The Fever Tree and Other Stories Read online

  ABOUT THE AUHOR

  Classic British crime fiction is the best in the world – and Ruth Rendell is crime fiction at its very best. Ingenious and meticulous plots, subtle and penetrating characterizations, beguiling storylines and wry observations have all combined to put her at the very top of her craft.

  Her first novel, From Doon with Death, appeared in 1964, and since then her reputation and readership have grown steadily with each new book. She has now received seven major awards for her work: three Edgars from the Mystery Writers of America; the Crime Writers’ Gold Dagger Award for 1976’s best crime novel for A Demon in My View; the Arts Council National Book Award for Genre Fiction in 1981 for Lake of Darkness; the Crime Writers’ Silver Dagger Award for 1985’s best crime novel for The Tree of Hands; and in 1986 the Crime Writers’ Gold Dagger Award for Live Flesh.

  Available in Arrow by Ruth Rendell

  The Best Man to Die

  A Demon in My View

  From Doon with Death

  The Face of Trespass

  The Fallen Curtain

  The Fever Tree

  A Guilty Thing Surprised

  A Judgement in Stone

  The Killing Doll

  Lake of Darkness

  Live Flesh

  Make Death Love Me

  Master of the Moor

  Means of Evil

  Murder Being Once Done

  The New Girlfriend

  New Lease of Death

  No More Dying Then

  One Across, Two Down

  Put on by Cunning

  The Secret House of Death

  Shake Hands Forever

  A Sleeping Life

  The Speaker of Mandarin

  Some Lie and Some Die

  To Fear a Painted Devil

  The Tree of Hands

  An Unkindness of Ravens

  Vanity Dies Hard

  Wolf to the Slaughter

  THE FEVER TREE

  AND OTHER STORIES

  Ruth Rendell

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781407070650

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Arrow Books Limited

  62–65 Chandos Place, London WC2N 4NW

  An imprint of Century Hutchinson Limited

  London Melbourne Sydney Auckland

  Johannesburg and agencies throughout

  the world

  First published by Hutchinson 1982

  Arrow edition 1983

  Reprinted 1987

  © Kingsmarkham Enterprises Ltd 1982

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  Anchor Brendon Limited, Tiptree, Essex

  ISBN 0 09 932130 0

  For Catherine, Pam and Brett Jones

  Author’s Note

  The following stories have already appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine:

  The Fever Tree; A Glowing Future (published under the title ‘A Present for Patricia’); An Outside Interest (published under the title ‘The Man Who Frightened Women’); A Case of Coincidence; Thornapple (published under the title ‘The Boy Who Collected Poison’); May and June (published under the title ‘The Strong and the Weak’); A Needle for the Devil; Front Seat (published under the title ‘Truth Will Out’); Paintbox Place (published under the title ‘The Paintbox Houses’); The Wrong Category (published under the title ‘On the Path’)

  Contents

  The Fever Tree

  The Dreadful Day of Judgement

  A Glowing Future

  An Outside Interest

  A Case of Coincidence

  Thornapple

  May and June

  A Needle for the Devil

  Front Seat

  Paintbox Place

  The Wrong Category

  The Fever Tree

  Where malaria is, there grows the fever tree.

  It has the feathery fern-like leaves, fresh green and tender, that are common to so many trees in tropical regions. Its shape is graceful with an air of youth, as if every fever tree is still waiting to grow up. But the most distinctive thing about it is the colour of its bark which is the yellow of an unripe lemon. The fever trees stand out from among the rest because of their slender yellow trunks.

  Ford knew what the tree was called and he could recognize it but he didn’t know what its botanical name was. Nor had he ever heard why it was called the fever tree, whether the tribesmen used its leaves or bark or fruit as a specific against malaria or if it simply took its name from its warning presence wherever the malaria-carrying mosquito was. The sight of it in Ntsukunyane seemed to promote a fever in his blood.

