Mrs Midnight and Other Stories (30 page)

I began to climb through the window as I had the previous night, but some impulse told me to try the French windows. I turned a handle and the doors opened. They must have been unlocked.

The same mist that I had seen the previous night had gathered itself on the veranda, about five yards away from me, but this time the upper part of it had assumed a recognisable form. The form was a face, a mask with eyes, no more than that; the rest was vague. It was a young woman’s face framed by a suggestion of pale, lustrous hair. The features were well-chiselled, the lips sensuously curved, the eyes heavy lidded, but it was the look that held me. Tilted downwards it seemed to stare at something that would have been at its feet if it had had them. The look itself was very particular, but hard to describe: a kind of hungry fascination, I suppose you might call it, with a slight smile on the lips as if pleasure were being taken from something that pleasure should not be taken from. The look had a certain beauty, because the features were those of a beautiful woman, and there was a rapture in it, but it filled me with fear and despair. I realise that I have been avoiding the use of the word ‘evil’ because I do not know what it would mean in this context. It is too general. This was a look that belonged to a particular person at a particular moment, a moment of ecstatic degradation.

I could not take my eyes off it. It must have lasted no more than half a minute until it began to waver and dissipate like a blown ring of tobacco smoke. Very slowly the mist sank and seeped away from the veranda leaving behind it only a slight luminescence and a faint perfume. Jasmine, was it?

The look was gone but it was lodged in my mind. I realised that there might come a time when I would believe, or want to believe, that I had only dreamed it, but that did not matter. The look was still the look. I could even identify the spot on the floorboards of the veranda on which the eyes had been fixed. On examination it turned out that this was where a section of the boards about five feet by three had been removed and replaced by a new segment. The substitution had been so skilfully disguised that one would not have noticed unless one had been looking for it.

III

The following morning was an exact copy of the previous one. Jumbo was, as usual, seated at the head of the breakfast table devouring devilled kidneys.

‘Morning, young feller-me-lad! Sleep well?’

I said yes, but avoided his penetrating glance. Jumbo told me he would drive me back to Nairobi later that morning and, just as we were about to leave, Freda appeared. She was immaculately dressed as usual but looked haggard. When the time came to say goodbye she kissed me full on the lips. I was conscious once again of the powerful sexual being that she was, but it still surprised me. When one is twenty-one assumes, like Hamlet, that for the over sixties ‘the heyday in the blood is tame’.

On the drive back Jumbo asked me if I had enjoyed myself which I said I had.

‘Good show,’ he said. ‘We hope you’ll come again. Freda enjoyed having you. She likes the cut of your jib.’ I had no idea what this meant and was far too shy to ask.

On my return to Nairobi I wrote two letters, one to thank Freda Daventry for her hospitality, the other to my father. I gave few details of my trip to Cloud’s Hill, and naturally excluded any mention of my more improbable experiences, which would only have provoked incredulity and distrust. I told my father how much I liked Jumbo and added, with what I thought at the time was a great show of maturity, that I did not think his wife Freda was ‘ghastly’, as he had described, ‘just very sad, and probably very lonely too.’

My father wrote back, as he always did, punctiliously with a letter full of rather dull news about the fox he had seen in his back garden, a Rotary Club dinner and his latest golf scores. Towards the end he wrote: ‘You appear in your letter by implication to rebuke me for calling Freda “ghastly” when I had not met her.’ It used to strike me as strange that my father, the most conventional of men, could nevertheless read my mind unerringly when he wanted to. ‘But I did not make the comment ill-advisedly. I suggest you go to the offices of a local newspaper—say the
Nairobi Messenger
—and look up the Hartland case in their archives. The relevant date to start from is, I believe, January 24th 1947.’

My father added a P.S. which read: ‘Jumbo has written to me and told me about your visit. I gather you made a very favourable impression and that you behaved well.’ Praise from my father was so rarely bestowed that even this scrap of oblique approval made me glow inside.

For the next week or so I had very little time. Samantha had given me what she called in her old-fashioned way ‘the juvenile lead’ in the next play and I was very busily occupied in rehearsing and learning lines. I was very conscientious. I wanted to make a success of my first major rôle, even in Nairobi where nobody of importance to my career would see me. However, as soon as I felt safe in my part and had a free moment, I paid a visit one afternoon to the offices of the
Nairobi Messenger
. When I asked to see the back numbers from January 1947 nobody seemed very surprised by my request. One of their office boys fetched the relevant bound volumes and left me in a little room to study them.

