“There was no sign of life, apart from the three horses and a pack mule that stood quietly whisking their tails, sharing the shade of the tree with the cabin. Two of the horses were small, wiry Boer nags; the other was a big rangy black. A good horse. As good as you’d find on an English hunting field.”

“Three men inside?”

“Is what I reckoned. Well, two Boers and whoever had been riding the black. We took our time. Made our plans. Circled the cabin and kept our heads down. We’d gotten very good at moving stealthily. Men whose feet have tramped miles avoiding anthills, snakes, scorpions, decaying corpses and entrenched Boer and lived to tell the tale, have learned where to place those feet.”

“The horses didn’t detect you?”

“Of course they detected us!” He grinned. “But a carefully calculated—by us!—five minutes after they’d made a hullabaloo when a pack of jackals decided to come into the reserve on the scrounge. We timed it well! An elderly Boer with a beard down to his chest and hair to his shoulders had come out shouting at them. He’d run off the jackals, quietened the horses and gone back inside to resume his quarrel with his mates. We’d heard raised voices, vicious voices, made out the occasional Boer word, even a laugh or two but the structure of the little building was pretty stout and not much of use had filtered through the walls. Chasing the jackals was probably the most exciting thing that had happened in the old feller’s day. He must have been just picking up his argument when the horses caught a whiff of us. He came out again with an even shorter fuse, assuming the jackals had sneaked back, and gave the nags a telling off. They settled down. And we settled down and waited for teatime.”

“Teatime?”

“Their teatime, not ours. In fact, they brewed up coffee for themselves. They always waited for the sun to lower before they got busy. We’d counted on them putting the kettle on and coming down to the river for a wash or a swim before dressing for dinner.

“The old feller came out first. He had a pee into the river, then started to take his shirt off. The moment it was up over his eyes, a khaki-camouflaged shape whipped out of the bush where he’d been going to hang it; thumbs found his neck and squeezed the life out of him in ten seconds. Our instructor would have been proud of the technique! The bloke never caught sight of his assailant: Lieutenant Abel Hardy at his most efficient. Abel pushed the body into the river and it swirled away.