The African Poison Murders (19 page)

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He put it down roughly and turned to go, but as he did so an object half hidden by some loose papers caught his eye. It was the bowl of another pipe. He picked it up, casually, then felt the muscles of his stomach contract a little and his pulses quicken with the familiar excitement of a find. The light from the window fell on the bowl and he turned it over and over in his hand. It was. well used, smooth and black with nicotine, but the pipe was useless, for the stem had been snapped in two.

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The fire had gone high into the mountains, and from Anstey’s road Vachell could see a thick, greyyellow cloud hanging over the trees above the bamboos, mingling with the true clouds above the crest. A faint haze blunted the sharp outlines of distant hills and imparted an unusual sort of blurred, North European look to the wide view. Anstey’s farm had escaped damage, Vachell found; the fire had swept up the mountains to the right and gone around behind his land.

He found Sir Jolyot Anstey down by the farm buildings, supervising some boys who were repairing the wall of a shed.

“We had a tragedy here last night,” he told his visitor. “In a sense, I imagine, a result of the fire.”

“Someone get hurt?”

Anstey shook his head. He was hatless, and his thick, white hair shone like silver in the bright sun.

“No, but two calves met a very unpleasant end.

Look at that.” He pointed to the damaged wall of the shed.

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The building, a calf-house, was made of heavy, unshaped cedar posts driven into the ground and set shoulder to shoulder, with strong wire-netting nailed across them on the outside. But two of the posts had been loosened by digging down to their feet, and then pushed apart so as to permit the passage between them of something as big as a medium-sized dog.

“That space isn’t big enough to let in a man,”

Vachell observed.

“It wasn’t a man. Look over there.” He pointed to one side, and lying in the shade of a grain-store Vachell saw the mangled body of a dead calf. Its neck was torn wide open and it was caked with dried blood. Along its flanks were deep lacerations, as though a rake with knife-sharp prongs had been drawn over it.

“A leopard,” Anstey explained. “Evidently it was driven from its usual haunts by the fire, and came here in search of food. We’ve had them before, of course, but not for some time, I’m glad to say.”

Vachell examined the hole by the calf-shed wall with close attention. “It hardly seems possible a leopard could figure all this out, and force a way in,” he remarked.

“Leopards are the most cunning of all the beasts of prey,” Anstey said. “They are also by far the most bold. There’s no doubt it’s a leopard, you can rest assured of that — we found the pad-marks this morning, and the other calf had been almost entirely devoured. It killed the second from sheer lust for 195

blood, I imagine, since one calf has hardly been touched.” He glanced shrewdly at Vachell and added: “I believe I can hazard a guess at what was in your mind. I have heard strange rumours lately about some unpleasant atrocities alleged to have been committed in the district — dogs attacked, ducks decapitated, and things of that nature. How much truth is there in them, if I may ask?”

“Too much,” Vachell said.

Anstey nodded. “Would you do me the honour of coming up to the house? It is time for the midmorning cup of tea, an admirable habit — at any rate in countries where it is customary to rise early and get much of the best work of the day done before eleven o’clock. Those rumours sounded too circumstantial to be invented, I thought. You realize, of course, that such actions are very likely manifestations of a recognized, if fortunately rare, form of insanity?”

“A kind of homicidal mania,” Vachell suggested, “applied to animals, instead of to men?”

“It’s something that in the old days would have been put down as a form of sorcery or witchcraft, and probably caused the death of a number of innocent suspects at the stake. Today psychologists could, no doubt, provide a number of convincing, but in fact little more illuminating, explanations.

One might, for instance, put it down (let us say) to a frustrated power-complex, a perversion of that universal urge to dominate others, to be acknowledged as a personage by one’s fellows, finding an 196

outlet in a mentally weak individual forced by circumstances to remain a person of no account.”

“It seems a far cry from an urge for power to the mutilation of dogs and birds.”

