A Guide to the Beasts of East Africa (4 page)

Rose Mbikwa's mother had long ago
expressed her wishes. She wanted to die at home in Edinburgh sitting at the bridge
table, having just bid and won a grand slam; failing that, she said, a small slam
redoubled and vulnerable would do nicely. Though she had been unsuccessful in this
ambition, her husband and daughter agreed that dying in her favourite armchair already
on to her second gin and tonic of the evening and more than halfway through the
Times
crossword was almost as fitting a departure. Rose's father,
though crippled by rheumatism these several years, assured Rose he could manage. The day
before the funeral she flew from Nairobi to Scotland and unpacked her bags in the very
bedroom she had grown up in. From now on she would be looking after her father in the
big old Morningside house, and that was that.

In truth, this was no burden for Rose. The
word ‘duty' never entered her head. She was simply doing what needed doing
for a man she loved and respected. She would continue to do so for as long as necessary.
When her husband Joshua Mbikwa had first been arrested in Kenya all those years ago by
order of the then president, she had not campaigned for his release from a sense of
duty. It had
simply been the right thing to do. After Joshua's
death in the plane crash four years later, she had not stayed on in Kenya and started up
the tourist guide training programme at the museum out of a sense of duty. It was her
small contribution to the land she had fallen in love with. The programme was now going
well. Her son, their only child, was grown up and happy and enjoying his job in Geneva.
She was needed more in Edinburgh than Nairobi. The choice had not been difficult.

Rose was surprised how quickly she had
fitted back into Edinburgh life. Though her father could not get out of the old house
much, the door was wide and the world could get in. Friends came to call and stayed to
gossip. Her father's sister and her mother's two brothers provided all the
family they needed. The two families had always been close. None of them had moved away
from Edinburgh, and their regular Sunday get-together at the old house in Glenlockhart
Road was a weekly ritual that Rose looked forward to. She would cook the lunch, as her
mother had before her. Her father would choose the wine and whisky. Each week the ritual
would be completed when Auntie Jean sat down at the piano after the meal. All the family
sang – you would almost have thought they were Welsh.

All this is not to say that Rose
didn't miss Kenya. Even after four years back in Scotland she sometimes woke up
thinking she was in her upstairs bed in Serengeti Gardens. The emptiness of Edinburgh
streets disconcerted her still; the streets of Nairobi were always thronged not just
with cars and trucks and matatus but with people – people on bicycles, people on foot.
She missed the smells
of Africa, and the faces and the sound of African
voices. The birds? Well, probably best not to think about the birds.

Mr Malik eased his old green Mercedes into
a space in the car park of the Nairobi Museum. Quite a crowd had already assembled – the
usual mixture of black, brown and white. They were greeted by Jennifer Halutu, who had
been leading the walks ever since Rose Mbikwa's departure. Though Jennifer Halutu
was a kind and competent woman, Mr Malik missed Rose. He wished he could hear again her
loud, clear speaking voice bringing everyone's attention to a chestnut-fronted
bee-eater on a telephone wire or a black kite – which is not really black, but brown –
soaring over the city.

Before they decided where they would go that
day, Hilary Fotherington-Thomas had something to tell them all.

‘I have some bad news and some good
news. I regret to say that Dr Neil Macdonald, the father of Rose Mbikwa, died six days
ago. Many of you will remember Dr Macdonald from his many visits to Kenya. He was
eighty-four years old and died at home in Scotland. He will be missed. The good news is
that Rose is coming back to Nairobi very soon. I had an email from her this morning. She
is flying in tomorrow.'

Though Mr Malik immediately felt a small
flutter in his heart, it was overruled by a stern admonishment from his brain. It had
been four years. Rose Mbikwa would probably not even remember his name, let alone that
dance at the Hunt Club Ball.

After a show of hands it was agreed that, as
there were plenty of cars this morning, they would go to the State Agricultural Research
Station. A small patch of forest near the entrance to the station, a pond that was used
to store water for irrigation, and coffee and tea bushes extending over several acres
made for a variety of bird habitats with the chance to see anything from a kingfisher to
an eagle. As usual, Mr Malik's old friend Thomas Nyambe rode in the front
passenger seat for the journey, and a gaggle of Young Ornithologists – in this case
three male and two female – squeezed into the back. Forty minutes later they arrived at
the gates of the agricultural station.

‘Follow me,' said Jennifer
Halutu.

One of the YOs pointed out a pair of augur
buzzards circling overhead – one light, one dark.

