and the police hauled him in as their prime suspect. But on the evening in question, Muttuhami, his father-in-law and several other men had played cards late into the night. One of the card-players was a retired constable, who could vouch that Muttuhami had never left the game. Since the poison had been introduced into a meal prepared forty miles away, his alibi was unshakeable. Yet the inspector in charge of the investigation was sure that Muttuhami was his man. Guilty as sin, he told my father. But how had the murderer done it?

In the presence of a conundrum the relentless application of logic is required. Muttuhami's victims had been murdered in their hut; therefore he must have had access to the premises. It was necessary to visitthe scene of the crime. The inspector and his sergeant rode out to the village. The headman, a pot-bellied scoundrel who reeked of toddy, led them to the hut where the bodies had been found. It stood in a tiny little plot crammed with pineapples, jak fruit, a betel vine, a patch of yams where someone had left a hoe driven into the red soil. The headman pointed out the breadfruit tree that was the origin of the quarrel; and there, on the other side of the barbed-wire fence, Muttuhami's hut could be glimpsed through a thicket of plantain trees.

There was little to see in the single cramped room where the family had died. The inspector noted a square of mirror on one wall, and a calendar, years