  An African in khaki shorts and shirt lifted up the bar for them so that their car could pass through the opening in the fence. Inside it looked no different from outside, the same bush, still, silent, unstirred by wind, stretching away on either side. Ford, driving the two miles along the tarmac road to the reception hut, thought of how it would be if he turned his head and saw Marguerite in the passenger seat beside him. It was an illusion he dared not have but was allowed to keep for only a minute. Tricia shattered it. She began to belabour him with schoolgirl questions, uttered in a bright and desperate voice.

  Another African, in a fancier, more decorated, uniform, took their booking voucher and checked it against a ledger. You had to pay weeks in advance for the privilege of staying here. Ford had booked the day after he had said goodbye to Marguerite and returned, for ever, to Tricia.

  ‘My wife wants to know the area of Ntsukunyane,’ he said.

  ‘Four million acres.’

  Ford gave the appropriate whistle. ‘Do we have a chance of seeing a leopard?’

  The man shrugged, smiled, ‘Who knows? You may be lucky. You’re here a whole week so you should see lion, elephant, hippo, cheetah maybe. But the leopard is nocturnal and you must be back in camp by six p.m.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I advise you to get on now, sir, if you’re to make Thaba before they close the gates.’

  Ford got back into the car. It was nearly four. The sun of Africa, a living presence, a personal god, burned through a net of haze. There was no wind. Tricia, in a pale yellow sundress with frills, had hung her arm outside the open window and the fair downy skin was glowing red. He told her what the man had said and he told her about the notice pinned inside the hut: It is strictly forbidden to bring firearms into the game reserve, to feed the animals, to exceed the speed limit, to litter.

  ‘And most of all you mustn’t get out of the car,’ said Ford.

  ‘What, not ever?’ said Tricia, making her pale blue eyes round and naive and marble-like.

  ‘That’s what it says.’

  She pulled a face. ‘Silly old rules!’

  ‘They have to have them,’ he said.

  In here as in the outside world. It is strictly forbidden to fall in love, to leave your wife, to try to begin anew. He glanced at Tricia to see if the same tho
ughts were passing through her mind. Her face wore its arch expression, winsome.

  ‘A prize,’ she said, ‘for the first one to see an animal.’

  ‘All right.’ He had agreed to this reconciliation, to bring her on this holiday, this second honeymoon, and now he must try. He must work at it. It wasn’t just going to happen as love had sprung between him and Marguerite, unsought and untried for. ‘Who’s going to award it?’ he said.

  ‘You are if it’s me and I am if it’s you. And if it’s me I’d like a presey from the camp shop. A very nice pricey presey.’

  Ford was the winner. He saw a single zebra come out from among the thorn trees on the right-hand side, then a small herd. ‘Do I get a present from the shop?’

  He could sense rather than see her shake her head with calculated coyness. ‘A kiss,’ she said and pressed warm dry lips against his cheek.

  It made him shiver a little. He slowed down for the zebra to cross the road. The thorn bushes had spines on them two inches long. By the roadside grew a species of wild zinnia with tiny flowers, coral red, and these made red drifts among the coarse pale grass. In the bush were red ant hills with tall peaks like towers on a castle in a fairy story. It was thirty miles to Thaba. He drove on just within the speed limit, ignoring Tricia as far as he could whenever she asked him to slow down. They weren’t going to see one of the big predators, anyway not this afternoon, he was certain of that, only impala and zebra and maybe a giraffe. On business trips in the past he’d taken time off to go to Serengeti and Kruger and he knew. He got the binoculars out for Tricia and adjusted them and hooked them round her neck, for he hadn’t forgotten the binoculars and cameras she had dropped and smashed in the past through failing to do that, and her tears afterwards. The car wasn’t air-conditioned and the heat lay heavy and still between them. Ahead of them, as they drove westwards, the sun was sinking in a dull yellow glare. The sweat flowed out of Ford’s armpits and between his shoulder blades, soaking his already wet shirt and laying a cold sticky film on his skin.

