The White Witch of the South Seas Read online

  THE WHITE WITCH OF THE SOUTH SEAS

  Dennis Wheatley

  For

  PHYL

  A small souvenir of our successful endeavours

  to secure a show in Bond Street for the

  paintings of the ex-leper, Semisi Maya.

  And for her husband,

  His Excellency Sir Derek Jakeway, K.C.M.G.,

  Her Majesty’s Governor of the Fijis.

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 Doomed to Die in a Ditch

  2 His Last Twenty-four Hours

  3 A New Interest

  4 Spanish Gold

  5 A Midnight Visitor

  6 The Ambush

  7 Death on the Lake

  8 Of Cannibals and Paradise

  9 Outbreak of Passion

  10 And the Bill to Pay

  11 Out of the Frying Pan into the Fire

  12 Land Safely or Die

  13 Enter the White Witch

  14 Midnight at the Grave

  15 Night Race to Suva

  16 The Fire-Walkers of Beqa

  17 None but the Brave Deserve the Fair

  18 Triumph and Disaster

  19 A Fateful Evening

  20 Death in the Dark Hours

  21 A Fateful Dawn

  Epilogue

  A Note on the Author

  Introduction

  Dennis Wheatley was my grandfather. He only had one child, my father Anthony, from his first marriage to Nancy Robinson. Nancy was the youngest in a large family of ten Robinson children and she had a wonderful zest for life and a gaiety about her that I much admired as a boy brought up in the dull Seventies. Thinking about it now, I suspect that I was drawn to a young Ginny Hewett, a similarly bubbly character, and now my wife of 27 years, because she resembled Nancy in many ways.

  As grandparents, Dennis and Nancy were very different. Nancy’s visits would fill the house with laughter and mischievous gossip, while Dennis and his second wife Joan would descend like minor royalty, all children expected to behave. Each held court in their own way but Dennis was the famous one with the famous friends and the famous stories.

  There is something of the fantasist in every storyteller, and most novelists writing thrillers see themselves in their heroes. However, only a handful can claim to have been involved in actual daring-do. Dennis saw action both at the Front, in the First World War, and behind a desk in the Second. His involvement informed his writing and his stories, even those based on historical events, held a notable veracity that only the life-experienced novelist can obtain. I think it was this element that added the important plausibility to his writing. This appealed to his legions of readers who were in that middle ground of fiction, not looking for pure fantasy nor dry fact, but something exciting, extraordinary, possible and even probable.

  There were three key characters that Dennis created over the years: The Duc de Richleau, Gregory Sallust and Roger Brook. The first de Richleau stories were set in the years between the wars, when Dennis had started writing. Many of the Sallust stories were written in the early days of the Second World War, shortly before Dennis joined the Joint Planning Staff in Whitehall, and Brook was cast in the time of the French Revolution, a period that particularly fascinated him.

  He is probably always going to be associated with Black Magic first and foremost, and it’s true that he plugged it hard because sales were always good for those books. However, it’s important to remember that he only wrote eleven Black Magic novels out of more than sixty bestsellers, and readers were just as keen on his other stories. In fact, invariably when I meet people who ask if there is any connection, they tell me that they read ‘all his books’.

  Dennis had a full and eventful life, even by the standards of the era he grew up in. He was expelled from Dulwich College and sent to a floating navel run school, HMS Worcester. The conditions on this extraordinary ship were Dickensian. He survived it, and briefly enjoyed London at the pinnacle of the Empire before war was declared and the fun ended. That sort of fun would never be seen again.

  He went into business after the First World War, succeeded and failed, and stumbled into writing. It proved to be his calling. Immediate success opened up the opportunity to read and travel, fueling yet more stories and thrilling his growing band of followers.

  He had an extraordinary World War II, being one of the first people to be recruited into the select team which dreamed up the deception plans to cover some of the major events of the war such as Operation Torch, Operation Mincemeat and the D-Day landings. Here he became familiar with not only the people at the very top of the war effort, but also a young Commander Ian Fleming, who was later to write the James Bond novels. There are indeed those who have suggested that Gregory Sallust was one of James Bond’s precursors.

  The aftermath of the war saw Dennis grow in stature and fame. He settled in his beautiful Georgian house in Lymington surrounded by beautiful things. He knew how to live well, perhaps without regard for his health. He hated exercise, smoked, drank and wrote. Today he would have been bullied by wife and children and friends into giving up these habits and changing his lifestyle, but I’m not sure he would have given in. Maybe like me, he would simply find a quiet place.

  Dominic Wheatley, 2013

  1

  Doomed to Die in a Ditch

  Gregory Sallust was dining alone at the Copacabana Palace, the most luxurious of the many hotels situated along the great bay to the south of Rio de Janeiro, which is Brazil’s most famous playground.

  Since losing his beloved Erika he had spent much of his time alone; not from necessity, as he had many friends in Europe and, although no longer young, was still very attractive to women, but owing to a restlessness that impelled him to spend the greater part of each year travelling.

  To most places where he intended to spend a fortnight or more he took introductions; but new acquaintances could not be expected to give him all their time and, as no woman could replace Erika, for him the casual affaires he had in dulged in had been short-lived. In consequence, he had become quite used frequently to going to his room immediately after dinner and reading in bed.

