He caught the asperity in his tone and smiled. “But it all looked so familiar! I expected any minute to hear a tinkling laugh and ‘Was that tonic or lime juice with your gin, Daphne?’ ring out. Inspector, we might have been invading Henley-on-Thames! Raiding Royal Leamington Spa! It was unreal! Until the moment we caught sight of the Mauser rifles poking through the lace-curtained upper windows. And then the barrage started up.”

“But you got across. Thanks to the purging of the crocodiles.”

“The worst of the obstacles to crossing we had to contend with was the very large number of enemy corpses and dead horses swirling down from the carnage being inflicted on the Boer by the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders holding our right wing, upstream of our position. There’d been heavy rain in the night, the current was fierce and the Scotsmen were ruthless killers. Or ‘bonny fighters,’ if you prefer.”

“I do prefer.” The rebuke was frosty.

The man smiled as he chalked up another point in the obscure game he was playing.

“You admired the capabilities of the enemy?” the inspector enquired carefully.

“Whoa there! Nothing treacherous in that, if treachery is what you’re implying. And I wasn’t the only man to notice. We were all impressed by their military prowess, including our commanders, who made many remarks to that effect in dispatches from the battle lines. No one had suspected that a group of Dutch settlers would be such a hard nut to crack. Ragged-looking scarecrows, not a uniform among them. The only flourish they allowed themselves was the occasional ostrich feather or a white cockade in their dusty old hats. The Boers of the Transvaal! Absolute sods when you got to know them at close quarters. Treacherous ticks! You wouldn’t want to play them at cricket! But the best marksmen in the world—best horsemen, too, most probably. And equipped with the finest rifles: the Mauser 95, bought at great expense from Germany.” He lightly caught the eye of the detective and added: “It struck some of us as odd, that. Dirt-poor farmers, scraping a living from an unproductive wilderness, yet armed with the latest imported machine guns, field artillery and rifles? Ordnance of European origin. French and German mostly. Far in advance of anything the British army could boast.” He sighed. “The cream of Her Britannic Majesty’s regiments was being shot to pieces by guerrilla gangs of rough-riding, sharpshooting farmers.”

“But evidently, you made it over to the northern bank.”