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wasn’t forced or tampered with?”
    “No. Of course I looked for that when I found them.”
    “Were the torn-off heads lying around inside the pen?”
    Anita Adams looked down at the table again and her hand shook as she reached for a cigarette. It was an unpleasant little story, but Vachell wondered why she should be quite so upset. She swallowed twice before answering, and ran her tongue over her lips.
    “No. They were found some way off, in the bush, where they’d been thrown. Torn and —” She left the sentence unfinished. Her face was very pale.
    It was getting cold on the veranda, but Vachell felt a chill that was not due to the approach of night.
    Pigeons, heifers, dogs. Work for a psychiatrist, not a policeman. “Do you know of any native who has a special grudge against the Munsons?” he asked.
    She gave a short harsh laugh that did nothing to lighten her colourless and uneasy face. “There are plenty of natives with grudges against Karl Munson.
    They tried to poison him once. But they wouldn’t pull heads off pigeons, if that’s what you mean.
    They wouldn’t bother about a pigeon — they don’t think of birds as valuable things. They’d go for his bulls and cows. Besides, they were my pigeons, not 43
    his. The hens are Mrs Munson’s, but she let me keep the pigeons. They were all I had.”
    The remark might have sounded silly, but it didn’t. Anita Adams looked so bare of possessions the statement might be almost literally true. Only a girl who had no place else to go would be likely to stay in a job at Munson’s place. That was her trouble, Vachell had learnt — no place else to go. Her father had died leaving a farm that fetched little more than enough to pay off the mortgage and Land Bank loan. Her mother had married again, soon after, and gone to South Africa; and the low level of commodity prices had hit the colony so badly that there weren’t many people who could afford a European governess, or help, on a farm. She wasn’t trained for anything else. Her last job had been with a Government official, but he had moved to the Falkland Islands and she’d been down and out in Marula for some time before she landed the Munson job. The Munsons probably paid her next to nothing, and were always late with that.
    Janice West walked with her a little way along the path. Vachell sat alone, watching the dusky blue of night deepen in the valley below, and the lights of Karuna spring up far away. From the native quarters came the soft beat of a drum and the sound of plaintive barbaric chanting that was doubtless a free rendering of a Church of England hymn.
    Bullseye snored quietly by his side. West came in and sat beside him, puffing at a pipe and filling the air with a pungent flavour.
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    “Sorry to desert you,” he said. “Bit worried about the bull. Had to drench him, and took a blood-slide to be on the safe side. Probably only indigestion, but you never know.”
    There was a scurrying in the darkness and the setters appeared, panting and waving long feathery tails and effusively greeting their master. Janice followed them up the steps.
    “Anita’s a pathetic creature,” she said, half apologetically, as she sat down. “I guess she gets as much fun out of life as a turnip in a clay field in a wet December. This is about the only place she can escape to, so I haven’t the heart to drive her away.
    But sometimes, I admit it, she’s a weight in the middle, like too much suet pudding.”
    “She lacks sex appeal,” Vachell admitted.
    “She’s got about as much sex appeal as a spike harrow left out in the rain,” West remarked irritably.
    “I wish she wouldn’t come over here. You’re too good to her, Janice. I’m sorry for her, but I don’t want any of that damned Munson lot over here.
    They’d better keep away. Even poor old Adams, with a face like a horse.”
    “She has to come up sometimes for air, Dennis.
    It’s not her fault. The children like her, poor little brats. And she