The African Poison Murders by Elspeth Huxley Read Free Book Online

just adores them. That’s why she stays with the job, I guess.”
    “She told a queer story,” Vachell remarked.
    “Yes, it wasn’t pleasant,” Janice agreed.
    West grunted: “If true.”
    45
    “Lock your door tonight,” Vachell advised. “And keep a weapon handy by the bed.”
    “I’m going to sit up all night,” West said. “If anything comes this time, by God I’ll plug it as full of holes as a bar of aero-chocolate. Small shot, of course — I won’t shoot to kill.”
    The air was cold on Vachell’s face, and he was glad to see, through the open door behind, a houseboy come in with a glowing brand to light the fire.
    He stared thoughtfully out into the garden, already dimly lit by a vast company of stars. Apprehension had laid its cold fingers on his heart.
    “Maybe you’d better hold your fire,” he said slowly, “until you’re certain that it’s somebody you want to hurt.”
    46

CHAPTER
FOUR
    One of the police askaris kept watch until 2 a.m. in a clump of bush below the garden, where the path from Munson’s farm came in, and the other took over until sunrise. Vachell himself slept lightly, with Bullseye by the bedside, and got up at two to see that the watch was changed. But no one came.
    The askaris spent a cold night wrapped in heavy overcoats and sustained by a thermos of hot tea.
    They saw nothing, they reported, except two duikers eating the Barberton daisies in the garden.
    After breakfast, complete with kippers that came from Scotland wrapped in cellophane, Vachell smoked on the sun-flooded veranda and wondered what to do next. He seemed to have run into a blind alley. Investigations in Africa often did. In Europe or America people were generally at hand to be questioned; whatever a person did, there usually turned out to be a looker-on. But here in Africa life was lived on two levels, with a barrier between the two. Natives might see and hear and register, but to the police be blind and deaf and blank. What 47
    white men did was no affair of theirs; what they did was at all times to be hidden from the whites. The only chance was to catch this dog-slashing maniac, this psychopathic pigeon-killer, at the next attempt.
    He had a hunch that if he stood by and waited, something, soon, would break.
    A little before ten o’clock the telephone rang. A houseboy put his head in at the door and announced: “The hole wants you,” and disappeared.
    Vachell heard the excited voice of Prettyman at the other end of the wire.
    “Sir, are you there?” the young policeman said.
    “Something extraordinary’s happened. Corcoran —
    you know, Munson’s nephew — has just come in by car. He says Munson’s dead.”
    Vachell whistled into the telephone.
    “Killed, or just passed on?”
    “I don’t know. He was found by a boy in the pyrethrum-drying shed this morning, about eight.
    Corcoran said there were no marks of foul play. He thinks Munson must have been overcome by fumes from the charcoal braziers and fallen down in a faint, and suffocated. But I thought, after yesterday, you’d want to look into it yourself.”
    “Sure thing. Did they leave the body out there?”
    “At the farm, yes. Corcoran says it was no good getting a doctor, Munson was quite dead. He wants to know what to do.”
    “Load him into a car and take him back there right away, and bring out the first doctor you can corral. Warn the doc if he can’t certify cause of 48
    death he’ll have to do an autopsy, and get the inquest arrangements under way. I’m going right over. Meet you there as soon as you can make it.”
    “Okay, sir,” Prettyman said, and rang off. Vachell collected a box of gadgets filled with his detective apparatus, known locally as the abortionist’s bag, got into his car, and bounced off over the lawn and down the drive inside three minutes. He made the Munsons’ homestead in less than fifteen more.
    There was a look of disorganization about the straggling homestead. No natives were to be seen;