"All right, my boy, I accept your conditions. Both sets will be yours one day, and until then you can read them whenever you wish to."

Jonathan had seldom been so pleased with a bargain. He had completed his sets after thirty years, and if the boy was serious about reading them, he had found a good home for them. The Lord knew, neither Douglas nor Roland was interested, and in the meantime perhaps the journals might draw Craig back to King's Lynn more often. He wrote out the cheque and signed it with a flourish, while Craig went out to the Land-Rover and dug the three leather-bound manuscripts from the bottom of his kit bag

"I suppose you will spend it all on that boat," Jonathan accused as he came in from the veranda.

"Some of it," Craig admitted. He placed the books in front of the old man.

"You are a dreamer." Jonathan slid the cheque across the desk.

"Sometimes I prefer dreams to reality." Craig scrutinized the figures briefly, then buttoned the pink cheque into his top pocket.

"That's your trouble," said Jonathan.

"Bawu, if you start lecturing me, I'm going to head straight back to town." Jonathan held up both hands in capitulation. "All right," he chuckled. "Your old room is the way you left it, if you want to use it." "I have an appointment with the police recruiting officer on Monday, but I'll stay the weekend, if that's okay?" "I'll ring Trevor this evening and fix the interview." Trevor Pennington was the assistant commissioner of police. Jonathan believed in starting at the top.

"I wish you wouldn't, jon jon "Don't be daft, "Jonathan snapped.

"You must LeaRN to use every advantage, my boy, that's the way life works." Jonathan- picked up the first of the three volumes of manuscript and gloatingly stroked it with his gnarled brown fingers.

"Now, you can leave me alone for a while, "he ordered, as he unfolded his wire-framed reading-glasses and perched them on his nose.

"They are playing tennis across at Queen's Lynn, I will see you back here for sun downers Craig glanced back from the doorway, but Jonathan Ballantyne was hunched over the book, transported by the entries in yellow faded ink back to his childhood.

AltHough it shared a common seven-mile boundary with King's Lynn, Queen's Lynn was a separate ranch. Jonathan Ballantyne had added it to his holdings during the great depression of the 1930s, paying five cents on the dollar of its real worth. Now it formed the eastern spread of the Rholands Ranching Company.

It was the home of Jonathan's only surviving son, Douglas Ballantyne, and his wife Valerie. Douglas was the managing director of both Rholands and the Harkness Mine. He was also Minister of Agriculture in Ian Smith's UDI government, and with any luck he might be away on mysterious government or company business.

Douglas Ballantyne had once given Craig his honest appraisal. "At heart you are a bloody hippie, Craig, you should get your hair cut and start bracing up, you can't go on dawdling through life and expecting Bawu and the rest of the family to carry you for ever." Craig pulled a sour face at the memory as he drove down past the stockyards of Queen's Lynn, and smelled the ammonia cal tang of cow-dung.

The huge Afrikander beasts were a uniform deep chocolate red, the bulls hump-backed and with swinging dewlaps that almost brushed the earth. This breed had made Rhodesian beef almost as renowned as the marbled beef of Kobe. As Minister of Agriculture it was Douglas Ballantyne's. duty to see that, despite sanctions, the world was not deprived of this delicacy. The route that it took to the tables of the great restaurants of the world was via Johannesburg and Cape Town, where it perforce changed its name, but the connoisseurs recognized it and asked for it by its noyn de guerre, their taste-buds probably piqued by the knowledge that they were eating forbidden fruits.

Rhodesian tobacco and nickel and copper and gold all went out the same way, while petrol and diesel oil made the return trip. The popular bumper sticker said simply, "Thank you, South Africa." Beyond the stock-pens and veterinary block, once again protected by the diamond mesh and barbed-wire security fence, lay the green lawns and banks of flowering shrubs and the blazing Pride of India trees of the gardens of Queen's Lynn. The windows had been covered with grenade screens and the servants would drop steel bullet-proof shutters into their slots before sunset, but here the de fences had not been built with the same gusto as Bawu had shown at King's Lynn. They fitted unobtrusively into the gracious surroundings.