“Quite so, but a close acquaintance with the speculations of modern psychology would leave you dumbfounded at the distance a psychologist’s cry can carry,” Anstey remarked dryly. “Personally, I distrust purely psychological explanations of conduct — or, shall I say, I find them incomplete. The abnormality perhaps has its origin in some condition of the ductless glands. A colleague of mine, for instance, once treated a patient who displayed the most inordinate and insatiable appetite. She would eat a whole shoulder of lamb at a sitting and still rise hungry from the table. The children of one of her employers (she was a domestic servant) kept white mice, and one day she was detected pulling off their legs and tails. Mentally she was undoubtedly a victim of arrested development, and one might point here to the parallel of the small boy in Struwwelpeter who was in the habit of pulling off the wings of flies. Undoubtedly she had some glandular abnormality.

In the later stages it was associated with obesity and a craving for sleep, and in due course she was certified as insane.”

“An unpleasant story,” Vachell remarked. They reached the house and a native servant brought a tray of tea and fruit cake, and set it on the table.

“Very likely you are up against something of the same nature in this case,” Anstey went on. “In its 197

early stages, the physical symptoms of the glandular state are often not apparent. Weak or strong?”

“As it comes,” Vachell said. “It’s possible for a person with this glandular defect to conceal his abnormality when it isn’t, you might say, in possession — to appear quite normal in between bouts?”

“Oh, certainly, yes. In the earlier stages the impulse would only attack him at intervals, very likely when he was subjected to some emotional strain. In between whiles he would not only appear normal but be normal; in fact, he might even be oblivious of the actions he performed while under the compulsion of his craving. Blood, you know, has a peculiar effect on many people. It frequently repels. You would be surprised at the number of people who feel sick even at the mention of the word. Every sensation probably has its perversions, and a craving for blood, though fortunately rare, is no doubt the perversion of the more normal sensation of repulsion. Here, no doubt, is the true foundation for the very ancient and remarkably widespread legend of the vampire.”

“Vampires in modern dress,” Vachell remarked.

“You will find, I believe, that every persistent myth, one that has come down to us in many forms through the ages, has some foundation in one of the diverse aspects of human activity. Even werewolves probably have a prototype somewhere. Unfortunately modern science is much less efficient than mythology. It may demonstrate the reality of the 198

vampire, but it will fail to supply us with a sprig of garlic to put over our doors.”

Vachell caught a glint in his companion’s frosty blue eyes that made him wonder if he was being taken for a ride.

“I guess the police provide the garlic,” he said.

“We didn’t get an anti-vampire precautions course in our training, but just the same we reckon the protection of the citizen against vampire depredations as part of our job. No thanks, I don’t care for a second cup. Sir Jolyot, where is your daughter stopping at present?”

Anstey paused with the teapot half-way to his cup and glanced sharply at Vachell’s face.

“My daughter? She’s spending a holiday with some friends. It’s fortunate that she should have chosen this time to be away. Although my daughter is a very competent farm manager, Mr Vachell, she is still very young, and I am exceedingly glad that she was not here during the last few days. She was very fond of the Wests, and I’m afraid she’ll be most upset at the tragedy of yesterday’s fire. A bad business, that. Dennis West will be a great loss, poor fellow, and I don’t know what Mrs West will do.”

Vachell lit a cigarette reflectively and killed the match in the dregs of his tea. “Are you sure,” he asked slowly, “that it was, in fact, your daughter’s choice to go away?”

Anstey put down his cup and looked across at his guest. His expression was set and hostile, and Vachell could almost feel the impact of his eyes.

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His was the sort of gaze, Vachell reflected, that registered like a physical touch, that a stranger couldn’t fail to feel if it was turned on to him in a crowded room. Anstey got up before replying, took a small cigar out of a box, lit it, and stood with his back to the fireplace.

“My daughter’s actions, you understand, are entirely her own affair, and to some extent mine,”

he said at last. “They are nothing whatsoever to do with you. I could perfectly well tell you to mind your own business and go to the devil. On the other hand I observe that you are a shrewd young man, and as I think I can see the paths along which your mind is working I shall answer that question as directly as it was put. The fact that my daughter has gone away was not her own choice. I insisted on her going, for some weeks at least, for a reason of which I think you are perfectly well aware.”

