I slept well in the census hut, lulled by the bourbon, no doubt, and oblivious to the many rustlings, scurryings and crepitations that emanated from the farther reaches of the long room. The place was full of lizards, and something-I hoped it was a squirrel-was living in the ceiling space. Before I fell asleep I heard the tick and scratch of sharp claws on the plasterboard as it scampered to and fro, to and fro above my head.

I was wakened by Joo's knock at six in the morning. We went to the canteen for some tea and to collect my packed lunch. Joo said he hadn't seen Liceu for a few days-he was very upset at the sacking, and had gone away. I suggested that whenever he came back we should meet up.

As we crossed the Danube I broke the bad news to Joo about the loss of my field notes and journal.

"A whole year," I said, ruefully. Now that I was heading out to work, the loss was suddenly painful. "We'll just have to start again."

"Well, I don't think is necessary," Joo said, trying not to smile. "I have my own notes. Plenty. Every night make Alda copy. For his training. You know he is not so good for writing."

"From the time I came? Everything?"

"Just the daily journal." He shrugged. "Of course, some days I am not with you."

"But I was either with you, or Alda...and Alda has his notes?"

"Oh yes. I check him every night."

I let the smile grow on my face. "I'll come and get them," I said. "Tonight."

"Of course." He was very pleased with himself. "So nothing is waste."

"What would I do without you, Joo?"

He laughed at me, averting his face and making a tight wheezing sound. I clapped him on the shoulder.

"Well done, Joo," I said. "We're going to be famous."

We came to a junction in the path. Back to work.

"All right," I said. "Where do we start?"

"Ow." Joo smacked a palm against his forehead. "I forgot. Lena and her baby, I saw her. She have a boy."

"Let's go and find her."

We found Lena at midday with a few other members of the southern group. They were resting in the shade of an ironwood tree. Lena was nursing her new baby and around her lounged Mr. Jeb, Conrad, and Rita-Lu. There was no sign of Clovis, Rita-Mae, Lester and Muffin.

Joo and I approached a little closer than usual, settling down only thirty feet or so from Lena. Her baby was almost hairless, and blue-black in color. Conrad was grooming Mr. Jeb, but I noticed from his regular glances toward Lena that he was clearly fascinated by the baby. Rita-Lu lay idly in the grass. She looked half asleep. I noticed a fresher pinkness on her rump and possibly some signs of swelling.

"We need a name," Joo said softly, "for the baby."

I thought for a while. "Bobo," I said, finally. I had no idea why. Joo wrote it down on his record sheet: "Bobo, male, son of Lena."

Conrad stopped grooming Mr. Jeb and slowly made his way over to Lena. She was leaning back against the trunk of the ironwood tree. Bobo clung feebly to the hair on her belly-through my binoculars I could see his tiny fists clutching tufts of fur-and sucked hungrily on her right nipple. Conrad moved closer, and Lena gave a small bark of warning.

Conrad sat down a few feet away and gazed at them both. Then, with Lena watching him intently, he reached forward very slowly across the gap between them and touched Bobo's back. I had always assumed that Clovis had impregnated Lena, but now I had a funny feeling that Conrad might be Bobo's father. Then Lena got up and moved away from him. I saw that the placenta was still hanging from her and the black loop of the umbilical cord was still connected to Bobo.

I shifted my position slightly and the noise I made caused Conrad to turn and look at me. With his white sclerotics, Conrad's gaze was always the most disturbing I had ever received from a chimpanzee. The whites around the brown iris made his eyes as meaningful as any human's. I looked at his black muzzle, the wide thin slit of his mouth and his heavy brows...he always seemed to be frowning. Conrad, a rather solemn and dignified character, not given to displays of frivolity. He came toward me a few paces and made some pant-hoots. Then he sat down and stared at me for a full minute, unswervingly. I looked into his eyes for a second or two, and then turned away.

