18.

Both Tolliver and Vera were awake before first light the next morning, impatient to be away.

After only an hour or so of fitful sleep, she wanted to run as fast as her legs would carry her from the scene of Ngethe’s demise.

Two hours’ march away, back near the river, Tolliver knew that only action would keep at bay the torrent of worrisome pictures falling into his head of her attacked by lions, gored by buffalo. To keep from beating his head on the ground to halt his imaginings, he was up and moving with the merest lightening of the sky.

“March,” he called as his raggedy column formed up. With him at its head they forded the river and moved off, following the trail of Vera’s party that led straight to the high tor in the distance.

With fewer people to organize and all of her group determined to be away from the place where they knew Ngethe’s remains lay exposed to the carrion eaters, Vera had less trouble getting underway with speed. By the time the sunlight was strong enough to throw a shadow, she and her Kikuyu were several miles gone, making straight for the camp Ngethe had seen before the snake bit him.

But Tolliver had halted. There, over a spot near the high outcropping, buzzards were circling. In three beats of his heart, his hand was in the air. “Doubletime, lads,” he shouted. Now Tolliver’s target was whatever the scavenger birds had their eyes on. With every step he tried to convince himself that many things having nothing to do with Vera could be dying out there. The area was replete with game. That was the whole point of people coming here to hunt. But those reassuring thoughts were soon overwhelmed by fear: there were other predators out here besides men—lions … and there were subtler dangers—deadly things that hid among the rocks. Good God, snakes. The striking cobra was the last thing he wished to imagine.

At the front of his jogging column, he picked up his pace. Suppose, he asked himself, that Newland saw her coming and realized that she had found him out. Then she would become the target of the worst predator of all: a man bent on murder. He ordered himself to stop such imaginings. He tried to laugh at his overly dramatic terrors. But he could not manage it. He just ran faster.

Finch Hatton was keeping pace, of course. He seemed to be treating the whole effort as if it were some sort of sporting event. The boys carrying the heaviest loads were falling quite a bit behind.

The birds were still circling, which could mean that whatever it was had not yet died. Or there could be animals gnawing on whatever the vultures were waiting to get at. Tolliver did not pause when he saw the jackals. He took the rifle slung over his shoulder and held it at the ready, but the beasts ran off without a second glance as the runners approached. The carcass, whatever it was, was still hidden in the grass.

Tolliver held up his hand to signal a stop, but the boys behind him had already done so. He approached, and his stomach turned. It was recognizable as a person, but not easily. The Kikuyu boys exclaimed loudest.

Kwai Libazo came up behind him. “He was a Kikuyu. Do you see the iron necklace? The rings around his ankle? The enlarged earlobes. These are Kikuyu emblems.”

“He must have been with Miss McIntosh’s party,” Finch Hatton said. “But his hair is gray. He must have been quite an old man. Why would she have taken a man so old on such a mission?”

“He must have been her tracker,” Tolliver and Kinuthia said in unison.

“Then she is now without a tracker,” Libazo said, speaking out of turn, as had become his wont.

It was not Libazo’s insolence but what he had said that Tolliver found upsetting. “She has gone off without a tracker then,” he said. “It can’t have been that long ago.” He was already making for the outcropping that loomed above them. “Kinuthia, come with me. Libazo, tell the men to drink and catch their breath,” he called over his shoulder.

As they climbed, Tolliver made for the side of the outcropping that faced in the direction where Vera’s party must have gone. Before they were more than thirty feet up, Kinuthia touched Tolliver’s shoulder and pointed. The emerald green plain that surrounded them stretched for miles in every direction. It was dotted here and there with clumps of thorn trees and herds of antelope. The river they had crossed this morning curved sharply to the right, glistening in the distance. The carrion birds were still circling, but a little farther off from the corpse.

