2.

Two days later, as the sun rose, three dozen Kikuyu workers set out from their village to walk the mile and a half to their work in the coffee fields at the Scottish Mission. They were clad in shukas—cloths tied at the shoulder—of an orange-brown that matched almost exactly the soil beneath their bare feet. They moved along in silence, some not thinking of anything much at all, but some pondering but not speaking of the strange fact that this land on which their forebears had lived practically since the dawn of man now belonged to representatives of a foreign god. The women among them were past resenting that they were required to work for the privilege of farming the land of their ancestors. The men were more inclined to be resentful, since before the coming of the white men, they had not had to do fieldwork at all. Women did that. Men watched and remained at the ready to take up their warriors’ shields and spears and defend their cattle, goats, sons, and women from attacks by other tribes.

The pairs of men who walked at the head and behind the column carried spears, like true defenders. But they watched, not for invading Maasai, but for jackals or leopards. All manner of predators might be out at this hour, hunting in the woods that separated their village from the white man’s buildings. Such dangers were unlikely, since there were plenty of antelope and zebra, predators’ prey, on the plains below these hills. Still, the guardsmen scanned the deep shade beneath the trees on either side of their path. Those in front held up their hands from time to time, if they heard noises that could mean danger. After a few seconds of intense listening, they gave the signal to proceed. More than a few of the farmworkers thought this action was for effect, to make the guards look and feel important. In the nearly twenty years of this mission’s existence no farmworker had been attacked by an animal on this path.

As the ragtag column reached the edge of the plantation, the workers picked up hoes from a shed at the edge of the field and spread out between the rows of fragrant flowering coffee bushes. The long rains had come early and been very good this year. The lushness of the fields pleased the Kikuyu, though they had no use for the product that their labor would yield. During this time of the cycle, their job of work was to keep down the weeds that wanted to strangle the crop.

A scream pierced the silence.

It came from a place about midway between the stone hospital building and the river. An alarm such as one might expect from a woman attacked by a cobra, but it came from a man.

Several hundred yards away, in her bedroom in the missionary’s house at the crest of the hill, Vera McIntosh was trying to hold on to a beautiful dream. She was waltzing with Justin Tolliver, who danced in that athletic way of his. In her dream, neither of them wore gloves. He held her right hand gently in his left. The white drill cloth of his tropical dress uniform felt smooth under her left palm. The song was not in the rather oom-pah-pah style of the usual King’s African Rifles Band at the Nairobi Club, but the sweet strains of a full orchestra such as she had danced to at balls in Glasgow. That music had been one of the few compensations of her most recent visit to her maternal grandmother. In her sleep, Vera danced on tiptoes that barely touched the floor. Then the violins, from farther and farther away, began to make a screeching sound. Vera tried to put her arms around Tolliver’s neck. And suddenly she was awake.

The screams were coming from down the hill. From the fields. And there were shouts at the front door. “Reverend Sahib!” And banging. She threw open the mosquito netting and pulled on a robe. The long hall outside her bedroom led to the noise. At the entrance, her father and Njui, their houseboy, were opening the door. She could not make out what the people on the veranda were saying. Her father groaned.

Her mother called from her bedroom door. “What has happened?”

“I don’t know, Mother. I will find out.” She ran back to her room, dressed quickly, and without even a splash of water on her face or a pause to lace up her boots, she ran out.

A knot of workers, whose shaved heads barely showed above the coffee plants, moved around, their arms raised in fright. She saw her father’s pith helmet and the battered brown hat of Joe Morley, the farm manager. Vera ran to them.

“Father?”

“Stay back, lass.”

She disobeyed, circled the knot of people, and pushed through the Kikuyu, who opened a path for her. A gasp shook her chest. Her uncle Josiah lay facedown between the rows. Dew clung to his khaki trousers as it did to the dark leaves of the plants. His left arm was half under his body, oddly askew. A native spear stood straight up in the middle of his back. His tan jacket had a slight stain of red-brown where the point of the spear had entered.

Her father was at her side. He put his arm over her shoulders.

“He’s dead,” she said. She had meant it as a question, but it came out as a statement, though she could hardly believe it.

Her father drew her to him and turned her head, shielding her eyes from the sight. “Ay,” he said. “We’ll have to tell your mother.” He turned to Joe Morley. “You’ll have to send someone to notify the police. Move the body into the hospital.”

“You’ll have to help me,” Joe said. “None of this lot will touch a dead body.”

It was a taboo Vera knew well. She had known the Kikuyu to burn a hut where a woman had died in childbirth. They never touched a dead person.

Joe Morley moved toward her uncle’s head. He picked up Josiah Pennyman’s hat, which had fallen off and lay beside his corpse. Her uncle’s dark hair shone in the early morning sunlight.

Her father moved toward the dead man’s feet. “Let’s get it over with,” he said and bent to lift the legs.

“I’ll go to my mother,” Vera said.

“No, lassie.” Her father’s voice was strangely commanding. “I will tell her. I will be there in a moment. Get yourself a cup of tea, my girl. You’re as pale as the coffee blossoms.”

And the world is as bitter as their perfume, she thought. Her uncle was dead. He, the pride of her granny. The handsome, brilliant doctor. Someone everyone seemed to like and admire. Vera felt a tinge of guilt, realizing that she had doubted how wonderful he was. In truth, though he was a member of her small family, living in close proximity, she hardly knew him. And now he was dead. And she was supposed to be extremely sorry. And she was, even though he never took the least interest in her.