Then, in the distance, I heard more hooting and barking. The other chimps hooted in response. Soon a crashing of branches heralded Clovis's arrival, followed by Rita-Mae, Lester and Muffin. Like Conrad, Clovis was very curious about Bobo, but Lena would not let him come close, barking and grimacing and even, at one stage, climbing into the ironwood tree. Clovis gave up and moved away. However, when Rita-Mae approached, Lena was much less anxious, even going so far as to lay Bobo down in the grass. Rita-Mae peered closely at him, seemingly fascinated, and stroked him gently once or twice. Then Lena gathered him up and moved away again to the periphery of the group.

After resting in this way for a couple of hours the chimpanzees roused themselves and moved off northward, Joo and I following behind. They halted at a fig tree above the banks of the Danube, where the river cut a deep ravine through the foothills of the escarpment. We watched them feed for a while. I watched Rita-Lu repeatedly touching her genital area and sniffing at her finger. She was coming into season.

That evening I walked down the track into Sangui to collect all Joo and Alda's field notes. Joo had said that he hoped Liceu might be there.

Joo's house was one of the largest in the village, and one of the few to be made of concrete. He was sitting on the narrow veranda with a small baby on his knee. He told me this was his third granddaughter. I took the baby while he went to collect the papers. She was naked, fat, and almost asleep, drugged by her feed. She had small gold earrings in her long, soft lobes and around her hips was a string of tiny multicolored beads. Her belly button was a small hard dome, the size of a thimble. I stroked her hair and thought of Lena and Bobo.

Joo came back with his wife, Doneta, who relieved me of her grandchild. Joo had a great bundle of papers, mainly copies of the daily analysis sheets. He turned up the light on the veranda lantern and I quickly sifted through them.

"Is this everything?" I asked him.

"Even today's follow," he said.

This was ideal. "Is Liceu coming?" I asked. I was keen to get back home with this material.

"He is already here. Liceu!" he called into the darkness of the compound. After a moment's pause, Liceu stepped uneasily into the circle of light cast by the lantern. Liceu was a teenager, about sixteen or seventeen, a constantly grinning, rather gormless boy who had wanted desperately to be a field assistant but who had neither the aptitude nor the patience. He came forward reluctantly, his face heavy with hurt and resentment, and started immediately and with belligerent conviction to protest his innocence. I let him go on for a while and began to piece together his version of events.

He had been tidying my tent, he said, and he had taken my dirty clothes to the camp laundry to be washed. He had been sitting chatting in the cooks' compound when he had heard a commotion and run out to find the tent well ablaze. No, he said, he had not seen any sign of Mr. Hauser or Mr. Mallabar. He had no idea how the fire started.

Doneta brought us all mugs of sweet tea. I lit a cigarette and offered one to Joo. He accepted. Liceu was still fulminating at the injustice of his dismissal in an unpleasant droning way when I casually offered him the pack. He said at once, "No thank you, Mam," and carried on talking. Two seconds later he stopped, realized what I had done to him, and looked at me accusingly.

"Ah, Mam, you know I don' never smoke." He sucked air disapprovingly through his teeth. He spread his hands. "Tell her that, Joo."

Joo confirmed this. I reassured Liceu, and apologized for testing him in that way. If I had not known it before, I did now: the fire in my tent was not the result of one of Liceu's cigarette butts.

Later, I walked back alone up the track to Grosso Arvore, hefting a thick bundle of daily field records under my arm. The oval pool of light from my torch shone four feet ahead on the ground as I searched for snakes and scorpions, its beam freckled with dancing night insects. I wasn't entirely sure what I was going to do with all this data, to tell the truth, but it seemed to me clear that if Mallabar and Hauser wanted my records destroyed, then it would be prudent for me to try and reproduce some copy of my own research, however patchy. Something Roberta had said also nagged at me: if Ginga had delayed publication of the book for a year, did that imply that its publication was now imminent? And could that explain the panic and unseemly coverup of the dead baby chimp? Also, all this talk about money was intriguing. Mallabar had been made wealthy by his work at Grosso Arvore; I wondered how much he would receive around the world for the successor to The Peaceful Primate and Primate's Progress?

