On the Murder Path

The stout Royal Mail truck stopped at Mirabeau, the country house that crowned a modest farm for cattle and other meat animals. As instructed on the sign, the mailman pressed a button on the box, alerting the help to the arrival of the mail with a buzz and a light in the servant’s quarters.

Daniel Mugenda stood up from the lethargy of the idleness that was being the head of Mirabeau’s servants and headed out the door. As he strolled through the main hall, Mr. Henderson, the owner of the house, spat at him, “Where do you think you’re going?” He said that in that stern mockery that only received pronunciation could truly convey.

“To get the mail. The truck just got here.”

“Good! That’s a good man. Is everything ready for when we drive tonight?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Wonderful! The General deserves the best Alnwick can give!”

“Yes, sir.”

He had already packed most of the silverware for the night’s gathering in the Pioneer’s Club in Morpeth. Mr. Henderson was a good friend of General Hayden, who was just returning from a long military deployment around London. His Pioneer friends were looking to welcome him home with open arms.

Daniel went out to the mailbox. The stout Royal Mail truck had already left. There were a few letters from his friends in the Pioneer Club, and a small box dedicated to a Mr. Pauley.

There was no Mr. Pauley living here at Mirabeau.

Daniel put the box in a coat pocket. He returned to Mirabeau.

The hours passed and the help began to load the refrigerator truck for the food for the banquet. There were a great many steaks and other cuts, as well as eggs and wine, plus a cake that the help had made. Mr. Henderson was trying to make Alnwick Mirabeau wine an internationally known brand, and he was investing in other vineyards in Northumberland.

He hadn’t gotten anywhere with it.

One of the other servants, Michael Kibaki, walked up to him. “Good luck there, tonight. Be sure to be in the backroom when they cut the cake.”

Daniel nodded. He clambered into the driver’s seat of the catering truck and waited until the Rolls-Royce that Mr. Henderson drove left the driveway. As soon as the Rolls-Royce turned towards Morpeth, the catering truck followed.

As they moved towards Morpeth, the rural arcadia slowly began to give way to industry. They drove by factories and depots and warehouses, then suburban homes, then the sparkling urban center of the metropolis known as Morpeth.

The city formerly known as Mombasa.

When Lord Halifax made peace with the Germans it was decided that Britain needed to do something to engage the spirits of the public. There had already been some settlements in the Kenya colony, but it was decided that such a thing would be perfect to calm a country that seemed likely to burst apart at the seams.

As with America and Australia and Canada, so with Kenya.

Daniel Mugenda was part of that small underclass in the Dominion that mostly made its living by serving the new elite of this colony, whose natives had been scraped off the earth and deposited into a small number of reservations. Daniel, a Kikuyu, was originally from one near what was once Nyeri and was now Swindon.

Most of the beautiful architecture from its era of independence and the Portuguese and the Omanis had been ripped away to build a city designed by the likes of William Levitt. It was a concrete and glass hellscape of a city in its commercial district, and gaudily nouveau riche in its high class segments.

The rest of it was crushing poverty, both black and white.

The Rolls-Royce parked up in front of the lavish Pioneer’s Clubhouse, while the catering truck drove into the loading bay. The loading bay was packed with the dark-skinned servants of the Dominion’s elite. They were Kikuyu or Maasai or Luo or Turkana, but they were all serving the British no matter how much they hated this particular murder of crows.

This was a banquet in honor of the return of General Spencer Hayden to the land he sculpted in his own image. He grew up in the original Morpeth, and felt it proper to cast off the name of an ancient city and commemorate it here. He was the premier originator of the General Plan for the Kenya Colony, inspired by German efforts to ‘civilize’ Russia, which sent a plethora of Britons to live in this land.

The Pioneer’s Club was composed mostly of Hayden’s friends during the war and Sandhurst and in other such places. They represented perhaps the single greatest concentration of political power in the Dominion.

One of the help, a young woman named Caroline Wambungu, came up to him. “Is everything ready?”

“Yes.” Daniel pulled out the box he had got from the mail, addressed to the nonexistent Mr. Pauley. He opened the box and pulled out two objects, one that could fit in his palm and one that he had to hold with both hands. He gave her the latter object and kept the former.

“Send it to them with the cake, and be sure a window is open.” he told her. She nodded and went off into the buzzing crowd of servants.

He could hear the bloviating of the Britons, telling obviously fake war stories and even more obviously fake stories about women. There was laughter and the occasional song.

The servants kept bringing in meats and cheeses and all sorts of delicacies that Kenya could provide. When one of the fish dishes was brought in, the servant in charge of one of the carts opened a window. None of the Britons noticed.

As the dinner went on, it came time for desert.

For cake.

Mr. Henderson stood up to say some nonsense about civilization and barbarism, and beckoned the help to wheel in the cake.

Daniel told some of the other servants that it was time to leave the building, and to spread the word, just as Caroline wheeled the cake in. They did so, and within a few minutes they were all at least a block away from the Pioneer’s Club.

He could hear the bombastic speech from General Hayden be abruptly cut off by some commotion. Caroline leapt out of the window and landed on the ground. Daniel saw her, and she nodded to him.

He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the detonator. He pushed the button.

The Pioneer’s Club, and all the Britons in it, went up in flames.



This story was inspired by the nonfiction book Imperial Reckoning: the Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins, about the crushing of the Mau Mau uprising. It's a book that has stayed with me even a year after reading it, and I was surprised to read about the attempts to turn Kenya into a settler colony. This story is an extrapolation of those attempts, to its most horrific extent.

The title is a reference to the name 'Morpeth,' one of whose possible etymologies is 'murder path.' I'm now of the understanding that that etymology is contested, but it just worked so well for this story.