11.

Both Justin Tolliver and Vera McIntosh thought often about that kiss over the next two days. If she had given it for luck, Tolliver made the most of it and saw to it that his team won the polo match on Sunday.

At the celebratory dinner that followed, Lucy Buxton approached him.

Tolliver had at that point completely abandoned Nurse Freemantle’s prohibitions and accepted more than one too many whiskeys offered him by his team’s supporters. In his cups, with his libido stimulated by his day with Vera but no hope of release there, he did not know how he would resist the lady’s advances, or if he wanted to. In fact the nearer she got to his corner of the ballroom, the more beautiful she looked in her blue beaded gown that clung so delicately to her curves, which drove away all thought of Lord Delamere’s warning about Lucy.

He smiled broadly at her and made a halfhearted stab at rising to greet her when she reached his side. “Sorry, my lady,” he said, not too drunk to feel his grin to be lopsided. “I’m a little wobbly on my feet just now, but I would love to have you join me in my little corner of the world. Won’t you have a seat?”

He watched her blue-beaded backside as she took the chair to his right. There were other things he was supposed to be thinking about, but he could not quite remember what they were. “What can I do for you?” he asked, though he was sure he knew the answer and was growing ever more enthusiastic about the prospect.

Tolliver was nearly too drunk to see the truth when it came to him. “Fetching as you look with the whiskey stars in your eyes, oh hero of the polo field,” Lucy said with a laugh, “I have not come to you for that purpose.”

Tolliver thought to answer her, but he was sure he would slur his words if he tried.

Lucy went on. “I want you to invite me for breakfast tomorrow morning.”

He shrugged, which she had the sense to interpret as a negative response.

“Don’t worry, it needn’t be early. Why don’t we say at ten?” She stood. “Don’t get up. I wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself.” She giggled. “I do think it’s time for you to find your pillow.”

She looked quite wonderful from behind as she walked away, a fact Tolliver had quite forgotten by the time she approached him the following morning in the dining room at the club. His head hurt too much for sexual fantasies. Though quite debilitated, he had enough brainpower left to wonder at this, especially given his prolonged state of celibacy. He wondered if he was getting old. He’d have his twenty-fourth birthday this year. That could not possibly be too old. The randiest men he knew were quite a bit older than that. The thought made his head hurt more.

When Ndege had wakened him at nine, he had only the vaguest recollection of having seen Lucy in the ballroom the night before, and none at all of having agreed to have breakfast with her. But a note from the lady had arrived that morning to remind him, and Tolliver had arrived at the club with but a few minutes to spare. He had barely taken his seat when she came toward him with her graceful strides and said, sotto voce, “I could see the headache pain in your eyes from halfway across the room. I’ll whisper, not to make it worse.”

Tolliver had risen when she approached and wished she would hurry and sit down. “Please join me. What will you have?”

“Just a coffee. I had breakfast ages ago.” She looked around the dining room, which was, happily, empty except for the two of them and the waiter. The Monday morning business breakfast meetings had ended, and the important and self-important of Nairobi had gone off to their respective desks. It suddenly occurred to Tolliver that if Cranford saw him and Lucy together in the morning he might think they had spent the night together. That thought intensified the pain splitting his forehead. He reached for his coffee cup.

“First of all,” Lucy said. “I want to apologize for my unladylike behavior toward you over the past several days. I was very drunk, and you are just too damned attractive.”

Tolliver did not know where to look, much less what to say. “You need not have come here to apologize,” he said. “I think you were grieving, and it got the better of you.”

She looked at him for longer than was comfortable for him before she spoke again. “When I agreed to marry Kirk he was every bit as gorgeous as you are now,” she said at last. “I could not have imagined that in fifteen years he would have turned into the slug he now is. I was twenty and he was thirty. If I had let myself go as he has…” She did not complete the thought. She did not need to.

“As I said, Mrs.—um—Lucy, you need not apologize to me. Let us forget it ever happened. I have to go on with my investigation, and it would be best if you and I did not see anything of each other until that is over. To tell you the truth, I am late getting to work now. As you undoubtedly saw, I overdid the celebrating last evening.”

The waiter approached, and Lucy Buxton ordered a coffee. She turned to Tolliver with an almost motherly concern in her eyes. “I can see you are not at your bright-eyed best. I will get to the point. I did not come just to apologize. I said all that first because I want you to understand the seriousness of what I say next. It is about your investigating my husband in the death of Josiah Pennyman.”