She went to the kitchen and asked Njui to make a pot of tea. In a little while, she heard her father coming in, his tread heavier than usual, and his knock on her mother’s door. “My lass,” he said softly. It was hard for Vera to think of her mother as anyone’s lass.

*   *   *

Later that morning, in the newly constructed Government House in Nairobi, Kwai Libazo stood with his back to the dark paneling of the district commissioner’s office, trying to seem inanimate, but listening carefully to what B’wana Cranford was saying to Assistant District Superintendent Tolliver. If Libazo had been naked and closed his eyes and mouth, he would have been nearly invisible, his skin so exactly matched the color of the wood behind him. As it was, the khaki of his uniform shorts and shirt, the blue-black of his puttees, and the dark orange shade of his leather sandals gave him away. His red fez was the brightest thing in the room, except for the British flag that stood behind District Commissioner Cranford.

The powerful man sitting at the desk was entirely gray, his clothing, his hair, his skin, his eyes. It occurred to Libazo that his grandfather, who had not lived ever to see a man so white, would have thought him a medicine man who had painted himself completely, even the pupils of his eyes, instead of just streaking his chest and cheeks with ash paste.

“So,” Cranford was saying, “I am glad you were able to subdue those oafs last night. I understand the predicament you were in, but I have already had several complaints about the unseemly sight of handcuffed Europeans being marched to jail by natives with rifles. We cannot have this, my boy.”

The district commissioner always called his white underlings “my boy.” The blacks, he addressed just as “boy,” if he spoke to them at all. The “my boy” in question was Libazo’s commanding officer, who stood at attention facing Cranford across the desk, his khaki clothing unrumpled despite the stifling heat. The effort of the toto standing next to the Union Jack and pulling a cord to operate the punkah fan overhead was having no effect whatsoever on the temperature of the office.

Libazo focused intently. His captain had been a soldier before he was a policeman, and it showed in his posture and in his respect for his superior. These were things Libazo understood, as would any warrior tribesman. Not that Libazo had been admitted to the rank of warrior in any tribe.

Tolliver leaned slightly forward. “It is a circumstance we will find more and more difficult to avoid, sir, given the paucity of European policemen and the recent influx of undesirable white men. I cannot see—” A sharp knock at the door interrupted.

“Come,” the district commissioner commanded.

Stocky, bow-legged Sergeant Hobson of the King’s African Rifles came in and saluted. His small blue eyes were wide, his forehead sweatier than usual. “A runner has just come. There has been a killing,” he said. “The doctor at the Scottish Mission hospital has been murdered by a native.”

D.C. Cranford leapt to his feet. “Bloody savages!” His face had turned a shade of red almost as bright as that in the flag behind him.

Kwai Libazo remained wooden, stiff. He held his breath not to allow his chest to heave. The tribe that lived near the Scottish Mission were Kikuyu, his mother’s people. His people. No matter the facts of the case, this would hurt them.

Captain Tolliver’s fists clenched. He turned to the sergeant, who stood at attention with his head thrown slightly back, his back hair shiny with sweat. Tolliver had barely changed his position, but his body was suddenly energized. To Kwai Libazo it seemed as if Justin Tolliver already knew something about what was going on at the Scottish Mission. “Was anyone else hurt at the mission?”

Hobson glanced to D.C. Cranford and back to Tolliver with quizzical eyes. “No. The runner said everyone else was safe.”

Tolliver let out his breath and unclenched his fists.

Libazo felt no such relief at the news that the mission family was otherwise safe. The hospital there was known far and wide, to the settlers and to the tribes. The doctor was the best in the district. He had cured Libazo’s baby cousin who had rolled into a fire in the night and been badly burned. His death at the hands of a tribesman was a very dangerous thing.

Cranford sank back into his chair and shook his head as if he were trying to settle its contents. “Bloody savages.” This time he growled the words. “Get out there immediately, my boy. Find the bastard, and we’ll do for him.”

Tolliver had started to inch toward the door before the order came. Sergeant Hobson opened it. Tolliver turned to his superior. “Sir,” he said, “I will need to take Libazo here with me. Request permission to mount him on a pony for speed’s sake.”

Libazo did not move, even to blink his eyes. The D.C. flashed his habitual look of disapproval, ever ready when anyone proposed to ignore any protocol, especially one that blurred the distinction between the people he called the natives, who had lived in this land forever, and the British, who had so lately begun to flow in and act as if it really belonged to them.

The expectant look on Tolliver’s face did not change in the too-long period it took Cranford to relent. “If you must,” the district commissioner said at last.

“Follow me, Libazo,” Tolliver ordered as he marched out the door that Sergeant Hobson still held by its brass knob.

Only then did Kwai Libazo let his muscles come to life and his tall, slender body to move. His mind was troubled by where these events would take him, but his bones and his muscles longed to race there on a steed.

