Copyright & Information

The Necklace of Skulls

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The right of Roger Longrigg to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

This edition published in 2012 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

Typeset by House of Stratus.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

EAN	ISBN	Edition
0755104889	9780755104888	Print
0755134990	9780755134991	Kindle
0755135083	9780755135080	Epub

This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

www.houseofstratus.com

About the Author

Roger Longrigg was a British author of unusual versatility who wrote both novels and non-fiction, along with plays and screenplays for television, under both his own name and eight other pseudonyms, including Laura Black, Ivor Drummond, Domini Taylor, and Frank Parish.

Born in Edinburgh into a military family, he was at first schooled in the Middle East, but returned to England as a youth and later read history at Magdalen College, Oxford. His early career took him into advertising, but after the publication of two comic novels took up writing full time in 1959.

He completed fifty five books, many under his own name, but also Scottish historical fiction as Laura Black; thrillers as Ivor Drummond; black comedies as Domini Taylor; and famously Rosalind Erskine – a name with which he hoaxed all for several years – who appeared to write a disguised biography of what life was like in a girls boarding school where with classmates she ran a brothel for boys from a nearby school. ‘The Passion Flower Hotel’ became a bestseller and was later filmed. Roger Longrigg’s work in television included ‘Mother Love’, a BBC mini-series starring Diana Rigg and David McCallum, and episodes of ‘Crown Court’ and ‘Dial M for Murder’.

He died in 2000, aged 70 and was survived by his wife, the novelist Jane Chichester, and three daughters.

PROLOGUE

A religious sect with fanatical adherents in all parts of India has devoutly believed, over many centuries, this account of its origin:–

When the world was young, the face of the world was plagued by a demon of such awesome stature that the deepest ocean rose only to his knees. It was this demon’s pleasure to devour mankind as soon as men were created by the Great Ones. It naturally fell to the goddess Kali to eliminate the demon – Kali the Destroyer, the Mother of Sorrows, the Drinker of Blood, who is sometimes black and blood-daubed, sometimes a tigress, sometimes hewn twelve-armed. Kali assailed the demon with her sword: but, as she shed its blood, each drop turned into another demon. Kali thereupon wiped the sweat from her forearm, and with it made two men. She tore strips, white and yellow, from the hem of her garment, and gave the strips to the men she had made, commanding them to strangle the new-born demons. They did so faithfully, thus enabling Kali to slay the parent demon and save mankind. In gratitude Kali gave them the strips of stuff, for themselves and their descendants for ever, at the same time laying on them a dreadful and bloody charge.

Subject to certain strict rules, and obedient to her instructions in the form of omens, they were to kill, by strangling, as many men as possible, and rob the bodies. And so they did. To a small extent this was for their gain, their livelihood. To a major extent it was an immutable religious duty, an act of worship.

In early days the goddess Kali ate the bodies of those slaughtered in her honour, which conveniently disposed of the corpses. But she strictly charged her servants that they should on no account look at her while she was dining. Once a chela, a novice of the sect, looked back, like the wife of Lot, and saw the Black Mother in the act of eating a new-killed victim. Kali refused thereafter to consume the bodies, but, in her mercy, gave to her followers one of her teeth, which they were to use as a pickaxe for digging the graves. And so they have done.

By and by the rest of India became aware that in its midst lived secretive men, false-faced, who killed and robbed on a terrifying scale. Such a man was called in Sanskrit sthaga, cheat. Hence came a word common to nearly all modern Indian vernaculars, t’hag, one who deceives, one who operates in disguise. It is generally rendered Thug.

The Thugs spread all over India. Membership was strictly hereditary. They survived and flourished because of their secrecy, their skill in disguises, their treacherous affability; they communicated to each other in a private language; they infiltrated army, police and government, often reaching high rank, which gave them excellent intelligence.

In the early 19th century the British government of India at last took stern action against the Thugs. After protracted and brilliant police work, 1,562 were arrested, of whom 382 were hanged and 986 deported or imprisoned for life. The women and young children were condemned to celibacy, so that Thuggee would die completely.

But a wise man said, “It is never safe to assert that any ancient practice in India has been entirely suppressed.”

She was hot, uncomfortable, angry and a little frightened. She was sitting on a low mud wall. Behind her stretched the huge plain of the Ganges. In front of her was a bus-stop at the edge of a West Bengal village, a huddle of mud houses full of people, cattle, images of gods, Communist slogans, and overpowering smells from the cooking-pots.