“To get her mind off Corcoran for a while.”

“Exactly. Daphne is only nineteen. She lives a life for which I believe she would sacrifice almost anything rather than change, but it is, nevertheless, unusually solitary for a girl. She sees few young men, or at least she sees them only from time to time; she has had no opportunity, as yet, of developing powers of sound judgment and discrimination.

I am not, I hope, a specimen of the oldfashioned father who drives his daughter’s suitors from the door, but nor am I willing to stand aside and see an unscrupulous young man with bad heredity and worse environment, unfortunately the 200

possessor of an easy superficial charm, take advantage of my daughter’s ignorance to talk her into marriage before she has had a chance to develop her own character and to know her own mind. I trust I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly, sir. You believe that Corcoran and your daughter had got so far as to talk of marriage?”

“I am certain of it.”

“I believe that Munson objected, on his side, to his nephew’s plans.”

“I have no knowledge whatsoever of Munson’s views, and no interest in them,” Anstey said coldly.

“Munson was sore as hell at you, sir — on account of the legal action you brought against him, I guess, and also the ideological differences between you.

He wouldn’t have let Corcoran marry your daughter, and unless Corcoran quit the country altogether he couldn’t have married without his uncle’s consent.

He had no capital to start on his own. You realize that Munson’s death removes the major obstacle to marriage with your daughter, from Corcoran’s point of view?”

“No, I do not,” Anstey said shortly. He was staring intently at the glowing end of his cigar. “I have no knowledge, naturally, of Corcoran’s plans, but I cannot see that his prospects will be affected in any way. Mrs Munson, I believe, was always the more rabid and least generous of the two.”

“Mrs Munson doesn’t inherit the farm.”

Anstey raised his bushy eyebrows and said: 201

“Really? You overestimate my interest in the Munsons’

affairs, Mr Vachell.”

“Corcoran gets it,” Vachell went on. “He can do what he likes. He’ll be the boss now.”

This time Anstey did not pretend to be indifferent.

He glanced up over his cigar, frowning, and snapped: “What do you mean? Munson has a son.”

“The son gets a half share when he’s twenty-one, if Corcoran doesn’t choose to buy him out at Land Bank valuation.”

“But that’s iniquitious!” Anstey exclaimed. For the first time Vachell saw him really moved. “A man has no right to disinherit his wife and son!

Under French law that would not be allowed. And now, after all, Corcoran….”

He turned his back and leant against the big stone fireplace, his forehead resting on a forearm, his head bowed. Vachell thought that the ex-surgeon didn’t want his expression to be seen. When he turned around, flicking away his half-smoked cigar, he was perfectly composed.

“So Corcoran gets his uncle’s farm and gets rid of the major obstacle in the way of his matrimonial plans, at one stroke,” he observed. “No doubt the implications have not escaped you.”

“They have not,” Vachell agreed.

“There is, however, another obstacle in the way,”

Anstey added, with a trace of grimness. “I can see that I shall have to do without a farm manager for some time.”

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A little way below the homestead, on his way back, Vachell stopped the car at the junction of the road (a courtesy title, as in the case of most Chania thoroughfares) with a track leading off into the forest to the left. It was overgrown with weeds, grass and creepers, but the trampling of cattle had evidently kept it from reverting to forest, and it was clear of trees or fallen logs. Vachell walked a little way along and decided that a car could use it without too much difficulty in dry weather, though not in wet. He couldn’t see any signs of a car’s recent passage, but there had been no rain for over a week and the ground was hard. A pony, of course, could get along it any time.

He found Prettyman at the Karuna police office, catching up on routine.

“I went along to the funeral to keep an eye on things,” he reported. “There was quite a crowd.

Everyone liked West, and the news was on the wireless last night, so a lot of people turned up. Mrs West looked terribly cut up. Natural, of course. I must say it’s lucky they pop people into coffins to put them underground, it all looked very decent, nothing to tell they were only burying a lot of roasted bones.”

“Was Parrot there?”