*   *   *

Even as he spurred Bosworth, his chestnut stallion, toward a tragedy, A.D.S. Justin Tolliver could not help but be impressed by the beauty of the land they traversed. The long rains had been plentiful that year, and the area around them was rich with grasses and exotic wild flowers. As he and Kwai Libazo crested the last hill, the sun had nearly reached its zenith. They looked upon the Mission of the Church of Scotland. On that April morning, in a verdant valley beside a meandering river, the coffee fields that stretched just below them were in flower, acre upon acre of white blossoms against dark green leaves. Cattle grazed on the far hillside. Though Tolliver was troubled at the thought of how Vera McIntosh was reacting to her uncle’s death, the vista lifted his heart. Something in his soul, his spirit, seemed to be expanding here in Africa. It was not what he had anticipated when he first traveled to South Africa with his Yorkshire regiment in 1909, the year the British colonies in the south were united. He had come to this continent a young lieutenant intent on doing his duty as an Englishman. He never expected his loyalties to change. England was his home. That “sceptered isle … earth of majesty” was where his heart was meant to belong. Back there, he had been a second son without prospects, and one itching for adventure, disinclined to settle down and marry a girl of means—his father’s phrase, one he loathed, but one that his sort of life in England dictated.

After more than a year in Cape Town and Johannesburg, he had been reluctant to go back where his only choice was to find a girl with money who would have him. When he heard of the wonderful hunting, the richness of game to be had, the ease of life in the new British East African Protectorate, he had taken only a brief sojourn in England, and then come here to seek a change—here where living was cheap and opportunities abounded—to serve the Empire and to see what he might make of it all. Once his fortune was made, he had expected to take it home and rejoin society there, not as a poor sap on the lookout for a large dowry, but with money of his own, so that he would be able to let his heart, not his banker, choose his wife.

He had not expected this land to grow on him so. Nor had he thought a missionary’s daughter would also find a place in his affections. But now, down somewhere among the picturesque buildings in this irresistible landscape was the niece of the dead man. His attraction to Vera McIntosh was another thing it would be better to resist.

He banged his heels into the flanks of the stallion that was, if he admitted it, one of the only truly loyal companions he had found in British East Africa. The horse skirted a hole filled with water from the recent rains.

“Careful here,” he called to Kwai Libazo, behind him on a pony. The last thing Tolliver needed was for Libazo to lame the animal. Cranford was already in a difficult enough mood.

“I see it, B’wana,” Libazo said.

“I have told you to call me sir.”

“Yes, sir.”

There was not a hint of irony in Libazo’s tone. Tolliver did not understand why he disliked the term the natives always used when speaking to European settlers. But it rubbed him the wrong way. He liked Libazo. Perhaps it was their matching stature. Perhaps it was the innate elegance of the man. Libazo was only half Kikuyu. He was half Maasai, which accounted for his being six feet two and straight as a rod.

The native policeman’s face always remained impassive, as if he little cared what happened, but the other night’s enterprise in the Masonic Hotel was typical of Tolliver’s experience of the man. Libazo could be counted to do the right and the intelligent thing. Whether they were sent to pick up the pieces after a drunken brawl or to fight a fire in the Arab trader’s stores, Libazo’s eyes often revealed that his thoughts tracked along with Tolliver’s. The askari worked side by side with Justin, always on point for whatever came up, but he never revealed that his thinking ran ahead of Tolliver’s. As it must have from time to time, considering Tolliver’s relative inexperience and the native’s superior knowledge of the territory and the people who inhabited it, even many of the white ones. Libazo’s deference was only proper, of course, but it must have taken something for him to give it.

They dismounted at the stable near the house workers’ huts. A toto ran up and took the reins and walked the horses into the shade.

“Wait here and water the horses,” Tolliver ordered Libazo and walked toward the mission office, passing the McIntosh family’s stone house on the way. He looked straight ahead, all the while worrying about what he would say to Vera about her and her family’s terrible loss and wondering if she was looking out through the gauze curtains as he went by.

Before he reached the office, her father, Reverend Clement McIntosh, shouted to him from the veranda of the house. “Captain Tolliver.” He always addressed Justin by the rank he had held in the army. It was a sign of respect that few British men accorded a young nobleman who had had the bad judgment to join the police force. And it endeared the Scot to him.

McIntosh beckoned with a sad smile. His ordinarily jolly, florid face was pale and troubled, as was to be expected.

Tolliver took the Scottish priest’s offered hand. “I am so sorry for your loss. I will do everything I can to apprehend the culprit.”

“A terrible business. Terrible.” The reverend’s chin sunk to his chest and he shook his head. His Scottish burr somehow made the word “terrible” sound worse than it otherwise would have. He sighed deeply and indicated a wicker chair beside a small white table laid with a lace cloth and teacups. He rang a little silver bell.

Glad of something to quench his thirst after the nearly hour’s ride from Nairobi and for tea to brace him up for the ordeal ahead, Tolliver took the chair, which creaked when he sat.

“I hope the ride was not too long and hot,” the reverend said, as if Tolliver had arrived for a social call.

With relief, Tolliver continued in that vein, knowing it could not be long before the business he had come to conduct would destroy any semblance of normalcy. “Not at all. The panorama from the crest of the hill is stunning on this lovely day.”

“The Lord’s rains have blessed the farmer this year,” McIntosh said. Like all British missionaries, he had come to this land to fight slavery and to convert the heathens, but like all the clergy that Tolliver had met here in the Protectorate or in England for that matter, he showed as much enthusiasm for his plantation and his herd of cattle as he did for his flock of native converts.

A door opened behind Tolliver. Expecting a native in a white robe and red fez, he nudged his cup toward the approaching sound, but when he turned he found Vera carrying a tray. He jumped to his feet and overturned his chair in the process. His face heated up. It mortified him that at the age of twenty-three he could still blush to near purple just because of an awkward moment.

She looked up at him. The rims of her eyes were the color he was sure she saw on his cheeks. He took the tray from her and set it on the table. “Miss McIntosh, I am so sorry about your loss.”

