THE JOURNAL OF ELLIOT CRIPPLESBY
I write this on the way to the International Airport back in Nairobi, my fears of retribution from our former hotelier having had to be have been pushed to one side through necessity. I don’t suppose it will hurt to cross my fingers though. What a time of it we are having! I am not certain I can come to terms with this at all!
Let me explain. When Geeza found me near the dancers on the showground he was in a frightfully excited state - in fact, he was all over the place, shaking, stammering, pulling on my arm and mumbling incoherently. He dragged me around the back of the grandstand and over to a building which housed, I found out later, a few small rooms that served as offices, some toilets, a couple of store rooms – that kind of thing. It was used in a seemingly random way, for all manner of functions.
However, Mr. Vermies appeared to know where he was going as we burst our way through the door and hurtled down a corridor, turning left at the end. We continued along for a further few feet when Geeza pulled me up short at a door which looked to me, for all intents and purposes, just like any other.
“What’s going on? Where are we? Are we even supposed to be in here?” The questions were coming out as fast as they formed in my mind. He grabbed my shoulders and stared into my eyes, panting for breath.
“Elliot - we’re probably too late - just be careful, ok?”
As you can imagine, this put me immediately on edge, but he placed a finger up to his lips, silencing the string of yet more questions that were battling with each other to get out.
“Here we go,” he said, “get ready.”
Placing a careful hand on the doorknob, he listened for a moment and then flung it open and charged in.
The room within was a tiny affair, a storage cupboard really, filled with tins of paint, brushes, brooms, a couple of rolls of wire and things of a similar nature; all for the maintenance of the showground. The faint noises made by the crowds filtered in from outside through a tiny, three-louvered window set high up in the wall. And there, lying bound and crumpled underneath it in a bruised and bleeding heap was the inert figure of the Champion Rally Driver, Ollie Donald!
I rushed straight out after one look at him to find Mombassa’s equivalent of the St John’s Ambulance, returning shortly after with two large men carrying first aid kits. We found Ollie sitting up - Geeza having untied him - and looking a little better for having some water splashed on his face, administered by my friend from a single tap at the end of the corridor.
A credit to their profession, the paramedics set to checking for broken bones or any other injuries he may have sustained and within the space of a few short minutes they had Mr Donald bandaged up and looking remarkably better. Apparently, these things often look worse than they actually are, head wounds, something to do with the amount of blood vessels in the face or something like that. Having finished their work, they explained that they would have to inform the show organizers (and they’d no doubt inform the police) and that they would then like to take Ollie into hospital for some tests.
Instructing us to stay here in the cool and quiet, they disappeared to find the appropriate authorities. I used the time to ask the racing driver if he could remember what had happened to him.
“We had done the presentation and the photo shoots,” Ollie said, “and I was on my way to the drivers’ rooms for a shower and to get changed.” He paused for a minute, his breathing obviously painful as he had sustained two cracked ribs. “I remember opening the door and there was my navigator, waiting for me with a bloody great pick-axe handle!”
Mr. Donald’s story revealed a most unpleasant side to this mad Professor’s character - for indeed I can only assume that he is, in fact, truly insane. He had set about Ollie with his stout cudgel like a man possessed, bludgeoning him to near unconsciousness before dragging him into the tiny store room and trussing him up in a corner.
“I must have passed in and out of unconsciousness a few times,” he admitted. “I saw him leave with the key to my locker and then when he came back he had all my stuff in a big bundle.”
“Did he talk to you at all?” I asked. “Give you some idea of what he wanted?”
“No, he just went through my wallet and all my pockets and things – he didn’t even look at me, not once. Man, that guy is a lunatic!” I could only agree.
“But all your money’s still there; all your cards…”
“Yeah, he seemed to be looking for something specific, you know?”
And evidently he found it because the last thing the battered driver could remember before sinking mercifully beneath the dark waves of oblivion was the Professor’s face, gleaming with a manic smile and holding aloft the key to Ollie Donald’s villa in Cap Ferret, in the South of France. When I asked him how Humphries had known about his home on the Med, I learned a most intriguing fact.
“It was two days before the race,” he began, “when disaster struck. HD suddenly went down with an acute case of food poisoning.” That would be HD Le Roux, his co-pilot or navigator, or whatever they call themselves. “This Humphries, he’d been loitering for a day or two around the drivers’ compound - just chatting, you know, talking with the guys. Anyway it turned out he had navigated once or twice when he was younger for a friend of his back in Scotland. I took him out for a couple of test runs and he seemed competent enough – and there was no one else anyway, so I took him on.”
