Death in Zanzibar (22 page)

A bat flitted past the open window and Dany flinched, and was startled to find that so trivial a thing could have the power to make her heart leap and her breath catch. Especially when there was nothing to be afraid of any longer — except the discovery of her identity, which was inevitable anyway. And yet she was still afraid …

The night was very quiet and the house very still, and now that the lights had gone out the garden was blue and black and silver only. There were no glints of gold except where the warm reflected glow from her own window touched the top of a jacaranda, and a small orange square, barely visible through the intervening trees, that showed that Lash Holden, in the little guest-house on the seaward corner of the boundary wall, was still awake.

A nightjar cried harshly in the garden below, and Dany's taut nerves leapt to the sudden sound, and she turned impatiently away from the window and looked about her at the strange white-walled room whose high ceiling was almost twenty feet above her head. A room built tall and cool for some lovely lady of the harem in the years before Sultan Saïd had deeded the House of Shade to his friend, Emory Frost — rover, adventurer, black-sheep and soldier-of-fortune.

What had the house seen during its long life? Had there been, as Millicent Bates suggested, ‘shady doings' there, and did the rooms remember them? Dany found herself turning quickly to look behind her, as she had done once before in another bedroom in the Airlane in London. But there was nothing behind her except a small cream-and-gilt writing-table on which someone had placed Miss Ada Kitchell's portable typewriter and a solitary book: a solid tome of Victorian vintage that did not look as though it would make entertaining reading.

Dany reached out and picked it up, to discover that it was a musty volume bound in leather that heat and many monsoons had patched with mildew. But despite its age the title was still clearly legible:
The House of Shade
by Barclay Frost.

Dany smiled, remembering Tyson's strictures on the author's style, and dipping into it she found that her step-father's criticisms were fully justified. Barclay's prose was insufferably pedantic, and he had never used one word where half-a-dozen would do instead. Still, it was nice of Lorraine to put it in her room, and she must certainly find time to read some if not all of it.

She was laying it down when she noticed that some inquisitive or would-be helpful servant had opened the typewriter case and had not known how to shut it again. Dany removed the lid in order to set the catches straight, and saw that the machine had also been used, for a fragment of torn cream-laid paper, taken from a shelf on the writing-table, was still in it.

One of the
Kivulimi
servants had obviously been playing with this new and fascinating toy, and Dany could only hope that he had not succeeded in damaging it. She rattled off a line of type that in time-honoured tradition informed all good men that now was the time to come to the aid of the party, and finding that the machine still appeared to function, removed the fragment of paper, dropped it into the waste-paper basket and replaced the cover.

Turning away, she looked at the neatly turned-down bed, but sleep seemed as far from her as ever, and she went instead to the dressing-table, and sitting down in front of it, stared at her face in the glass. Lorraine was right. It was an unattractive hair style and her skin was too warm a tone for red hair.

She removed the spectacles, and reaching for her hairbrush swept the fringe off her forehead, and having brushed out the neat rows of curls that were arranged in bunches on either side of her head, twisted the soft mass into a severe knot at the nape of her neck. Dany's bones were good — as Daniel Ashton's had been — and where a frizzed and fussy style of hair-dressing reduced her to mediocrity, a severe one lent her distinction and a sudden unexpected beauty.

An enormous green and white moth flew in through the open window and added itself to the halo of winged insects that were circling about the electric light, and Dany rose impatiently and, going to the door, snapped off the switch. That should give the tiresome things a chance to find their way out into the moonlight, and she would give them a few minutes to get clear, and then pull the curtains before turning on the light again.

Now that the room was in darkness the night outside seemed almost as bright as day, and she returned to the window to look out once more at the shadowy garden and the wide, shimmering expanse of sea.

Lash's light had vanished and he was presumably asleep. But now that Dany's own light was out she became aware that the window immediately above hers had not yet been darkened, for there was still a warm glow illuminating the jacaranda tree. So Millicent Bates was still awake. And so, it seemed, was somebody else …

A pin-point of light was moving through the shadows in the garden below, and for a moment Dany thought it must be a firefly. Then her ear caught the faint crunch of the crushed shell and coral on the winding paths, and she realized that what she could see was the lighted end of a cigarette, and that someone was walking up through the garden towards the house.

The tiny orange spark was momentarily lost to view behind a screen of hibiscus, to reappear again as a man in a dinner jacket came softly up the nearest flight of steps on to the terrace, and turning along it, vanished round the far corner of the house.

He had looked up at Dany's window as he reached the top of the steps, and as the moonlight fell on his face she had seen the anxious frown between his brows, and had resisted an impulse to lean out and assure him that she was all right. Though why she should suppose that Larry Dowling was in any way interested in her safety she did not know. It was far more likely that he had merely been strolling in the garden at this late hour because he, like herself, did not feel sleepy.

From somewhere down among the shadowy trees the nightjar cried again. But this time the harsh sound did not make her start, for the thought that Larry was somewhere nearby, and would be spending the night under the same roof, was an astonishingly comforting one. So comforting, that tension and disquiet fell away from her, and all at once she was pleasantly drowsy. She could go to bed now. And to sleep.

Dany's room was the end one on the first floor, above the dining-room and at the top of one of the four flights of stairs that curved upward from the courtyard. A door at one end of her bedroom led at right-angles into a small bathroom that faced west, with beyond it another and larger bathroom belonging to another and larger bedroom that had been given to Gussie Bingham. On the opposite side of her room, and looking out on the same view, was a morning room, and beyond that again a bedroom and a bathroom, the duplicate of her own, which was occupied by Amalfi Gordon.

