15.

When Denys Finch Hatton entered Justin Tolliver’s room, he looked sincerely dismayed. “Good God, man. What are you doing out of bed? Cranford seems to think you are at death’s door.”

Tolliver, knowing he needed Finch Hatton, had prepared to ingratiate himself to the man he could think of only as a rival, and a rival with too many advantages. “A bit of overacting on my part I am afraid.”

Tolliver offered Denys a chair and explained to him what he wanted, giving only as many of the details as he needed to be convincing. He did not reveal his suspicions about Richard Newland, only emphasized that he needed to find young Otis McIntosh. “I wonder then, if your man Kinuthia can guide us and help us track the Newland party.”

Finch Hatton’s famously expressive eyes took on a calculating cast. “I take it Ms. McIntosh has told you about our visit to the Kikuyu blacksmith.”

Tolliver bit back rising anger over any such traipsing around the countryside Vera might have done in the company of Finch Hatton. Concentrate on the task at hand, he told himself. “No. What has that got to do with my request?”

“The blacksmith described a very unusual Maasai spear that he had gotten from an Arab trader. A very old one. He said he sold it Richard Newland not long ago. Miss McIntosh thought it was the very one used to kill Josiah Pennyman. Miss McIntosh said she was going to get word to you of this.”

Tolliver’s skin turned hot, as if he were running the fever he had been feigning. “I know nothing of this.” This was his investigation. It galled him that Finch Hatton had a critical piece of evidence that he did not know. How could Vera not have reported it to him?

“I am sure Miss McIntosh had intended to tell you about it. She did not?” Finch Hatton’s words made Tolliver feel worse.

“I have not seen her for days.”

“Well,” Denys said, “you can ask her. We can stop at the Scottish Mission, on our way to track Newland. We better find out everything the Reverend and Mrs. McIntosh know about exactly where Newland planned to hunt.”

Tolliver stood up. “I don’t think you need to involve yourself in this. If we can have Kinuthia to show us the way, I will handle the trip.”

“Not at all.” Finch Hatton’s charming smile was going full force and entirely lost on Tolliver. “I will organize Kinuthia, some supplies, and porters. You go down to Athi River looking ill. We will pick you up at the mission and set off. I imagine you will not want Vera and her family to know what we are doing.”

Tolliver barely held his temper. An outburst might put Finch Hatton entirely off. If Tolliver alienated him, he was perfectly capable of taking off after Newland on his own and upstaging Tolliver completely. “Very well. I must set off at once for the hospital. When will you meet me there?”

“In the morning.”

Tolliver shook Finch Hatton’s hand, satisfied that he would, at the very least, be able to speak with Vera alone before she saw Finch Hatton again.

“Tomorrow then,” Denys said with a hearty handshake.

*   *   *

While her up train was stopped for the normal long layover at Nairobi Station, Vera McIntosh, fearing being seen and having her ruse discovered, remained onboard, away from the windows that faced the platform, with her head bowed over a book. Had she gotten off the train, she would very likely have encountered Justin Tolliver being dramatically carried on a stretcher through the inelegant corrugated iron station. He was arranging to travel on the down train toward Athi River and Vera’s home.

As it was, in that quarter hour they passed very near each other completely unnoticed.

When Tolliver descended at Athi Station in midafternoon, Kwai Libazo was there with a wagon to take him over the bumpy roads to the hospital. Nurse Freemantle, having been forewarned, had a bed ready for him when he arrived. It took her only moments of examination to spot the deceit. Tolliver did not even bother to try to persuade her that he was ill. He needed her as an ally. He told her his plan to track the possible murderer of Josiah Pennyman without regard to his superior officer’s orders, and he asked for her help. He counted on two things to motivate her: his supposition, from the way she had cared for Pennyman’s corpse, that she had had a tender attachment to the doctor, and in addition his assumption that, like many women who nursed the casualties of the Boer War, she had little respect for officers and the officials of the realm. He must have been right because she immediately agreed to let him stay in hospital overnight in the cause of justice.

