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meant postponing this visit or perhaps sacrificing it altogether, then it would have been the police who would have found that gun — and without her fingerprints on it. And if she had given them what little information she could, it might have helped them to get on the track of the real criminal at once, instead of wasting time trying to trace her.
    She had, thought Dany with bleak honesty, been selfish and cowardly and deplorably gullible. She had obstructed justice and played a murderer’s game for him, and she wondered how long it would take the police to find out that Mr Honeywood’s visitor had been a Miss Dany Ashton if she did not write and tell them so herself? Perhaps they would never find out. Perhaps, after all, it would be better to say nothing at all — having let things get this far. Could she get a jail sentence for having used someone else’s passport, in addition to one for having obstructed justice? Yet she had only wanted to see Zanzibar. Zanzibar and Kivulimi …
    Lorraine had sent her some photographs of Kivulimi two years ago. They had arrived on a cold, wet, depressing afternoon in November, and brought a breath of magic into Aunt Harriet’s stolidly unromantic house. ‘There are jacarandas in the garden,’ Lorraine had written, ‘and mangoes and frangi-pani and flamboyants, and any amount of orange trees, and they smell heavenly and keep the place nice and cool. I suppose that’s where it gets its name from. “Kivulimi” means “The House of Shade”.’
    Dany put away the writing paper and pen and returned the attaché case to the rack. It was all too difficult, and she would wait until she could make a clean breast of it to Lorraine and Tyson. Lorraine would think it was all thrilling, and Tyson would probably be furious. But they would take charge of the whole problem, and know what to do.
    She sat down again, feeling cold and forlorn and more than a little ashamed of herself. If only Lash would wake up! But Mr Holden did not look as though he intended to wake up for anything short of the Last Trump, and Dany found herself regarding him with increasing hostility.
    It was, she decided suddenly, all Lash’s fault. If it had not been for him — him and that ridiculous stuffed cat! ‘Asbestos’ indeed!
    A fragrant breath of Diorissimo competed triumphantly with the smell of cigarette smoke, antiseptics and upholstery, and Dany became aware that Mr Holden’s pleasant profile was silhouetted against a background of lime-green linen.
    Amalfi Gordon was standing beside him in the aisle, looking down at his unconscious form with a faint frown and an expression that was a curious mixture of speculation, doubt and annoyance. In the shadow of the drawn blind, and with the light behind her, she looked blonder and lovelier than ever, and it was impossible to believe that she must be a good deal nearer forty than thirty, and had been at school with one’s own mother.
    She lifted a pair of long, gilt-tipped lashes that were undoubtedly genuine, and glanced at Dany with the unseeing and entirely uninterested look that some women bestow on servants, and the majority of beautiful women accord to their plain or unattractive sisters.
    It was a look that aroused a sudden sharp antagonism in Dany, and perhaps it showed in her face, for Mrs Gordon’s sea-green eyes lost their abstraction and became startlingly observant. She looked Dany up and down, noting her youth and missing no detail of her dress or appearance, and the frown on her white brow deepened. She said without troubling to lower her voice:
    â€˜You must be Lash’s — Mr Holden’s — secretary. I thought he was bringing Ada.’
    â€˜She couldn’t come,’ said Dany shortly, disturbed to find that she was blushing hotly.
    â€˜Oh?’ It was obvious, and in the circumstances fortunate, that Mrs Gordon was not in the least interested in