The bus was supposed to arrive at nightfall. It was not expected to be punctual. On the bus would be a group of men. They would look like ordinary poor travellers, peasant farmers, Bengali jute-growers. They would have baggage and bundles of various kinds, which would contain stolen antibiotics worth $100,000. They would transfer themselves and their bundles to bullock-carts, and disappear into the illimitable darkness of the Indian night. Unless they were stopped.

There would probably be four or five men; there might be eight or ten. They would probably not be armed, at least with guns. This was uncertain. They were probably not tough, nor used to fighting, nor trained in combat. This was also uncertain. Nothing was certain, least of all the outcome.

Jenny wished violently that someone else was doing this job, instead of herself and two friends. It was not her problem. She had been dragged into it. She wanted out. She knew that if the antibiotics went off in the bullock-carts they would reappear, in time, on the black market. They would be diluted and hideously overpriced; they would be adulterated and therefore dangerous. Children treated with them could be blinded, go mad, die. She knew also that the police could not be informed, could not help, must never hear about any of this. She still bitterly resented being caught up in it. She resented the boredom of the long hot wait, while steaming day turned into steaming night. She was uncomfortable on the low wall. She disliked the possibility that an armed, effective gang of ten men might be carrying the stolen antibiotics.

The three of them had allies in the village, it was true. Jenny had not seen them but she knew they were there. It was not at all clear why they were there. They could do not good. The point had been made, most clearly, that their well-wishers were men of peace, utterly opposed, like Gandhi himself, to violence even in the best of causes. There were Hindus who fought, fine soldiers, men of the warrior castes. There were Hindus who under no provocation would raise a hand to fight. It seemed that their allies were of the gentle, fatalistic kind. Perhaps, thought Jenny, they were almost saints. But she did not want soft-spoken saints at her side, not this evening. She wanted men with clubs and knives and loud voices.

Ishur Ghose was there too, hidden with the others somewhere in the shadowed edge of the village. He was a soldier. He had fought very many battles. And his battles had been of this kind, discreet ambushes, adroit executions. But Ishur Ghose was very old and frail. His pipe-stem legs needed the aid of a stick; his failing eyes needed heavy spectacles. He had fought his battles for the British Government long before the Second War. He was there as their friend, and he had brought friends of his own: but for all the use they were they might as well have stayed in Calcutta.

The minutes dragged by like hours. There was nothing for Jenny to do but sit and wait. There was no point in thinking about the future, which could be faced when it came. She thought about the past, the all-too-logical sequence of events which had brought her to this steam-bath of a place, this smelly rendezvous with a gang of coffee-coloured criminals.

“I have to go to India,” he said in his soft American voice. Older, more respected, much busier Tuckers, engaged as he was not in the active management of the Tucker commercial and industrial empire, had summoned him from his yacht in the Caribbean. They had reports of large-scale thefts from the company in Calcutta, which was the headquarters of the whole far-eastern operation. John Tucker, one of Colly’s serious cousins, ran the place, and his explanations were vague and unsatisfactory.

A major scandal loomed. It was impossible to suspect John Tucker: but it was horribly possible to suspect his stepson, a spoiled and wilful youth, cradled all his life in mother-love, introduced into the Calcutta office by his mother, John’s wife, by dint of sustained emotional blackmail. Young Harry thought he was entitled to the top job and the top salary. His stepfather wouldn’t play favourites to that point. The boy added resentment to greed. This much was known; the deeply embarrassing consequence was guessed.

“Publicity would be a disaster,” said Colly to Jenny’s family at dinner. “Thing like this could torpedo the whole operation, as well as dropping old John in the, uh, manure, which would be a shame. So the heavy brass sent for me to New York and said, ‘Son, tuck away that yachting cap, buy a solar topee, and go clear up the mess.’”

“Just what I’d like to do, Lady Teffont,” said Colly, “but from what we hear, telling the Indian cops is not the way to keep a secret.”

“I should think that’s true,” said Jenny’s father. “Especially in a city with a Communist government.”

“Any stick to beat Uncle Sam with,” said Colly. “And this would make a pretty big stick.”

“All the same, my dear,” said Lady Teffont, “I imagine you’ll want local help of some kind. This odious stepson can’t be doing all this stealing all on his own, and if his partners are local people―”

“That’s so, ma’am. He has to sell to somebody, for one thing. I do need local help. I was kind of relying on Sandro for that.”

“It never occurred to me you wouldn’t,” said Colly. “That’s why I came here.”

“But Sandro, with all his gifts, is not precisely a local in Calcutta,” said Lady Teffont.

