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with six others, in a ritual ‘Payback’ clan skirmish two years earlier. He had been out hunting all day and found them on his return. Found what was left of them, that is. The aggressor clan took heads as trophies and, like Banto’s people, were cannibals. The inevitable Payback revenge attack, a month later, had butchered eight of the old enemy, with Banto himself despatching two. He had also, for the first time, eaten the flesh of one of the warriors he killed, as a symbol of total victory. The forest echoed with these and other memories and filled him with foreboding about the trip. Something was telling him he might never return. This could be his last night amongst his own people. His young warrior’s heart was heavy.
    Chancey meantime was in the visitors’ bark-walled bush house on the edge of the village. Beside him was the latest young girl he had attracted with his Western magic. As he taught his eager student different kinds of tricks—perversions he had picked up from Japanese porn videos—he thought wildly about all the money he was about to make. When he delivered Banto to the American, Bolitho, and once the tests were checked, he would at last be able to leave PNG. For Australia. Life as a street criminal—a ‘rascal’ as PNG slang over-innocently calls such gangsters and murderers—was no longer for him. He wanted out. A new life. The excitement of it all rushed through his body, and he pulled her head down fiercely by the hair until she gagged, panting for air.
    *
    The fire roared in the Adam fireplace, but Sir James Barton none the less rooted at it aggressively with the poker before throwing on yet another log. Outside the study window snow continued to fall on the parkland that stretched to the misty horizon. It was even beginning to settle now on the frozen lake beyond the ha-ha.
    Cognac before lunch had become the norm at Temple Manor, and Barton helped himself to his second XO Hine of the morning. Lady Barton, his American wife, Madeleine, came in and frowned at him.
    ‘ Yes, Maddie. I know. It’s not even noon.’ His big, heavy-set frame made its presence felt in even the grandest of rooms.
    ‘ Well. At least you’re not attacking the humidor yet. That’s something,’ she scolded half-heartedly.
    He looked at her sharply. At thirty-two, and his second wife, she was some twenty years his junior. Despite everything she had been one of his better ideas, he thought to himself. Her family, top-drawer Philadelphia, had put Maddie, an only child, through all the upper middle-class rites of passage: Swiss finishing school—to perfect her French and Italian—before reading literature at Harvard, followed by a short spell as a classy photographic model. It was whilst over in London on a Harpers’ shoot that she had met Barton—then a Member of Parliament and junior Treasury Minister—at a dinner party thrown by her godfather. Having monopolised her attention, at the end of the evening he had hurriedly invited her to join a weekend house party in the country before she flew back home.
    Whereas her affection for him took time to grow, it had been love at first sight for his eighteenth-century ancestral home, Temple Manor. Immediately drawn to its patina of neglect, to her surprise she found herself longing to respond to its desperate plea for tender loving care and, of course, money. At the time, ten years earlier, Barton had faced monumental debts—from his divorce, the costs of upkeep, and a Lloyd’s debacle. But then he, like scores of British aristocrats before him, suddenly found salvation staring him in the face. In the shape of a beautiful young American, and her family’s old money.
    The elevation from headstrong American heiress to Lady Barton, mistress of the 1,200-acre Temple Estate had, after their St Margaret’s wedding and Palace of Westminster reception, appeared seamless to the outside world. Le style anglais was so right on her and, like the young Grace Kelly whom she so