  A stone pyramid with arrows on it, set in the middle of a junction of roads, pointed the way to Thaba, to the main camp at Waka-suthu and to Hippo Bridge over the Suthu River. On top of it sat a baboon with her grey fluffy infant on her knees. Tricia yearned for it, stretching out her arms. She had never had a child. The baboon began picking fleas out of its baby’s scalp. Tricia gave a little nervous scream, half-disgusted, half-joyful. Ford drove down the road to Thaba and in through the entrance to the camp ten minutes before they closed the gates for the night.

  The dark comes down fast in Africa. Dusk is of short duration; no sooner have you noticed it than it has gone and night has fallen. In the few moments of dusk, pale things glimmer brightly and birds make a soft murmuring. In the camp at Thaba were a restaurant and a shop, round huts with thatched roofs and wooden chalets with porches. Ford and Tricia had been assigned a chalet on the northern perimeter and from their porch, beyond the high, wire fence, you could see the Suthu River flowing smoothly and silently between banks of tall reeds. Dusk had just come as they walked up the wooden steps, Ford carrying their cases. It was then that he saw the fever trees, two of them, their ferny leaves bleached to grey by the twilight but their trunks a sharper, stronger yellow than in the day.

  ‘Just as well we took our anti-malaria pills,’ said Ford as he pushed open the door. When the light was switched on he could see two mosquitoes on the opposite wall. ‘Anopheles is the malaria carrier but unfortunately they don’t announce whether they’re anopheles or not.’

  Twin beds, a table, lamps, an air conditioner, a fridge, a door, standing open, to lavatory and shower. Tricia dropped her make-up case, without which she went nowhere, on to the bed by the window. The light wasn’t very bright. None of the lights in the camp were because the electricity came from a generator. They were a small colony of humans in a world that belonged to the animals, a reversal of the usual order of things. From the window you could see other chalets, other dim lights, other parked cars. Tricia talked to the two mosquitoes.

  ‘Is your name Anna Phyllis? No. Darling, you’re quite safe. She says she’s Mary Jane and her husband’s John Henry.’

  Ford managed to smile. He had accepted and grown used to Tricia’s facetiousness until he had encountered Marguerite’s wit. He shoved his case, without unpacking it, into the cupboard and went to have a shower. Tricia stood on the porch, listening to the cicadas, thousands of them. It had gone pitch dark while she was hanging up her dresses and the sky was punctured all over with bright stars.

  She had got Ford back from that woman and now she had to keep him. She had lost some weight, bought a lot of new clothes and had had highlights put in her hair. Men had always made her feel frightened, starting with her father when she was a child. It was then, when a child, that she had purposely began playing the child with its winning little ways. She had noticed that her father was kinder and more forbearing towards little girls than towards her mother. Ford had married a little girl, clinging and winsome, and had liked it well enough till he had met a grown woman. Tricia knew all that, but now she knew no better how to keep him than she did then; the old methods were as weary and stale to her as she guessed they might be to him. Standing there on the porch, she half-wished she were alone and didn’t have to have a husband, didn’t, for the sake of convention and of pride, for support and society, have to hold tight on to him. She listened wistfully for a lion to roar out there in the bush beyond the fence, but there was no sound except the cicadas.

  Ford came out in a towelling robe. ‘What did you do with the mosquito stuff? The spray?’

  Frightened at once, she said, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What do you mean, you don’t know? You must know. I gave you the aerosol at the hotel and said to put it in that make-up case of yours.’

  She opened the case, though she knew the mosquito stuff wasn’t there. Of course it wasn’t. She could see it on the bathroom shelf in the hotel, left behind because it was too bulky. She bit her lip, looked sideways at Ford. ‘We can get some more at the shop.’

  ‘Tricia, the shop closes at seven and it’s now ten past.’

  ‘We can get some in the morning.’