‘Ah yes, buzzards,' said Mr
Nyambe. ‘That reminds me …'

Mr Malik took out his pen, opened his
notebook, and began to write.

By the time the walk ended at noon Mr Malik
had recorded the names of forty-two species of Kenyan birds – one of the YOs'
sharp pairs of eyes had even spotted a rare dwarf bittern standing motionless among some
dead rushes on the far side of the pond. He had also noted that the Secretary of State
for Development had now dined twice at the Hilton with senior representatives from one
of the world's leading producers of GM maize, that the Minister of Finance had
again left the country ‘on private business' – flying Swiss International –
and that despite
his assurances that national parks were for people not
profit, the Minister of Agriculture and Tourism had given the go-ahead to his
wife's cousin for another private development on the shores of the Kiunga Marine
National Reserve.

The biggest news that Thomas Nyambe had
passed on, though, concerned the new Minister for the Interior. After the previous
minister had been forced to resign by revelations in the
Evening News
about
unauthorized slum clearing in Nairobi's Kibera district, the new minister had
vowed to relocate people only when new housing was available. He would, he had declared,
make this his mission. Not only that, he would ensure complete transparency of the
process, with open tenders for government housing contracts and a free and fair ballot
system for choosing who would occupy the new houses. But according to what Mr Nyambe had
heard from one of his fellow government drivers, not only was the building project
stalled (despite all that money from the EU), but the list of those eligible for the
houses – should they ever be built – seemed only to include members of the
minister's own constituency.

‘Thank you, my friend, for your
company and your conversation,' said Mr Malik, closing his notebook.

‘And thank you, my friend,' said
Mr Nyambe. ‘It is good to share things. Sometimes I think that there should be
more sharing in the world.'

Which, by coincidence, is exactly what
Petula wanted to talk to her father about at breakfast the very next morning. Mr Malik
wasn't sure he understood all the details, but it seemed that the new
Communications
Director from Geneva, who she'd met the day
before, was keen to set up a local website for Clarity International through which
people with interesting inside information – ‘whistle-blowers', Petula
called them – could reveal what they knew to the world. The tricky thing was to make
sure that while anyone could post their information, it couldn't be traced back to
them. This was just the kind of thing where Petula, with her passion for all things to
do with computers, knew she could be useful. She seemed quite excited.

‘Did you hear, A.B.? Tomorrow's
talk has been cancelled.'

‘The Thursday lecture, you
mean?'

‘Yes. Damned shame, I was looking
forward to it. “Safeguarding Nairobi's Water Supply in the Twenty-first
Century” – should have been interesting.'

Mr Gopez put down his glass and reached for
the bowl of chilli popcorn.

‘Me too – always like a good fairy
story. Chap drowned, did he?'

‘Died of thirst, I heard,' said
Mr Patel. (Nairobi's water supply, like most of its municipal services, is often a
little erratic.) ‘Ah, there you are, Malik. Speaking of drowning, you're
looking a little damp about the noggin. Raining outside, is it?'

Mr Malik decided to ignore him.

The picture of ourselves that we carry in
our minds is seldom the one we see in the mirror. No matter what our age, no matter what
our sex or skin colour, few of us view our image in the looking glass with one hundred
per cent personal approval. Too short or too tall; too thin or too fat; our eyes too
close together or a little too far apart; our nose too big or too small. Of all our
physical features, hair
seems to give the least satisfaction. Too
straight or too curly; too pale or too dark; too thick or too thin – or there is simply
not enough of it. Hence Mr Malik's hairstyle.

The classic comb-over is not a matter of
sudden whim. A man does not wake up one day, examine his reflection in the mirror and
think to himself: ‘Right, no more Mr Baldy – it's comb-over time.' He
does not decide that from this day forth he will let grow what hairs remain on one side
of his head, that he will cherish and nurture them as the vigneron his vines. He does
not then begin to coax the hairs with brush or comb, and perhaps a little Brylcreem, to
wind their way over his scalp. No man believes that his family and friends, confronted
with such a tonsorial transformation, will immediately forget that he was ever bald,
that they will think that a miracle has occurred, and the part of his scalp that was
once bare has blossomed with hair as the desert blossoms after rain.

No, such things happen slowly, over many
years. A man notices a little thinning of the hair. It is the matter of a moment to
conceal this by altering the flow of the rest of his hair. As the thinning increases,
the time and care taken to disguise it increases. All too soon the man finds himself on
the horns of a dilemma. Should he continue with an artifice which is looking more and
more unnatural by the month, or should he dispense with it – in effect, go bald
overnight? Mr Malik had long ago decided to take the former path. No matter how long it
took him each morning or how often the abominably hairy Patel teased him, as long as a
single hair grew on his head, that hair would be plastered up and over his scalp in
glorious defiance of the effects of age, gravity and male hormones.

