Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 37, No. 6, June 1992

A Visitor to Mombasa by James Holding

Sergeant Harper of the Mombasa Police was daydreaming about Rebecca Conway when his telephone rang. He reached out with a long arm for the instrument on his desk. “Yes?”

“Constable Jenkins here, sir. Waterfront Detail.”

“What is it, Jenkins?”

“I’ve got a queer one, sir. Probably nothing in it, but I thought I ought to report it.” Jenkins was new to the job and anxious to play everything safe.

“What is it?” Harper repeated.

“Man named Crosby, sir. Works near the end of the causeway, a night watchman. He claims he saw a leopard sneaking across the causeway into town last night. Or this morning, rather. Just before dawn.”

“A leopard!”

Harper’s voice held surprise.

“Yes, sir.” Jenkins waited respectfully for Harper’s reaction.

It came promptly. “Fellow was drunk,” Harper said.

“I thought of that, sir.” Jenkins sounded worried now, but continued. “Crosby admits to a couple of pints on the job during the night. But he swears he saw a leopard. Walking across the causeway from the mainland, bold as brass. He couldn’t see the cat’s spots, it was too dark, but he says he could see the shape all right for just a moment, and he’s sure it was a leopard.”

Harper said, “We’ve had no sighting reports this morning from anyone. Which we surely would have by now, if a leopard’s on the loose. Anyway, thanks, Jenkins. I’ll look into it.” He hung up.

Harper leaned back in his desk chair. He damned the sticky heat of his cramped office and the gullibility of all police recruits. A leopard in Mombasa — he snorted. Tsavo, Nairobi, and Amboseli parks weren’t far away, of course, but no, the hell with it. He went back to picturing the bright Scandinavian beauty of Lieutenant Conway’s wife.

Ten minutes later, his telephone rang again. The constable on switchboard duty said, “A lady calling about a leopard, sir. Insists on speaking to someone in authority.”

Harper groaned. “Put her on.”

The lady, a Mrs. Massingale, reported seeing a creature she was sure was a leopard at daybreak that morning.

“Where?” Harper asked.

“Right here in Mombasa, sergeant,” Mrs. Massingale said indignantly. “The least we could expect in this godforsaken city, it seems to me, is protection against wild animals wandering freely about the streets.”

“I meant,” explained Harper with exaggerated patience, “just where in Mombasa did you see this leopard?”

“On the old railway line near Mbaraki Creek. Our cottage isn’t fifty feet from the line. I happened to look out a rear window this morning at daybreak and there was this black shadow slinking along the ties. I caught its silhouette quite clearly for a moment. It was a leopard.”

“Thanks for reporting it, Mrs. Massingale,” Harper said. “I’ll look into the matter promptly.”

“See that you do.” She hung up with a muted crash that made Harper grin.

Two reports. So perhaps there was a leopard in Mombasa, unlikely as it seemed. Harper stood up, a tall, solidly-built man with a heavy black mustache and an air of general frustration he made no attempt to conceal.

The frustration was easily explained, even understandable, in a man of his type. He had come late to police work after a long career as a white hunter in Tanganyika before uhuru. Now, after being mildly famous in East Africa, he found himself all at once a lowly sergeant of police, reduced to obeying the orders of Lieutenant Conway, a stuffy man, ten years his junior, who was married, damn his eyes, to the most beautiful woman in Mombasa.

Harper stepped two paces from his desk to the city map taped on his office wall. A leopard reported on the causeway just before dawn — he put a fingertip on the map at the end of the causeway. A leopard reported on the railway line near Mbaraki Creek at daybreak — he touched the spot with another fingertip, and regarded the space between his fingertips narrowly. Yes, he decided, it’s quite possible. Suddenly he felt a surge of cheerfulness. Dealing with a leopard was work he knew. Still looking at the wall map, he tried consciously to put himself inside the spotted skin and the narrow skull of a leopard, to think as the cat might think, to forecast the movements of the killer he had come to know so well on a hundred safaris.

Suppose, he mused, the leopard was an accidental fugitive from one of the nearby game reserves. The unexpected sight of a long bridge, deserted and comfortably dark, might well have aroused enough feline curiosity in the leopard to make it venture out upon the causeway. Once there, a drift of scent across the water from dockside cattle pens, perhaps, might have drawn it on in quest of meat. Harper could picture vividly the silent cat, padding cautiously across the causeway, nostrils twitching with finicky distaste at the odors of diesel fuel and rotting refuse that vied with the cattle smell over Kilindini Harbor.