Tolliver had barely opened his mouth, when she waved away his objection. “No. No. Don’t be shocked at how much I know. You must learn that everyone knows everything here. It is almost totally impossible for a person to have a conversation with anyone in a public place without it becoming common knowledge within a few hours.”

He squared his shoulders and made an attempt at dignified speech. “As I have just tried to tell you, Mrs. Buxton, I am not at all sure that I should discuss my investigation with you. There are rules that govern my work.”

She was spooning sugar and pouring cream into the coffee the waiter had placed at her elbow. “I have information that will have a profound effect on your thinking about why Josiah Pennyman was killed and who might have done it,” she said. “I know that you have established where Kirk was at the time of Josiah’s death, that he could not have done it with his own hands. Have you considered that he may have paid someone to do the deed for him?”

She might have hit Tolliver with a thunderbolt. “Why would you imagine such a thing?” he managed to ask once he had recovered his thoughts.

She put down her cup and sighed. “I imagine, though I have never heard you say it, that you think Kirk might have killed Josiah to defend his honor against the man who seduced his wife. Believe me, Captain Tolliver, that would not be anything that would motivate old Kirk. It was Kirk’s true love, money, that was at stake.”

Tolliver saw where she was going with her line of talk and imagined that she was about to reveal what he already knew from Lord Delamere about Pennyman’s loan, but she surprised him. “If Kirk killed Josiah, it would have been to shut him up.” She studied him to see if she had engaged his interest.

She had. “Go on, please.”

She leaned forward and lowered her voice though the waiter had left and they were alone. “Kirk has been dabbling in land speculation in secret, something that is strictly against the rules, actions that could ruin his reputation as a banker. Such as it is.”

Tolliver wanted to know more about that reputation. His mother always tried to stifle his natural curiosity by warning him not to pry. Now it was his duty. “What would you say people think of Mr. Buxton?”

She looked surprised, as if he were the mere boy she sometimes assumed him to be. “He is working for the Standard Bank of India, Mr. Tolliver. It is owned by colonials in the Raj. It does have a London office, but it is not as if he is employed by a venerable old English institution. And he is the branch manager, not a managing director. Kirk Buxton has neither the bloodlines nor the brainpower to aspire to anything that one would actually call prestigious.”

Justin Tolliver’s headache was getting worse. “Just what has this got to do with the death of Josiah Pennyman?” His tone was harsher than he intended, but the words were spoken, and there was nothing he could do about them now.

She did not seem to mind. “Josiah found out about Kirk’s underhanded dealings. Given that Josiah was extremely upset when Kirk rescinded the loan for his improvements on his farm, he threatened my husband, said that if Kirk did not change his mind and give him the money, he would publicly accuse Kirk of using the bank’s deposits for his own speculative land deals. Certainly, then, Kirk would have lost his position with the bank. He might very well go to jail. You’re a policeman. You must know the law on such matters.”

“And this makes you think that Mr. Buxton paid someone to kill Dr. Pennyman?” He was incredulous, and it showed.

Lucy rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “I told you that my husband does not think about anything but money. It is everything to him. It’s a short step from understanding that fact to knowing he is capable of using money as a murder weapon.” She stood.

Tolliver started to rise, but she held up her lovely hands to stop him. “Don’t bother to get up. Just think about what I have said.” She picked up her handbag from beside her chair and marched away, showing Tolliver his now favorite view of her, for more reasons than one.

He sank back in his chair. He had to report to D.C. Cranford at eleven. Lucy Buxton had just turned everything he thought he would say upside down.

He looked into his empty coffee cup and around at the deserted dining room. He reached across the table and took the half-cup Lucy had left behind and drank it. He was certain that putting on his pith helmet when he went outside would make his head explode.

*   *   *

Kwai Libazo was happy to take up his post at the wall behind A.D.S. Tolliver in the district commissioner’s office. Listening to these men talk had taught him more about them than any of the books by Englishmen that Libazo had read at his mission school in Kibwezi. The window beside him was open, bringing in the sounds of the crews installing the electric light poles. Electricity was a wonder, everyone said. When the whites came to the country with lanterns that could burn and give light in the night, the tribespeople had thought them a form of magic. This new thing, that required all these black wires—they said it would make the night in the town like the day. Kwai Libazo wished they would work faster because he was very keen to see them banish the darkness forever.

Unlike Tolliver’s usual posture of standing before his superior’s desk, today he had taken a chair. Libazo was happy that his ears were good because the sounds from outside would otherwise drown out Tolliver’s voice.

Cranford and Tolliver had begun, as the white men always did, by not speaking about what they had come together to say.