In the middistance, where Kinuthia’s finger indicated, Tolliver made out a party of about twenty, trekking away from them. They looked few and very vulnerable in the middle of this vast area. At least sixty Cape buffalo were grazing about a hundred yards off to their right. Tolliver jumped down a level and made to descend and get after them. Kinuthia grabbed his shoulder and pointed again: farther into the distance, off next to the river, at the foot of some low hills, was a large camp; smoke rose from its fires. The Newland camp. Vera and her boys were making directly for it.

And if Tolliver knew anything, there was a murderer there.

*   *   *

Every step Vera took pained her. Blisters on her toes, cramps in her calves. The remorse over Ngethe tortured her soul. Only her fear for Otis could have driven her to go on.

A whiff of smoke in the air told her she was close, though she could not see the Newland camp in the undulating plain. The boys with her chanted as they ran, and suddenly there were eight or ten porters approaching them. They were dressed in the brown and navy uniforms of Tarlton and Company, the leading safari outfitters, which she found odd. Ordinarily, settlers traveled on safari less expensively than one did with Tarlton’s.

“Are you with Richard Newland’s party?” she asked in Swahili.

“Yes, Miss,” the lead boy answered in English. “You look done in, may we help you?” They had a pallet with them, on which she gladly lay herself down.

Richard Newland and his son came out to meet her before she arrived at their campsite. “Where is Otis?” she demanded to know.

“In a minute,” Richard said. “Let us get you settled. You’ve had a difficult time.” His aquiline face was careworn, as if he were the one who had spent the last several days tramping through the wilderness as fast as he could move. He led his porters to a camp bed under an acacia tree, where they placed her, pallet and all.

She started to get up, but Newland put out his hand. “Please rest a minute. The boys will bring you some tea. I will be back in a moment.” He turned and walked away, pushing his son ahead of him.

Tea was what she longed for, but she did not lie back. “Where is my brother? I want to see him immediately.”

Newland waved his right hand over his head, without turning around. “Just a minute.” They went into a tent across the clearing. The flap of it closed behind them.

“I will not be put off,” she shouted after him. Muiri came and sat beside the camp bed and took Vera’s hand. It was entirely unclear whether she wanted to give comfort or get it. Vera herself wanted neither.

Why had her brother not greeted her? Was he in that tent? Was he ill? She jumped up and ran to find out. As she crossed the campground, she saw a flash of red hair to her right. Her heart lifted and then sank. It was Berkeley Cole. Not Otis. She continued toward Newland’s tent. He came out just as she arrived and handed her an envelope.

Her name was written on it—“Miss Vera McIntosh”—in her brother’s neat and gentlemanly script.

She tore it open. The paper inside said, “Dear Vera, By the time you read this, I will be very far away. I fear we will never see one another again. Uncle Josiah’s death is my fault and mine alone. I had to save Mother. Please be very kind to her. Do not blame her. Do not let her confess.” In the final sentence, the word “not” was underlined four times. The letter was signed, “Your loving brother, Otis.”

She stared at the paper in astonishment, several times opening her mouth to speak, but not able to force out any words.

Richard Newland stood next to her, looking expectantly into her face.

She folded the paper and held it and the envelope to her heart. She looked right into Newland’s sad eyes. “Have you read this letter?” Her voice was sharp.

“No,” he said, “but I think I know what it says.”

“What? You tell me what you think this abominable message says.”

He, too, was having difficulty getting his words to flow. “Otis talked to me at length and he—”

A great noise was rising up at the edge of the camp, shouting and clattering. Berkeley Cole came running. “I’ve seen them. It’s Denys, with a large party. They are at doubletime. I think Justin Tolliver is with them.”

Vera ran to the noise. With no thought of anything. Just moved to him.

As soon as he saw her, he ran to her. He was sweating and panting.

She threw herself into his arms.

He tried to hold her off. He must smell disgusting.

She held on to him with her arms around his neck. She was weeping.

He embraced her, kissed the top of her head. After a minute or two, he managed gently to peel her arms from him. “I’m a stinking mess,” he whispered in her ear. It seemed entirely the wrong thing to say.