Having crossed the bridge, finding no direct route to the cattle scent that drew him, and suddenly surrounded by the strange effluvia of a large city, the leopard would rapidly become confused and frightened, Harper theorized. The beast’s curiosity and hunger would be forgotten in an instinctive urge to find cover quickly in this unfamiliar terrain.

The cat, Harper felt, would therefore turn aside from the wide vulnerable expanse of Makupa Road into the comparative seclusion of the deserted railway line, stepping delicately along the ties through the industrial section of town to Mbaraki Creek, where Mrs. Massingale had caught a fleeting glimpse of him. Thence, it seemed obvious from the map, the leopard might be expected to come out on the bluffs overlooking the sea at Azania Drive, footsore now, apprehension growing as the daylight strengthened, the need for cover reaching panic proportions.

Azania Drive; Harper tried to recall the configuration of the land just there where the railway line bisected the drive. It was a bleak and lonely stretch of the seaside road, as he remembered it, meandering along the bluffs past an ancient Arab watchtower and bearing little resemblance to the fashionable Azania Drive that also yielded a view of the sea to the Oceanic Hotel, the golf club, and scores of comfortable residences beyond. At that place on Azania Drive, above the ferry, a grove of baobab trees stood, defying the sea winds, Harper remembered.

He nodded to himself, utterly intent, thinking with a sense almost of excitement that the thick twisted foliage of those baobab trees just possibly might offer welcome sanctuary to a frightened leopard.

He turned his back to the map. His next step was clear. He should delegate Constable Gordon in the squad room to go at once and check out the baobab trees on Azania Drive for a stray leopard. Gordon would welcome the action, and he was an excellent shot, too, Harper knew. Yet, after the stimulating exercise of mentally plotting the leopard’s probable whereabouts in Mombasa, Harper was reluctant to turn the hunt over to somebody else before he himself had even sighted the game. He needn’t be in at the kill, he told himself. On safari, he had always turned the final shot over to his clients — he was used to that — but he did want to mark down the target with certainty before yielding the kill to another. Aside from his thus far unsuccessful campaign to make Rebecca Conway unfaithful to her pompous husband, this city leopard hunt was the most exciting thing that had happened to Harper since he joined the police force.

Yielding to temptation, he reached for his hat, took field glasses from the shelf under his wall map, and strode into the squad room. “Back in a few minutes, Gordon,” he told the constable in passing. “Take over until Lieutenant Conway gets in, will you?” Conway never showed for duty until nine o’clock. Yet who could blame him, Harper thought enviously, with the voluptuous Rebecca to keep him at home until the last moment?

He felt the sweat start the moment he stepped out of headquarters into the compound. He climbed into one of the two police cars parked there, a Land Rover. As he turned out of the police compound and headed for Azania Drive, the sun had already warmed the driver’s seat so that the cushions burned him, even through his trousers.

A hundred and fifty yards short of the baobab trees on Azania Drive, he stopped the Land Rover, parked it beside the road, and walked slowly toward the trees. The field glasses hung on their strap about his neck. It was still only a little after eight. Traffic was very light on Azania Drive.

He waited until the road was empty both ways before he stepped from it onto the springy turf that ran like a shaggy carpet along the landward side of the road, solidly covering the acre of ground under the baobab grove. He walked carefully to within thirty yards of the trees, then stopped and brought the glasses up to his eyes and examined carefully the twisted branches and tangled foliage of the baobabs. He saw nothing that looked even remotely like a leopard.

After five minutes, he moved across the road, still well clear of the trees, and walked another fifty yards to a position from which he could comb the grove from a different angle. He swept the glasses slowly from tree to tree, conscious of growing disappointment as they failed to find what he sought.

The glasses were trained on the last of the trees — a gnarled giant closer to the road than its neighbors — when suddenly, with the sense of electrical shock that accompanies an unexpected explosion, he found himself gazing through the magnifying lenses at two merciless yellow eyes which seemed disembodied in the tree’s sun-dappled shade.

He breathed an exclamation that was part admiration for the magnificent cat, whose savage stare transfixed him, part satisfaction at his own astuteness in locating the beast.

Carefully he marked the tree and the cat’s position in it. Then he withdrew to his Land Rover and drove away, whistling softly to himself and thinking he should have brought a rifle with him when he left headquarters. Still, he hadn’t really expected there was a chance in ten that he’d find the leopard in the grove of baobab trees, he justified himself.

All the same, the cat was there!