She blinked her eyes and for a moment he was afraid she would burst into tears. But she poured the tea instead and asked, “Have you seen the body?”

“Vera!” her father exclaimed. “Captain Tolliver will think…” He didn’t finish.

She put down the teapot none too gently. “Well, isn’t that why he came?” She took the third chair at the table while Tolliver righted his own and sat on it, trying not to blush again as it let out a sound like an injured cat and threatened to collapse under him.

“Let the man have his tea in peace for a moment, gal.”

She gave her father a rather wan smile. “Captain, I believe you take it with cream and sugar.” She did not wait for a reply before she took the tongs, dropped in two lumps, poured in cream from a blue and white china pitcher, and offered the cup, looking right into his eyes.

Tolliver took it from her hands. They were small and beautiful and had disappeared into his when they had waltzed at the Nairobi Club, when they had both been wearing gloves. He resisted drinking the tea in one long draught, as his mother had warned him never to do in company.

He did not want to send Vera away, but he also thought it quite inappropriate to talk about a murder in the presence of a young lady. She had, however, brought it up herself, and given the extreme gravity of such an act of violence as had occurred, there was a great deal of urgency in this matter. She might have information or insights that would be helpful to his inquiries. Those who disapproved of his choice of a profession were right about one thing: Sometimes the behavior of a gentleman and that of a policeman were mutually exclusive. “Perhaps Miss McIntosh is right, and if she will forgive us for speaking of such an unseemly matter in her presence, it might be best to get on with it.”

Her father looked decidedly reluctant, but nodded his assent.

Tolliver drained his cup and drew his noisy chair forward. “Please tell me, Reverend, what you know about the discovery of Dr. Pennyman’s body. The runner who came to Government House could not give us any details except for the fact that it—um, he was found at early light facedown in the coffee field with a native spear in his back.”

“Yes, that is correct. The workers take to the fields just after dawn to get on with their work before the sun is too strong. They always have some stalwart native laddies with spears with them, in case there are night-prowling animals that might be in the groves, and they make a great noise to warn off any creatures lurking there. When their usual chanting turned to screams and shouts, I thought it might have been a hyena or even a lion. But when I got there, I saw it was Josiah.” He looked away and blinked.

While her father was talking Vera had taken Tolliver’s cup and refilled it from the china teapot and placed it in front of him. He gave her a fleeting smile of thanks and took a sip while he waited for her father to recover himself. Her pretty face was calm. Enigmatic girl that she was, she was holding her own against her grief. Perhaps D.C. Cranford was right about Vera, that having been born here and nursed by a Kikuyu woman, she was bred without the true delicacy of an English maiden.

“Forgive me, Reverend, but I must ask—please describe exactly what you saw with as many precise details as you can remember.”

McIntosh coughed and took a long breath. “He was lying facedown, as if he had been speared whilst running away, and died instantly. One arm was underneath the body, the other was bent at the elbow. The spear was sticking straight up from the middle of his back.” His head shook, more like a shudder than a negation of what he was saying. “The spear shaft threw a shadow, like a sun dial’s.”

Vera made a tiny noise.

Her father threw her a quizzical glance and stood up. “Perhaps, my dear, you should spare yourself this.”

She stood, too, but made no move to leave them.

Tolliver rose. “Perhaps your father is right, Miss McIntosh.”

They were all standing now. Her dark eyes pierced him with a troubled glance. “Yes. Excuse me. I will go to my mother. I do wish to speak to you before you leave, Captain.”

Tolliver assented with a slight bow, and he watched her disappear through the green painted door of the house. The speed and determination in her gait made her small, slight frame seem strong and lithe as she moved, but light, as if she might as well hover over the ground as walk upon it. Tolliver pressed his lips together. Her flight from the subject of murder told him that she had not been as composed as she seemed on the surface. Somewhere in that African-born graceful figure lurked a real English—no, a Scottish girl, after all.

*   *   *

Vera’s step slowed once she was out of Tolliver’s disturbing sight and he out of hers. She had done her best to act the demure young lady in front of him, but she was sure she had done a bad job of it. Every time he turned that blue glance of his on her, she saw something in it that looked like shock, or at least like surprise. Never did she see attraction, much less affection. Every part of her was disturbed: by the discovery of her uncle’s body, by her mother’s outpouring of grief, the most emotional state she had ever seen in her mother, and even in the face of all that, more so by Justin Tolliver’s presence. Who, what, how, everything he was overwhelmed her. Even his rosy lips and blushes, which were not supposed to impress a girl. Her father used the word “virile” to describe men he admired—like that other newcomer Denys Finch Hatton. People had used it when they talked about her dead uncle. She had never really understood the word. “Manly,” her mother had said it meant. Tolliver was broad shouldered and tall. She came up only to his chin. And athletic. He had proved that even in the way he waltzed. Maybe it was his virility that disturbed her so. He seemed walking proof that a manly man could blush and have lips the color of strawberries. And now he was crossing the compound to examine her uncle’s dead body.

She backed away from the window, slipped down the corridor, and knocked lightly on her mother’s bedroom door. “Mother,” she said barely above a whisper, half desiring, half dreading intimacy with her mother that she used to imagine would make her feel loved.

“Come in, Vera.” Her voice was tired and resigned.

