A Guide to the Beasts of East Africa Read Online Free PDF Page B

sudden whim. A man does not wake up one day, examine his reflection in the mirror and
     think to himself: ‘Right, no more Mr Baldy – it’s comb-over time.’ He
     does not decide that from this day forth he will let grow what hairs remain on one side
     of his head, that he will cherish and nurture them as the vigneron his vines. He does
     not then begin to coax the hairs with brush or comb, and perhaps a little Brylcreem, to
     wind their way over his scalp. No man believes that his family and friends, confronted
     with such a tonsorial transformation, will immediately forget that he was ever bald,
     that they will think that a miracle has occurred, and the part of his scalp that was
     once bare has blossomed with hair as the desert blossoms after rain.
    No, such things happen slowly, over many
     years. A man notices a little thinning of the hair. It is the matter of a moment to
     conceal this by altering the flow of the rest of his hair. As the thinning increases,
     the time and care taken to disguise it increases. All too soon the man finds himself on
     the horns of a dilemma. Should he continue with an artifice which is looking more and
     more unnatural by the month, or should he dispense with it – in effect, go bald
     overnight? Mr Malik had long ago decided to take the former path. No matter how long it
     took him each morning or how often the abominably hairy Patel teased him, as long as a
     single hair grew on his head, that hair would be plastered up and over his scalp in
     glorious defiance of the effects of age, gravity and male hormones.
    ‘Did you hear?’ said Mr Gopez.
     ‘Looks like there’s going to be a water shortage tomorrow.’
    ‘Really?’ said Mr Malik.
     ‘I thought that new dam on the Thika River was supposed to stop all
     that.’
    ‘What he means is that the
     lecture’s been cancelled,’ said Mr Patel, ‘the one about our water
     supply.’
    ‘Speaking of that new dam on the Thika
     River,’ said Mr Gopez, ‘have you chaps read the paper? You don’t just
     need the water, you need the pipes. The old ones all leak, apparently, and according to
     what I’ve just been reading in the
Evening News
that aid money from
     Norway for new ones seems to have leaked too.’
    ‘It’s still there, you
     know,’ said Mr Patel.
    ‘I wish I could share your optimism.
     It’ll have been channelled into some secret bank account in Liechtenstein by now,
     mark my words.’
    ‘Not the money, the gun – the one he
     shot Erroll with. It’s still there, in the Thika River, where he threw it on the
     way to Nyeri.’
    ‘Oh my God, Patel, you’re not
     still going on about your damned Delves Broughton?’
    ‘Look, A.B., he told that girl all
     about it. What’s-her-name – Carberry’s daughter. He told her the very next
     day. It’s all in the book that English journalist wrote, and in the one she wrote
     too. He admitted that he’d shot Erroll. Not only that, he told her what he’d
     done with the murder weapon. On the way up to Nyeri he’d stopped at Thika and
     chucked the gun over the bridge into the falls. You must have read it –
White
     Handkerchief
, or whatever it was called.’ He turned to Mr Malik.
     ‘You’ve read it, haven’t you, Malik?’
    ‘I think you may mean
White
     Mischief
.’ Mr Malik nodded. ‘Yes, I’ve read it.’
    ‘Well, what about the other
     book?’ said Mr Gopez.
    ‘Not that Secret Service assassination
     thing,’ said Mr Patel. ‘I thought we’d agreed to ditch the conspiracy
     theory.’
    ‘No, no. I’m talking about the
     book by that other woman.’
    ‘You wouldn’t by any chance be
     referring to
Diana Lady Delamere and the Lord Erroll Murder
, would you?’
     asked Mr Malik. ‘By Mrs Leda Farrant?’
    ‘That’s the one. Correct me if
     I’m wrong, but she says that in the 1960s some local journalist chappy came up
     with some new evidence and got a story published in the
Sunday Nation
putting
     the finger squarely on Diana. The