Harper felt like celebrating, all at once, his frustrations temporarily forgotten. He had brought off a surprising feat, really: tracking a wild leopard... mentally... through several miles of sprawling city to a specific lair. His mood was one of exhilaration.

This is what I am good at, he reflected, this is what I was meant to do — not piddling along at a stinking little police job in a dirty city, but working with wild animals, somehow, somewhere, in free, open country, tracking them down and killing them, or working to preserve them from extinction, no matter which, so long as the job was useful and, yes, dangerous. He’d made a horrible mistake when he gave up hunting animals for hunting men. If he could only convince Rebecca Conway to go with him, he’d leave Mombasa tomorrow for Nairobi, Uganda, Australia, India, Alaska — anywhere away from the imperious beck and call of Rebecca’s impossible, intolerable husband.

He’d asked her a dozen times to leave the fool she was married to and join him in a new free life somewhere else; but Rebecca only smiled at his pleading, kissed him lightly on the cheek like a sister, called him an aging Lothario (at forty-one!), and quoted Shakespeare at him about preferring to bear those ills she had than fly to others that she knew not of. She was flattered by his passion for her, of course, yet she was too fond of her idle, easy life in Mombasa as Conway’s wife to risk it lightly.

Harper decided to drive back to headquarters by way of the center of town. That would give him a little extra time to savor his success with the leopard; to anticipate the soon-to-come thrill of squeezing off the perfectly-aimed shot that would rid Mombasa of its dangerous visitor in the baobab tree. Fifteen minutes’ delay in finishing off the leopard would make no difference to anyone, so far as he could see. The leopard was treed well off the road. It was still frightened, edgy, and hungrier than ever, no doubt, yet posed no threat, Harper knew, to passersby on Azania Drive unless someone approached its tree.

His memory played back to him one of the warnings he had always issued to hunters on safari: remember that a treed leopard, if hungry, frightened, or wounded, will usually attack anything that moves beneath it. So why would anyone approach that baobab tree? Harper was the only person in the city who could possibly have any interest in it.

The high crenellated battlements of Fort Jesus loomed on his left above the crimson blossoms of a flame tree as he passed the Mombasa Club. In the center of the turnabout, the bust of King George caught the morning sunlight and seemed to wink at Harper as he tooled the Land Rover around the circle and into Prince Arthur Street.

At police headquarters, he remembered to park his car in the compound off the street, even though he intended to use the Land Rover again at once, as soon as he secured a rifle from the gun case in his office. That was one of Lieutenant Conway’s silly rules, if you like: that the curb before headquarters must be kept clear and free at all times, so that if the wooden building ever caught fire, there would be ample space for the fire-fighting apparatus to park there.

Thinking of Lieutenant Conway and, inevitably, of Rebecca, Harper’s leopard-inspired high spirits drained rapidly away. The exhilaration of ten minutes ago had turned to creeping depression by the time he reached his office; the elation of winning a guessing game with a leopard lost its edge. If Rebecca refused him one more time, he swore to himself, he’d throw up this bloody job anyway, and go off without her.

He unlocked his gun cabinet and took down one of his old rifles, unused since his last safari five years ago. As a special favor Lieutenant Conway had allowed him to keep this personal weapon as an addition to the headquarters’ arsenal. Harper was glad of it now.

He put ammunition into his pocket, relocked the gun cabinet, and was turning for the door when his telephone rang. Impatiently he paused by his desk, scooped up the receiver, and said, “Yes?”

“Some fellow wants the lieutenant,” the switchboard man said.

“Then give him the lieutenant,” snapped Harper. “I’m busy.”

“Lieutenant’s not in yet, sir.” The constable was apologetic.

Harper glanced at his watch. It was not yet nine o’clock. “Who’s calling the lieutenant?”

“He won’t say, sir. Says it’s confidential and urgent. Native, I believe, and he speaks Swahili.”

“Put him on.”

The caller’s voice was male, low-pitched, sounded very young. “Who is this?” it asked.

Harper said, “Sergeant Harper. Lieutenant Conway is not here. What do you want?”

“The reward, sir,” the young voice whispered. “The reward offered by your lieutenant.”

“What reward?”

“For arrow poison, sir. For the names of Wakamba doctors who make arrow poison against the new law.”

“Oh.” Harper remembered that Conway had been trying for six months to discover which of the Wakamba witch doctors were still manufacturing arrow poison, and thus contributing to massive native slaughter of the game in the reserves. The arrow poison of the Wakamba was made from tree sap; it smelled like licorice; it left a black discoloration in the wound; and it was capable of killing a bull elephant in fifteen minutes.