The lovely old house was very much as Craig remembered it from before the war, rosy red brick and wide cool verandas. The jacaranda trees that lined the long curved driveway were in full flower, like a mist bank of pale ethereal blue, and there were at least two dozen cars parked beneath them, Mercedes and jaguars, Cadillacs and BMWs, their paintwork hazed with the red dust of Matabeleland. Craig concealed his venerable Land-Rover behind the tumble of red and purple bougainvillaea creeper, so as not to lower the tone of a Queen's Lynn Saturday. From habit he slung an FN rifle over his shoulder and wandered around the side of the house. from ahead there came the sound of children's voices, gay as songbirds, and the genial scolding of their black nannies, punctuated by the sharp "Pock! Pock!" of a long rally from the tennis courts.

Craig paused at the head of the terraced lawns. Children spilled and tumbled and chased each other in circles like puppies over the green grass. Nearer the yellow clay courts, their parents sprawled on spread rugs or sat at the shaded white tea-tables, under the brightly coloured umbrellas. They were bronzed young men and women in tennis whites, sipping tea or drinking beer from tall frosted glasses, calling ribald comment and advice to the players upon the courts. The only incongruous note was the row of machine pistols and automatic rifles beside the silver tea set and cream scones.

Someone recognized Craig and shouted, "Hi Craig, long time no see," and others waved, but there was just that faint edge of condescension in their manner reserved for the poor relative. These were the families with great estates, a closed club of the wealthy in which, for all their geniality, Craig would never have full membership.

Valerie Ballantyne came to meet him, slim-hipped and girlishly graceful in her short white tennis skirt. "Craig, you are as thin as a bean pole." He always brought out the maternal instincts in any female between eight and eighty. "Hello, Aunty Val." She offered him a smooth cheek that smelled of violets. Despite her delicate air, Valerie was president of the Women's Institute,served on the committees of a dozen schools, charities and hospitals, and was a gracious, accomplished hostess.

"Uncle Douglas is in Salisbury. Smithy sent for him yesterday.

He will be sorry to have missed you." She took his arm. "How is the Game Department?" "It will probably survive without me." "Oh, no, Craig, not again!" "Fraid so, Aunty Val." He didn't really feel up to a discussion of his career at that moment. "Do you mind if I get myself a beer?" There was a group of men around the long trestle-table that did service as a bar. The group opened to let him in, but the conversation went straight back to a discussion of the latest raid that the Rhodesian security forces had made into Mozambique.

"I tell you, when we hit the camp, there was food still cooking on the fires, but they had run for it. We caught a few stragglers, but the others had been warned." "Bill is right, I had it from a colonel in intelligence, no names-no pack drill, but there is a bad security leak.

A traitor near the top, the terrs are getting up to twelve hours" warning." "We haven't had a really good kill since last August when we took six hundred." The eternal war talk bored Craig. He sipped his beer and watched the play on the nearest court.

It was mixed doubles, and at that moment they changed ends.

Roland Ballantyne came around the net with his arm around his partner's waist. He was laughing, and his teeth were startlingly white and even in the deep tan of his face. His eyes were that peculiar Ballantyne green, like creme de menthe in a crystal glass, and although he wore his hair short, it was thick and wavy, bleached to honey-gold by the sun.

He moved like a leopard, with a lazy gliding gait, and the superb physical condition that was a prerequisite of any member of the Scouts glossed the muscles of his forearms and bare legs. He was only a year older than Craig, but his assurance always made Craig feel gawky and callow in comparison. Craig had once heard a girl he admired, a young lady usually Was& and affectedly unimpressed, describe Roland Ballantyne as the most magnificent stud on show.

Now Roland saw him, and waved his racquet. "Don't be vague, call for Craig!" he greeted him across the court, and then said something inaudible to the girl beside him. She chuckled and looked at Craig.

Craig felt the shock begin in the pit of his stomach and ripple outwards like a stone dropped into a still pool. He stared at her, petrified, unable to drag his eyes off her face. She stopped laughing, and for a moment longer returned his gaze, then she broke out of the circle of Roland's arm and went to the baseline, bouncing the ball lightly off her racquet and Craig was certain that her cheeks had flushed a shade pinker than the game had previously rouged them.

Still he could not take his eyes off her. She was the most perfect thing he had ever seen. She was tall, she reached almost to Roland's shoulder and he was six one. Her hair was cropped into a glossy cap of curls, that changed colour as the sunlight played upon it, from the burnished iridescence of obsidian to the rich dark glow of a noble burgundy wine held to the candlelight.