Vera turned the knob and opened the door silently as if she were playing the thief. Her mother lay on the bed fully clothed except for her boots, which stood side by side on the rag carpet beside the iron bedstead. Her father insisted that they always wear boots, frightened as he was of snakebites. It made no difference to him that the natives walked about barefoot and in Vera’s memory none of them had been bitten.

Her mother stretched out a hand to her and moved over to make room for Vera to sit beside her on the bed. This in itself made Vera suspicious and anxious. The death of her uncle, her mother’s only sibling, seemed to have softened her heart in a way Vera would have thought impossible.

Vera sat and took her mother’s hand. Her angular face was ashen and her eyes puffy from her tears. “This is awful,” Vera said.

Her mother squeezed her hand, let it go, and reached for a balled-up linen handkerchief that lay beside her on the damask bedspread. She patted her eyes and her nose. “I heard Captain Tolliver’s voice. They have gone to see Josiah, I suppose.” She sobbed and bit her lip, but the tears flowed anyway.

Vera twined her fingers in between her mother’s. “Oh, Mama, I am so sorry. Shouldn’t we try to send for Otis?” No one and nothing cheered her mother as much as the presence of Otis. Accustomed to her mother’s strength and the depth of her habitual reserve, Vera found it intolerable, seeing her like this.

“I told you already, Vera, and you know as well as I that tracking him in that vast wilderness is neigh on to impossible. They have two days’ head start. Kibene is our best tracker, and he has gone with them. Richard Newland said he and Berkeley Cole intend to end up at Berkeley’s farm on the Naro Moru. There is absolutely no way to know what route they will take through all that trackless open space. We will send word to Cole’s farm that they must bring Otis home forthwith. There is no need to break the news to him before he returns.”

*   *   *

A.D.S. Tolliver followed Clement McIntosh toward the stone-built hospital on the other side of the mission compound. They mounted two steps, crossed the flagstone veranda, and entered through a heavy door carved with native symbols. Tolliver removed his pith helmet and placed it under his arm as he entered. The walls of the interior were whitewashed and the rooms impeccably clean. A nursing sister approached them immediately and greeted them with a Scots burr so thick Tolliver could barely make out what she was saying. He nodded gravely to her, and she led them down a corridor lined with waist-high wainscoting. Though the exterior of the building was typical of such a place in the Protectorate, the interior was arranged very like any hospital in Tolliver’s native Yorkshire. The sister closed her eyes and bowed her head as she opened the door and let them into a small room where Dr. Josiah Pennyman’s body lay under a sheet on the table where he used to perform operations.

As Tolliver approached the corpse, McIntosh drew back the sheet. The dead doctor’s hair was the exact rich brown color of Vera’s, which gave Tolliver a start. He concentrated on his work. In the seven months that Tolliver had been in British East Africa he had never had occasion to visit the doctor and had seen him only in large crowds at Nairobi Club dances and at sporting events. In life, from afar, the doctor’s statuesque form and countenance had confirmed his reputation of enormous appeal. His face, though a bit roundish, had pleasant regular features, a bright complexion, a quick, handsome smile, a hardy laugh. Here, even in death, there was a gentleness about the face of the corpse that made it easy to see why he had been so well liked, even loved.

Clement McIntosh woke Tolliver from his reverie with a touch on his arm. “Do you want to see the wound?”

“Yes.”

It took all their strength and the nursing sister’s assistance to keep the inert body from falling on the operating room floor while they turned it. A gash about three or four inches wide traversed the man’s spine just below the shoulder blades. The wound was clean, the flesh inside it white.

McIntosh’s open hand indicated the nurse. “Sister and I washed him once we brought him here,” he said.

The woman in white pursed her lips and nodded but did not speak.

“I’ll want to see the place where you found him,” Tolliver said.

“I will show you.” McIntosh started for the door.

Tolliver held up his hand. “In a moment.” He turned to the nurse. “I suppose the spear pierced his heart and that is what killed him.”

The woman’s rigid face darkened; her lips pursed again. “We could not say that with any certainty. The spear most likely severed the spinal cord. That might have been enough to kill him. A qualified doctor performing an autopsy would be able to determine that but—” She glanced back at the dead man. “But we no longer have such a person here.”

“I don’t suppose it much matters,” Tolliver said. “One way or another the spear killed him. How long do you suppose he had been dead when they found him?”

“Again, it would be difficult to be certain. But his clothing was quite damp. It did not rain in the night, so the wet must have come from dew. I would imagine that he was lying there most of the night. A few hours at least.”

Tolliver studied her. She was sturdy and no nonsense, as one would expect of a Scottish woman who volunteered to work in an African mission hospital. But there was also a spark of intelligence and pride in her eyes. She merited his confidence, which her denials of certitude belied.

He extended his hand to her. “Thank you very much, Nurse—”

“Nurse Freemantle,” she said. Her handshake was firm but very brief.

“If you think of anything else that might be helpful, please let me know.”

The look she gave him was almost a smile.

Tolliver followed the missionary to the door. As they left, he saw the nurse covering the dead man with the white sheet, an act of gentleness not all nursing sisters spared for the living.

Tolliver signaled to Kwai Libazo, who was waiting in the shade of an acacia tree near the horses. He would need Libazo to translate as he questioned the Kikuyu who had found the body. McIntosh led them across the center of the compound and into the flowering coffee fields that sloped gently down to the river. Here and there, natives, mostly women, worked with hoes. The plants stretched far to their left and right. The myriad blossoms were as white as clouds and gave off a bittersweet fragrance. Tolliver had read somewhere that a death by arsenic gave off a bitter almond smell. But that could have no relevance here. McIntosh stopped in a spot that seemed undistinguished from any other in the expansive plantation and pointed to the ground. “Just there,” he said.