“No,” said Colly, “but he does have friends. I don’t know why he does. Pretty creepy bunch most of them are, guys in security and counter-intelligence and stuff like that. Which is what I need. Somebody who can provide a little muscle and a lot of local knowledge, and keep his mouth shut.”

“Not for a while. This thing has been going on for a year. It can go on another month. I want to do a crash course in Urdu. Sandro’s doing one.”

The Air India jet landed at Dum Dum. John Tucker welcomed his younger cousin with that mixture of affection and contempt with which all Colly’s relations treated him. Quite apart from his wealth and his shocking idleness, he had mild green eyes, untidy mousy hair, a shambling walk and a self-deprecating manner which begged for contempt even as they called for affection.

Colly performed the introductions as coolies carried the baggage, on their heads, from the customs to the car.

Jenny saw a forceful, conventional American of fifty with stiff grey hair and sharp grey eyes. John Tucker saw an English girl whose face was insanely attractive but far from intelligent. She did not, John considered, quite attain classic beauty – her face was too round, her nose too short and tilted: and when she smiled the smile dug a single dimple in her left cheek, an asymmetry of great charm but clearly against the rules of classical perfection. Her hair was bright gold, long and untidy; her eyes were large and blue and silly. Her body, as far as it could be deduced under her cotton shirt and pants, was perfect. John decided that Lady Jennifer looked good enough to eat but not bright enough to talk to.

John Tucker switched his gaze from the juicy but retarded English girl to the enormous Italian. Il conte Alessandro di Ganzarello was a King Kong, a human mountain, ugly but impressive. The barrel of his chest, the width of his shoulders, the muscles of his arms, threatened to burst out of the beautiful Italian silk of his clothes; his black hair was peppered with silver watch-springs; his face was so deeply tanned that he was darker than many high-caste Indians, who are careful to stay out of the sun and stay as pale as possible: but in the midst of the dark leather of his face were most un-Indian eyes, eyes of startling Nordic blue, as surprising as a honey-blond child in the slum tenements of Calcutta.

The road into the city from the airport was hideous with deep ruts and potholes. It was jammed with carts, the shriek of their wooden wheels and the meaningless, automatic shouts of their drivers louder than any traffic. Each side of the road, on swampy, undeveloped land, were acres of squalid little huts jammed into dense colonies like those of insects. They were made of mud, scraps of wood, gasoline cans; they swarmed with people. Acrid smoke billowed from cowdung cooking-fires. Among the huts, all over the road, all along the road into Calcutta, all over Calcutta, there were impossible, unimaginable numbers of men, little dark underfed men in identical dirty-white dhotis.

Jenny opened the window beside her. She shut it again immediately. The stench from the acres of huts was overpowering, unspeakable. The acrid smoke of the fires, not unpleasant, was drowned in the reek from the shallow ditches, hardly scratches in the ground, which were all the drainage of the bus- tees, the cities of huts.

Sandro had been almost everywhere, but never to Calcutta. He said, “I never saw people, so many people, in such misery. Not in South America, not in any part of Africa. These people are hardly alive. They cannot live so. It is impossible.”

“It’s possible because it’s an illusion,” said Colly. “Right, John?”

“To them it is. That’s how they bear it. The whole of life is a brief illusion, a kind of bad dream.”

They drove through vast areas of docks, warehouses, aged ramshackle factories, and tall baroque houses, once grand, now sprouting lush vegetation from every cranny and crammed with poor families. The streets were packed. The sides of the roads were lined with squatting vendors of wilted vegetables and plastic combs, over whom stumbled hump-backed cows and a few buffaloes and goats. If garbage was collected at all, it was collected capriciously and seldom.

“I suppose it’s interesting,” said Jenny. “But I don’t like it. Can we please go somewhere quite different?”

They went somewhere quite different, to the smart residential suburb of Alipur. In John Tucker’s big cool house in a big shady garden they returned to civilization after an excursion through a hell worse than anything in the medieval imagination.

“The contrast is more than I can cope with,” said Jenny. “I didn’t make those slums. So why do I feel so guilty, having this delicious drink?”

Colly had written disingenuously to his cousin to say that he and two friends needed a vacation. They were tired after doing a few exhausting things in Morocco and Kenya and other places. They wanted to see India, a little of India. Could they use John as a start point?

“I get tired when I do nothing,” said John. “I guess Colly’s the same.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I like Colly. He was a nice kid and he’s pretty nice still. Never gave anybody any trouble.”

