Death in Zanzibar by M. M. Kaye

Author:M. M. Kaye
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250089274
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

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The House of Shade stood three storeys high on a wide stone terrace that was approached from the garden by short flights of steps set at regular intervals about it. Each of its storeys was of a different height, for the ground floor had once been a colonnade surrounding an open central courtyard about which the house was built, and the rooms on the first floor had been large and long, and were abnormally high. It had been Tyson’s father — who had a mania for improvements — who had divided them into bedrooms, bathrooms and dressing-rooms.

The top storey, by comparison, appeared unduly low, and the rooms were hotter than those on the floor below, for the sun beat down strongly on the flat Eastern roof and the shade of the trees did not reach them. But the breeze did, and by night they were cool.

There was a lily pool in the courtyard, where lethargic goldfish idled in the shade of the flat green leaves, and on each floor the rooms led out on to pillared verandahs that faced each other across it, in a manner vaguely reminiscent of a courtyard in Seville.

Curious, curving stone staircases with shallow, disproportionally wide treads, their heavy banisters of hammered iron wrought in an odd geometrical design and barely a foot and a half in height, rose from each corner of the courtyard, inside the verandahs and leading up on to the next. Dangerous looking things, depending for their support only on the stout metal and the proportion of stone that had been built into the thickness of the wall, and proof that some long-dead Arab builder had known his trade as well as Adams or John Nash.

At the edge of each verandah, stone jars filled with sweet-scented creepers and flowering shrubs stood between the tall supporting pillars, and gave an entrancing impression of hanging gardens. But from the outside the house looked far less decorative and unusual: a square, white, very high building with a flat crenelated roof and rows of green-painted shutters.

It was sometime during the afternoon, and shortly before Tyson left to take a letter in to the Residency, that Mr Cardew, the Police Superintendent of the Zanzibar Division, called briefly at the House of Shade.

His car came and went again, making so little sound on the white coral dust of the palm-shaded road that no member of the house-party heard it, and apart from Tyson, only a Somali servant, a somnolent gardener’s boy, and a drowsing cat on the wall above the main gate, had seen him.

He had stayed less than a quarter of an hour, and it was not until much later in the day, when night had fallen and the house-party were seated at the dining-room table in a glow of candlelight, that Tyson had chosen to bring up the subject of his visit.

The dining-room at Kivulimi was a long narrow room, with a row of arches along one side that had once been open, but which Tyson’s father, Aubrey, had converted into french windows.

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