk in ruffs, doublets and heavy brocade would think of their strange environment, a log cabin on top of an African 117

mountain, and of their descendant, clad in old khaki slacks, stained with tractor grease, who sat at a big roll-top desk in front of a window at one side the room.

Sir Jolyot Anstey did not look up; but he heard the footstep, and shouted in a highpitched energetic voice:

“Come in, come in! Who is it and what do you want?”

Vachell took off his hat and gave his name.

“I’m from Manila,” he added. “I’d like to talk with you if you can spare a few moments.”

Anstey got up abruptly and crossed the room with quick jerky strides. He was a shortish man of slight build, with pink cheeks, very blue eyes, and a shock of thick white hair. Everything about him seemed decisive; there was nothing indeterminate in either his manner or his looks.

“My name is Anstey,” he said. “You’re welcome to talk to me about anything you like so long as it isn’t local politics or farm machinery, because I’m not going to buy any more. Sit down, sit down, and have a cigar. You’re not a Labour Inspector, are you — or from the Agricultural Department?” A gleam came into his eye. “Because if you are, I’d like a word with you about your latest so-called rustresistant wheat.”

Vachell felt already a little guilty about belonging to anything so prosaic as the police. He explained his business briefly, whilst Anstey waved him to a 118

chair and took one himself on the other side of the fireplace.

“Certainly I’ll help you if I can,” he promised, “although I considered Munson to be a despicable creature and a menace to the future of Chania, and I cannot be other than delighted that he is dead. I have reached an age, sir, when I no longer feel it necessary to pretend distress when those whom I consider to be influences for evil in the world are removed. I understand Munson collapsed in his pyrethrum-drying shed and died immediately. Are you satisfied as to the cause of death?”

“No, that’s why I’m here.” Vachell explained about the autopsy and the lack of postmortem symptoms, and added:

“I’ve heard that you’re an authority on native poisons, sir. There’s an idea that some native who had it in for Munson — there seem to be plenty around — slipped a shot of some such poison into his early morning tea. Do you know any native poisons a guy could swallow without knowing it, that would kill quickly and be hard to detect after death?”

“I know of six or eight,” Anstey replied. “At least three exceedingly deadly poisons grow within ten miles of this house, any one of which would kill a man within twenty-four hours — probably in much less — giving rise to no symptoms likely to be recognizable by anyone but a native practitioner, who would be of course familiar with them all.”

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“Can these be detected in an autopsy?” Vachell persisted.

“That depends, my dear young man, on who conducts it. They can be, yes, by a skilled pathologist who knows what he is looking for, and how to look for it. But the toxic principle is in most caseschemically unstable, and very hard to trace.”

Vachell nodded; Anstey was telling him what he had expected to hear. This was a hell of a case, he thought for the fiftieth time; every step took him deeper into the fog. How could you get anywhere when you couldn’t even depend on doctors to tell you the cause of death?

His mind on poisons, he fired a question almost at random.

“How about these arrowpoisons the natives used to brew for hunting animals, and for warfare too, I guess?”

“They use them still, extensively,” Anstey said.

“That is, arrowpoisons are used by most of the tribes that eat meat. I made a special study of them some years ago. The subject is much neglected, but one of great scientific interest. How much do you want to hear? You’re young enough to know that you’re on dangerous ground. It’s much harder to stop an elderly bore than a charging buffalo.”

Vachell smiled and lit a cigarette. “I don’t know any chemistry to speak of,” he said. “I’d just like a kind of concentrated essence of the facts I’d be likely to understand.”

Sir Jolyot Anstey leant back in his chair, crossed 120

his knees, and inspected the sole of the very old pair of plaid slippers that clothed his feet. “There are many arrowpoisons,” he began, “but by far the most common are those derived from the Acocanthera species. So far as I know there are five common species normally used in East Africa, but in Chania Acocanthera schimperii and Acocanthera longiflora are the two sources most generally employed. To get the poison you boil down the leaves and bark of the tree in water till you get a black glutinous mass; and there you have your poison. It’s the simplest thing in the world. I did it myself, most successfully, in an old petrol tin.

“The toxic principle is ouabain, a cardiac glucoside of the same group as strophanthin and digitalin.

When heated with acid it splits up into a sugar and a glucose, a substance closely related to the sex hormones — but I don’t suppose you’d be interested in that. According to Raymond, the Government analyst in Tanganyika, who has done some very valuable work on arrowpoisons, about three to five grains of the toxin are normally found in the coating applied to a native arrowhead. Since as little as two milligrams may be a fatal dose, the poison found on a single arrowhead would be capable of killing two hundred and fifty men. The toxin must, of course, be introduced directly into the bloodstream. When taken by the mouth the worst it can do is to induce a mild attack of dysentery. Is that what you wanted to know?”