The reports began on the 25th of January with a front page headline:

HARTLAND SHOT DEAD ON CLOUD’S HILL ESTATE

A brief few paragraphs in heavy type told me that in the early hours of the morning of the 24th of January Mr Henry (‘Harry’) Hartland, the millionaire business man and property owner, was found shot dead at his home Cloud’s Hill in the Aberdare Mountains; that police suspected foul play and were actively pursuing enquiries. Accompanying this was a studio portrait photograph of the victim, a balding, middle-aged man with heavy features. The eyes looked out somewhat aggressively.

Reports on subsequent days yielded further details. Hartland had been shot several times in the head and body on the veranda of Cloud’s Hill. No-one had witnessed the murder itself, but two figures had been spotted running away from the scene. Hartland’s wife, a Mrs Freda Hartland ‘who is well-known as a leading figure in Kenyan society’, had not been at Cloud’s Hill at the time but had been staying with a friend in Nairobi. The photograph of Freda Hartland showed a strikingly beautiful, blonde woman with chiselled, sensual features. That picture gave me a double shock. I recognised at one and the same time the face of Freda Daventry and the look that I had seen on the Cloud’s Hill veranda.

Two days after this came the announcement that an arrest had been made. Police searching the hut of Ibrahim, one of Hartland’s Somali servants, discovered a .32 Colt revolver hidden under a mattress. This gun was shown to have been fired recently and its ammunition corresponded with some of the bullets which had been found in Hartland’s body. It added, for the first time, that Police believed that Hartland had been shot eight times, five times by a Colt .32, and three times by another revolver of unknown type. The report concluded that a few days before the murder, Ibrahim had had a violent disagreement with his master after being beaten for an offence connected with some missing silver forks.

There was some sort of paragraph on the Hartland murder each day in the
Messenger
after that, but little was added to the stock of hard facts until about a week later when the police stated that the ownership of the Colt revolver had been traced to one Lord Glenross, ‘the popular socialite and white hunter’. Lord ‘Jock’ Glenross told the police that he had noticed that his Colt was missing several weeks before the murder when he had been visiting Cloud’s Hill. He had not reported the gun’s absence at the time because he just thought he had ‘mislaid’ it. A picture of Lord Glenross showed a man in an African bush setting with one foot planted on the head of the lion he has just shot, a rifle carelessly slung across his back. The face, partly shadowed by a solar topee, is grinning broadly.

Another week passed before there was another front page headline:

LORD GLENROSS ARRESTED

FOR HARTLAND KILLING

Again, the paragraphs below supplied very meagre additional information, beyond the fact that Ibrahim had been cleared of all charges because it had been shown that he was ‘elsewhere’ on the night of the crime, and it was now believed that he had been ‘deliberately and falsely implicated’. It was also stated that: ‘Lord Glenross had been a close and intimate friend of Mr Harry Hartland and, more particularly, of his wife Freda Hartland’. Inside the paper the editorial section contained a rather windy piece of comment on ‘the low standard of morals prevailing among the wealthy élite of Kenyan society where adultery is looked on as a casual pastime, to be indulged in without thought, like gambling or excessive drinking’.

At this point I looked at my watch. It was getting late and I must go to the theatre. I would have to wait another day for the trial reports—if there had been a trial.

Mrs King was in the Green Room that night during the interval. She smiled at me with more than her usual complacency.

‘So,’ she said. ‘I hear you spent a weekend at Cloud’s Hill.’ I nodded. ‘I often used to stay there myself, you know. In the old days. I know a great deal about gardens. Freda never failed to take my advice. She was born under Aquarius, always a changeable sign. Are the gardens still exquisite?’

‘Superb.’

Mrs King seemed disappointed. ‘People can be so ungrateful,’ she said. ‘Don’t you agree?’

I smiled, muttered something about checking a prop and left the room. The following afternoon I was back at the
Messenger
offices.

The trial was preceded by the dramatic discovery of love letters from Freda Hartland to Lord Glenross. Though they did not directly incriminate her they provided incontrovertible evidence that the two had been conducting a passionate affair. She was interviewed on a number of occasions by the police, but stuck to her story that she had no part in the murder and that she was in Nairobi at the time. ‘This alibi,’ wrote the
Messenger
, ‘has been confirmed by the person with whom she was staying, Mrs Sabrina King, widow of the late Dr Conrad King, the distinguished Nairobi osteopath.’

