Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 116, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 709 & 710, September/October 2000

Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 116, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 709 & 710, September/October 2000

Murder in a Time of Siege by Marjorie Eccles

Yorkshire-born novelist and short story writer Marjorie Eccles has a new book coming out in the U.S. next month. The Superintendent’s Daughter (St. Martin’s Press) features Ms. Eccles’s long-running series character, Police Superintendent Gil Mayo, the hero of more than a dozen previous novels. Her new short story for EQMM is a nonseries work set in 1899, during the Boer War.

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They would soon be reduced to eating the horses. The idea was anathema to any I Britisher. They would do if it was a question of survival, but thank God it hadn’t come to that, not yet.

The small township in the middle of nowhere lay sweltering on the unending, sun-scorched expanse of the African veldt. A hitherto pleasant, orderly, and uneventful place, now seething with fifteen hundred defending troops, surrounded by the enemy, Mafeking had suddenly found itself turned into a garrison by virtue of its strategic position on the borderland railway.

The first actions of the Boers had been to cut through the telegraph wires, tear up two miles of railway, and seize the waterworks outside the redoubts — though as to this last, they might have saved themselves the trouble: There remained an ample supply of water within the town from tanks, and wells drilled through the rock. Three months of siege had followed, yet morale stayed resolutely high. Though the bombardment had been heavy, loss of life and the numbers of wounded had been comparatively light so far, mostly confined to the military in their storming parties against the enemy. Relief was expected daily, but was not yet forthcoming. Belts were tightened further, while the overall commander, Colonel Baden-Powell, the idol and hero of the hour, continued to keep General Cronjé and his Afrikaners busy, driving them back with his cavalry sorties and causing them considerable losses. His indefatigable, cheery confidence was immensely heartening to the beleaguered townsfolk. Better than a pint of dry champagne any day, good old B.P.!

Undeterred, the Boers celebrated the first day of the new century by shelling the women’s laager. Fortunately, only one person was slightly injured.

Then, on the ninety-ninth day of the siege, Edward Carradine was arrested for murder.

“Mafeking, upon the hundredth day of siege, sends loyal devotion to your Majesty and assurances of continued resolve to maintain your Majesty’s supremacy in this town.”

Having despatched his doughty telegram to his queen, via a trooper valiant enough to risk breaking through the enemy lines and riding with it to Pretoria, Mr. Frank Whiteley, the mayor of Mafeking, forsook his bicycle for once and made his way on foot down the main street. The town lay baking under the dry wind; red, gritty dust puffed out from under his boots at every step. An upright man with a clear and steady gaze, he was deeply tanned by his many years under the suns of Africa, thinner than he had been, by reason of the privations to which they had all been subjected in recent months here in Mafeking. He had followed the business of an Interior trader and hunter, in partnership with a brother-in-law in Bulawayo, since he was seventeen, and no one was better acquainted with the territories and people of Bechuanaland and the country north of the Limpopo than he. He loved and understood Africa and the African people almost as much as he honoured England and the English, His hard years in this land had made him a man of foresight and courage. But at the moment, he was also a man beset by worries: the great loss to him of his company stores, recently reduced to rubble by heavy shelling, his business already in decline because of the war, the longing for his absent wife and children, the continuing need to eke out food supplies. The responsibility — entirely his — of looking after five hundred women, children, and nuns in the women’s laager. And not least, the troubling business of Edward Carradine, an all-consuming anxiety which almost eclipsed all the rest.

Carradine! That unfortunate young man who had arrived in Mafeking with such high hopes and was even now languishing in a makeshift gaol until he could be moved to prison in Pretoria.