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away — there’s calves to feed, chicks hatching out, milk records, butterfat tests — you know how it is on a farm. I like it all right, only lately it’s been — well, I guess things have gone a bit sour.”
    Vachell didn’t say anything to that. The peace of evening lay over the garden and the vast drowsing valley. The boles of acacia trees were reddish-gold in the slanting light. In spite of all the beauty he could feel the sadness too. A phrase of Prettyman’s stung his mind like a persistent mosquito. “What I can’t understand is what the hell she can see….”
    That coarse, arrogant bastard. He dodged the thought and focused all his attention on a shining emerald sunbird deftly robbing the flowers of a giant buddleia bush.
    A tall figure rounded the corner of the house, walking with long strides. It was Miss Adams. She came up to the veranda and halted awkwardly below them on the deep-green lawn. Her face was a little flushed from the walk and she looked, somehow, 40
    less flattened, more three-dimensional, than she had in Munson’s presence.
    “Hello, Janice. Hope I’m not butting in,” she said. “Edward’s taken the children up to the top dam in the car, so I took the chance to slip away. I do hope you don’t mind.” Her voice had a new warmth in it; Vachell was vaguely surprised at the change.
    “Of course I don’t, Anita. Come right up and have tea. You’ve met Mr Vachell?”
    The girl muttered something and came on to the veranda, moving jerkily. She did not look at Vachell at all. She sat down and talked to Janice about the Munson children — there were two of them, a boy and a girl — and the rains. He could see that Janice was sorry for her rather uncouth and lonely visitor, but he couldn’t imagine they had much in common.
    He gazed at the deepening view, hardly listening to the talk, until a sudden exclamation from Janice made him look round. She was gazing at Miss Adams as if she had just seen a ghost.
    “Anita,” she said, “I forgot. Your pigeons. You must tell Mr Vachell about that.” Her voice was urgent and intense.
    The unexpected remark clearly disturbed the girl.
    She looked down at the table and ran her thumb over the cloth.
    “I — I hate talking about it,” she said.
    “I know. I know just how you feel, Anita. But don’t you see, it’s all linked up with — with what happened to Rhode.”
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    Anita Adams raised her head with a jerk and fixed her pale nervous eyes on Vachell’s face. “I came over here to tell you, really,” she said. Her sentences were abrupt and unshaded, like ant-hills on a treeless plain. “Only it — it seems such a small thing.
    And I’ve tried to forget about it altogether. It makes me feel sick.”
    “You’d better let me have the story,” Vachell said. He tried to sound encouraging and soothing at the same time.
    “About a week ago I lost my pigeons,” she said baldly. “I mean their heads got bitten off. Clean, right off, like a guillotine.”
    “That’s too bad,” Vachell said. “That’s the way mongooses act, isn’t it, or civets; or any of those wild-cat things.”
    “Yes, but this wasn’t a mongoose or a civet cat.
    The pigeons live in a coop that’s raised off the ground on piles, and there’s a big chicken-wire cage all round it. Of course they sleep in the coop, I always shut them in myself, and padlock the door of the pen. Well, someone must have let them out of the coop, because in the morning they were lying on the ground without heads. They couldn’t have got out unless someone had opened the door. At least, I don’t see how.” She came to a full stop and looked at him with a puzzled expression, her light eyes steady, for once, on his face.
    “Does anyone have a key to the pen, aside from you?”
    “Yes, Mrs Munson. She has all the keys, but she 42
    lets me keep a duplicate for the mashroom and for the pigeons.”
    “None of the natives has a key?”
    Anita Adams shook her head.
    “And the lock