A partial palm print corresponding to that of Glenross had been found on the Colt .32 which ballistics confirmed to have been one of the weapons used in the killing. Witnesses came forward to testify that they had seen Glenross at Cloud’s Hill on the night of the murder. There was talk of a second killer with a second gun, but neither could be identified or found.

In May of that year Jock Glenross went on trial for the murder of Harry Hartland at Nairobi’s Central Court. I did not pore over every detail of the judicial process, as recorded by the
Messenger
, but it would seem in retrospect that Glenross was doomed from the start, despite the best efforts of a flamboyant K.C. hired from Johannesburg to defend him. Glenross probably delivered the fatal blow to his own case when, half way through the trial, and against his counsel’s advice, he decided to change the entire basis of his presumed innocence by claiming that he had killed Hartland in self-defence. Glenross alleged that he had quarrelled with Hartland over his affair with Freda and Hartland had threatened him with a revolver. There was a struggle and both guns had gone off accidentally. But why had there been eight bullets in Hartland’s body, and where was the second gun?

Freda Hartland had gone into the witness box as a grieving widow ‘dressed’, according to the
Messenger
, ‘immaculately in black with a spotted veil and a diamond Cartier pin on her lapel’. Opinions differed as to her performance. Some said it was courageous, stoically grief-stricken; others claimed it was a heartless and calculated charade. She had admitted to her passion for ‘Jock’, but denied all knowledge of the murder either before or after the fact.

Despite the pressure of evidence many had apparently believed that the all white jury would acquit Glenross, or that he could be found guilty of some lesser offence. It would appear that for most of the trial Glenross too shared this sanguine point of view, though, towards the end he was overheard ‘by our reporter’ to say to his defence counsel: ‘They don’t hang whites in this country, do they?’

The verdict was guilty and, despite many petitions for reprieve and appeals for mercy, Lord Glenross was hanged, almost a year to the day after he had committed his crime.

I emerged from the
Messenger
offices that afternoon in a daze. My mind was so immersed in the events of the trial that I was nearly run over as I crossed the road to get to the theatre. The vehicle in question was a Land Rover being driven at high speed. I recovered my senses sufficiently to notice that the driver had been Freda Daventry and that in the passenger seat beside her sat Mrs King.

IV

A few days later something happened which I had been dreading: Jumbo rang me up at the theatre asking me to spend another Saturday to Monday at Cloud’s Hill. When I hesitated, he said: ‘Freda and I so much enjoyed your previous stay.’ A note of pleading was detectable, and I felt under an obligation. When I agreed Jumbo’s normal clipped tones were resumed.

‘Good show! Pick you up from the theatre on Saturday night as usual.’

On the Saturday night, in the wings before the show, Samantha said to me: ‘So we’re off again to the flesh pots of Cloud’s Hill to be waited on hand and foot, are we? You lucky boy!’

Ignoring this, I said: ‘What happened to Freda after Glenross was hanged?’

‘Oh, so you’ve found out about that, have you? I wondered what you’d been up to in the
Messenger
offices. Well, you know, after the execution there was a great wave of sympathy for Jock Glenross in spite of everything. Someone told me that he didn’t behave terribly well at the end: kept snivelling and shouting out Freda’s name, you know. Which was rather a shock because everyone thought he’d go like the officer and gentleman he supposedly was. I remember him only vaguely, but though what he did was pretty foul obviously, he had been an attractive sort of scamp. All the charm in the world; and plenty of people beside Freda had been in love with him. Naturally they started to blame her for the whole thing, saying she had been at the bottom of it all, led him on, that sort of thing. She’d been a big cheese in Kenyan society, queen of the Muthaiga Club. All that. Suddenly she was persona non grata. Practically everyone was giving her the cold shoulder, except Sabrina of course, but then she didn’t count. People began to notice the colour of her skin, so she was out too. Well, Freda couldn’t stand this, so she went off to South Africa. She didn’t sell up as I would have done: Freda always had a bloody minded streak. Well, in Durban she met Jumbo and by the time she came back to Kenya she was married to him. Of course, at first everyone thought Jumbo had just married her for the Hartland millions she had inherited, but very soon they realised he was as straight as they come and they began to make overtures to them both. But Freda wasn’t having any of it. I told you she was bloody minded. She thought they had betrayed her in her hour of need and she didn’t want anything to do with the swine. So she’s remained pretty isolated ever since. And now, if you will excuse me, I am about to play Judith Bliss and you are supposed to be my young admirer Sandy Tyrrell. Shall we now address ourselves to Mr Coward’s
Hay Fever
?’