  ‘Mosquitoes happen to be most active at night.’ He rummaged among the bottles and jars in the case. ‘Look at all this useless rubbish. “Skin cleanser”, “pearlized foundation”, “moisturizer” – like some young model girl. I suppose it didn’t occur to you to bring the anti-mosquito spray and leave the “pearlized foundation” behind.’

  Her lip trembled. She could feel herself, almost involuntarily, rounding her eyes, forming her mouth into the shape for lisping. ‘We did ‘member to take our pills.’

  ‘That won’t stop the damn’ things biting.’ He went back into the shower and slammed the door.

  Marguerite wouldn’t have forgotten to bring that aerosol. Tricia knew he was thinking of Marguerite again, that his head was full of her, that she had entered his thoughts powerfully and insistently on the long drive to Thaba. She began to cry. The water went on running out of her eyes and wouldn’t stop, so she changed her dress while she cried and the tears came through the powder she put on her face.

  They had dinner in the restaurant. Tricia, in pink flowered crepe, was the only dressed-up woman there, and while once she would have fancied the other diners looked at her in admiration now she thought it must be with derision. She ate her small piece of overcooked hake and her large piece of overcooked, breadcrumbed veal, and watched the red weals from mosquito bites coming up on Ford’s arms.

  There were no lights on in the camp but those which shone from the windows of the main building and from the chalets. Gradually the lights went out and it became very dark. In spite of his mosquito bites, Ford fell asleep at once but the noise of the air-conditioning kept Tricia awake. At eleven she switched it off and opened the window. Then she did sleep but she awoke again at four, lay awake for half an hour, got up and put her clothes on and went out
.

  It was still dark but the darkness was lifting as if the thickest veil of it had been withdrawn. A heavy dew lay on the grass. As she passed under the merula tree, laden with small green apricot-shaped fruits, a flock of bats flew out from its branches and circled her head. If Ford had been with her she would have screamed and clung to him but because she was alone she kept silent. The camp and the bush beyond the fence were full of sound. The sounds brought to Tricia’s mind the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, imps and demons and dreadful homunculi which, if they had uttered, might have made noises like these, gruntings and soft whistles and chirps and little thin squeals.

  She walked about, waiting for the dawn, expecting it to come with drama. But it was only a grey pallor in the sky, a paleness between parting black clouds, and the feeling of let-down frightened her as if it were a symbol or an omen of something more significant in her life than the coming of morning.

  Ford woke up, unable at first to open his eyes for the swelling from mosquito bites. There were mosquitoes like threads of thistledown on the walls, all over the walls. He got up and staggered, half-blind, out of the bedroom and let the water from the shower run on his eyes. Tricia came and stared at his face, giggling nervously and biting her lip.

  The camp gates opened at five-thirty and the cars began their exodus. Tricia had never passed a driving test and Ford couldn’t see, so they went to the restaurant for breakfast instead. When the shop opened Ford bought two kinds of mosquito repellant and, impatiently, because he could no longer bear her apologies and her pleading eyes, a necklace of ivory beads for Tricia and a skirt with giraffes printed on it. At nine o’clock, when the swelling round Ford’s eyes had subsided a little, they set off in the car, taking the road for Hippo Bridge.

  The day was humid and thickly hot. Ford had counted the number of mosquito bites he had and the total was twenty-four. It was hard to believe that two little tablets of quinine would be proof against twenty-four bites, some of which must certainly have been inflicted by anopheles. Hadn’t he seen the two fever trees when they arrived last night? Now he drove the car slowly and doggedly, hardly speaking, his swollen eyes concealed behind sunglasses. By the Suthu River and then by a water hole he stopped and they watched. But they saw nothing come to the water’s edge unless you counted the log which at last disappeared, thus proving itself to have been a crocodile. It was too late in the morning to see much apart from the marabou storks which stood one-legged, still and hunched, in a clearing or on the gaunt branch of a tree. Through binoculars Ford stared at the bush which stretched in unbroken, apparently untenanted, sameness to the blue ridge of mountains on the far horizon.