I sat up late that night in the census hut analyzing and summarizing the information in Joo's and Alda's field records. To be secure, I really required copies of all these, but the nearest photocopiers were a six-hour drive away.... Perhaps I could volunteer to do next week's provisioning run again? I smiled to myself. Usman would be very surprised.

Around midnight I came to the final days' notes. There was Joo's sighting of Lena and her new baby.... I turned the page: here, Alda had seen six unidentified male chimpanzees in southern territory. I frowned-they must have been northerners. I checked the map references. According to Alda's estimations they were well south of the Danube.

I stood up and paced around the census hut. This was most unusual. Since the community split no northern chimps had ever traveled that far south...I yawned, went back to my desk and tidied up my papers. I wondered if Ian Vail had noticed this migration; if it was temporary, or if the little band of northerners was still in the south?

I undressed, went to bed and forgot about it. That night I dreamed of Hauser, emerging naked from his shower stall and scampering across the grass to my tent with a box of matches in his hand. He struck match after match and held them to the canvas in vain. Then suddenly Mallabar appeared, unzipped his fly, and pissed on the side. His urine ignited like blazing gasoline and soon the tent was burning fiercely. Then with horrible squeals Lena fled from it, Bobo clutched to her belly, her placenta bouncing and dragging on the ground behind her....

I remembered this dream vividly the next morning and wondered vaguely what my unconscious was trying to convey: Hauser could barely strike a light, while Mallabar pissed like a flamethrower. It made no sense to me.

When Joo arrived he said he felt ill-a fever, he said. I sent him home. I picked up my provisions from the canteen and headed south to look for Lena and Bobo. I found them toward midmorning, with all the other members of the southern group present, at the half-dead fig tree. I noticed that Lena's placenta had dropped free in the night and that only six inches of dry, shriveled umbilical cord hung from Bobo's hairless belly. Rita-Lu's sexual swelling had also grown and both Mr. Jeb and Clovis were intensely interested in it, sniffing and inspecting her genital area whenever possible. Mr. Jeb even squatted down and presented his spiky erection to her, but she screamed at him and he scampered off promptly. The males generally seemed less curious about Bobo today, but Rita-Mae and Rita-Lu constantly approached Lena and her son. Lena was cautious, but she allowed them to hunch over the baby, peering at him and touching him gently from time to time with their fingers.

I took up my position and observed them for almost three hours. My head was full of suppositions and hypotheses about the fire, and the possible role played in it by Mallabar or Hauser. I had temporarily hidden the field notes beneath the mattress of my bed, but the census hut was not well blessed with hiding places and I realized, on reflection, that beneath the mattress was the first place anyone would search. I wondered whether I would be wiser leaving them with Joo until I had had copies made, but couldn't decide. All the time, I asked myself, fruitlessly, what on earth was going on.

Then I heard a warning bark that snapped me out of my circling speculations. I looked up. Lena, holding Bobo to her, was now sitting in a low branch of the fig tree. Rita-Lu was approaching her, on the ground, one hand held out. Behind Lena, I saw Rita-Mae climbing higher in the tree. Lena bared her teeth at Rita-Lu. I wondered what I had missed, the mood was now so clearly tense and hostile. Rita-Lu persisted, arm held out, inching closer, as if she wanted to pet Bobo. Lena screamed furiously at her, the noise shrill and ragged, and stood up on the branch, as if she were about to jump to the ground and run off. But before she could move further, Rita-Mae swung down through the branches of the tree above her and threw herself onto Lena's back. All three fell six feet to the ground.