“Very well done, on the polo field yesterday, my boy. Very well, indeed.” The district commissioner’s voice, as usual, boomed. He always seemed to be speaking to a whole village, even when there was only one person in the room with him. Cranford, of course, would not count Kwai Libazo. British people did not care what he thought, or even if he thought. At first, Libazo had found it insulting when they paid him so little mind, though he knew he could never complain about it. But now, he found it convenient. His insignificance meant they also did not care what he heard. More than once since he joined the police force, he had overheard very helpful information. His missionary teacher had often instructed the boys in his class about the two sides of the coin. With white people there was always the coin, and it always had two sides.

“Thank you, sir,” Tolliver was saying, “Thistle is a great pony.”

“Capital. Capital. Now let us get this business of the witch doctor over and done with, shall we?”

“Well, sir, I believe you saw in my written report, about Kirk Buxton’s whereabouts, etc.”

“Damn fine job of work, too.” Cranford slammed his hand on a sheaf of papers to his right on the desk. Behind him, the punkah toto, pulling the cord for the overhead fan, gave a shudder of shock. The district commissioner went right on. “I sent a copy of it to London in the dispatch box on this morning’s train.” He fingered the pages. “This will keep those interfering homebodies in the colonial office in London out of our hair.” He ran his hand over his head and what there was left of hair on it.

Captain Tolliver leaned forward and put his forearm on the desk. He pinched the bridge of his nose, which meant that the headache he had complained of coming here was getting worse. “Just this morning, I have found there is something more to add, I am afraid, District Commissioner, sir.”

Libazo’s attention perked up. When the captain had come to get him and take him along to this meeting, he had said that he needed an extra pair of ears with him, that he had to drop a bombshell, and that he was hung over. These were the kind of terms that Libazo now understood. The captain did not mean to cause an actual explosion, but to say something that would upset his superior very much. Many times in speaking, British people said things in this descriptive way; similar to the way the Kikuyu named white people for things they wore or said. The captain was about to explode his bomb.

“Lucy Buxton suggested to me this morning, sir—”

D.C. Cranford looked very sour and waved his hands in front of him, as if he were trying to stop a wagon. “Let us not bring your pillow talk into this, Mr. Tolliver. I’ve told you—”

Tolliver leapt to his feet. Now his voice was almost as loud as Cranford’s. “If you please, District Commissioner. Your assumptions about Mrs. Buxton and me are entirely wrong. There is no pillow talk. In fact, there is no pillow anything between Mrs. Buxton and me. I resent…” His voice trailed off. He took several breaths and sat back down. “I apologize, sir. Last week, in her grief over Pennyman’s death, and in her cups, Mrs. Buxton lost control and tried to … Whatever she thought, I was not her man. I am not her man. Please let me tell you what she suggests.”

“Very well, but I don’t see how it could possibly change my mind.”

Tolliver went on to say something that seemed not to impress Cranford at all, but impressed Libazo very much—that Mr. Buxton might have paid someone to kill the Scottish doctor. This was an idea entirely new to Kwai Libazo. Would anyone accept money to kill a person? Certainly he knew that people had killed others to rob their money. The first case he had worked on with Tolliver, six months ago, when Inspector Tolliver had been new to the force, had involved such a thing. Also, the Kikuyu and Maasai killed each other in wars to steal cattle. And tribesmen had been known to kill members of their own tribes in rages. But would someone do it to be paid?

“I’m not having any of it.” The district commissioner sounded like a roaring lion.

“But, sir—”

“No, Captain. The entire idea is preposterous. I’ve known Kirk Buxton for years. He is a banker, not a member of some secret Chinese killing society. Besides, except for a talent for bridge, the man is practically an idiot. He doesn’t have the capacity to organize such an endeavor.”

“Now, sir, really. He is the manager of one of the largest banks in Nairobi. Surely if he can run a bank—”

“No. No. First of all, he is only the branch manager. That doesn’t take the intelligence of a flea. Banking is the easiest game in the world. It’s run on the principle of if you have an orchard we will be happy to lend you an apple. They lend money only to people who don’t really need it, charge them for the privilege, and almost always get recompensed no matter what happens. You don’t need to be a strategist to be a banker.”

“So, what do you think I ought to do about Mrs. Buxton’s suggestion, then?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Waste of time. Can’t see how you could ever prove such a thing anyway. You have your man. Get him up before the magistrate immediately, give the court the facts of the case, and put Mbura before a firing squad.”

“A firing squad, sir? Not a hanging?”

Libazo had thought they were through with firing squads.

“What’s the difference? The disgusting barbarian will be dead at the end of it.”

