out of date, advertising Reckitt's Blue. A tin trunk contained clothing. There were sleeping mats rolled up neatly. An enamelled basin, five clay cooking pots, a grinding stone, a wooden rice chest, an ancient Huntley & Palmer's biscuit tin half full of flour. The inspector noted that the floor in the hut was intact. Where theft was the motive for murder, the assailants would always dig up the floor in search of buried valuables.

The air was foul with the reek of rancid coconut oil. The headman had already stepped out onto the verandah and was chatting with the sergeant. The inspector was about to join them, the taste of failure sour on his tongue, when something made him scan the room one last time. And suddenly he saw- everything. There were five cooking pots in that hut.

Most people would have missed the significance of that trivial fact, said my father. But the inspector knew that in a poor village home, where every cent is scraped together and possessions are scant, five pots is a luxury. The dead family would have lived on rice eaten with a little curry, some chillies and onion. What were they doing with five pots? The inspector knew the answer. Proof was another matter. He had all the pots taken away and analysed. Two of them, noticeably less blackened from smoke than the others, were found to be impregnated with rat poison. They were also covered with Muttuhami's fingerprints.

The police charged Muttuhami. He was brought before my father and confronted with