Murder on Safari by Elspeth Huxley Read Free Book Online Page B

vermin… .There’ll be a murder in this camp one of these days. Half the people are at each other’s throats, and the other half in each other’s beds. What with Cara Baradale and young Englebrecht disappearing into the long grass together all day, and our respected employer dallying with her sulky boyfriend, the camp’s practically a damned brothel.” He lit his pipe, picked up his felt hat, and rose to go.
    “A couple of elephant watered below the drift this morning,” Chris said. “I thought I’d take the bus out later on and look for them.”
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    “Good idea,” de Mare agreed. “Take Vachell
    along too. Give him an idea of the lie of the land. I must go and butcher this wretched lion to make Catchpole’s holiday, I suppose. It’ll probably give him some new ideas for mural design in cocktail bars,”
    “Good luck,” Chris said. She smiled at him, and Vachell noticed that it made her face look young and vivacious, and that her teeth were white and even.
    “Thanks,” de Mare said. “Oh, and by the way
    Ч watch your step if you see Lord Baradale this morning. He’s in a tearing rage. Cara kept her word, and went off to Malabeya with Englebrecht before dawn in one of the Plymouths.”
    Vachell sat up abruptly in his chair. “She did?”
    he asked incredulously. “She didn’t leave here with him in the car.”
    “No; she used low cunning. She was waiting for him about a mile down the road, according to the driver, who was turned out and came back on
    foot, Lord Baradale is not amused.”
    Vachell leant back and lit a cigarette, his eyes on the morning sunlight sparkling on the river. He’d got away to a bad start, he reflected. Cara had outsmarted him already. She’d got away from the camp without being searched.
    As he lay there, his muscles relaxed, it seemed to him that a cloud passed swiftly over the sun. He shivered, and goose-flesh rose on his arms. “A goose walking over my grave,” he said to himself, 53
    and smiled at the superstition.
    Afterwards he wondered if he had, for the first time in his life, experienced a premonition Ч a warning that before the sun had reached its zenith, death’s cold shadow would have fallen across these bright surroundings.
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CHAPTER
SIX
    A little before ten o’clock Chris and Vachell drove in the remaining Plymouth to the roughly cleared airfield just outside the camp. The blue two-seater Miles Hawk looked a flimsy little object for such tough conditions Ч more like an outsize locust, Vachell thought, than anything else. He climbed up on to the wing, pulled a flying-helmet over his head, and settled into the front seat. Chris swung the propeller and clambered into the pilot’s seat behind. There were two rifles, a heavy one and a light, by her side Ч a wise precaution, he
    imagined, in case of a forced landing. A native guard kicked the blocks away from under the
    wheels, the engine roared, and they bumped
    forward over the veldt and into the wind.
    They flew first down the river bed, a dark green ribbon on a speckled light green field, at about five hundred feet. When they came to the drift the plane banked and started to climb to the left. That was funny, Vachell thought; the elephants were on 55
    the right bank of the stream. A herd of antelope in the thin bush just below looked like a swarm of red ants. He wished that he knew what they were.
    The plane rose higher and Chris took up a pair of field glasses and peered down at them through the open window.
    They swung away from the river in a wide
    sweep to the south. The country below was
    rolling, fairly open bush. Chris kept on banking the Hawk slightly to the left so that she could examine the ground beneath. They came to a dark patch of trees and she circled over it, using the glasses. Then she switched off the engine and they drifted silently down towards the splodge of vegetation.
    “There they are,” she said.
    Vatchell lent out as far as he could and saw what looked like a collection of