Tolliver stood up, at attention. Libazo knew from his determined posture that he was about to say something dangerous to himself. “I must tell you, sir, that I am absolutely set upon seeing justice is served. I intend to file a report to the colonial office of Mrs. Buxton’s accusation. And for the rest of it, if you are set on a premature trial and the execution of Gichinga Mbura before we have exhausted the other possibilities of who might have killed Josiah Pennyman, you will have to find someone else to do it. I will not carry out your order until I have decent evidence that Mbura committed the crime. He may very well be the murderer, sir, but if we are here to bring to this continent all that is best of England and English law and justice, then we must do it properly.”

Only with a great effort was Kwai Libazo able to keep his statuelike posture. He had not yet told Tolliver what he had found out on Sunday at Richard Newland’s farm. He wanted to blurt it out now, to support Tolliver’s contention, but he knew he would lose his position on the police force if he said a word.

His work had become more important to him than anything else in his life. In fact, it was the first thing he had come across that drew all of him, that made him feel like a man. He had been denied warrior status in both his mother’s and his father’s tribes. He belonged nowhere in his native land. And he knew very well that he could never be seen as a true member of the white people’s tribe, though he now served them. But when Justin Tolliver spoke to him of their mission to instill the rule of law and justice, he wanted to serve that. The rule of law and justice was his tribe.

A very red D.C. Cranford was sputtering. “Stop with that immediately, Mr. Tolliver. You risk your position entirely if you continue with this nonsense. Sit back down, man. You are forgetting yourself.”

Libazo’s heart trembled when he saw Justin Tolliver retake his seat. If Tolliver gave in to Cranford’s demands, Kwai’s loyalty to Tolliver would be destroyed, and Kwai’s purpose in serving him would be lost.

“That’s better,” the district commissioner was saying. “I think you are letting your feelings for Lucy Buxton get the better of your good judgment.”

Kwai Libazo saw Tolliver’s neck and back turn to the stone he himself was trying to imitate. Tolliver gripped the sides of his chair.

“Ah, I seemed to have hit the mark. I have told you that you must not—”

“Begging your pardon, sir, I have already told you, you are mistaken. I do not have the feelings for Mrs. Buxton you imagine.”

Cranford patted the air in front of him and laughed. “Ever the gentleman,” he said. “You needn’t deny it to save the lady’s reputation, my boy. I saw it with my own eyes. And quite understandable it was, though I must say—”

Tolliver started to get up again.

“Oh, sit back down. I was a young buck once myself. I understand the temptations of virility, it’s just that—”

“Really, Mr. District Commissioner, sir, you must allow me to explain.”

The missionaries who taught Kwai Libazo to speak English had made a great point that it was forbidden to interrupt a person who was speaking. Yet, British people seemed to do it to one another all the time.

“I am all ears,” the district commissioner said, which almost made Libazo laugh out loud, since the district commissioner did have extremely large ears that stuck out from his head. That and the grayness of his habitual clothing, his hair, his eyes, and even his skin was why the Kikuyu nicknamed him Elephant-man.

“Please, let me put aside this notion of my having an … of anything serious going on between Mrs. Buxton and myself. You must believe me. What you saw that night was Mrs. Buxton, having had too much to drink, looking to me for … It was not my intention to…” The back of Tolliver’s neck had changed nearly to the color of Kwai Libazo’s uniform fez.

Tolliver’s hands gripped the edge of his chair again. “Sir, I am acting as an investigator here. That is all, and I do think we must deal with Mrs. Buxton’s accusation. We are here to serve justice, are we not?”

“Dear boy, what is to stop us imaging that Lucy Buxton is accusing her husband of doing what she herself might have done: hired someone to kill the doctor. She is far cleverer than her husband, I dare say. If we are going to let our imaginations run wild, suppose Pennyman was throwing her over and she could not stand to lose him. I would not put it past him to be two-timing the lady—given the reputation he arrived with about not being able to control his pudding.”

Again Tolliver was struck as silent as Kwai Libazo had been trained to keep himself. It took him a moment and then he said, “With great reluctance, sir, I am going to reveal that Mrs. Buxton told me that Pennyman had information about Kirk that could ruin him. Information Pennyman had threatened to reveal.”

“What information?”

“Sir, it is an act that could be a crime. I will not accuse Mr. Buxton of it until I have corroboration of his wife’s word.”

Libazo did not understand the word “corroboration,” but it seemed to quell the D.C.’s curiosity.