The reddishness of the earth was the color of all the ground thereabouts—not a sign of blood. Tolliver examined it carefully. It held no clues.

“It has been well cleaned,” McIntosh said.

Tolliver could not help but frown. If he had been Sherlock Holmes, the fictional detective whose stories had been all the rage in England since Tolliver was a babe in arms, he would have cursed this statement and gone back to his apartment to work out his anger playing the violin, except that in his case it would be a cello.

“The Kikuyu despise and fear death,” a lovely voice from behind Tolliver said. He turned to see Vera’s grave face. She was standing beside Libazo and looked up to him, seemingly for confirmation. The native policeman might have been carved out of wood for all his expression altered.

The girl shrugged and went on. “They burn down a hut if someone dies inside it. They will not touch a dead body. My father and Joe Morley had to move my uncle to the operating room.” She spoke the words without distaste or judgment, straightforwardly, as no proper English girl ever would have.

“Joe Morley?” Tolliver asked.

“The manager of the plantation,” the missionary explained.

Libazo looked down. Tolliver saw in his eyes that it was costing him some effort to maintain his lack of expression.

“My workers would have refused to come into the fields where a dead body was found,” the Reverend McIntosh said. “Morley had to call in Gichinga Mbura to cleanse the area. At this time of year the weeds want to turn the field wild again. And it is hard enough to get the workers to give us enough time to keep nature at bay.”

“Who is this Gichinga Mbura?” Tolliver asked. The very mention of the name had set the muscles in Libazo’s jaw working.

“The local witch doctor,” McIntosh said, his voice ever more apologetic. “Much as I regret it, I sometimes have no choice but to give the local religion, if you can call it that, its due. Otherwise nothing would get done on the farm and the mission cannot survive without the income from the coffee. The faithful of Scotland cannot be expected to support hundreds and hundreds all over Africa.”

“Libazo,” Tolliver said, “go into the Kikuyu village and find this Mbura. Perhaps he noticed something while he was doing his spells that might help us?”

Libazo stared at Tolliver as if he expected him to explode. “B’wana, the medicine man—”

Tolliver held up his hand. “How many times do I have to tell you to call me ‘sir.’ Now please just do as I have asked. Go and find Mbura and bring him to me.” Tolliver turned back to the missionary. “Reverend McIntosh, where is the spear? I would like to look at it.”

“I put it in my study with the hunting rifles and shotguns, for safekeeping. I thought you would want to confiscate it. It will be evidence, no?”

“Certainly.” Tolliver’s voice was deep and resonant. Vera loved the sound of it, with its barest hint of Yorkshire. He had got that from his nanny, she imagined. She shook her head in a vain attempt to dislodge her thoughts. She would either have to give up dreaming of him or to make herself into the kind of girl he would think attractive. Neither course seemed at all possible at this moment.

He turned and led the way up toward the house.

Vera tramped through the fields following her father and Tolliver in a state of complete confusion. Ever since she last saw Tolliver at the Nairobi Club dance, whenever she enjoyed something, she had imagined how much it would enhance her joy to have him with her enjoying it, too. Once the coffee came into blossom a week ago, she had fantasized about walking with him among all this beauty—the tall clouds sailing in the blue sky, the blossoms in matching white profusion, their heady perfume, the lightness of the air above. She wanted Tolliver to know this place at its most beautiful. Anyone with a human soul would find a thrill in this. She knew from the way he had spoken to her at the club dances that the wonder of British East Africa had surprised him. Until this morning, whenever she thought of him that was how she thought, of the places she wanted to take him, of the native crafts she wanted to show him. There were stories her Kikuyu nanny had told her, splendid vistas— Oh, what was the use? Now he would look at her only as the niece of a murder victim. Happiness for him would never attach itself to her. And if he could read her thoughts now, he would think her horrid for dwelling on such a subject when her uncle lay dead.

With her head lowered, she nearly walked right into his back as they approached the veranda of the house.

In spite of her confusion of feelings, Vera could not help going with him into her father’s study. He stood aside and let her enter first. Her father took the long spear, which stood in the corner, and brought it to Tolliver. Its one-piece head of iron had a leaf-shaped blade and cylindrical base into which the long wooden shaft was fitted. The point of the blade shone brightly; it had been cleansed of any blood from the stabbing.

Tolliver stood it next to him and glanced up at the tip. “A bit taller than I. Six feet and four inches I would say.”

Vera’s father nodded. “The blade was in his back up to about there.” He pointed to a spot on about two inches from the top.

Tolliver glanced at Vera. His round blue eyes held concern and something else that might have been disapproval of her. Ladies were supposed to faint if they heard such things. “I have seen a Kikuyu kill a warthog with a spear,” she said as if to defend herself. “And a Maasai kill a lion with one very like that.” If anything, his look of disapproval deepened.

She turned away, went to the window. “Your man is returning with Gichinga Mbura.” She did not bother to tell him that Mbura was gesticulating wildly and that the black policeman in the red fez was having to push the medicine man along the path with a hand at the middle of his back.

*   *   *

Kwai Libazo knew he had no choice but to deliver the medicine man to A.D.S. Tolliver. He was unsure if the rules also required him to reveal what he had just learned: that Mbura hated the Scottish doctor with a passion most Kikuyu reserved for their worst enemy—the Maasai.