‘Did you hear?' said Mr Gopez.
‘Looks like there's going to be a water shortage tomorrow.'

‘Really?' said Mr Malik.
‘I thought that new dam on the Thika River was supposed to stop all
that.'

‘What he means is that the
lecture's been cancelled,' said Mr Patel, ‘the one about our water
supply.'

‘Speaking of that new dam on the Thika
River,' said Mr Gopez, ‘have you chaps read the paper? You don't just
need the water, you need the pipes. The old ones all leak, apparently, and according to
what I've just been reading in the
Evening News
that aid money from
Norway for new ones seems to have leaked too.'

‘It's still there, you
know,' said Mr Patel.

‘I wish I could share your optimism.
It'll have been channelled into some secret bank account in Liechtenstein by now,
mark my words.'

‘Not the money, the gun – the one he
shot Erroll with. It's still there, in the Thika River, where he threw it on the
way to Nyeri.'

‘Oh my God, Patel, you're not
still going on about your damned Delves Broughton?'

‘Look, A.B., he told that girl all
about it. What's-her-name – Carberry's daughter. He told her the very next
day. It's all in the book that English journalist wrote, and in the one she wrote
too. He admitted that he'd shot Erroll. Not only that, he told her what he'd
done with the murder weapon. On the way up to Nyeri he'd stopped at Thika and
chucked the gun over the bridge into the falls. You must have read it –
White
Handkerchief
, or whatever it was called.' He turned to Mr Malik.
‘You've read it, haven't you, Malik?'

‘I think you may mean
White
Mischief
.' Mr Malik nodded. ‘Yes, I've read it.'

‘Well, what about the other
book?' said Mr Gopez.

‘Not that Secret Service assassination
thing,' said Mr Patel. ‘I thought we'd agreed to ditch the conspiracy
theory.'

‘No, no. I'm talking about the
book by that other woman.'

‘You wouldn't by any chance be
referring to
Diana Lady Delamere and the Lord Erroll Murder
, would you?'
asked Mr Malik. ‘By Mrs Leda Farrant?'

‘That's the one. Correct me if
I'm wrong, but she says that in the 1960s some local journalist chappy came up
with some new evidence and got a story published in the
Sunday Nation
putting
the finger squarely on Diana. The paper got cold feet, thinking she'd sue. They
pulled the story – but not before the first edition had gone out. Much to their
surprise, nothing happened. No writ, nothing. A few days later this chap's boss
was playing cards at the Muthaiga Club, and who should be on the same table as him?
Diana. He thought he should say something – apologize, you know. She waved his
explanation aside. “Oh, everyone knows I did it,” she said.'

‘Yes, A.B.?'

‘Well, there you are, that's
what I'm saying. She admitted it.'

Mr Patel shook his head in disbelief.

‘That is hardly what I would call an
unambiguous admission of guilt. Even if she did say it, does it not occur to you that
her words might have been intended as ironic?'

‘And if I might put in a word
here,' said Mr Malik who, being no less fascinated by the case than anyone else in
Kenya, had indeed read all the books about the Erroll case he could
get his hands on over the years (and dozens of newspaper articles besides), ‘it
seems that once again we are faced with the problem of hearsay evidence. The woman who
wrote this book – and, as far as I remember, she paints a far from flattering picture of
Diana – bases her conclusions on a conversation at which she was not herself
present.'

‘Exactly my point, Malik,' said
Mr Gopez with a triumphant smile.

‘What point?' said Mr Patel.
‘A moment ago you were saying that Diana did it.'

‘The point I was trying to make,
Patel, is that Malik is right. Hearsay evidence is like one of those verbal agreements
in Hollywood you read about – not worth the paper it's written on. Same with your
Delves Broughton.'

At this point, some of you may be feeling
just a little confused by all these references to this and that theory by this and that
writer. So, while our friends at the Asadi Club order another round of Tusker beers and
make further inroads into the bowl of chilli popcorn on the table in front of them, let
me summarize.

White Mischief
– later made into a
film of the same name – was published in 1982 by the English journalist James Fox. The
book reads like a true-life detective story and was based on the transcript of the 1941
Broughton murder trial and interviews which Fox and his colleague, the English writer
Cyril Connolly, conducted from 1969 onwards with as many as possible of the key players
then still alive. His story goes like this.