Harper said, “Have you earned the reward?”

“Yes, sir. I have two names for Lieutenant Conway.”

“Who are they? I’ll tell the lieutenant.”

“No names,” the young Wakamba murmured, “until the reward is given. Not until then.”

Harper grinned. “Don’t trust us, is that it?”

The boy was silent.

“We’ll give you the reward first, in that case. All right? What’s your name?”

“I have no name,” said the young voice very formally. “I am risking death to give the lieutenant this information, sir. My own people will kill me if they learn of it.”

Harper tried it another way. “Where are you calling from?”

“The Golden Key.”

Harper knew the Golden Key, a disreputable bar immediately across the Nyalla Bridge. Used to be called the Phantom Inn because natives would dress up in sheets and act the ghost to startle customers. “You a houseboy there?” he asked.

“No, sir.”

Harper hefted his rifle, impatient to go after his leopard. “How can we arrange to give you the reward if you won’t tell us who you are?”

“Very simple, sir. I will meet the lieutenant in private. He brings me the reward. I give him the names of the poison-makers.”

Harper considered for a moment. “Where do you want the lieutenant to meet you?”

“Where no Wakamba can see me talking to a policeman.” Simple and clear.

“When?” asked Harper.

“Today, sir, please. This morning, if possible. I need the reward very badly, sir. Otherwise, of course...” His voice, touched with desperation now, trailed off.

“All right, then,” Harper said. “I’ll meet you and bring the reward, since the lieutenant isn’t here just yet. How much were you promised?”

“Ten pounds, sir.” Eagerness now. “That will be good. Where shall I meet you?”

The Wakamba boy’s simple question seemed to echo and reecho in a strange pervasive way inside Harper’s head, and the idea that was born in his mind at that instant seemed to make his heart shift position in his chest. He sank into his desk chair, clutching the rifle on the desk before him with one hand.

He took a deep breath and said, “You know the old Arab watch-tower, boy? Below Azania Drive near the ferry?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll meet you there in an hour. Or Lieutenant Conway will, if he comes here soon enough. You can make it in an hour, can’t you?”

“Yes. But remember, please, I dare not be seen, sir. Azania Drive is very public. Is there no more private place we can meet?”

“That’s private enough.” Harper was brusque. “Don’t use Azania Drive to get there, come up the shore line on the beach under the bluffs. No one will see you. No one ever goes there, to the tower.”

“Very well,” said the soft, boyish voice. “I’ll be there, sir. One hour.”

“Good,” Harper said. His hand was sweating on the rifle stock. After he hung up, he dried his palms on the jacket of his uniform. He glanced again at his watch: nine ten. Conway was later than usual today.

He rose and put the rifle back in the wall cabinet. Then, pretending to be busy over a stack of reports, he sat quietly at his desk until he heard Lieutenant Conway’s fussy voice in the squad room, greeting Constable Gordon as he passed through his office.

Harper waited a moment or so before walking into Conway’s room. “Morning, sergeant,” Conway said briskly. “Something on your mind?”

Harper told him about the telephone call from the young Wakamba informer who wouldn’t give his name. “Now you’re here, sir,” he finished matter-of-factly, “I expect you’ll want to meet the boy and get his information yourself, since it’s your pigeon, so to speak.”

“Of course.” Conway rubbed his hands together in a gesture of satisfaction that Harper found extremely irritating. He was exultant, his high voice almost a crow of pleasure as he went on: “So the clever lad, whoever he is, has a couple of witch doctors’ names for me, does he? Quite a feather in our cap, sergeant, if we can clear up this arrow poison business at last, eh? Where am I supposed to meet him?”

Harper said quietly, “At the Arab watchtower below Azania Drive. It’s private enough to quiet the boy’s fears of being seen, I thought, yet within easy reach for us. You know it, of course?”

“Certainly I know it. An admirable choice, sergeant. There and back in fifteen minutes without unduly wasting the taxpayers’ time, eh? There’s an old track down the bluff to the tower’s base, as I remember it.”

“Right, sir. You can park by the grove of baobab trees on Azania Drive and go straight through under the trees to the cliff edge, where the track goes down.”

“I must remember to take the boy’s money. What time did you tell him you’d be there?”

“As soon as I could. He seemed anxious to get it over with. He’s been at considerable risk, he claims.”

“I’ll leave at once.” Lieutenant Conway stood up. “Take charge here, sergeant.” He strutted from the room, calling loudly to the cashier outside to give him ten pounds at once.