“Given your confounded idealism, I will not press you for it now, but whatever it is, you had better get to the bottom of it and quickly.” Now the district commissioner rose from his chair. “I am in a mood to be a bit lenient about this, my boy, but not for much longer. Let the witch doctor rot in jail a few more days. Give it one last stab to put your conscience to rest on this subject. But I will not stand for any threats of making trouble for me by writing reports to London. I will give you one more chance, but this is the last. And if I hear another word about your writing reports, I will write one that will destroy your career, about your making love to a suspect in the case.”

Tolliver opened his mouth as if to object, but Cranford signaled him to hold his words. “It may be stuff and nonsense, but I do not have to take your word on that. If you are going to go about acting like a jumped-up little shit and threatening to go over my head, I shall have to put you in your place. I give you one week to answer for all of this. If you refuse after that to follow my orders and get the witch doctor before the magistrate, I’ll have you on a boat back to Portsmouth before you can say Jack Robinson.” He then put his left hand on Tolliver’s shoulder, like a father would do giving advice to his son. “Get on with it then and give it your best if you must. Youthful idealism will have its day. Then, once you have seen the folly of trying to make a watertight case of this, take the evidence to court. You know very well that when you finally follow my orders, the mumbo-jumbo man will be found guilty and that will be an end on it, and we’ll have the barbarian’s head.” He extended his hand to the captain.

Tolliver shook the district commissioner’s hand, an Englishman’s sign of having reached an agreement, but Kwai Libazo could not tell exactly what it was they had decided to do. It seemed to have something to do with stopping before the truth was known and taking off Gichinga Mbura’s head, something Kwai knew from reading the missionary’s English books that the British actually used to do to their criminals. But Kwai Libazo believed Mbura was not the murderer. The god of justice, that he had lately learned to worship, demanded that he save the medicine man’s head, even if he despised the man himself.

Libazo marched smartly behind Captain Tolliver out to the lobby of Government House and into the street. “Where can we go from here?” Tolliver said under his breath more to himself than to his companion.

“Sir?” Kwai Libazo was not sure what Tolliver wanted him to say, but he had a very good idea about where they should go.

“Nothing. I was just thinking aloud,” Tolliver said. He looked distracted and confused.

“I think, B’wana, that we should go to Richard Newland’s farm.”

“Why, in God’s name?”

“I still do not understand exactly the meaning of proof,” Libazo said, “but I often hear you talk of things that might have happened, and if these things actually did happen they would mean it is not proved that Gichinga Mbura killed the mission doctor.”

“Yes?” Tolliver did not seem to have understood what Libazo was trying to say, but he had started to walk in the direction of the stable.

“Sir. I thought of such a possibility. Yesterday, I went to Richard Newland’s farm to find out if this thing I imagined really did happen. I think it did, sir.”

“Well, out with it then. What did you find out?”

“The missionary’s son, sir, did not leave two days before the doctor died. His family say that he did, but he did not. The workers at the farm told me this. The hunting party did not leave until the morning of the death, sir.”

Tolliver stopped and looked at Libazo. They were so much the same height that they were eye to eye. “You went to the Newland farm to ask that question?”

“Yes, B’wana.”

“How did you get there?”

“By the train, sir. And I walked from the station.”

For a moment, it seemed as if Tolliver was going to say that he didn’t believe Kwai. He was shaking his head as if to say no. “You can’t mean you think Otis McIntosh had something to do with his uncle’s death. He is just a boy.”

“I believe he has fourteen years, sir. If he was a Maasai he would be ready for emorata. For circumcision.”

Like all white men, Tolliver grimaced at the word. “Still.”

“I was only thinking of what might be possible, sir. I understand that you want to make very sure that the only man who could have killed the doctor is Gichinga Mbura.”

For the first time, but not for the last, Justin Tolliver realized that he trusted Kwai Libazo’s instincts more than he trusted those of any white man he knew.

“You are right, then, Libazo, we must find out why there is a difference between what people are telling us about Otis McIntosh and the truth.”

Kwai Libazo was happy with this decision, but when they collected Tolliver’s stallion and Kwai’s pony at the Afghan, Ali Khan’s stable, Tolliver turned not toward the road toward Chania Bridge and Richard Newland’s farm, but toward the Parklands section of the town. “There is a question I need to ask of Mrs. Buxton before we leave town,” he said.

From time to time, he had taken to doing this, to explaining his actions to Kwai Libazo. A very surprising thing for a British man to do.

*   *   *

For the second time in the past week, Denys Finch Hatton was sitting on Vera McIntosh’s veranda, sipping tea. Vera’s mother had greeted the young man, but quickly excused herself, citing mission work to be done and leaving only the houseboy Njui to attend on her daughter. It did not escape Vera’s notice that her mother was willing to let her take a picnic alone with Justin Tolliver, but she was unwilling to leave her with Denys Finch Hatton here on the veranda.