At this commotion, the other chimps began to scream and display but none intervened in the fight. As Lena hit the ground, still clutching Bobo, Rita-Lu immediately grabbed her free arm and sank her teeth into her hand, working her jaws violently, chewing on the flesh of her palm. Lena screamed in agony, and with rapid jerking movements tried to pull her hand free. Rita-Lu hung on and I saw Lena's blood falling from the sides of her mouth as her head was jerked to and fro. Meanwhile, Rita-Mae had leapt on Lena's back again and was trying to rip Bobo from his mother's grasp. Then she backed off and lunged and snapped at Lena's rear, her teeth gashing her bare rump badly.

At this new attack, Lena dropped Bobo, her head arched back in a shriek of pain. She whirled round and leapt on Rita-Mae, snapping and punching with her fists. Rita-Lu immediately seized the baby and climbed with it up into the tree. Lena tore herself away from Rita-Mae and raced after her child. She bit Rita-Lu on the shoulder and tore Bobo away from her. Now Lena had Bobo, but Rita-Mae was in the tree beneath her and was snapping and biting at her feet while Rita-Lu, above her, repeatedly hit her about the head and shoulders with her hands. Lena held one arm above her head to protect herself. Rita-Mae, with a sudden lunging movement, grabbed Bobo and shimmied down the tree to the ground with the baby, while Rita-Lu kept up the attack.

Bobo was making a shrill keening sound, his thin arms batting the air uselessly. Rita-Mae bounded away from the tree, holding him out at arms' length with one hand. Then she squatted on a rock and drew him into her breast as if she were going to cuddle him.

It was at that moment that I knew what she was about to do. I screamed at her: "Rita-Mae! Rita-Mae!" But I was just another sound in the cacophony of sounds, and she didn't hear me, or was not bothered by my desperate shouts. Bobo wriggled and squirmed in her grasp, then Rita-Mae hunched forward and bit strongly into his forehead. I heard a distinct cracking sound as the frail skull was crushed by her teeth.

Bobo died instantly. At this, Rita-Lu immediately broke off the fight with Lena, retreating higher into the fig tree. Lena lowered herself slowly to the ground, exhausted and bleeding from the bad wounds on her hand and rump. The noise subsided.

I looked round. Rita-Mae was eating Bobo. She tore into his belly and pulled out his entrails with her teeth. She flung his guts away onto the rocks. Rita-Lu, meanwhile, climbed out of the tree, circled round Lena-who started to scream, loudly and monotonously-and rejoined her mother. They both fed on Bobo's body while Lena screamed vainly at them. Then, abruptly, she stopped. She seemed to lose all interest; all her outrage disappeared. She gathered up some leaves and dabbed at the wound on her rump with them.

Rita-Mae and Rita-Lu continued to eat the baby. Lester came up to his mother but she pushed him away vigorously. The other chimps also seemed to grow indifferent to what was going on. Only Lena kept staring at Rita-Mae and Rita-Lu. Then she left the tree and made her way over the rocks toward them. She stopped about six feet away, and watched them silently as they ate her dead baby. Then she began to whimper and extended her hand. At first Rita-Mae ignored this gesture. Lena circled around the two of them. She found a fragment of Bobo's entrails on a rock, picked it up, sniffed it and let it fall. She whimpered again. Rita-Mae dropped Bobo's body and went toward her. Lena whimpered submissively. Rita-Mae embraced her, holding her in her arms for a full minute. Then she released her and returned to the baby's corpse. Lena sat and watched Rita-Mae and Rita-Lu for the rest of the afternoon as they fed idly on the body. At dusk, when they moved off to their nesting site, Rita-Mae draped the shreds of Bobo's body over her shoulders like a scarf.

Mallabar's face remained still and emotionless as I told him what I had seen. We were in the census hut, alone; the evening meal was over. I sat on the bed, he sat by the desk. I finished talking. He looked down; I could see his jaw muscles working busily beneath his neat beard.

"Was the field observer with you?" he asked, formally.

"No. He was ill so I sent him home."

"So there was no other witness."

"For God's sake, I'm not on trial. I saw-"

"I'm sorry, Hope," he interrupted me. "Deeply sorry that you should feel this way."

"Feel what way? What're you talking about?"

