The Major drank some wine. Then he studied the ash on his cigar. We sat still, waiting.

“So of course I began trying to puzzle out what might have happened,” he went on. “I looked at my glass of whiskey. It was where I always put it, on top of the little white-painted balustrade surrounding the veranda. Then my eye travelled upward to the roof of the bungalow and to the edge of the roof and suddenly, presto! I’d got it! I knew for certain what must have happened.”

“What?” we said, all speaking at once.

“A large Blister Beetle, taking an evening stroll on the roof, had ventured too close to the edge and had fallen off.”

“Right into your glass of whiskey!” we cried.

“Precisely,” the Major said. “And I, thirsting like mad in the heat, had gulped him down without looking.”

The girl called Gwendoline was staring at the Major with huge eyes. “Quite honestly I don’t see what all the fuss was about,” she said. “One teeny weeny little beetle isn’t going to hurt anyone.”

“My dear child,” the Major said, “when the Blister Beetle is dried and crushed, the resulting powder is called cantharidin. That’s its pharmaceutical name. The Sudanese variety is called cantharidin sudanii. And this cantharidin sudanii is absolutely deadly. The maximum safe dose for a human, if there is such a thing as a safe dose, is one minim. A minim is one four-hundred-eightieth of a fluid ounce. Assuming I had just swallowed one whole fully grown Blister Beetle, that meant I’d received God knows how many hundreds of times the maximum dose.”

“Jesus,” we said. “Jesus Christ.”

“The throbbing was so tremendous now, it was shaking my whole body,” the Major said.

“A headache, you mean?” Gwendoline said.

“No,” the Major said.

“What happened next?” we asked him.