The African Poison Murders Read Online Free PDF Page A

irises, and very restless. He thought that she looked hungry, and wondered how much Munson employees were given to eat. She seemed nervous in front of Munson, and ill at ease with the visitors. She wore a pair of khaki slacks that had been washed into a threadbare faded condition, a yellow sweater darned a good many times, and no hat.
    She said her piece about the chickens in a jerky yet monotonous voice, self-consciously, keeping her eyes away from Vachell’s face. He felt sorry for her, she was so painfully shy. Directly it was over, she turned her back to attend to an incubator in the corner of the shed. The top had jammed, however, and she couldn’t get it open. Vachell stepped quickly forward with an offer of help. It was a homemade contraption; the lid, constructed of boards, had swollen and refused to budge. He dug at it with his pocket-knife and then asked for the big sheath-knife he had seen hanging from Munson’s belt. When Munson handed it over he ran his thumb down the cutting edge. It was sharp as a sliver of glass, and so bright it must have been recently cleaned. He prised the lid open and noticed that the eggs inside had crosses on their uppermost sides, and that reminded him again of Janice West.
    Outside, in the bright sunlight, he said: “Thanks a lot, Mr Munson. There’s just one more thing.
    29
    There was a little trouble over at Commander West’s place last night — an accident to a dog. The boys thought they saw someone, they don’t know who, make a getaway along the path that goes to your farm. I’d like to know if you can account for all of your household around, say, ten o’clock last night.”
    Munson scowled, and readjusted the monocle in his eye. “What do you think — that one of my household goes at night to cause an accident to West’s dogs? What has occurred to the dog?”
    “Someone cut its paws off with a knife.”
    A slight sound, it might have been a stillborn gasp, caught his ear, but Munson had halted and swung around before he could get it classified in his mind.
    “Why do you listen, Miss Adams?” he barked.
    “What business has this of yours?” The girl was standing in the doorway, her eyes fixed on Munson, a curious expression, half of fear and half enlightenment, on her face. She shook her head. “None —
    none at all. I — I’m sorry I didn’t mean to hear. I was thinking of the wretched dog.”
    “Wretched dog,” Munson repeated. “You think of West’s dog, what of my heifers? Three die of poisoning. Poison plants, the vet says. Where do those plants come from? They do not grow on my farm. They are put there at night, in the paddock by the boundary of West’s farm. Why will not the police attend to that? But no, they will come here to tell me that I cut off dog’s paws with a knife!”
    30
    “I’m asking, not telling,” Vachell said. “Where were you at ten o’clock last night?”
    “In bed, of course. What do you think? That a farmer stays up to midnight playing beggar-myneighbour, perhaps?”
    “Perhaps,” Vachell said equably. He glanced around at the cluster of huts, like a glorified native village, and sighed inaudibly. It was a hopeless proposition. Everybody slept in a separate hut; noone could check another’s statement. After bedtime — around 9.30, he found — anyone could slip away without being seen. The native boys slept way out at the back, and they wouldn’t be worrying, anyway, about the comings and goings of the Europeans.
    His eyes came back to Munson and he caught the tail end of a wolfish grin on the German’s long, rigid face. There was something malignant in that look. He felt vaguely disturbed, as if the light had dulled suddenly with no cloud over the sun. A memory of Mrs Munson’s suety face, with its hard little eyes, increased his disquiet. A pair of troublemakers right enough. A foreboding came to him that the trouble wouldn’t end with the death of a dog.
    31

CHAPTER
THREE
    “You know, sir, I shouldn’t