As usual, Finch Hatton’s conversation centered on the local peoples and their habits and any changes Vera had seen since the founding of the Protectorate and the recent influx of settlers. It was a subject that greatly interested Vera as well and that she discussed with relish, especially with one who seemed as sensitive to the problems the British were causing as Vera was. It would all have been quite delightful but for the fact that Finch Hatton’s presence made Vera so jumpy and unsure of herself.

For one thing, her caller always seemed to be around when Tolliver arrived and his presence seemed to displease Tolliver very much. Not that Vera was expecting Captain Tolliver to call on an ordinary Monday, but she always hoped to see him. And when the rider appeared at the top of the ridge overlooking the mission an hour ago, she had thought from a distance that he might be Justin. Ever since Saturday, she had had this fantasy that he had come back and that he would kiss her on the back of her neck.

But the rider turned out to be Finch Hatton, with his amazingly shiny eyes and bodily grace, and the fact that he focused so totally on her when she was speaking. He treated her as if she were some African wise woman, when she was nothing more than a girl who had been born here a few months after her missionary parents arrived, had been educated by her parents, and had none of his sophistication or verve. He had listened to her telling him about the camping places along the Uaso Nyiro River that she had visited last year, on safari, with her father and her brother. She had just told Finch Hatton how well she remembered the details of each place. When one was out in the wild, every detail remained forever vivid.

He was gazing out over the fields of fading coffee blossoms, across the river to the hills in the distance. “It’s strange,” he said. “From far away it looks all of a piece, but then when you are in it, especially if you see one of the rare animals, a leopard or a cheetah particularly, it becomes so distinct in your memory.” His voice was beautiful. His accent perfect, but it carried none of the self-importance that she often heard in the voices of many Englishmen. They made her feel out of place. Instead, he made her important, but somehow feeling important made her even more nervous, a discomfort that redoubled when he brought up Captain Tolliver’s name.

“Tolliver has arrested the witch doctor.”

“Yes, I know.” She was suddenly on her guard. What would she say to him if he asked her a question she did not want to answer, about how her uncle had made an enemy of Gichinga?

“How has your father dealt with the presence of the Kikuyu and their medicine man? Converting the natives must have been hard given their beliefs in their witch doctor’s powers.”

“My father is a joyful Christian, Mr. Finch Hatton. His favorite quote from the Bible is from the Psalms: ‘Make a joyful noise unto the Lord all ye lands. Serve the Lord with gladness.’”

Finch Hatton’s bright eyes danced with glee. “Not very Scottish of him.” He didn’t seem in the least worried that he might have insulted her heritage.

Loving her father as she did, she could not take umbrage. She thought the same of him—that he was not at all like the dour clergymen she had met in Glasgow. “His grandfather on his mother’s side was an Anglo-Irish bishop. He was named Berkeley as it happened. I think he might have also been somewhere in Berkeley Cole’s family tree. Anyway, the medicine man’s most powerful weapon is the fear he can engender with his curses. My father’s is to have his flock experience the joy of loving Jesus. He thinks joy can drive out fear.”

Finch Hatton’s bright blue glance left the sunbathed landscape and looked into her face. He seemed pained when he said, “I wish that were true.”

She stood his piercing gaze as long as she could and looked down at her heavy boots, that her father insisted she always wear to ward off snakebite. Her father was not entirely immune to fear himself. “I wish that, too. But my father has made a number of converts. I think it is because he is so kind. I am sure if people love Jesus it’s because they have grown to love my father.” She knew she loved her father better than she loved the Lord. She was supposed to think that wrong, and she would never say it. Not to her father and not to Finch Hatton.

“Speaking of powerful weapons,” Denys said, “I understand that the evidence against the native priest is a spear, and that there is some question of it being a Maasai weapon because of its shape.”

That Finch Hatton, who had no connection to the deceased or to the police, knew this startled Vera. She did not know why, but she thought it ought to be a secret. She began to feel resentful that he knew it.

He laughed that rich, liquid laugh of his. His eyes danced. “You must not be so surprised. You were born here; you have to know full well that there are not that many people here and to a man, gossip is almost as important to them as making a profit from what they do.”

She was just enough put out by his glee in all of this to snap back. “You speak as if only the Europeans are people. And maybe only the men. There are actually quite a lot of people here, and the Africans don’t all gossip all the time.”