At about 3 a.m. on the morning of Friday the
24th of January 1941, two African men were driving a milk delivery truck from the then
rural settlement of Karen to Nairobi. It was dark and wet. Soon after the two men had
turned right out of Karen Road and were heading north-east towards the city, they saw
the lights of a stationary car that seemed to have veered across the highway in the
direction they were heading. The car had ended up tilted halfway into a shallow pit on
the wrong side of the road about 150 yards beyond the junction. They stopped their truck
and got out. The car was a black Buick. Though its headlights were still on, the engine
wasn't running and the windows were closed. At first the car seemed empty, but
when the delivery drivers looked inside they saw a man hunched sideways on the floor
under the steering wheel on elbows and knees, his head on the floor, his hands together.
He looked dead. The two men immediately turned the truck back towards Karen to go and
get help.

Within the hour, four local constables from
the police post at Karen were on the scene. They flagged down a white dairy farmer who
was also driving towards Nairobi. The dairy farmer later stated that he had earlier
passed the spot, heading in the opposite direction, at about 2.40 a.m., but had seen
nothing. While talking with the constables, the dairy farmer noticed a wound behind the
dead man's left ear. He drove on to the main police station in Nairobi to fetch
further assistance while one of the constables fetched Assistant Police Superintendent
Anstis Bewes from his nearby home in Karen.

Bewes arrived at 4.50 a.m. He saw tyre marks
leading away from the front of the car. When he opened the car
door, as
well as seeing the body on the floor he noticed blood on the front passenger seat and a
strong smell of scent. He also saw white marks on the rear seat – possibly from pipeclay
used to whiten gym shoes, he thought – and observed that both armstraps had been
wrenched off the inside of the roof and were lying on the back seat. He went off to
phone Nairobi, and by 6 a.m. five more police officers were on the scene.

At 8 a.m. a government pathologist, passing
by on his way to work, was flagged down. He ordered that the body be removed for
examination. It was only when the body was pulled from its crouched position, and he
could see the face, that he recognized the dead man as Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll.
The body was taken to the mortuary and the car towed away. At the mortuary, Police
Superintendent Arthur Poppy confirmed that the dead man had a bullet wound behind his
ear surrounded by powder scorch marks. Further examination of the car revealed a spent
.32 bullet, bloodstains on the inside of the passenger side window, a hairpin and a
lipstick-stained Players cigarette.

Mr Malik admitted to being no less
intrigued by the Erroll murder than were his friends, but while part of him – the part
that had made him read every book and article on the case that he came across (and
recall every detail, clue and theory) – could not help but wonder who did it and why,
another part of him thought that there are some questions to which we will never have an
answer, and this was one of them. He was relieved to see Tiger Singh approach their
table. Perhaps the Tiger would be able to turn the conversation on to another subject.
Mr Malik was not
quite so pleased, though, to see another figure behind
him – a white-haired, brown-skinned man dressed in a pale linen jacket with slacks to
match, below which were what looked suspiciously like a pair of white espadrilles.

‘Good evening, gentlemen,' said
the Tiger. ‘Look who I bumped into in the Hilton.'

The man stepped forward. Mr Gopez stood and
reached out a hand.

‘Harry Khan. Good to see you, old chap
– Patel here told us you were back in the country.'

‘Hey, A.B., Patel,' said Harry
Khan with a white smile. ‘And if it isn't my old pal Malik. What's
happening, Jack?'

‘Murder,' said Mr Malik.

‘Murder?'

‘We were just talking about it,
Tiger.'

‘He means the Lord Erroll
murder,' said Mr Patel.

‘Don't worry, Harry,' said
the Tiger, ‘it was a very long time ago. No reason you should know anything about
it.'

‘Trial made headlines all over the
world,' said Mr Patel. ‘But then he got off.'

‘I think the word you want, Patel, is
acquitted
,' said Mr Gopez. ‘Broughton was acquitted – found not
guilty by a jury of his peers.' He turned to Harry Khan. ‘It was Diana –
Broughton's wife – who did it, you see.'

‘Khan, please forgive my friend. He
knows not of what he speaks. Malik'll tell you – he's read the books.
Broughton admitted it, didn't he, Malik?'

‘Yes, Patel, but –'

‘And please forgive
my
friend, Khan,' said Mr Gopez. ‘Whether his mental deficiency is hereditary
or acquired, we can only feel the deepest sympathy for both him and
his
family. No, as usual,
cherchez la femme
– and you don't have to
cherche
very far to find all tracks leading to Diana. Wouldn't you
agree, Malik?'