'And who were you jealous of?'

'No one.'

'No one?'

'That's what I said.'

Kommandant van Heerden peered over the edge of an abyss. 'No one,' he almost screamed. 'How in the name of hell can you be jealous of no one?' He paused, and looked at her suspiciously. 'No One is not the name of another kaffir, is it?'

'Of course not. It means exactly what it says. I was jealous of no one.'

'You can't be jealous of no one. It's not possible. You've got to be jealous of somebody else.'

'I haven't, you know.' Miss Hazelstone looked at him pityingly.

Beneath him the Kommandant could feel the abyss yawning. It was the abyss of all abysses.

'No one. No one,' he repeated almost pathetically, shaking his head. 'Someone tell me how somebody can be jealous of no one.'

'Oh it's really quite simple,' Miss Hazelstone continued, 'I was just jealous.'

'Just jealous,' the Kommandant repeated slowly.

'That's right. I didn't want to lose dear Fivepence.'

Teetering above the unfathomable void of abstraction the Kommandant clutched at Fivepence. There had once been something substantial about the Zulu cook and the Kommandant needed something substantial to hang on to.

'You were frightened you were going to lose him?' he pondered aloud, and then realized the terrible contradiction he was stepping into. 'But you say you shot him. Isn't that the best way of losing the brute?' He was almost beside himself.

'It was the only way I had of making sure I kept him,' Miss Hazelstone replied.

Kommandant van Heerden pulled himself back from the void. He was losing control of the interview. He started again at the beginning.

'Let's forget for the moment that you shot Fivepence so that you wouldn't lose him,' he said slowly and very patiently. 'Let's start at the other end. What was your motive for falling in love with him?' It was not a topic he particularly wanted to investigate, not that he believed for a moment that she had ever been in love with the swine, but it was better than harping on about no one. Besides he felt pretty sure she would give herself away now. The Hazelstones couldn't fall in love with Zulu cooks.

'Fivepence and I shared certain mutual interests,' said Miss Hazelstone slowly. 'For one thing we had the same fetish.'

'Oh really. The same fetish?' In his mind the Kommandant conjured up a picture of the little native idols he had seen in the Piemburg Museum.

'Naturally,' said Miss Hazelstone, 'it provided a bond between us.'

'Yes, it must have done, and I suppose you sacrified goats to it,' the Kommandant said sarcastically.

'What an extraordinary thing to say,' Miss Hazelstone looked puzzled. 'Of course we didn't. It wasn't that sort of fetish.'

'Wasn't it? What sort was it? Wooden or stone?'

'Rubber,' said Miss Hazelstone briefly.

Kommandant van Heerden leant back in his chair angrily. He had had about as much of Miss Hazelstone's leg-pulling as he could take. If the old girl seriously supposed that he was going to believe some cock-and-bull story about a rubber idol, she had another think coming.

'Now listen to me, Miss Hazelstone,' he said seriously. 'I can appreciate what you are trying to do and I must say I admire you for it. Family loyalty is a fine thing and trying to save your brother is a fine thing too, but I have my duty to do and nothing you can say is going to prevent me doing it. Now if you will be good enough to get to the point and admit that you had nothing whatever to do with the murder of your cook and were never approximately in love with him, I will allow you to go. If not I shall be forced to take some drastic action against you. You are obstructing the course of justice and you leave me no alternative. Now then, be sensible and admit that all this talk about fetishes is nonsense.'

Miss Hazelstone looked at him icily.

'Are you easily stimulated?' she asked. 'Sexually, I mean.'

'That has got nothing whatever to do with you.'

'It has got a lot to do with this case,' said Miss Hazelstone, and hesitated. Kommandant van Heerden shifted uneasily in his chair. He had come to recognize that Miss Hazelstone's hesitations tended to augur some new and revolting disclosure.

'I have to admit that I am not easily aroused,' she said at last. The Kommandant was delighted to hear it. 'I need the presence of rubber to stimulate my sexual appetite.'

The Kommandant was just about to say that in his case the presence of rubber had quite the opposite effect, but he thought better of it.

'You see I am a rubber fetishist,' Miss Hazelstone continued.

Kommandant van Heerden tried to grasp the implications of the remark.

'You are?' he said.

'I have a passion for rubber.'

'You have?'

'I can only make love when I am dressed in rubber.'

'You can?'

'It was rubber that drew Fivepence and me together.'

'It was?'

'Fivepence had the same propensity.'

'He did?'

'When I first met him he was working in a garage retreading tyres.'

'He was?'

'I had taken my tyres in for a retread and Fivepence was there. I recognized him at once as the man I had been looking for all my life.'

'You did?'

'I might almost say that our love affair was cemented over a Michelin X.'

'You might?'

Miss Hazelstone stopped. The Kommandant's inability to say more than two words at a time and those two in the form of a question she had already answered was beginning to irritate her.

'Do you have any idea what I am talking about?' she asked.

'No,' said the Kommandant.

'I don't know what more I can do to make my meaning plain,' Miss Hazelstone said. 'I have tried to explain as simply as I can what I found attractive about Fivepence.'

Kommandant van Heerden closed his mouth which had been hanging open and tried to focus his mind on something comprehensible. What Miss Hazelstone had just told him so simply had not, he had to admit, been in the least abstract, but if just before he had hovered over a void of unfathomable abstractions, the simple facts she had placed before him now were so far beyond anything his experience had prepared him to expect that he began to think that on the whole he preferred the conceptual abyss. In an effort to regain his sense of reality, he resorted to healthy vulgarity.

'Are you trying to tell me,' he said, picking the bathing-cap off the desk and dangling it from his finger a few inches in front of Miss Hazelstone's face, 'that this rubber cap gives you an overwhelming desire to lay me?'

In front of him Miss Hazelstone nodded.

'And if I were to wear it you wouldn't be able to control your sexual impulses?' he went on.

'Yes,' said Miss Hazelstone frantically. 'Yes, I would. I mean, no I wouldn't.' Torn between a raging torrent of desire and an overwhelming aversion for the person of the Kommandant, she hardly knew what was happening to her.

'And I suppose you're going to tell me that your Zulu cook had the same taste for rubber?'

Miss Hazelstone nodded again.

'And I suppose all those rubber clothes I found in the bedroom upstairs belong to you too?' Miss Hazelstone agreed that they did. 'And Fivepence would put on a rubber suit and you would wear a rubber nightdress? Is that right?'

Kommandant van Heerden could see from the expression on Miss Hazelstone's face that at long last he had regained the initiative. She was sitting mute and staring at him hypnotized.

'Is that what used to happen?' he continued remorselessly.

Miss Hazelstone shook her head. 'No,' she said, 'it was the other way round.'

'Oh really? What was the other way round?'

'The clothes were.'

'The clothes were the other way round?'

'Yes.'

'Inside out I suppose, or was it back to front?'

'You could put it like that.'