“That’s fine,” Vachell said. “How long does it 121

take to kill the victim? And what sort of symptoms does it have?”

“The answer to your first question depends on where the man is hit,” Anstey replied. “Introduced near the heart, the poison may kill in as little as two or three minutes; thirty would probably be about the limit. Introduced in an extremity, say the hand or foot, it might take an hour, or at the most two, to kill. I have never heard of its taking longer than that. When it is used for its legitimate purpose of hunting, the natives say that an animal rarely goes more than a hundred yards. As regards your second question, the action of the poison is to paralyse the nerves that control the muscles of the heart. The symptoms are nothing more nor less than a cessation of the action of the heart.”

“By God, sir, I believe you’ve got it!” Vachell exclaimed excitedly, sitting forward in his chair.

“That’s exactly what the doctor said — you used his very words. How about postmortem symptoms?”

“As a rule there are virtually none. Ouabain can of course be identified — a test with metadinitrobenzene, for instance, gives a characteristic blue reaction — but only if the test is applied immediately and with great accuracy; in other words, only if you know what you expect to find.”

“Say, that fits in from every angle,” Vachell said.

He was still excited, and crushed his cigarette into a brass tray. “This looks like the first real break I’ve had.”

FR1;CHAPTER

ELEVEN

Anstey raised his bushy white brows a little and looked at his visitor in amused surprise. His vivid blue eyes were as bright as those of a squirrel.

“Don’t tell me someone’s been shooting off poisoned arrows at Munson,” he observed.

“It’s something a good deal more cagey than that.

But thanks to you, sir, I believe we can get the wrappings off. I wonder how — say, what became of the poison you said you prepared? I suppose you threw it out when you’d finished?”

“I used some of it for my frog experiments,”

Anstey replied, wrinkling his forehead. “I can’t remember what happened to the rest. If you like we’ll go and see.”

He led the way through a door at one end of the long room into what seemed to be a cross between a laboratory, a study, a tool-house and a junkshop.

A long bench covered with bottles in racks and a certain amount of simple laboratory equipment ran the whole length of one wall, and a big paperlittered desk stood beneath a window opposite.

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Various strange-looking cabinets and contraptions, at whose uses Vachell could scarcely guess, occupied the remaining space. One wall, he observed with mild astonishment, was covered with charts showing the movement of the stars.

Anstey glanced up and saw his visitor’s eyes fixed wonderingly on the charts.

“Have you any knowledge of the chemical influence of the stars on plant growth?” he inquired.

“No, perhaps it is hardly a subject likely to be studied by the police. I assure you, though, it’s a matter of absorbing interest and vast possibilities —

far too vast, in fact, for us to realize at our present stage of intellectual complacency, social chaos and spiritual infancy. (The average native elder, whom we affect to despise as a savage, could teach me a great deal about medicine or agriculture, and you, certainly, a lot about law enforcement and detection of crime.) Are you aware, to begin with, that the chemical composition of various types of star has been determined by spectre-analysis?”

“No, I guess not,” Vachell said.

“The spectra of stars in group 0 and B in the Harvard classification, for instance,” Anstey continued, waving in the air a pair of secateurs that he had picked up, “show a preponderance of helium and hydrogen. In type A the helium has disappeared altogether and the metal lines are prominent; by the time you reach type F you find little hydrogen, but a preponderance of calcium; and the spectra of groups B, K and M betray the presence of many 124

metals and of hydro-carbons in various forms. Thus, | you see, the light sent out through space from one star is different from that emanating from another; everything depends on the chemistry of the star.

i Since, as we know, the phenomenon of plant growth ‘ is controlled by light, may we not suggest that the quality of the light can affect the growth of plants in ways which we do not yet understand? And to go a step further, mightn’t we postulate that when stars of a certain type are in the ascendant, let us say those in whose molten mass calcium abounds, then the calcium-influence, as we might term it, will be predominant, and will stimulate some plants and retard others — will even, perhaps, affect the animal life of the planet? Mark my words, young man, one day the true chemical basis of astrology will be revealed.”

“I guess you’re right, at that,” Vachell hazarded.

“It’s a most extraordinary thing about this Acocanthera extract,” Anstey remarked. “I could have sworn I saw it among these tins here only a few weeks ago. I know I haven’t moved it myself.”

“Don’t you keep this room locked up?”

“Good gracious, no. I dislike locks, just as I dislike firearms; both indicate a distrust of one’s fellow men which they then feel impelled to justify.

I have never had anything stolen, so far as I am aware.”

Vachell smiled and remarked: “If your method worked more often I could put in more time fishing.

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Dangerous stuff, though, to keep lying about. I guess you made enough to kill an army.”

“Probably,” Anstey agreed, “provided you had enough arrows.”

At last he gave a triumphant grunt and pulled a tin from behind a pile of books on the bench.