“Life is a stinking mess,” she said and sank to the ground.

*   *   *

Once the tumult of their arrival had subsided, he took Vera aside and spoke to her first and alone, she sitting on the camp bed under the tree and he cross-legged on the ground beside it. She had a teacup in her hands. His was on the grass next to his foot.

“I came to arrest Richard Newland for your uncle’s murder,” he said. “As you already know, the murder weapon belonged to him. Finch Hatton told me.”

“I came to the police station to tell you,” she said, “but you were visiting Mrs. Buxton at the time.” The sadness in her brown eyes took on an offended glint.

He could not tell her anything but the truth. “She means nothing to me,” he said. “You are the only woman who interests me.”

She stopped breathing. Tears came to her eyes. She reached out and touched his face. He took her hand and kissed it.

“When I realized it was Newland,” she said after a moment, “I became afraid for my brother, so I came to protect him.”

Tolliver realized he had not seen the boy in the helter-skelter of his arrival. “Where is he?”

She reached into her pocket and handed him a paper.

He scanned it quickly. “This shocks me,” he said.

“No more than it does me.” A tear escaped her eye. He had to force himself not to kiss it as it ran down her cheek.

“Do you believe this?” He held up the note between his index and middle fingers.

“I don’t want to, but it is in Otis’s hand, and it was sealed in an envelope addressed by him to me.” She dug the envelope out of her pocket.

He took it. “I will have to keep these for now.”

She snatched them back. “No!” She said it so loudly that it caused the boys tending the cook fire several yards away to look over at them. She had suddenly realized that it implicated her mother. He, the policeman, would have to arrest her mother.

“Suppose it isn’t true. Suppose the killer really was Richard Newland.” She knew her statements were useless.

He shook his head and pointed to the paper in her hand. “How can that be?”

She bit on her bottom lip. “Suppose— Suppose … that … Richard forced him to write this and then killed him. Suppose he wants to save himself by casting the blame on my poor brother.”

“Dearest Vera,” he said gently. “That does not seem at all likely. And if it were true, why would your brother have said anything about your mother?”

Defiance won out over the fear in her eyes. “It’s absurd. My mother would not have killed her brother. I cannot imagine what my brother meant by saying such a thing.”

“Was Otis very fond of your mother? And she of him?”

“Extraordinarily so.” Vera did not say what she always thought of her mother—that she did not love her daughter half as much as she loved her son.

“Well, then,” Justin said, “it is all very easy to explain. Your brother feared your mother would try to take the blame, to save your brother from being accused. She would not be the first parent to want to make such a sacrifice for a child.”

“Do you think it could be true? That Otis did it. That he is afraid my mother will try to shield him by confessing to the crime?”

He nodded an emphatic yes.

She folded up the envelope and the note and pressed them deep into the pocket of her skirt.

“I feel so dirty and sweaty,” she said. “I wish I could bathe in the river.”

“Can’t we?” he asked, before he realized that he might have been talking about them bathing together. He blushed, but he could not banish the thought.

“It doesn’t seem so. There could be crocodiles.”

“Ah,” he said. “Pity.”

While the safari boys roasted a haunch of antelope meat and some of the sweet potatoes they had dragged with them all those miles from the Chania Bridge, Tolliver told Newland that he had been a suspect in the killing of Josiah Pennyman. But that he no longer was. That he and Vera would have to go back to Nairobi directly to make the proper depositions and close the case.

Finch Hatton and Cole had come upon them while they spoke. Tolliver’s resentment of his rival had all but completely evaporated the moment Vera McIntosh ran toward both of them and threw herself into Tolliver’s arms. He had embraced her, his heart singing because she was safe. But also because she had felt to him at that moment like a hard-won prize. She was off in a tent now, bathing, Newland had said.

“What about young Otis?” Denys asked, helping himself to a drink from a tray table between Richard Newland and his glum son. “A fourteen-year-old boy cannot simply vanish. There has to be a way to track him.” He looked at Newland as if challenging him to go and find the boy.

