Free The African Poison Murders by Elspeth Huxley

working-clothes out of a drawer. Vachell was curious about the old shoes on the dead man’s feet.
    “Bwana wears the same pair every day,” the native said. “He uses one pair only until they are dead; then he goes to the Indian and buys more.”
    “When do you clean them?” Vachell inquired.
    “In the evening, when work is over, bwana takes off his shoes. He puts on the slippers, or sometimes, if it is wet, the long boots. Then I clean the shoes of every day and return them to bwana’s room, where they are ready for him in the morning.”
    “And last night — did you return them as usual to his room?”
    “Yes, of that I am certain; I cannot be mistaken.”
    “Then why did your bwana put on the very old shoes, the pair that had died, if the new ones of every day were waiting as usual?”
    Mwogi shrugged his shoulders.
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    “I do not know. How am I to know why Europeans behave as they do? But I am certain I put the shoes of every day into his room last night.”
    Vachell rubbed the lobe of his ear and puzzled a little over the point. It seemed irrelevant, and probably was, but all the same it was odd.
    “The good shoes were in his room when you made up the bed this morning?” he persisted.
    “Yes, bwana, I saw them on the floor when I entered, after he had gone to the cows, as if he had thrown them away in anger.”
    Vachell released his ear-lobe and regarded Mwogi with a new interest.
    “Come to the room and show me,” he said.
    Mwogi at first displayed extreme reluctance to enter the room, although he knew that Munson’s body had been taken away. But after a little Vachell coaxed him in. He kept glancing uneasily at the vacant bed, but he put one of the shoes down on its side a few feet from the bed, and the other against the opposite wall. They did, indeed, look as if they might have been hurled away by a man seated on the edge of the bed.
    “Perhaps he threw them at the rats,” Mwogi suggested. “There are many here.”
    Vachell examined the shoes carefully, inside and out, but could find nothing wrong. They were roughly made out of thick stiff leather, but they seemed in good shape. Finally he locked them into a box in the car, together with the packet of tea, for closer examination later on.
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    Munson had gone out to the farm buildings soon after six. He had spoken to the milkers and inspected a cow with mastitis and another with a sore eye. At about half-past six, the boys said — their times were always vague — he had walked on past the bullpens towards the pyrethrum-drying shed, which was screened from the rest of the farm buildings by scattered olive-trees and some tall bush. A cart track led past the shed door and down a slight hill towards the pyrethrum fields beyond. Munson had walked down this cart track, and, so far as Vachell could discover, that was the last time he had been seen alive. He’d said nothing to the boys of his intentions, save that they were to start to handdress the bulls and he would be back to see that the job was being properly done.
    That left an hour and a half to fill in. He might have gone straight into the pyrethrum shed and died at once. Or he might not have entered it at all for another hour. Or, of course — if it was foul play — he might have died elsewhere and been taken to the shed afterwards, though for what reason it was impossible to say.
    Prettyman was instructed to go over the shed with a fine-tooth comb, using a magnifying-glass on the edges of the louvres to search for traces of anything having been stuffed in to block the ventilation system.
    Vachell went through all the letters and papers he could find in Munson’s room, and the contents of the dead man’s pockets, without discovering 74
    anything beyond farm documents — bills, receipts, estimates, circulars — and a few personal letters which seemed of no special interest. A list of recent cream cheques showed that Munson was dairying on a big scale; at the present price of butterfat he