Eleanor, who came from Iowa, took a sterner view of life and of human merit. She had hideously spoiled her only son, but in all the rest of the world she was intolerant of sloth and weakness. She resented Colly. She resented Jenny, when the party arrived at the big cool house in Alipur, very much indeed.

Eleanor took Jenny to be vapid, frivolous and superficial. She was not to be blamed for his misapprehension: Jenny went through life sedulously acting a part remote from the toughness of her real character and the formidable scope of her real abilities. Other people were misled as Eleanor was misled; almost all others, to the point where only Sandro and Colly, who loved her and beside whom she had fought so many battles, fully knew the cobra-quick and cobra-deadly fighting machine behind the charming and silly mask.

Eleanor assumed that Jenny would want to see the smart boutiques of the Chowringhee and admire the great green expanse of the Maidan, redolent of the Raj and furnished with splendid relics.

Jenny dutifully pressed her button nose on the windows of jewellers and dressmakers; she inspected the gigantic statue of the Queen Empress, from whose left eye dribbled, like a tear, a mess made by a perching crow.

She met the others for lunch at an opulent hotel, onto the very steps of which crawled and thrashed innumerable beggars. Some pointed at their blind eye-sockets; some gestured with the stumps of arms and legs. They were revolting, and infinitely pitiable. To give to one brought down upon the giver a swarm of others; but not to give seemed monstrous.

The others had been busy. Sandro had been on the telephone to a friend in Delhi – just such a friend as Colly had known he would have. Colly had been talking to his cousin’s stepson. Sandro finished the morning with a name and address; Colly finished it with a nasty taste in his mouth.

Sandro telephoned again from the hotel. He arranged that they should meet the friend of his friend in a room above a shop in a side street.

Ishur Ghose was very old indeed: not only by the standards of India, where old age begins to rush up on the poor the moment they have attained precocious adulthood, and where the life expectancy is barely forty years, but even by European standards. Wisps of white hair floated over his narrow brown skull. He was clean shaven. His hands were very thin, but the knuckles were misshapen with arthritis. He walked slowly, stooping, with the aid of a walking-stick of black wood with a large ivory knob. He wore a beautifully embroidered heavy silk shirt over his dhoti. His wrinkled old feet were sandalled. Gold-rimmed spectacles perched on his long nose, and he wore a modern hearing-aid of an expensive type. He looked like a retired scholar with a private income.

He said to Sandro, in English better than Sandro’s, “Please convey my respectful regards, Count, to our friend in Delhi when you next speak to him. It is a city full of memories for me. I was recruited into the government service there in 1920. A different government, I need hardly say. Of course my kind of appointment did not survive independence and partition, both of which, to my mind, were disasters. This is not a view I often put to my fellow countrymen. Your fellow countrymen, Lady Jennifer, were the best rulers India has ever had. Or at least since the days of Akbar and his son and grandson. Do you know your Indian history? I have made a considerable study of it. It is my hobby. Indeed it is my full-time occupation now that my active career is finished. I have explored all kinds of byways of our past. Scandalous things happened, you know. Human life was held very cheap, and so were honesty and honour. Public honesty was introduced by the British. It was a completely foreign plant, and it flourished only while they were here to foster it. People talk about exploitation, and of course great fortunes were made. The nabobs, you remember. But the British put far more into India than they took out. I am, I suppose, obliged to believe this, as I served the British until the deluge. Which we had foretold, those of us whose task it was to know what was going on behind closed doors. Our advice was ignored, owing to pressure from the urban intellectuals who called themselves the Congress party. They said they represented India, but they represented the riffraff of the big cities. You will understand that I keep all this most strictly to myself, except when I am speaking to people such as you.”

“Have you read Kim?” went on Ishur Ghose, remorselessly garrulous. “In many ways it is a fanciful account of the organization in which I served, though in certain regards it is quite an accurate picture, though of course of a byegone epoch. The days of yore. I am not altogether sentimental in regretting them. Please quote me to nobody, or my head would be forfeit. Of course I am speaking metaphorically.”

He paused at last and looked at Colly. His eyes were as bright as jet buttons behind his gold-rimmed spectacles. He was old and he talked too much, thought Colly, but he was a long way from being senile.

“And what, Mr Tucker,” he said gently, “could you possibly be wanting with a long-retired officer of the Secret Service?”

Colly waited a moment before answering. He was wondering how much to say. By Sandro’s friend, Ishur Ghose had been given a character of absolute discretion as well as devious cunning. He had been, it seemed, a loyal servant of the government as well as an effective and inventive spy. That being so, it was probably safe to tell him everything; the more he knew, the more he could help.