  But tonight he had an engagement, and one which promised to be very interesting. On arriving in Rio he had looked up an old war-time friend, Colonel Hugo Wellesley, who was now Military Attaché at the British Embassy. During the past few days Hugo and his wife Patricia had entertained him most kindly, and the Colonel had arranged for them to attend a Macumba ceremony.

  Macumba is the form of Voodoo widely practised in Brazil, and ceremonies of a kind were put on regularly to attract tourist money; but this was to be the real thing, from which all non-practitioners were normally excluded. The all-powerful Chief of Police had secured agreement for Hugo and his party to be present and, in case of trouble, they were being provided with a police escort.

  Gregory’s knowledge of the Black Arts was confined to his reluctant co-operation with a Jewish Satanist during the last years of the Second World War, when they had made use of Hitler’s belief in the occult to drive him to commit suicide instead of leaving Berlin for the Bavarian Alps where, with a still undefeated army, he could have prolonged Germany’s resistance. Voodoo and its allied cults were entirely new territory to Gregory; so, although he had no intention whatever of allowing himself to become involved, he was looking forward to the ceremony as a fascinating entertainment.

  At half past nine he asked the hall porter to get him a taxi. As he stood waiting for a few minutes outside the hotel, he could see the whole curving sweep of the splendid Copacabana Bay. It was early January, so in Rio high summer and during the daytime the long beach was black with people. Even at th
is hour innumerable couples lay scattered upon it. Thousands more, enjoying the comparative cool of the evening after the long, hot day, were strolling along the promenade, lit by the myriad lights from hotels, shops and cafés.

  The city of Rio consists of several valleys which run like gaps between outspread fingers into the great mountain range that cuts it off from the interior, and Copacabana is separated from Rio itself by a lofty spur that runs right down into the sea; so Gregory’s taxi took him through a long tunnel under the spur, then through the streets in the nearest valley to a small park with many lovely tropical trees. High up on one side of the park stood the President’s Palace and, beyond it, still higher up and backing on to a mountain, the fine residential block in which the Wellesleys had an apartment.

  On Gregory’s arrival he found the small party already assembled. His host was a lithe, dark, handsome man in his late forties, his hostess a pretty blonde with merry blue eyes. When he had selected a daiquiri from a tray presented by a white-coated houseman, she introduced him to her other guests—a Brazilian couple named da Fonseca, a Madame Manon de Bois-Tracy and Captain Candido Sousa from Rio Police Headquarters.

  The da Fonsecas were middle-aged and, judging from the Senhora’s jewels, very wealthy. For a while the conversation became general, then the da Fonsecas resumed an animated discussion they had been having earlier with Hugo in Portuguese. The Police Captain—a big, round-faced, jovial man—spoke only broken English, but in an unembarrassed spate of words was obviously endeavouring to impress Patricia; so, having accepted a second drink, Gregory turned his attention to Madame de Bois-Tracy, whom he had rightly assumed to be French.

  She was of medium height and what the French term a ‘belle-laide’ when they wish to describe a woman who is not beautiful but definitely alluring. Her attractions lay in a pair of magnificent brown eyes beneath delicately tapering eyebrows and a pretty figure that her dress sense enabled her to display to the best advantage. Her nose was snub, with wide nostrils, her lips thick, which suggested a dash of coloured blood somewhere in her ancestry, and her complexion was sallow. Gregory put her age down as a little short of forty and was quick to realise that she was a sophisticated woman of the world who could prove intriguing and amusing.

  The outer wall of the main room in the Wellesleys’ apartment was one huge window which could be wound down during the great heats—as it was now, for the evening was oppressively hot and sultry. Having been there in the daytime, Gregory knew that from the window there was one of the finest views imaginable. It looked out over the President’s Palace and hundreds of other roofs to the world-famous entrance to Rio harbour and to Sugar Loaf Mountain, the outline of which could still be seen against a background of blue-black sky, twinkling with a myriad of stars. Further off, across a wide sheet of water, lay another mountainous shore. The Portuguese explorer Gonçalvo Coelho had come upon this great area of bays, capes and estuaries on January 1st, 1502. On sailing up into it, he had assumed that he was entering the mouth of a broad river and so erroneously named it River of January. Darkness now hid a great part of this magnificent panorama; but, from eighty feet above the park, which lay immediately below, thousands of lights gleamed in the dusk, giving this valley of the city a fairy-like quality.

  By unspoken agreement Gregory and Manon de Bois-Tracy carried their drinks over to the wrought-iron balustrade installed to prevent children or incautious people from falling from the big window. Finding her English halting, he changed his conversation to French, as he was fluent in several languages. She told him that she was in Rio only on a holiday and that her home was in Fiji. Friends there had given her an introduction to the wife of the First Secretary of the British Embassy, and it was at dinner with them that she had met the Wellesleys. Afterwards she and Patricia had chanced to talk about the occult, and it was this that had led to her being invited to witness the Macumba ceremony that night.

