I wondered if my little friend would ever come back and whether his help would make much difference one way or the other. The cage could only be opened by lowering it to the ground, which in turn could not be done without making a hell of a racket and waking the entire camp. Furthermore, sentries stayed awake the entire night, so that even if I escaped from the cage, I would probably be caught trying to sneak out of the camp. And if I wasn’t caught, I would have a whole jungle to walk through.

I wondered if the Land Rover still worked. It had been at about the end of its tether anyway; the path that had brought me the last little bit of the way to the guerrilla encampment was barely wide enough to admit the car, and was so overgrown in spots that a less rugged vehicle would have given up miles earlier. So even if the Land Rover were still operable, which was doubtful, I couldn’t count on it to take me anywhere.

Was there anything of value in the car? Nothing much, really. The extra clothing I had brought would have been appropriated by the guerrillas, just as they had taken what I was wearing. They probably would have left the butterfly-collecting equipment alone. The spreading board, the killing jar, the butterfly net, all the little accoutrements designed to cover my presence in the jungles and rubber plantations of Thailand, and all quite wasted now. These guerrillas did not seem to care whether I was a bona fide lepidopterist or a sneaky spy. All they wanted to do was kill me.

I closed my eyes and cursed. I cursed Tuppence’s father for going back to Africa and conceiving Tuppence in the first place. I cursed Tuppence for coming first from Nairobi to New York, and then from New York to Bangkok. I cursed the King of Thailand for being a modern jazz enthusiast and I cursed Tuppence for being a thief, and over and above it all I cursed myself for being several different kinds of a damned fool.

Then I stopped cursing and started thinking, and of the two thinking turned out to be the more productive, because by the time night had fallen once and for all and my little Thai friend had crept soundlessly to my cage and whispered his presence, I had it all figured out.