“I advised him to go to Lake Victoria and take the steamer into Uganda,” Richard Newland said. “I want him to get away. I told him who would help him, gave him the means, and I promised I would never betray him.” He poked the fire in front of him, which was dying. One of the porters put more wood on it. “And I never will. Whatever happened, he did my family a favor. We cannot give Antonia’s sister her innocence back, but at least the blackguard who took it from her got his just desserts.”

“Who would have imagined it?” Cole said. “A spotty youth like Otis McIntosh.”

Newland took off his hat and passed his hand through his damp black hair. “He said he did and I believe him. Not only believe him, I applaud him. I wish I had had the courage to do it myself.”

Tolliver let them think what they wanted. It would be better if they thought the matter completely settled. But he knew it was not, that there was still a piece of this puzzle missing. The answer to why. Why would Otis McIntosh have killed his uncle? His note to his sister said he did it to save his mother. But to save her from what? There was still at least one question an assistant district supervisor of police needed to answer before he could close the file on this sordid affair. If he clung to the letter of the law, by rights he ought to arrest Newland for helping a murderer escape. He would not. He was happy that he would not have to arrest Vera on that same charge. Vera who was in a tent, bathing now in that huge tin bathtub that Newland had caused his porters to lug through the wilderness along with the crystal and the china from which the party were about to dine.

*   *   *

Vera picked at her supper, though it was the best meal she had had since she left home. She had taken a place next to Justin Tolliver at the table. He put his hand over hers when they were side by side, and left it there while they breathed two breaths. When he took his hand away she looked into his eyes and smiled, rather wanly she imagined.

The gentlemen at the table were assiduously avoiding any mention of her brother or anything at all disturbing, for that matter. Cole and Newland talked of farming, and Dicky Newland quizzed Tolliver about the upcoming cricket match between the Railway Society squad and the Nairobi Club’s team. All very civilized and proper, when her heart was broken and all she wanted to do was scream at them that she wanted her Otis back.

When she placed her perfectly pressed white damask napkin next to her plate and said she wanted rest, Tolliver rose and took her gently by the elbow and helped her up. They all made appropriately understanding, murmuring noises.

Muiri helped her disrobe and on with her muslin nightdress. Once Vera lay on her cot, the girl made off. Vera imagined she was finding company among the boys of her village who had come along on this journey. Vera envied her the freedom, envied her the love, if one could call it that, that she would receive. Yes, Vera thought, she did call it love. Though she had no experience of it herself, from what the girls she had known from babyhood had told her, it was wonderful. The kind of thing that would make one giggle. Vera wept instead, about her own loss. Her own loneliness. She was so tired of weeping.

She was still awake when the camp went completely silent except for the singing of the cicadas and the gurgling of the river. When she heard a movement outside her tent, her first thought was that it was a hippo, but she had not noticed any in the river. Then she heard Tolliver whisper her name. “Vera?” Softly. It was the first time she had ever heard him say it. Not “Miss McIntosh,” as would have been proper. “Vera?” he said again, still softly. “I’ve come to see if you are alright.”

She threw off the mosquito netting, drew a shawl around her, and went to the flap of the tent. “Yes,” she said.

“You don’t need anything?” He was just on the other side of the canvas, his voice barely audible.

She reached out, parted the opening. She moved toward him. He smelled of soap. He was silhouetted against the pale light of the crescent moon. She dropped her shawl and put her hands on his upper arms.

“I need—” She swallowed. “I need you.”

It took only one small step for him to be inside the tent with her. The flap closed behind him, and she was in his arms, kissing him. Then there was no separate him deciding what to do, no separate her. Just the two of them entwined, with no way to stop all they wanted to be to each other. Her skin. And his. Her arms. And his lifting her to the cot. His lips. Her breasts. His hands. And hers. The sweet smell of her hair. The quickness of his breath.

When the moment came for him to enter her, he hesitated. But she did not. “Love me. Please just love me,” she whispered.

And he did.