"I'm prepared, just this once, to accept that the shock of the fire and the loss of a year's research may explain this...this fantastical story."

He looked at me, his face full of concern. I said nothing.

"On a personal level," he went on, "I can only record my deep hurt that you should feel such resentment and bitterness toward us here, your friends and colleagues. And whatever you may think, we are your friends." He stood up. "You've changed, Hope."

"Good."

"No, it's not. And I'm sorry for you."

This made me mad, but he started speaking again before I could interrupt.

"I'll overlook this now," he said, "but I must warn you that if you persist in these fabrications, if you repeat them to anyone outside this room, I will have to terminate your employment here, immediately." He paused. "As for myself, I won't speak of this to anyone. At all."

"I see."

"Do you understand?"

"I understand everything."

"Then you're a shrewd person, Hope. So please don't let this foolishness continue." He stopped at the door. "We won't talk about this again," he said, and left.

I worked hard that night. By the time I went to bed I had most of my article drafted out. I was pleased with my title too: Infanticide and Cannibalism Amongst the Wild Chimpanzees of the Grosso Arvore Project. The peaceful primate's days were over.

FERMAT'S LAST THEOREM Peano Curve. The Weierstrass Function. The Cauchy Condition. L'Hopital's Rule. A Mbius Strip. Goldbach's Conjecture. Pascal's Triangle. Poincare Map. The Fourier Series. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. A Cantor Dust. A Bolzano Paradox. A Julia Set. Riemann's Hypothesis. And my favorite: Fermat's Last Theorem.

What are these things?...Why am I so curious about them?...What is it about these names, these oddly poetic appellations, that is so beguiling and fascinating? I want to know about them, understand them, find out what they do, what they imply.

And this, I suppose, is every mathematician's secret dream. To have a function, a number, an axiom, a hypothesis named after you.... It must be like being an explorer on a virgin continent, naming mountains, rivers, lakes and islands. Or a doctor: to have a disease, a condition, a syndrome called after you. There you are on civilization's intellectual map. Forever.

Fermat's Last Theorem.

Now, bear with me. I love the ring of this one, it sounds so good. Let's see what we can make of it. (I found it hard too: formulae have a narcoleptic effect on my brain, but I think I've got it right.) Take this simple formula: x2 + y2 = z2. Make the letters numbers. Say: 32 + 42 = 52. All further numbers proportional to these will fit the formula. For example: 92 + 122 = 152. Or, taking the proportionality downward: 122 + 52 = 132. Intriguing, no? Another example of the curious magic, the severe grace, of numbers.

Along comes Pierre Fermat in the seventeenth century, a civil servant whose bobby was mathematics. He wondered if this same proportionality would apply if you raised the power above two. What if you cubed the numbers? Would x3 + y3 = z3? The answer was no. It never worked, no matter how high be raised the power. So be produced his notorious Last Theorem. THERE ARE NO POSITIVE WHOLE NUMBERS, WHATEVER, WHERE 'N' EXCEEDS TWO, SUCH THAT Xn + Yn = Zn.

For four hundred years no one has been able to prove or disprove Fermat's Last Theorem, and they have checked every power of 'n' from 3 to 125,000. Intriguingly, Fermat himself said at the end of his life that he had a proof, though it was never found when his papers were searched after his death. What I like about Fermat's Last Theorem is that it remains one of those conjectures about the world which are almost indubitably true, that no one would ever deny, but which, in the final analysis, we can't actually, physically prove.

Hope trudged across the dewy field toward the hedgerow. It was eight in the morning and a gray mist off the sea lay over the downlands that stretched along the coast in this part of Dorset. She checked her map to make sure she was in the right place and veered over to a corner of the field. Reaching the hedge, she hooked the end of her tape measure over a protruding hawthorn twig and unreeled the tape for thirty meters. The hedge was thick, perhaps six feet across at its base, and was growing on a small bank. At first glance it looked like an ancient hedgerow to her, in which case, she reflected, it should conform to her dating theory. She walked slowly along its length. Predominantly hawthorn, but there was a fair amount of elder and blackthorn mixed in there too. On closer inspection she found some field maple, dogwood and, just within the thirty meter sample area, a small patch of holly. She noted this all down on the map and in her record book. Six species in thirty meters: according to the theory this hedge had been here for approximately six hundred years. She took a small sample of the soil for the geologist and then made another quick search for brambles, but there were none in this section. She sat down on a stile and wrote it all up.

