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Abdullah asked.
    Stan said yes, Millie at the same time said, “London,” and then corrected herself, adding, “just the past couple of weeks.”
    “I was in Europe once,” Abdullah said. He pronounced the word so that it had three syllables. “Spain,” he added.
    “What did you think of it?” Stan asked.
    “I hate it,” Abdullah answered in a loud whisper. “I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.”
    In the back seat, where Abdullah had insisted on putting them, Millie and Stan looked at each other sideways. Abdullah continued to express his hatred. The inflection of his voice didn’t falter. As soon as he showed signs of letting up, Millie asked, “Why did you hate it?” Stan pinched her arm hard, but too late.
    Abdullah began: the devils, the pigs, the dogs who put him in a filthy room like a box, they say you undesirable alien, you are bad to come here, you don’t have food what you want, you take what you get and you pay for the boat or you go to jail, may they die in unspeakable agonies.
    At the end of the drive, when they had climbed from the car and were walking towards the bungalow out of earshot, Stan said, “What the hell got into you? Couldn’tyou see he was just itching for you to give him his cue?”
    “Don’t be silly, Stan. Would you have missed all that for anything? If half the things he said are true—”
    “They aren’t.”
    “How do you know? You’ve never been a penniless stowaway caught by the Immigration Department.”
    Ian came out on the porch to meet them and bring them inside.
    The house was neat and comfortable. There was a lot of light wood everywhere, carved statues, masks, mounted trophies, paintings, bright rugs on the floor and chintz covers patterned and flowering on chairs and couches. Pippa Foster was grey-haired but otherwise looked like a girl out of the 1920s.
    Stan said, “What do you do when you have clients from Spain?”
    “What’s that?” Ian asked.
    “Abdullah.”
    “Oh dear,” Pippa said. “Has he started on that again?”
    Ian said, “Fortunately it’s never happened. Suppose I’d tell them to say they were from South America.”
    They got into the landrover once more and drove far out into the country. Stan felt for the first time that he had finished with the plane flight and the sense of disorientation. But he couldn’t get over the way the place looked. If it weren’t for the animals, the slanting, trapezoidal shapes of some of the trees and the clear, dazzling air, it might almost have been somewhere like Florida.
    They tested the guns. Ian was impressed by Stan’s marksmanship and Millie was about to tell him: yes, Stan even had medals for it, when she stopped herself.
    A car drove up while they were still adjusting sights.Nicholas got out and came over. He told Ian that he’d heard from the Whiteacres, who now thought they would definitely be arriving in a week’s time. Did Ian want to wait that long or go on alone?
    “There’s an even chance that that week is only an estimate,” Ian told him. “They’ll let you know in another week that they’ve changed their minds again.”
    “Makes it awkward for the boys,” Nicholas said. “They don’t know where they are.”
    “Well, we’ve got their money, and they were meant to arrive last week. Tell them we started charging them field rates from the date they originally gave us. They won’t miss it.”
    “But it might aggravate them enough to send them somewhere else.”
    “They’re more trouble than they’re worth, Nick.”
    “Not if they’re prepared to pay those prices. We don’t have a choice.”
    Stan and Millie were standing too close to be completely outside the conversation, but made it appear that their attention was directed somewhere else. He checked the sights on a rifle and aimed, lifting the stock to his shoulder and squinting down the barrel. She looked closely at her shotgun as if she might be expecting to find a message printed on it.
    “We’ll