He put his hands together and bowed his head and spoke contritely. “Point well taken. I do wonder about that assumption though, about who might have used that weapon and why. Is it true that you can tell what tribe made the spear by looking at it.”

“Yes,” she said, not entirely mollified. “Actually, the local ironworkers can tell which blacksmith made which implement, in much the same way you can tell a Rembrandt from a Rubens.”

“Is there a blacksmith nearby?”

She pointed to their right. “Just beyond those woods. At the edge of the Kikuyu village.”

“I’d like to see that.” He leapt to his feet. “Take me to see it, please.”

She rose slowly. “I will speak to my mother.”

“Yes, of course.” He remained standing while she left the veranda.

Once inside, she quickly found her mother in her workroom near the rear door, teaching three Kikuyu girls to make European dresses for themselves. Fearful of being roped into that effort, Vera quickly asked permission to take Denys Finch Hatton to visit the Kikuyu village. “Do not worry, Mother. I am not at all interested in him,” she quickly added.

Her mother’s brown eyes looked disbelieving, as if Vera had said something patently impossible. “You may go. Stick to the path.”

“Of course.” Vera took her rifle from the rack on the wall of her father’s study and pocketed a few shells. She felt vaguely unfaithful to Justin Tolliver as she walked onto the lawn with Denys Finch Hatton. “Perhaps you should take a rifle, too. At this hour the woods are usually safe, but—”

He was already trotting toward the stable to fetch his weapon from the holster on his horse.

The path was empty. The Kikuyu workers were gathered in the shade of the coffee plants taking their midmorning rest. Denys, to Vera’s delight, seemed content to leave off their conversation and walk in silence, listening only to the chirping of the insects and the chattering of little gray monkeys in the trees. The path, which ran between the coffee field and the cow pasture on one side and the woods on the other, was only partly shaded this close to midday. It cooled considerably once it plunged into the forest.

Vera was admiring the flowering creepers hanging from tall trees and glistening here and there in pools of sunlight, when suddenly something more beautiful caught her eye. She put out her left arm to stop Finch Hatton and then moved her index finger to her lips. She pointed up at a rain tree a few yards into the woods.

Finch Hatton took a quick, nearly soundless deep breath. About twenty feet from the ground, on a horizontal limb, a leopard was resting. The skin, bones, and gnawed carcass of a bushbuck hung over the limb between him and the trunk. His eyes were half closed. The handsome animal, which might have been deadly under other circumstances, was obviously sated from his early morning kill and not interested in anything but napping and digesting. Still, after admiring its beauty for a brief while, Vera, never taking her eyes from him, backed along the path. Denys, his rifle at the ready, followed her example.

“How did you notice him?” Finch Hatton asked when they had gotten far enough away. “He was practically invisible with his spots in the dappled light.”

“His tail hanging down,” Vera said. “You learn. When you have done it often enough, your eyes get used to what they are seeing. They seem to do it on their own, without your trying.”

Finch Hatton shouldered his rifle. “I think that some people have a talent for it. You must.”

Though his compliment gave her a glow, she said, “In a place like this, a person wouldn’t live very long if he completely lacked that skill.”

“I hope I have it. I want to stay here.” He said that with a passion she sometimes heard from British people who seemed to love Africa as much as she did, even though, or perhaps because they were born and raised up there in the chill north.

“Why did you come here in the first place?”

“I am a second son,” he said. “I did not want to give my life over to the pursuit of an heiress.” He laughed as if it were a joke. She stopped and looked at him to see if it really was.

His expression was completely jocular. “Not really. Doing that was never anything I seriously considered. I may have been born to it, but the sort of life I’d have had in England did not appeal. I needed something more. I thought I would find what I wanted here.”

“And did you?”

His beatific smile dawned on his face. “Yes, I think I have.”

If this had been a conversation between two characters in the novels Vera’s granny sent her every Christmas, his words might have been the prelude to a proposal of marriage. But Finch Hatton was not looking at her when he talked of what he was looking for. His bright eyes scanned the trees and flowers of the forest and the ribbon of blue sky above them on the path. His arm swept an arc. “I did not know until I arrived here that this is what I wanted—a place where life can be forever new.”

“I am glad you can see it for what it is.” She turned and pointed to a narrow path that forked off from the main way to the village. “The blacksmith is down this way.”

They went quickly through a little corner of the forest, wary on the odd chance that a lion might be out looking for breakfast. Pink-blooming African daphnes surrounded their way, turning the scent of this forest from spice to sweet perfume. They emerged into an open area that smelled only of smoke and hot metal. There stood the smithy next to a hollow dug into the ground, lined with clay, and topped with a cone-shaped furnace. Vera pointed at it. “That is where he smelts his ore.”