All the remaining rooms on the first floor — those on the other two sides of the courtyard — were taken up by Tyson and Lorraine, while Nigel, Eduardo, Larry Dowling and Millicent Bates had rooms on the top floor.

‘Perhaps not
quite
the thing to do, popping Bates up among all the bachelors,' Lorraine had said. ‘But anyone who has ever seen Millicent arrayed for bed — or merely seen Millicent! — would realize that no bachelor is ever likely to cast her so much as a speculative glance, poor girl, so I expect it's all right. I was going to put Ada Kitchell up there — the real one. But that nice Dowling man can have her room instead. He's rather a pet, isn't he?'

Dany caught herself listening for the sound of Larry Dowling's feet on the stone staircase outside her room. But the walls of the House of Shade had been solidly constructed to withstand high temperatures, marauding pirates and tropical hurricanes, and the heavy wooden doors were old and carved and almost sound-proof. She did not know if Larry had returned to his own room or not, but concluded that he must have done so by now, and realized that he would probably have gone up by the servants' staircase on the far side of the house.

A little breeze blew in from the sea, ruffling the leaves in the garden below, and she heard for the first time the song of tropic islands and coral coasts: a sound that is as haunting and as unforgettable as the sigh of wind through pine trees. The dry, whispering rustle of coconut palms.

It was a soothing and pleasant sound and a relief from the stillness and silence that had preceded it, and Dany leant out over the window-sill, listening to it, until another sound made her turn. A curious scraping sound that seemed to come either from the verandah or from the room above her. Probably Millicent dragging a suitcase out from under the bed. Or Larry Dowling, scraping his feet on the stone stair. The breeze blew coolly through the hot room, billowing the mosquito curtains and bringing with it all the lovely scents of the tropic night, and presently Dany heard the clock strike the half hour. Half past twelve. It really was quite time that she got to bed.

She pulled the curtains, shutting out the moonlight and the moths, and had turned to grope her way across the room towards the light-switches by the door when she heard another sound. A curious harsh cry that was followed by a dull thud, and that seemed to come from just outside her door.

Dany stood still, listening, all her drowsiness gone and her pulses once again leaping in panic; until an obvious explanation occurred to her, and she relaxed again. It had only been a nightjar crying in the courtyard, and the wind must have overturned a top-heavy creeper-filled urn at the verandah edge. She smiled ruefully at her own fears, and walking forward in the darkness, felt for the switch.

The light clicked on and the room became safe and bright and comfortable, and there were no shadows. But the breeze had passed and the night was still again, and in that stillness she heard once again, and more distinctly, the sound that she had previously thought might be Millicent moving a suitcase: a soft, slow, unidentified sound that suggested stone moving on stone, and that seemed to come not so much from the room above her as from the verandah outside. It did not last for more than ten counted seconds, but this time it brought a sudden picture into Dany's mind: a picture of someone who was hurt, trying to crawl up the stairs. That cry she had heard — it had not been made by a nightjar, and of course the breeze could not have knocked over one of those heavy stone urns! It had been someone crying out and falling. Larry!… Supposing it were Larry, tiptoeing up the stairs in the dark so as not to wake her, and losing his footing
____

Dany listened at the door, but could hear no further sound. Had Larry been trying to drag himself up the stairs with a sprained ankle, or was he still lying out there in the dark verandah, winded or in pain?

Forgetting caution, she turned the key and jerked open the door.

The moon was not high enough to shine into the well of the courtyard, and Dany could see nothing but darkness except where the light streaming out from her open doorway made a narrow yellow pathway across the coconut matting, and silhouetted a flower-filled stone jar and a single slender pillar against the black emptiness beyond.

There was no chink of light from any other of the many doors that faced each other across the central courtyard, and the night was once again so still that the plop of a goldfish rising at a moth in the pool below was clearly audible in the silence.

Dany spoke in a whisper, afraid of rousing the sleeping house. ‘Larry! — Larry, are you there? Is anyone there?'

The whisper made a soft sibilant echo under the high dark roof of the verandah, but no one answered her, and nothing moved. Not even the fish in the pool.

Then another breath of breeze stirred the creepers and flowering shrubs in the stone jars, and as Dany's eyes became accustomed to the darkness the tall lines of pillars with their rounded arches, the dark squares of the doors in the long white-washed wall and the outlines of the stone jars became visible, like a negative in a bath of developing solution. She could make out the long empty stretch of the verandah to her right, but to the left, where it turned sharply at right-angles, the stairs leading to the floor above made a pool of blackness.

She set the door wide and took a hesitant step forward, peering into the shadows. Surely there was something there…? Someone. An untidy heap, sprawled in the dense shadow below the curve of the stone stairs and so nearly the colour of the matting as to be almost invisible.

Dany ran forward, and stooping above it touched a tousled head that appeared to be twisted at an odd angle. But it was not Larry Dowling. Who then? She caught at the slack shoulders, desperately tugging the heavy shape nearer to the light from the open doorway, and then remembered that the switches of the verandah lights were on the wall near the staircase, and ran to them.

A switch clicked under her shaking fingers, and a sixty-watt bulb enclosed in a hanging lamp of oriental design dispersed the shadows, throwing elaborate fretted patterns across the white wall and the coconut matting. And on Millicent Bates, dressed in pyjamas and an oatmeal-coloured dressing-gown, lying face downwards and very still on the verandah floor.