“Is it? Oh. Yes.”

“I think I’ll have tea. The coffee was awful.”

“So’s the tea actually. Always. Do we,” Mrs. Fortescue swallowed, “do we really want anything?”

“I do,” said Hersey very firmly and opened her handbag. She fished out her purse and took out the correct amount. “And a bun,” she said. There was no gainsaying her. “I’ve got a headache,” she lied. “I’ll be glad of a cuppa.”

When they arrived at Palmerston South, Hersey said, “Shall I?” and reached for Mrs. Fortescue’s handbag. But Mrs. Fortescue muttered something about requiring it for change and almost literally bolted. “All that for nothing!” thought Hersey in despair. And then, seeing the elegant dressing case still on the square seat, she suddenly reached out and opened it.

On top of the neatly arranged contents lay a crumpled five-pound note.

At the beginning of the journey when Mrs. Fortescue had opened the case, there had, positively, been no fiver stuffed in it. Hersey snatched the banknote, stuffed it into her handbag, shut the dressing case, and leaned back, breathing short with her eyes shut.

When Mrs. Fortescue returned she was scarlet in the face and trembling. She looked continuously at her dressing case and seemed to be in two minds whether or not to open it. Hersey died a thousand deaths.

The remainder of the journey was a nightmare. Both ladies pretended to read and to sleep. If ever Hersey had read guilt in a human countenance it was in Mrs. Fortescue’s.

“I ought to challenge her,” Hersey thought. “But I won’t. I’m a moral coward and I’ve got back my fiver.”

The train was already drawing into Dunedin station and Hersey had gathered herself and her belongings when Mrs. Fortescue suddenly opened her dressing case. For a second or two she stared into it. Then she stared at Hersey. She opened and shut her mouth three times. The train jerked to a halt and Hersey fled.

Her friend greeted her warmly. When they were in the car she said, “Oh, before I forget! There’s a telegram for you.”

It was from Harold.

It said:

Harold had delivered the punchline. His listeners had broken into predictable guffaws. He had added the customary coda: “And she didn’t know Mrs. X’s address, so she couldn’t do a thing about it. So of course to this day Mrs. X thinks Hersey pinched her fiver.”

Hersey, inwardly seething, had reacted in the sheepish manner Harold expected of her when from somewhere at the back of the group a wailing broke out.

A lady erupted as if from a football scrimmage. She looked wildly about her, spotted Hersey, and made for her.

“At last, at last!” cried the lady. “After all these years!”

It was Mrs. Fortescue.

“It was your fiver!” she gabbled. “It happened at Ashburton when I minded your bag. It was, it was!”

She turned on Harold. “It’s all your fault,” she amazingly announced. “And mine of course.” She returned to Hersey. “I’m dreadfully inquisitive. It’s a compulsion. I—I —couldn’t resist. I looked at your passport. I looked at everything. And my own handbag was open on my lap. And the train gave one of those recoupling jerks and both our handbags were upset. And I could see you,” she chattered breathlessly to Hersey, “coming back with that ghastly coffee.”

“So I shoveled things back and there was the fiver on the floor. Well, I had one and I thought it was mine and there wasn’t time to put it in my bag, so I slapped it into my dressing case. And then, when I paid my luncheon bill at Oamaru, I found my own fiver in a pocket of my bag.”

“Oh, my God!” said Hersey.

“Yes. And I couldn’t bring myself to confess. I thought you might leave your bag with me if you went to the loo and I could put it back. But you didn’t. And then, at Dunedin, I looked in my dressing case and the fiver was gone. So I thought you knew I knew.” She turned on Harold.

“You must have left two fivers on the dressing table,” she accused.

“Yes!” Hersey shouted. “You did, you did! There were two. You put a second one out to get change.”

“Why the hell didn’t you say so!” Harold roared.

“I’d forgotten. You know yourself,” Hersey said with the glint of victory in her eye, “it’s like you always say, darling, I’m such a fool about money.”

On the morning before he died, Caley Bridgeman woke to the smell of canvas and the promise of a warm day. Bell-birds had begun to drop their two dawn notes into the cool air and a native wood pigeon flopped onto the ridgepole of his tent. He got up and went outside. Beech bush, emerging from the night, was threaded with mist. The voices of the nearby creek and the more distant Wainui River, in endless colloquy with stones and boulders, filled the intervals between bird song. Down beyond the river he glimpsed, through shadowy trees, the two Land-Rovers and the other tents: his wife’s; his stepson’s; David Wingfield’s, the taxidermist’s. And Solomon Gosse’s. Gosse, with whom he had fallen out.

If it came to that, he had fallen out, more or less, with all of them, but he attached little importance to the circumstance. His wife he had long ago written off as an unintelligent woman. They had nothing in common. She was not interested in bird song.

“Tint Ding,” chimed the bellbirds.

Tonight, if all went well, they would be joined on tape with the little night owl—Ninox novaeseelandiae, the ruru, the morepork.

He looked across the gully to where, on the lip of a cliff, a black beech rose high against paling stars. His gear was stowed away at its foot, well hidden, ready to be installed, and now, two hours at least before the campers stirred, was the time to do it.

He slipped down between fern, scrub and thorny undergrowth to where he had laid a rough bridge above a very deep and narrow channel. Through this channel flowed a creek which joined the Wainui below the tents. At that point the campers had dammed it up to make a swimming pool. He had not cared to join in their enterprise.

The bridge had little more than a four-foot span. It consisted of two beech logs resting on the verges and overlaid by split branches nailed across them. Twenty feet below, the creek glinted and prattled. The others had jumped the gap and goaded him into doing it himself. If they tried, he thought sourly, to do it with twenty-odd pounds of gear on their backs, they’d sing a different song.

He arrived at the tree. Everything was in order, packed in green waterproof bags and stowed in a hollow under the roots.

When he climbed the tree to place his parabolic microphone, he found bird droppings, fresh from the night visit of the morepork.

He set to work.

At half-past eleven that morning, Bridgeman came down from an exploratory visit to a patch of beech forest at the edge of the Bald Hill. A tui sang the opening phrase of “Home to Our Mountains,” finishing with a consequential splutter and a sound like that made by someone climbing through a wire fence. Close at hand, there was a sudden flutter and a minuscule shriek. Bridgeman moved with the habitual quiet of the bird watcher into a patch of scrub and pulled up short.

He was on the lip of a bank. Below him was the blond poll of David Wingfield.

“What have you done?” Bridgeman said.

The head moved slowly and tilted. They stared at each other. “What have you got in your hands?” Bridgeman said. “Open your hands.”

The taxidermist’s clever hands opened. A feathered morsel lay in his palm. Legs like twigs stuck up their clenched feet. The head dangled. It was a rifleman, tiniest and friendliest of all New Zealand birds.