“Scotland?” I couldn’t help myself from latching onto the word. It was quite unconscious.
“Yeah?” he said slowly, although with his accent it was more like ‘yarrrrrrr?’ “Is that important?”
Well, where to start? I explained very briefly about my interest in all things Scottish.
“Ah, what, you’re a research student, or you’re writing a book or something like that?”
“Something like that,” I said sheepishly.
“Well, my family’s from Scotland.”
“What?” This was getting weirder by the minute.
“Yeah, originally I mean. Funny, Humphries was interested in that too-”
“What?”
“Yeah, he asked me quite a lot about my family in fact.”
He then proceeded to tell me what he had told the Professor, shortly after they had teamed up. I could say he told us, but Geeza seemed to be in a bit of a world of his own. He just squatted silently and looked around as if he was the only one there – which he may well have been, wherever he actually was, because he certainly wasn’t with us.
Mr. Donald is indeed of Scottish descent – I should have guessed from the name really. The story goes that his great, great grandfather had shipped the family out in the latter portion of the 1890’s. They had set up home along the eastern coast of South Africa, a few hours drive from the Drakensberg Mountains which apparently reminded Robert Donald of the Grampians.
With his main home currently situated near Durban in the town of Amanzimtoti, Ollie Donald now owned several houses and villas around the world, wherever the rallying circuit took him on a regular basis.
He had explained to Humphries, he said, that some of the family heirlooms were housed in his French home and that among these treasures were several coins which his great, great grandfather had taken with them when they emigrated. These coins were the sum total of all the family had owned when they emigrated, having sold up lock, stock and barrel, but upon arriving on the shores of their new homeland they soon discovered that the money was useless. It was Scottish money and therefore not recognised as legal tender!
What a tragedy! His savings had totalled nearly seven Scottish pounds, a princely sum in those days, especially after paying passage for his family. They effectively had to start again from nothing, but the great, great grandfather kept the coins as a reminder, so they would always have a target to aim for. Once the sum they represented had been surpassed, then the family would know that they had ‘made it’, been successful. Ollie regarded the coins as primary factors contributing to the competitive streak i
n his family and therefore one of the reasons for his success. These coins were kept in a display case on the wall of his French living room.
And so the penny had dropped. Or was about to - right into the Professor’s pockets! Geeza sprang back to life when this Scottish money was mentioned.
“That’s why he attacked you!” he exclaimed. “He wanted the key to get the coins! It’s the money he’s after – the Scottish money! Damn it, we’ve got get to it before he does! We’ve got to get to the South of France!”
Of course we do Geeza.
He insists, although he will not explain why or how, that we must assume this is why the Professor latched onto poor old Ollie in the first place.
“It’s probably the only reason he came out here - it’s the money, I’m telling you! Remember the bikers and the hotel,” he said. He would not be drawn into saying anything more however, so I left him to it.
It seems a bit far-fetched to me, but what am I talking about? This whole saga up until now has been exactly that! Why on earth should this professor - although granted he’s quite obviously stone bonkers - why would he be so interested in Scottish money? It just doesn’t make any sense. Then again, like I said, what does around here these days?
After explaining briefly our own motivations for wishing to catch up with Humphries, Mr. Donald gave us carte blanche to do as we saw fit in apprehending the lunatic. He told us the address of his home in Cap Ferrat and how to get there from the nearest airport in nearby Nice.
“You can have the run of my house boys,” he said as he was being quietly stretchered into an ambulance out of view of the public eye. “There’s a spare key in a little box buried just to the left of the third rose bush by the door. Do whatever you need to do ok - just get this guy.”
And so that is where you now find me, driving back to Nairobi at a rate of knots. We are not in the Land Rover this time you see. The race organisers, keen to hush the whole thing up, have given us the use of one of the Rally cars (having assured me they would handle all the paperwork regarding the Land Rover) and have agreed to give us two days before informing the authorities of anything. That way if we catch the Professor, all well and good and the correct channels can be gone through from there.
And if not, it ensures that we will be well out of Nairobi by the time the police come swarming around the airport, so there will be as little chance as possible that the incident with the animals from the hotel will rear its ugly head – poor choice of expression there, under the circumstances - and give us any nasty, unwelcome surprises.
I am not sure that I fully approve of this kind of shameless corruption, simply because we are helping Mr. Donald out, but funnily enough I think I’ll be able to sleep at night, just so long as we get of Kenya intact.
***