When Libazo had arrived at the medicine man’s hut, the villagers had stood mute and suspicious, as was their wont with him ever since the British government had hired him to be a policeman. Not that he had ever been completely accepted by the Kikuyu, his mother’s tribe, or by the Maasai, his father’s. He had asked both his father’s and his mother’s brothers to include him in the circumcision ceremony of their respective tribes. Becoming a full-fledged man in either would have freed him from the limbo in which he had lived his life. But neither group would accept him. Once he turned fifteen and it was clear he would never get his wish from either tribe, he had confronted his mother. Why had she lain with an enemy of her people to make him? Why had she brought into the world a son who had no place in it? She had looked up into his face and walked away from his anger and his pain.

One of the old men who sat around in his mother’s village watching the women do the farmwork had suggested that his mother might have been raped during a Maasai raid to steal goats and cattle. The old grandfather had told him to ask his father. But his father was dead—eaten by a lion. And his father’s brother denied it, and said the old man was just trying to get Kwai to hate his own father. He had never gotten the truth about why he had been born.

Kwai pushed the medicine man forward as if he had a right to command the second-most powerful man in his mother’s tribe, after the chief, Kinanjui. “Your tribesman Kamante told me that you have been cursing the white doctor, that you have said he deserved to die because he was trying to steal the Kikuyus’ spirits for his god.”

Gichinga Mbura contorted his torso to shrug off Libazo’s hand on his back. His skin still bore the remains of the red mud and white ash with which he had painted himself for the ritual cleansing of the coffee field. “That dwarf Kamante is a twisted monster. No one follows his words. What does he know of the power of Small-knife-no-spear?”

Libazo kept his face in neutral though the Scottish doctor’s nickname made him want to smile. His mother’s people did this: They gave names to the white settlers that described something about them, usually a physical attribute or an article of clothing, derogatory if they disliked the person, complimentary if they found the person pleasing. Libazo had briefly worked for the red-haired Berkeley Cole and called him Sunset-shines-on-head.

Libazo pressed harder on the medicine man’s back. “Move faster.”

Gichinga twisted away from Libazo’s hand again and began to walk very fast. “You give the white man’s orders, but you are not a white man. You are not a Kikuyu. You are not a Maasai. You are not as much of man even as Kamante.”

Kwai Libazo’s Maasai father’s height and strength gave him an advantage over the smaller, slighter Kikuyu. Libazo now grabbed Mbura by his upper arm and held him fast. “You would be better to think how you will answer B’wana Tolliver’s questions.”

“You would be better to think why you take the side of your B’wana against your own people.”

Libazo did not remind Gichinga that he was just after saying that Kwai Libazo did not belong to those people. He decided at that moment that he would tell A.D.S. Tolliver about Mbura’s threats against the British doctor.

*   *   *

Justin Tolliver had seen an African witch doctor only once, in full regalia, during a ceremony to greet the former American president Teddy Roosevelt, who had come to the Protectorate to hunt and to explore. That was almost two years ago on a brief visit with a schoolmate and fellow army officer, Granville Stokes. They had come from South Africa to transport polo ponies and see the new British territory. The memory brought back powerful images. Tolliver suppressed a wave of desire that wanted to wash over him. He and Gran had met two women at a polo match. They had stayed with them for two months. Lillian, Lady Gresham, had introduced him around as her nephew. In private she had called him Candy. She had nearly consumed him. Almost old enough to be his mother but slender and lively, with skin soft and warm, the heady air of the African highlands and the scent of her French perfume, his first real affair. Barely past his twenty-first year, he had spent that leave lost in a stupor of sex and whiskey. Until she ran away south with a German, and he went back to Johannesburg to grow out of his infatuation. And he did. He now thought of her as debauched, rather than delicious. Except sometimes in the night. When the urge came over him to make love and that lecherous woman seemed the ideal partner.

He shook off those thoughts and stood beside Vera McIntosh on the veranda, waiting for Libazo to cross the mission compound with the witch doctor in tow. Clement McIntosh had left them and gone to see how his wife was faring in her grief.

Tolliver tried not to think of what it would be to lift Vera’s body and kiss her mouth and find out what she was like without that silly split skirt and boyish khaki shirt. She was not a predatory woman looking for nothing but pleasure. Neither was she a prim and proper English girl who would faint at the slightest provocation. Somehow, at this second, that made her more desirable than any woman he had ever known.

Libazo let go of Mbura’s arm as they approached. Tolliver stepped forward and with Libazo translating asked the native to describe exactly what he had removed from the site where the body was found and if there had been anything left behind that might help them discover who had killed the doctor.

Libazo dutifully asked the questions his captain had requested. He wanted to reveal his suspicions to Tolliver, but he was not sure that Mbura was as ignorant of the British language as he claimed to be. No matter what the English may say, he knew there was reason to fear the medicine man’s curses. And the lady who was standing by, he knew, spoke perfect Kikuyu, so she understood all that passed between him and the medicine man.

Tolliver grunted. “This is not helpful at all.” There was an edge of frustration in his voice.

“Perhaps,” Vera suggested, “Gichinga Mbura will look at the spear and tell us if he knows who the owner might be. Even if he does not know its owner, he may know which iron monger made it.”

Tolliver turned his blue gaze on her. It went through her heart. “I’ll go inside, Miss McIntosh, with your permission, and get it.”