  As she talked, in an attractive, slightly lisping voice, she was studying Gregory acutely. Owing to the habitual stoop with which he walked, his lean head thrust a little forward like a bird of prey, he appeared shorter than his five foot eleven inches. His hair had turned nearly white, owing to the strain he had endured while a secret agent for long periods in Germany during the Second World War; yet his face belied his age. The only two furrows on it were deep laughter lines curving from nose to chin on either side of his mouth. An old scar ran up from the corner of his left eyebrow to his forehead, on which the thick hair came down smoothly in a widow’s peak. From long habit, when speaking in a foreign language, he used his hands to stress the views he uttered. On international affairs his opinions were well informed, highly practical and always tinged with a cynical humour.

  Gregory had not been talking to Manon de Bois-Tracy for very long before she decided that he was quite an exceptional man—considerably older than herself, but nonetheless attractive for that, and one with whom it might prove highly rewarding to become on intimate terms; while Gregory had come to the conclusion that she was the most unusual and intriguing woman he had met for a long time.

  Both of them had been in Rio for some days and to begin with they had compared their impressions of the city. She thought the main streets and shops unworthy of such a great metropolis, but the scenery superb. They had both been up the Corcovado, a rocky peak two thousand three hundred feet high dominating the whole area, from the top of which rises a one-hundred-foot-high statue of Christ, and agreed that the view from it must be one of the finest in the world. He found the obvious poverty of the masses depressing and spoke of the appalling shanty towns on the slopes of the mountains adjacent to the city, where tens of thousands of people lived without sanitation. But she shrugged that off, remarking that such a state of things was not unusual in countries as poor as Brazil, and that at least the people had ample food and appeared happy.

  ‘I’ll grant you that,’ he said. ‘And, anyway, Brazil can take credit for being one of the few countries in the world that have solved the colour problem. There really is equality here between whites, Negroes, native Indians and the people with an infinite variety of mixed blood.’

  She then asked him what form he thought the ceremony they were to see that night would take.

  ‘I have only a vague idea,’ he replied, ‘but I expect they will all smoke marijuana and dance until they have worked themselves up into a frenzy. Then some of them will have what appear to be epileptic fits, froth at the mouth, throw themselves on the ground, squirm about and prophesy.’

  Manon nodded. ‘When they behave like that they believe themselves to be possessed by one of their gods, don’t they? But we won’t be able to understand what they say, so if there is no more to it than that it doesn’t promise to be very exciting.’

  ‘You never know.’ Gregory gave her a slow smile. ‘I’ve heard that at times these shows end up in a general orgy.’

  She raised one eyebrow, then said quite calmly, ‘That would be fun and I’m all for it—providing I am not expected to participate.’

  His smile widened to a grin. ‘I’ll see to it that you don’t have to—provided, of course, there is some hope of your rewarding me afterwards.’

  As she laughed, she showed two rows of even white teeth. ‘I’ll make no promises, but, to echo your own words just now, “You never know”.’

  Their attention was momentarily distracted by raised voices behind them. Turning, they saw that Captain Sousa was insisting that the Senhora da Fonseca should leave her jewels in the Wellesleys’ apartment. Still protesting, she took them off. Manon followed suit with her more modest jewellery and Hugo collected the valuable pile of trinkets to lock up in his safe.

  Captain Sousa then talked to them for a while about Macumba. He said that throughout the whole of Central and South America very similar cults had grown up from a blending of the religion of the native Indians, the superstitions brought over by the Negro slaves from Africa and the imposing on both of the Roman Catholic faith. The vast majority of th
e people in these countries would tell you that they were Christians, and they regularly attended the ceremonies of the Church; but they also continued to believe in the potency of the old gods and worshipped them during midnight meetings held deep in the jungle. How widespread the belief in Macumba was could be judged from Copacabana Beach on New Year’s Eve, when the sea was white for a quarter of a mile out with the tens of thousands of lilies thrown into it by Macumba votaries to propitiate Yemanja, the goddess of the ocean.

  These meetings were conducted by both men and women, who were known either as ‘Godfathers’ or ‘Godmothers’. They said the prayers, invoked the spirits and, with a trident, stirred a cauldron from which rose lurid flames. Meanwhile, initiates of both sexes, already under the influence of drugs, performed a dance which continued for several hours. From time to time a spirit would enter into one of the dancers. He or she would then break from the ring, gyrate wildly and become the voice of the spirit, calling out messages from the gods. Then, exhausted, the possessed would fall writhing and jerking to the ground.

  With one exception everyone wore white, as the symbol of good. The exception—a concession to the doctrines of the Christian Church—was a representative of the Devil, who was painted red and wore red clothes.

  Finally, Sousa told his listeners that they must make no comments, because the ceremony they were about to witness was normally attended only by believers and, should they be suspected of ridiculing it, there would be serious trouble. But provided they remained quiet all should be well. Recently quite a number of socialites in Rio had become converts to Macumba, so the good clothes worn by the members of the party would not alone give them away as non-believers.

  After a last drink they all went down in the lift to two large, waiting cars. In addition to police drivers, a detective was in one and a police-woman in the other. Introductions were made, everyone shook hands, then the party of eleven squeezed into the cars and they set off.