“I would like to speak to Miss McIntosh this evening if at all possible,” he said. He did not add that Vera knew something about the murder weapon that he wanted to hear about, and he did not reveal that Richard Newland was his quarry. “Would you mind asking her to come visit me here? And would you leave us alone together for a few minutes when she does.”

He had been afraid she would be shocked at the very idea of leaving the missionary’s daughter alone with him.

But she shocked him instead. “Miss McIntosh is away. She went off this morning with a party of natives to go to Fort Hall for a stay with Frances Bowes, the colonel’s daughter.” The nurse marched away.

Fear and admiration warred for dominance in Tolliver’s heart. He knew in three blinks of his eyes that Vera had gone on the quest he himself was planning. If ever a girl had the pluck to do such a thing on her own it was Vera. Find her, protect her, his heart shouted at him. He wanted to leap out of bed and speed after her, but he knew that was impossible on his own. He must wait for Finch Hatton and his tracker and their guns and ammunition. But then, when he found Vera, when he could be sure nothing dreadful had happened to her, Denys would be there, too. He could not imagine anything that could rankle him more.

As Tolliver lay in bed, pretending to the hospital helpers to be weak, inactivity got the better of him. Soon every drop of his blood was alive with anxiety and confusion. His feelings were already at fever pitch, both his admiration for Vera’s courage and his concern for her danger. But soon, a pesky voice joined in, one that came into his head sounding like his father’s. It warned him about his deepening regard for Vera and asked, in the pater’s gruff tones, what kind of girl she was who would lie to her parents and go off on her own on an ill-advised journey into the wilderness. Before long, he could not tell if he should idolize or abhor her. His parents would certainly say this was not the behavior of any girl he should consider as a wife. And a vexing thought kept coming back to him that she had betrayed him by not coming to him with the information she had about the murder weapon. Evidently she had taken Finch Hatton to see the blacksmith. Why had she not taken him? He was, after all, the person in charge of the investigation.

Until he had heard about Richard Newland’s relationship to the girl Pennyman had assaulted, he had no reason at all to suspect Newland. Had Vera known all this from the beginning? Did perhaps also her parents know of the Pennyman-Newland connection? Had they all been hiding evidence from him? If so, then why would her discovery that Newland had owned the murder weapon precipitate her trip? He could not imagine that her father would have approved of her going off after Newland on her own. He tried to convince himself that she really did go to Fort Hall to visit Frances Bowes.

The more he lay inert in his bed, the more his mind raced from one possibility to another, and the more muddled he became. When Libazo showed up to tell him that the porters were secreted a mile or so off in the Kikuyu village, Tolliver sent him to talk to the mission natives to confirm what he had concluded about where Vera had gone. After less than half an hour, Kwai returned to say that Wangari, Vera’s nanny, readily told him the truth, on the absolute promise that he would reveal it only to Captain Tolliver. And that Captain Tolliver would not inform her parents.

Once the fact that Vera was in danger had been confirmed, Tolliver could not concentrate on anything else. He tried to imagine playing Bach on his cello to quiet his thoughts, but imagining the music did not help. He needed to feel it in his body. And now he could not.

By the time Nurse Freemantle came back to see him, accompanied by a native girl carrying a tray of food, he was in such a state of confusion he could barely formulate a coherent sentence.

“I have not told the reverend that you are here,” the nurse said. “I was about to, but then I thought, given your true reason, perhaps you would not want him to know.” Her small, piercing dark eyes stared at him expectantly, as if she would read far too much into any answer he gave.

“To be truthful, I do want to speak to him, but I am a bit tired. I wonder if you would tell him that I am here. Please do not reveal my real reason. And ask him to come to see me after he has had his dinner? Would that be alright?”

She agreed readily. Tolliver tucked into the roasted meat and native pumpkin with honey dressing. Without being asked, Nurse Freemantle had taken pity on him and sent the girl back with a bottle of dark ale. He wished he had paper and pen to make some notes. Before talking to McIntosh, he needed to sort things through, put the questions that plagued him in proper order and perspective. He continued to wish for his cello and went over the entire chain of events in his mind.