She held his eyes with hers and nodded. While he was gone, she asked Libazo in English why Gichinga was so agitated. He told her in Kikuyu about the witch doctor’s anger at her uncle. He wanted Mbura to understand that his true feelings were being revealed.

Tolliver returned before she could ask anything further. He stood the spear upright in front of Mbura, who looked carefully at the blade, pointed to it, and spoke animatedly to Vera.

Tolliver interrupted. “Ask him if he knows who owned this,” he said to Libazo.

Kwai nodded and spoke at length to the witch doctor, who answered with a torrent of words.

“What is he saying?”

Libazo raised a hand to quiet Mbura. “He says that this is a Maasai spear.”

It seemed an entirely inadequate report of a conversation that had taken more than two minutes. “How does he know that?”

Libazo pointed to the blade. “Do you see here, sir? This shape of the leaf, how it curves abruptly into the shaft? Well, that is the shape of Maasai blade. A Kikuyu blacksmith would make a blade where the bottom of the leaf slants more gradually into the shaft. Like this.” He traced a finger along the blade to demonstrate the difference between Maasai and Kikuyu spearheads.

“But there are over a million Kikuyu in the Protectorate. There must be hundreds of blacksmiths in the tribal areas. Do you mean to tell me they all make their spearheads the same way and all the Maasai make theirs a different way?”

Vera put a hand on his arm. “Englishmen,” she said, “often lump all the natives together as if they must all have the same attitudes and traits. They do not. One tribe is as different from another as the French are from the English or the English from the Italians. Each tribe’s artisans have their own signature way of making things like baskets or wood carvings, or songs and dances for that matter.”

Tolliver gave her another assessing look and then addressed Libazo. “Is this a Maasai spear?”

Libazo nodded. “Yes. And, sir, you see these lines cut into the blade.” He turned the blade over to show Tolliver both sides. “I have never seen anything like these. Both the Kikuyu and the Maasai might make a design there, but always something that resembles a snake. I have never seen a spear that looked exactly like this.”

Tolliver examined the spearhead. Incised in it on one side was a squared-off design that resembled a Greek key. On the other side was a zigzag that looked very like something found among Egyptian hieroglyphics.

“Also, sir,” Libazo said, “I think you ought—” he began hesitantly.

Vera interjected, speaking to Libazo in English. “Let me explain to the captain.” She knew it would be best for Libazo if she, rather than he, revealed the witch doctor’s possible connection to the murder. She turned to Tolliver. “May I ask Mbura some questions?”

“About?”

She drew near and put her lips close to his ear. “I think Gichinga Mbura knows more about my uncle’s death than he is saying. Kikuyu do not easily answer direct questions from strangers, but they are usually more open with people they know. Mbura is being evasive with Libazo. It seems to me he has something to hide. He has known me from birth. Perhaps he will be more forthcoming with me. Shall I ask him?”

Tolliver gestured with an open palm for her to proceed and waited while she spoke rapidly, but in a polite voice. The witch doctor accorded her no such civility. His tone was harsh, and he even stamped his foot at one point. At length she hushed him up with a gesture and turned back to Tolliver. “Mbura says that he has lost face with his people because they began to look to my uncle to cure their ills whereas in the past he was the one who could help them. From the way he spoke, he resented my uncle quite vehemently.”

Tolliver looked from her to the blade of the spear to Mbura. “It is likely then that he killed your uncle.”

Vera seemed about to object when her mother suddenly appeared in the doorway. Her father stood a few feet behind his wife in the hall. Mrs. McIntosh gave a slight bow to Tolliver in lieu of a greeting. “I think you should know that my brother was carrying on an affair with Lucy Buxton,” she said. “I do not like to reveal Josiah’s sins, but Kirk Buxton recently found out about his wife’s—” She grimaced. “Shall we say, activities?” Her lips pursed with disapproval.

Tolliver glanced from the witch doctor to Blanche McIntosh. Kirk Buxton was the manager of the Standard Bank of India’s branch in Nairobi. Tolliver was well aware from his previous visit to the Protectorate of what went on among certain European settlers, had been part of it himself. He tightened his grip on the spear he still held. “But your brother was killed with a native weapon. And I have just this moment discovered that this Mbura had a motive to kill him.”

Blanche McIntosh’s gray eyes widened. She looked down, and her shoulders sagged. Tolliver could not tell if she felt disappointment or just grief.

In the dim light of the hallway, Clement McIntosh stepped forward. “Anyone could take a native spear and kill someone with it,” he said. “If a settler wanted to conceal what he had done, it would be the weapon to choose.”

“I think, sir,” Libazo said, speaking out of turn, “that a Kikuyu medicine man would never choose a Maasai spear to reclaim his power. Mbura said this himself just now. The Kikuyu and the Maasai have been enemies since they found themselves together in this valley.”

Tolliver let Libazo’s insolence pass. He was already struggling to keep control of his own thoughts. For a moment, it had seemed that this murder was going to be a straightforward case of resentment and a savage’s way of reasserting his power. Now he was not so sure. British interests required not only that the police force show that English law now ruled this land, but also that the British Empire stood for true justice. If they did not take the moral high ground and teach the natives the righteousness of British ways, the best of England would never prevail.

“Ask him if he killed your uncle,” he said to Vera.

She moved a step closer to Tolliver’s side. Her mother turned away and walked toward her bedroom with her head hanging. Her husband followed her.

Gichinga Mbura’s answer to Vera’s question poured forth with such violent temper that Tolliver felt the need to step between her and the witch doctor.