She drew Denys to the open-sided shed under which Muturi Embu, the blacksmith, stood. He was taking a red glowing lump of iron out of the fire with tongs and placing it on a stone before him. He was of short stature, like most of the Kikuyu tribesmen, but very powerful in his upper body. He wore a dark stained cloth tied around his waist that covered him to his ankles and a cowhide apron over his chest. The brown skin of his arms glowed with sweat. Behind him, on the single wall of his shed, hung all manner of spear blades, swords, arrowheads, hoes, knives, axes, and the razors that the Kikuyu, both men and women, used to shave their heads.

Vera greeted him in his language. He bowed to her without letting go of his tongs or saying more than “Antiriri, wimwega.”

“Antiriri,” Vera answered. “I am well.” She asked after his wives and children and told him Finch Hatton’s name.

“I suppose,” Denys said, “that he works out here away from the village to avoid the danger of the fire.”

Vera could not suppress a giggle. “There is fire in or near every single hut in the village. No, he is here because the Kikuyu consider the blacksmith unclean, so he must stay away from the others. Smiths cannot marry except within their group.”

“Like the lower castes in India? I didn’t know that happened here. Ask him if I can look at the spearheads.” It was one of the things Vera liked very much about Finch Hatton. Most white settlers would not have asked permission of a native to do anything. They had not asked permission to move into their country and take it over. They always assumed they had a perfect right to take whatever they wanted. But Finch Hatton was not like that.

When he gained the blacksmith’s assent, he carefully took down a spearhead. Vera went to his side and explained to him what about its design made it recognizable as Kikuyu. And how a Maasai spear would be different.

“Ask him if he would make me a Maasai spearhead.”

Vera did not like the question but she asked it, and Muturi Embu responded exactly as she expected him to and more respectfully than Finch Hatton deserved. “He says that he will be happy to make a spearhead for you in his design, but if the B’wana wants a Maasai spear, he must go to the Maasai blacksmith to get it. Given the traditional enmity between the Kikuyu and the Maasai, I think he finds the question a bit—” She didn’t have the nerve to say “disrespectful.”

“I asked,” Finch Hatton said, “because I wondered if the Kikuyu witch doctor could have easily gotten his hands on a Kikuyu spear that looked Maasai.”

Vera wondered at this. Was Finch Hatton trying to solve the crime? The way Justin Tolliver frowned whenever he saw Denys, he was sure to see such an attempt as meddling. But then she did a little meddling of her own and asked Muturi Embu if and how a Kikuyu might come into possession of a Maasai spear.

“We have taken their spears in battles in the past,” the blacksmith told her, “but never as many as they take of ours. But we blacksmiths melt them down and remake them into other things. We would never ever fight with one another’s spears or swords. The sword of one’s enemy kills one’s brother.”

“So there are no Maasai spears among the Kikuyu?” She had thought this was the case, but she wanted to hear the blacksmith say it.

“There are traders, who travel all around from the Lake Nam Lolwe—which you call Victoria—all the way to the coast that trade in what the blacksmiths of all the tribes make. There have always been these people. My grandfather spoke of his grandfather trading with them. If a person wants to get a Maasai spear, he can find one.”

“Could Gichinga Mbura have gotten one from a trader?”

Muturi Embu put down his work. “Mbura is too proud a man to have killed the Scottish doctor that way. If he had killed him with a spear, any spear, all would have seen that he was afraid of the white doctor’s magic.”

Once Vera explained what he had said to Finch Hatton, they both saw that this was a much more plausible reason to consider the witch doctor innocent than was the rigmarole about the Maasai spear. She thought she had better tell this to Captain Tolliver. Then, Muturi Embu said something that overrode all that.

“I myself have had Maasai swords and spears from the traders. Since the white man came, I have always been able to trade unusual iron things for goods that please my wives. There are white men who always want to trade for Maasai spears, especially old ones. I think because the Maasai are such fierce warriors that these men think their spears will make them strong, too. I had one during the long rains this year. I have never seen one like it—it had a design on the blade like this.” He drew a line in the air with his forefinger.

Vera’s skin went cold. The design he traced was that strange Egyptian-like one that was on the spear that had killed her uncle.

Embu smiled with glee. “The trader said that it was very old. I sold it for more rupees than I have ever had from that white man—Too-many-hats. He always wants to buy all the Maasai spears. What can he do with so many of them?”

Vera’s breath stopped. Too-many-hats was the Kikuyu name for Richard Newland.