Ishur Ghose smiled benignly. He said, “You had to make a judgement of my character before you decided to spill all your beans, Mr. Tucker. You had to decide whether you could trust this old gasbag not to blab, and whether it was worthwhile anyway. You judged favourably, and it so happens you were quite right. That gives me confidence in your judgement. Therefore when you say this young man is stealing from his stepfather I believe you. Even though you have no proof at all. If you were right about me, the odds are you were right about him also. So we proceed on the basis that your hypothesis is correct. But I must ask for a further judgement of his character. If you lean on him, will he talk?”

“Yes,” said Colly immediately. “But that’s exactly what I can’t do, not if we want to keep this quiet.”

“Quite so, my dear fellow, but it is what you must do after we have made a number of other preparations. I will do a bit of snooping myself. Tell me again exactly what he has been stealing?”

“Exactly what you’d expect. Stuff with high value but low bulk. Clock movements, timing and control devices for automated machinery, drugs. I mean pharmaceuticals, not dope.”

“Of course. I did not expect opium or bhang in your cousin’s warehouse. Very good. What I shall sniff for is items of this kind coming onto the market from obscure sources. The drugs will be relabelled, but the labels will be locally printed and probably amateurish. Yet they will be drugs that could not be manufactured locally. It is quite easy, you see. I think the police would find the pipeline quite quickly, and trace it back―”

“I fully understand the problem. It is extremely familiar to India, even to some of the leading merchant families in Bombay and Madras. What I recommend, in all humility and nervousness, is that we allow this misguided young gentleman to proceed with another operation, and catch his friends in the act.”

“Why not just put the fear of God into this stepson?” asked Jenny. “Sandro’s good at that. I haven’t met the man, but I expect you could put the fear of God into him, darling.”

“That is a very bad idea, Lady Jennifer,” said Ishur Ghose. “His partners in crime will not allow him to stop. He will be threatened and he will be blackmailed. Nothing whatever will be solved, and the risk of public exposure is much increased.”

“You two gentlemen,” said Ishur Ghose, “Must find out all you can, but you must do it without arousing the faintest suspicion in our man.”

“Agreed,” said Colly, “While you get a lead on the other end of the pipeline. And on the night we’ll chop it in the middle.”

“You’re lucky in your new friend, darling,” said Jenny as they drove back to Alipur.

“Yeah,” said Colly. “But I feel a little funny about taking Cousin Eleanor’s hospitality while I’m putting a bomb under her ewe-lamb.”

“Fly him back to New York the same night we chop his friends, I hope. Then when they sing there isn’t anybody to sing about. The bunghole stopped and the scandal avoided. Then I thought we might go to Kashmir to look at this houseboat proposition the ads in the New Yorker talk about.”

“It is most ironic,” said the old man. “Of course our distinguished ancestors often knew in advance about treasure being taken across country by couriers. They made some very nice hauls. But I do not know of a case in all our history when a valuable consignment of stolen goods has been literally dropped into our laps.”

“It is a highly satisfactory state of affairs,” said his companion, who was in extreme physical contrast. He was a big, powerful man, exceptionally tall and well set-up for an Indian. He was in early middle age, and had a mane of thick silvering hair. His face was strong and intellectual, with a big nose, rather heavy mouth, tall brow, and the deep sad eyes with which most Indians look out at a discouraging world.

The younger man went on, “You are quite right – if the thefts had been reported to the police the crime would have been exposed already, unless some very heavy bribing went on. I am sure we can find out what is going to happen, and when and where.”

“I feel the omens are bound to be good, when the goddess has promised so rich an offering.”

Idhur Ghose’s intelligence was remarkably good. He seemed to have an army of eyes and ears in the back streets of Calcutta, in the bazaars and tenements, among the beggars and shopkeepers and criminals.

He reported quite soon that he knew who was buying the merchandise, and how it reached the buyer. The latter was a bent industrialist. The middlemen were professional criminals, but not clever ones. The whole thing was pretty amateurish. Only John Tucker’s reluctance to shop his stepson, or even to suspect him, had prevented the whole racket being blown up months before.

With this information Colly could act. An anonymous message reached John Tucker telling him to stocktake meticulously at very frequent intervals.

After a short while $100,000 worth of antibiotics, airfreighted from America, was reported missing from the bonded warehouse.

Colly got a message to Ishur Ghose. Then he and Sandro leaned on John’s stepson.