That was at nine twenty. At ten fifteen the call came.

“A motorist on Azania Drive just called in, sir,” the switchboard man said. “Says he saw a fellow lying under a tree up there, covered with blood, as he was driving past. Stopped to see if he could help. Got to within fifty feet of the man under the tree and saw he was dead, so he called us.”

“Dead!” Harper kept his voice level. “How could he tell from fifty feet away?”

“No face left, sir,” the switchboard man said, as though he were reporting a shortage of beer in the commissary icebox. “Bundle of bloody flesh and shredded clothes, the motorist says. As though the fellow’d been mauled by a leopard, maybe.” The constable cleared his throat. “Any chance, sir, it could have been the leopard the lady reported earlier?”

“Possible,” Harper said. “Where’d he telephone from?”

“The nearest house. He’ll stand by until one of our chaps gets there, he says.”

“Fine. Hope he has enough sense to keep people out from under that tree where the dead man is. Where is it on Azania Drive?”

“Near the old Arab watchtower. There’s a grove of baobab trees just there...”

“Right,” Harper said. “I’m on my way. Better take a rifle, I guess. Give any calls for me to Constable Gordon.”

Surprisingly, when he reached the baobab grove and drew up behind Conway’s parked car, there was no one in view nearby save for the motorist, a man named Stacy, who had telephoned headquarters. Greeting Harper’s arrival with obvious relief, he said he’d managed to send curiosity seekers — only a handful so far — quickly about their business by telling them there was a wild leopard loose in the grove.

“Good work,” grunted Harper, stepping from his car. As though drawn by magnets, his eyes went to the ghastly figure lying asprawl under the nearest tree. Then, in a voice that sounded shocked even to him, he said, “From the looks of that poor chap under the tree, I’d say you were right about the leopard, Mr. Stacy.”

Stacy swallowed hard. “I was sick in the ditch when I saw it,” he said. “Then I ran like hell and called you.”

Harper nodded and reached into the back of the Land Rover for the rifle. “So let’s see what we can do about it,” he said. “Get across the road, away from the trees, will you, Mr. Stacy, and handle anybody else who may stop to gawk?”

Stacy was more than glad to withdraw across the road.

Harper knew where his target was. For Stacy’s benefit, however, he was forced to carry on a pretended search of the baobab tree. He moved to various vantage points, left and right of the tree, the rifle held ready. At length, he suddenly raised a hand to Stacy and nodded vigorously, as though he had at last located the cat.

As indeed he had. Even without the field glasses, he had no trouble zeroing in on those blazing eyes turned unblinkingly toward him, and even with the field glasses, he could see quite plainly the streaks and spatters of blood on the savage muzzle. Lieutenant Conway’s blood, he told himself with grim satisfaction.

He brought up the gun, steadied his sights on the small target, and squeezed off his shot.

Instantly a squalling cyclone of spotted hide and sheathed claws fell out of the tree, crashing through the baobab foliage. At the crack of the shot, a widow bird rose from the top of a neighboring tree and flapped slowly away; trailing its long black feathers. Harper wondered if that were a sign. When the leopard struck the ground, only a few feet from its mangled victim, it was quite dead.

“You got him!” yelled Stacy from across the road, his voice thin from excitement. “Bravo!”

Harper didn’t take his eyes off the leopard, holding the gun ready for a second shot, although he was quite sure the first had done its work thoroughly. He was remembering another of his maxims: never approach downed game until you are certain it is dead.

At length he was satisfied. He motioned to Stacy to stay where he was and, stepping carefully on the rough turf, made his way to the baobab tree and the still figures under it. A glance showed him the leopard was quite dead; a head shot of which he could be proud.

He turned, then, toward Lieutenant Conway’s corpse, his brain suddenly busy with a variety of thoughts. He must not forget to give the Wakamba boy at the watchtower his reward and settle the arrow poison business, now that Conway was gone. He must inform Rebecca Conway of her husband’s tragic end and console her as best he could. Would he be promoted now to lieutenant, and thus be able to offer Rebecca a continuation of the privileged life she seemed to find so enchanting in Mombasa? Given time, he was sure he could persuade her to marry him — and now, he thought, smiling a little, he had lots of time.

He was wrong. He didn’t even have time to raise his eyes to the tree branch above him, or to bring up the rifle, still held loosely in his hand. In the last split-second of his life, before pitiless teeth and talons tore his throat out, Harper had time for but a single flash of realization: there had been a pair of leopards visiting Mombasa.