Her face was squarish, with a firm, perhaps stubborn, line to the jaw, but her mouth was wide and tender and humorous. Her eyes were wide-spaced and slanted to such a degree that they seemed just a touch squint. It gave her a vulnerable appealing air, but when she glanced at Roland, they took on a wicked taunting glint.

"Let's blast them, pardner," she called, and the lift of her voice raised little goose bumps on Craig's forearms.

The girl turned her shoulders and hips away, tossed the yellow ball high as she went up on tiptoe and then swung back into the overhead stroke. The racquet sprang sharply and the ball blurred low across the net, and spurted white chalk from the centre line.

She crossed the court with quick dainty steps, and caught the return on the volley. She tucked it away in the corner, and then glanced at Craig.

"Shod" he called, his voice ringing hollowly in his own ears, and a little satisfied smile puckered the corner of her mouth.

She turned away and stooped to recover a loose ball. Her back was turned towards Craig, her feet slightly apart and she did not bend her knees. Her legs were long and shapely, and as her short pleated skirt popped up, he had a fleeting glimpse of thin lacy panties and the buttocks in them so neat and hard and symmetrical that he was reminded of a pair of ostrich eggs gleaming in the Kalahari sunlight.

Craig dropped his eyes guiltily as if he had played the peeping Tom. He felt light-headed and strangely breathless. He forced himself not to look back at the court, but his heart was pounding as though he had just run a crosscountry, and the conversation around him seemed to be in a foreign language, relayed through a faulty transmitter. It did not make sense.

It seemed hours later that a hard muscular arm was thrown around his shoulders, and Roland's voice in his ear.

"You're looking well, old son." At last Craig allowed himself to look around.

"The terrs haven't caught you yet, Roly?" "No way, Sonny, "Roland hugged him. "Let me introduce you to a girl who loves me." Only Roland could make a remark like that sound witty and sophisticated. "This is Bugsy. Bugsy, this is my favourite cousin, Craig, the well-known sex maniac." "Bugsy?" Craig looked into those strangely tilted eyes. "It doesn't suit you." He realized that they were not black, but a dark indigo blue.

Janine," she said. "Janine Carpenter." She held out her hand. It was slim and warm and moist from the game. He did not want to release it.

"I warned you," Roland laughed. "Stop molesting the girl and come and have a set with me, Sonny." "I haven't got togs." "All you need is shoes. We are the same size, I'll send a servant for a spare pair." raig hadn't played for over a year. The lay-off seemed to have worked wonders. He had never played so well. The ball came off the sweet spot of his racquet so fast and clean that it felt as though he had clean missed it, and the top-spin pulled it down onto the baseline as though it were a magnet.

Effortlessly, he passed Roland on either side, and then dropped the ball so short that it left him stranded in mid court He hit first-time serves that nicked the line, and returned shots that usually he would not have bothered to chase, then he rushed the net and slaughtered Roland's best forehand.

He was loving it, so involved with the marvelous unaccustomed sense of power and of his own invincibility, that he had not even noticed that the stream of Roland Ballantyne's easy banter had long ago dried up until he won another game and Roland said, "Five games to love." Something in his tone reached Craig at last, and for the first time since they had begun playing, he really looked at Roland's face.

It was a swollen ugly red. His jaw clenched so that there were lumps of muscle below his ears. His eyes were murderous green, and he was dangerous as a wounded leopard.

Craig looked away from him as they changed sides and he saw that their game had fascinated everybody. Even the older women had left the tea-tables and come down to the fence. He saw Aunty Val, with a nervous little smile on her lips. From hard experience, she recognized her son's mood.

Craig saw the sniggering smiles on the faces of the men. Roland had won his tennis half-blue at Oxford, and he had been Matabeleland singles champion three years running. They were enjoying this as much as Craig had been up until then.

Suddenly Craig felt appalled at his own success. He had never beaten Roland at anything, not a single contest of any sort, not even monopoly nor darts, not once in twenty nine years. The elasticity and strength went out of his legs, and he stood on the baseline, just a long-legged gangling boy again, dressed in faded khaki shorts and worn tennis shoes without socks. He gulped miserably, pushed the hair out of his eyes, and crouched to receive service.

Across the net Roland Ballantyne was a tall athletic figure. He glared at Craig. Craig knew he was not seeing him, he was seeing an adversary, something to be destroyed.