The result was an eighty-mile drive, in a company car, through dusty jute-fields, north-west of Calcutta, to this drab little village in the gathering darkness.

“Will your European friends be there when we meet the thieves?” asked the big man with the mane of silvering hair.

“The two men, oh yes, I am sure they will. They are very rich, you know. Beautiful watches and gold cigarette-cases and pockets full of money. I know it is little compared to the merchandise, but it is all grist to the mill, as my colonel used to say.”

“Only because, in the days of our greatness – in the other days of our greatness – there were few feringhi to kill, and those few travelled well guarded and well armed. These men are not musicians or potters or mahouts or religious mendicants. They do not fall into any of the forbidden categories. The Italian is a landowner and the American is a kind of merchant.”

“Can? We must, if the omens are propitious. Even if they were penniless, we must kill them if the omens order us to.”

“Very well. I bow to your superior knowledge of the Law, and to your authority as the midwife of our rebirth.”

Sandro, Colly and Jenny waited in cover, out of sight of each other, listening for the tinny local bus.

Colly had a brief word with Ishur Ghose, who had arrived by some unknown and separate means. He mentioned his friends.

“They are here to see fair play,” he said. “To keep the ring, as we used to say.”

“Oh, you do not need help, Mr Tucker, I am quite sure. You and the count have enjoyed a high-protein diet all your lives. The poor little specimens who will get off the bus have had nothing but carbohydrates.”

Colly sauntered over to where Jenny sat invisible on her low mud wall. He reported the conversation. It was very odd and unsatisfactory.

The big man with silvering hair squatted in the darkness. A dozen men squatted in a close half-circle behind him. They were fifty yards from the village, hidden, at the edge of the jute-fields.

The big man held a brass jug, a few cowrie-shells, and a small pickaxe almost identical to the trenching-tool used by the British Army in the First War. Using these humdrum objects, he was completing a religious ceremony unknown to any orthodox sect of Hinduism.

At the end he softly intoned, in a language which was not any language of ordinary people in India: “Great Goddess, Universal Mother, if this our expedition be fitting in thy sight, vouchsafe us a sign of thine approbation.”

The men behind repeated this prayer in the same strange tongue, quietly, sounding like sleepy bees.

They fell silent. They listened intently for the meaningful sound of crow or crane, of ass or jackal.

The open archway of a house at the edge of the village was brightly lit by an oil-lamp within. A figure came from the darkness into this patch of light. It was a young woman, heavily pregnant, with a waterpot on her head.

There was a collective gasp of joy, from the men squatting piously in the darkness, at this very best of all omens: this sign that the goddess approved and would assist the killing.

Then, in the distance, over the cry of insects and the babble and laughter just audible from the houses, and the shifting feet of cattle, they heard the rattle of the approaching bus.

Colly heard the bus. He stood up, stretched, and threw away his cigarette. He eased the gun in his shoulder-holster and fingered the cosh inside his sleeve. He stood by the trunk of a mango tree, seeming part of the trunk of the tree, waiting for the bus.

Sandro heard the bus. He uncoiled himself from the ground and brushed the khaki dust from his pants. He checked his weapons, and moved like a great cat into the angle of a ruined mud-built hut.

Jenny heard the bus. She was invisible, in dark jeans, dark shirt with sleeves to the wrists, and a dark scarf over her head. She was in reserve. Sandro and Colly would tackle the men, hold them up with guns, relieve them of their bundles. If there was trouble, Jenny would materialise behind the men with another gun. It was all right, it would work, if there were not too many men, and they had no guns, and they were not brave.

The big man with silvery hair had moved delicately to the edge of the village. His men were behind him.

He said softly, in the same strange language in which he had intoned his prayer, “Let the fight go as the fight goes, if there is any fight. Let such as are killed be killed, if it falls out thus. After, and only after, do we move.”

There was a murmur of assent. The goddess was with them tonight, as she had told them by the omen of the woman great with child and carrying water.

Jenny saw the dim yellow headlights of the bus as it came out of a hollow onto the higher, flood-proof ground on which the village stood. Its engine thudded and protested at the slight gradient; its body rattled like a biscuit-tin on a roller- skate. It trundled to the sign at the edge of the village and stopped. The asthmatic engine cut.

Five men got off the bus. They were small men, stunted, undernourished, dirty. They carried all manner of bundles wrapped in blankets, cardboard boxes, and, between two, a tin trunk.

Jenny sighed with relief. This puny, pathetic enemy was an anticlimax. She welcomed the anticlimax.