The survey of the Knap estate was well advanced. Much of the archaeological work was already completed: the ancient barrows, the deer enclosure, the Celtic field systems, had all been thoroughly examined, mapped and described. The ecologist who had done the initial work on the hedgerows and woodland had resigned for some reason-hence the job vacancy-but Hope had found so many inaccuracies and inconsistencies in his estimates that she had told Munro she would have to start again from scratch. It meant that she had much more work to do than she had been contracted for, but it kept her busy, and for that she was grateful.

Her own approach to the problem of dating was based on a simple formula she had devised, namely, one shrub species in a hedge equaled a hundred years. She made many trial counts on hedgerows whose age was known (the earliest detailed map of the estate was dated 1565) and her method had proved to be surprisingly accurate, with an insignificant margin of error. So she had set about dating all the unmapped hedgerows with some confidence, and already she had discovered that there were many more medieval hedgerows than had hitherto been imagined. Feudal and Saxon field systems were revealed where previously eighteenth-century enclosure fields had been believed to exist. The landscape history of the estate was far more complex and thorough than had been envisaged. As a result of her efforts, one hundred and forty-seven new hedgerows had been classified as level one. In conservational parlance, they were of ancient and abiding historical interest and to be preserved at all costs.

To her vague surprise, Hope found she was thoroughly caught up in her work, in a way she would not have imagined possible. Sure, it was routine and methodical, but there was a profound satisfaction in that routine and method when it allowed her to draw clear and irrefutable conclusions.

Another bonus was that she was out of doors all the daylight hours, walking the downlands and the fields in all weathers. In the weeks she had been there, she had lost weight-almost fourteen pounds-and she felt markedly fitter. Now she had almost finished classifying the estate's hedgerows and Munro was encouraging her to move swiftly on to the many woods and coppices.

She was keen to do so. She had forgotten this facet of her personality: the dogged application of, an exultation in, her expertise. This was what she had trained herself to do; this was why she was educated. Problems were presented to her and she found a way to solve them. It was a feature of her character that, when it was not required or employed, she somehow forgot. It did not feature in her private conception of herself. The fanciful, wishful version of Hope Clearwater tended to downplay the professional scientist in her.

Now she was working again she enjoyed and savored the unrelenting rigor of her approach to her task, the unswerving persistence of her routine and the evident success of her experimentation. In her work she was achieving something irrefutably concrete. However recondite, however parochial, she was adding a few grains of sand to that vast hill that was the sum of human knowledge. She was discovering aspects of the English landscape that were unknown or hidden; and what pleased her most was that she could prove she was right. As her steady documentation of the estate increased and as the maps were redrawn and dates corrected she developed a quiet but strong pride in her abilities. Her latent self-confidence-never far below the surface-re-emerged into the clear light of day again.

Munro was pleased, and said so. But he had other priorities, largely directed by the need to complete the project on schedule. Hope was stubbornly resisting his attempts to hurry her along, as she had developed another dating theory that was even more precise and she was impatient to try it. Munro was not so enthusiastic, as it might mean more delay. Her theory was that the number of bramble subspecies in a hedge would follow the same pattern as shrub types, and she had proved the efficacy of the method to Munro very neatly one day, in an attempt to make him vote her more funds. (With a few assistants she could cover the entire estate in two months, she reckoned.) Munro was impressed but as yet undecided. He would see if there was any chance of hiring an assistant or two, he said, but he reminded her that the estate had fifty-three named woods and coppices and all but twelve of them were dateless.