There were now three men who had very strong motives to have killed Josiah Pennyman. He thought about those motives. He moved the saltcellar to the near left-hand corner of the tray in his lap. Richard Newland was the salt of the earth.

Tolliver fingered the saltcellar and put the pepper shaker beside it. Kirk Buxton: He had the weakest reason as far as Tolliver could think. Jealousy over Lucy’s liaison with Pennyman? Some men might kill to avenge their honor. But Kirk Buxton did not seem at all the type. Besides, what honor was there in stabbing a man in the back? Or worse yet, as Lucy suggested, hiring someone else to do it? From all Tolliver had heard, Lucy’s affairs were well known and documented before Pennyman even arrived in the Protectorate. Buxton might be peeved about it, but if the banker had ever cared about his wife’s adulteries, he did not seem to anymore.

Lucy seemed convinced the murderer was her husband, but if Tolliver thought about it, she seemed all too anxious to come up with ways and means and motivations. It niggled at Tolliver that Lucy showed so much determination in the matter. When Tolliver didn’t swallow the hired assassin theory, she came up with that story about Buxton wanting to stop Pennyman revealing his underhanded financial dealings. That might have been less far-fetched, except that it was the lovely Lucy’s third try at getting Tolliver to suspect Kirk. If she had had all that information from the beginning, she should have revealed it all at once. Justin hated to think of any woman so coldhearted as to falsely accuse her own husband of murder, especially to slander him with the cowardly act of hiring an assassin.

Even for a woman whose brain was as addled by drink as Lucy’s, it was a stretch for Tolliver to believe she was giving him anything useful. He wondered for a moment whether all of her attempts at seduction weren’t part of the whole picture, but he remembered full well seeing her down all that drink that day they had had luncheon with the Lord and Lady Delamere. Lucy was a desperate woman. And a pathetic one. Instinct and logic both pointed Tolliver to the conclusion that Buxton was not the killer.

The crime, the fact that Pennyman was stabbed in the back with a spear, seemed to be one of extreme anger. Not a way of avenging honor or silencing a man about to reveal a secret—as would be the case with Buxton. It was more the kind of thing a man would do to blot out evil.

Tolliver moved his fork beside the salt and pepper. The simplest explanation, of course, was that Gichinga Mbura actually did kill Pennyman and that D.C. Cranford was right, that all Justin’s insisting on dotting the “i” and crossing the “t” in “justice” was a bloody waste of time.

Tolliver shook off that doubt. He still believed that the letter of British law must be applied. In a sense it was more important in the case of a native accused of a heinous crime. It was the only way to accomplish the realm’s prime objective. The English were here to bring the Pax Britannica and civilization to the savages. His mind stopped at the word “savages.”

Having considered the behaviors of Pennyman, Buxton, and Lucy, what right did he have to call the natives “savages”? True, they went about practically naked, but it seemed to him that, while their skin was dark, their souls were lighter than many of his countrymen’s.

He picked up the fork and reversed its direction. The spear in question had belonged to Richard Newland. Newland had precisely the right kind of motive to make an outraged person thrust a weapon into a man, wherever he could stick it. If he was the murderer, Vera was heading toward him now. There was a vast open area between here and Berkeley Cole’s farm. She could be anywhere out there. And when people went on safari they could easily be gone a month or six weeks. They carried with them the wherewithal to live in the wilderness. A needle in a haystack in Yorkshire would be easier to find than even a large party of human beings who could be anywhere between the Scottish Mission and the slopes of Mount Kenya.

Tolliver was toying with the idea of betraying Vera to her father when the native girl arrived to take his tray. “The reverend has asked me to say he is here to see you,” she said. She spoke her English with a native lilt and a touch of Scottish burr that was perfectly charming. “Tell him to please come in straightaway.”

She took away the tray with the symbols of Tolliver’s suspects that had helped his thinking but also increased his fears for Vera. His conversation with the Reverend McIntosh revealed nothing new. He told Tolliver that Vera had gone to Fort Hall, and for all the world he acted as if he believed it. Tolliver did not disabuse him of the fact.