She left the field and set off down a farm track toward Coombe Herring, a small village on the estate. There was a long ditch and bank there that ran up to the edge of the village that the project's archaeologist had classified as part of the enclosure of an early seventeenth-century deer park. There was a problem in dating the hedge on the bank as it was almost entirely hawthorn. Out of curiosity Hope had done a bramble test on it and it had turned up a count of ten subspecies. She felt sure, as a result of this, that the ditch and bank belonged to a construction that was significantly older than the deer park-an old parish or manor boundary perhaps, or even a barrow mound. When she put this supposition to the archaeologist-a lean-jawed, pale-faced man called Winfrith-he had almost lost his temper with her. He reminded her that he had spent months plotting and reconstructing the configuration of the deer park, and he informed her that he had no intention of redrawing his maps because of a "bunch of brambles." She planned to take several more examples from thirty-meter sections and confound him with the evidence.

She walked through the small village and up a sunken drove road that rounded a hill and eventually led on to East Knap, the village where she was living. It was a cool day, even for September, with a fresh east wind and the sky low and dense with packed clouds. She climbed up the bank off the road, went over a stile and cut through a small wood of coppiced hazel to the disputed bank and ditch.

She measured out her first thirty-meter section and with a pair of secateurs began to collect samples of the profusion of brambles that grew amongst the hawthorn. She worked steadily and carefully, placing the samples in plastic bags and labeling them. The wind stirred her hair, and her nostrils were full of the scent of earth and leaf mold disturbed by her feet and the dusty green smell of the hedge.

She picked a bramble berry and ate it, her mouth full of its winey, sour taste. She could hear birds singing and the restless thrash of the hedgerow elms above her being hustled and bothered by the wind. Through the gaps in the hawthorn she could make out the gentle rise of the coastal downs and sense, rather than see, the chill of the Channel beyond. Behind her back the landscape of Dorset unfolded. Its gentle hills, its fields and woods, the shallow valleys with their farmsteads and villages. Her mind was calm and full of her task and all her senses were stimulated as she crouched at the foot of a hawthorn hedge in a landscape she had come to know as intimately as any in her life. No wonder she loved her work, she thought, no wonder-she added guiltily-she hardly ever thought of John.

The project office was in the stable block of Knap House, a long attic room above a row of loose boxes. Every Friday there was a meeting to report on the individual progress of each project worker. Munro chaired it, invariably diplomatic and mild. Hope arrived a little late to find Munro and Winfrith waiting for her. She gave Munro, a soil geologist, the soil samples she had taken that day and sat down at the round table. Winfrith had motored in for the meeting from Exeter where he spent most of his time these days working with the project's historian, a woman called Mrs. Bruton-Cross, whom Hope had met infrequently. These were her three colleagues, but she dealt mainly with Munro, who supervised and collated all their respective efforts. To all intents and purposes she worked on her own from Monday to Friday. Munro would telephone her in the evenings if he had anything of note to import.

The meeting lasted its usual half hour and Winfrith left at once for Exeter. Munro made her another cup of coffee.

"Here Saturday, Hope?" he asked her. "Marjorie and I were wondering if you'd like to-"

"Sorry. Going up to London, I'm afraid," she said quickly, trying to keep the relief out of her voice. She had had one dinner with Graham and Marjorie Munro in their little cottage in West Lulworth and that had been sufficient. It had proved to be an eternity of strained conversation and wineless food. The one small sherry she had been offered-and had consumed-before dinner had turned out to be the solitary alcoholic component of the evening's entertainment. As she ate her way through Marjorie's special casserole (recipe happily provided if requested), Hope had been seized by such a craving for booze that she made an excuse (flu coming on) and had left before coffee, making straight for the nearest pub before it shut.

"Shame," Munro said, genuinely. "Marjorie was looking forward to meeting John."

"Oh, he'll be down again," Hope said vaguely. "I'll give you plenty of warning."

"Say hello to the Big Smoke for me," Munro said.

"What?"