Sandy’s face went blank, expressionless. He stared at Hillgarth. Harry thought, Sandy will realize the only way you could know all this is through me. Hillgarth could have warned him they were going to dive straight in like this.

‘The shares in your company, Nuevas Iniciativas,’ Hillgarth went on, looking Sandy in the eye. ‘They’re going down.’

Sandy leaned forward, tapped the ash from his cigarette carefully into the ashtray, then sat back, raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s the stock market for you.’

‘And of course things must be getting very difficult now Lieutenant Gomez’s body has been discovered.’

Sandy’s face remained expressionless. He said nothing. It was only a few seconds but it seemed to stretch out for ever. Then he glanced at Tolhurst before returning his gaze to Hillgarth’s face.

‘You seem very well informed,’ he said quietly. ‘So Harry has been spying on me? Not my old pal?’ He turned slowly and looked at Harry. The large brown eyes were full of sorrow. ‘You’ve been into everything, haven’t you?’

‘The information’s accurate, isn’t it?’ Hillgarth prompted.

Sandy turned back to him. ‘Some of it might be.’

Hillgarth leaned forward. ‘Don’t play games with me, Forsyth. You’re going to need a bolt-hole soon. If the state takes over exploiting the mine you’d be seriously out of pocket. Someone could even decide to prosecute you for Gomez’s murder.’

Sandy inclined his head. ‘Not my fault if some of the people I work with got carried away.’

‘Our information is you set them on to him.’

Sandy didn’t reply, he took a long swig of his whisky. Hillgarth leaned back. All the time Tolhurst stared owlishly at Sandy. If it was meant to make him uneasy, it failed – he didn’t seem to notice.

‘All that’s beyond our jurisdiction,’ Hillgarth went on, waving a hand. ‘We’re not really interested. The point is, if you are in difficulties, you might consider a change of job. Working for us.’

‘What sort of work might that be?’

‘Intelligence. We’d get you back to England. But first you’d have to tell us all about the mine. That’s what we sent Brett to find out about. How big is it, how near to starting production? Will it give Spain the gold reserves to buy food abroad? At the moment they’re dependent on loans from us and the Americans, which gives us a lever.’

Sandy nodded slowly. ‘So, if I tell you everything about the mine, you’d get me out?’

‘Yes. We’d send you to England, and if you like we’ll train you up and get you work somewhere else where your talents might come in useful. Perhaps Latin America. We think it might suit you. It’d be good pay.’ Hillgarth leaned forward a little. ‘If you’re happy to carry on as you are, fine. But if you want to get out, we need to know everything about the mine. Everything.’

‘That’s a promise?’

‘A promise.’

Sandy put his head on one side, swirling the whisky in his glass. Hillgarth went on, his voice steady and slow. ‘It’s up to you. You can come in with us, or go back to your gold mine. But that’s a dangerous game, however profitable it might have looked once.’

To Harry’s astonishment, Sandy threw back his head and laughed.

‘You’ve actually been spying on me and you haven’t realized. Oh, Jesus. You never twigged.’

‘What?’ Harry asked, puzzled.

‘What?’ Sandy mimicked. ‘Still a bit deaf, or was that just a cover story?’

‘No,’ Harry said. ‘But what do you mean? Twigged what?’

‘There isn’t any gold mine,’ Sandy said then, quietly but with withering contempt. ‘There never was.’

Harry jerked upright. ‘But I saw it.’

Sandy looked at Hillgarth, not Harry, as he answered. ‘He saw a stretch of land, some equipment and huts. Oh, the land’s the type that might bear gold deposits, only there aren’t any.’ He laughed again and shook his head. ‘Have any of you heard of salting?’

‘I have,’ Hillgarth said. ‘You take a sample of the right type of soil and put fine grains of gold in it, to make it look like ore.’ His jaw dropped. ‘Jesus Christ, is that what you’ve been doing?’

Sandy nodded. ‘That’s right.’ He took out another cigarette. ‘Christ, it’s almost worth being betrayed by Brett to see your faces.’

‘I’ve worked in mining myself,’ Hillgarth said. ‘Salting’s a difficult job, you’d need to be a skilled geologist.’

‘Quite right. Like my friend Alberto Otero. He worked in South Africa, he told me some of the stunts that have been pulled out there. I suggested it might work in Spain, the government’s desperate for gold and the Ministry of Mines is full of Falangists seeking to increase their influence. He scouted out a suitable spot and we bought the land. I already had some useful contacts in the ministry.’

‘The man de Salas?’ Tolhurst asked.

‘Yes, de Salas. He’s had a difficult time keeping Maestre at bay. He thinks the mine’s real too. He thinks it’s going to help Spain be a great Fascist nation.’ He turned back to Hillgarth with a smile. ‘We use our labs to distribute fine gold dust within the ore, the breccia, then we send it off to the government labs. We’ve been doing it for six months. They keep demanding more samples and we supply them.’

Hillgarth’s eyes narrowed. ‘You’d need a fair bit of gold to do that. The black-market price is fantastic. Any sizeable purchases would get talked about.’

‘Not if you’re on a committee that helps poor benighted Jews escaping from France. They’re only able to bring what they can carry and most bring gold. We relieve them of it in return for visas for Lisbon, then Alberto melts it down, turns it into tiny grains. We have as much gold as we need and nobody’s any the wiser. The Jews were my idea actually.’ He exhaled a cloud of smoke. ‘When I heard that French Jews were turning up in Madrid fleeing from the Nazis, I thought I might help them. Harry might not believe it but I felt sorry for them, people who can never seem to do anything right, always sent wandering. But to get visas for them I needed money and all they had was gold. That set me talking to Otero about how gold is always valuable, always makes men’s eyes light up. That’s where the idea came from.’ He smiled at Hillgarth; still he seemed reluctant to look at Harry.

So it was all a trick, Harry thought. All this, the work and the betrayals and Gomez’s death, it was all for nothing. Smoke and mirrors.

Hillgarth looked at Sandy for a long moment. Then he laughed, a loud guffaw.

‘By Christ, Forsyth, you’ve been bloody clever. You had everyone fooled.’

Sandy inclined his head.

‘What were you going to do, wait till the company shares rose enough, then offload them and disappear?’

‘That was the idea. But someone in the Ministry of Mines has been putting the word about that the company’s likely to be taken over. Their latest tactic to get control. Crafty bunch of bastards.’ He laughed again. ‘Only they don’t know it’ll be control of nothing, just a couple of useless farms. But then Maestre put his spy in down there. He had keys to the offices – if he had anything about him he’d have found out the truth.’

‘So you could find yourself penniless.’ Hillgarth’s eyes were cold as stones. ‘Maybe with a price on your head.’

‘At any moment. Or stabbed down a dark alley. I don’t like having to watch my back all the time.’

‘You’ve been playing a very risky game.’

‘Yes. I thought Harry could be an asset.’ Still he wouldn’t look at him. ‘I knew he had money and if we put more capital in and bought more land it would make us look stronger, harder to buy out. Harry would have made a big profit, too. I’d have seen to that, told him when to sell. Then when we learned about Gomez we were terrified he’d found out the whole thing was a fake, but he can’t have because nothing more happened. Gomez wasn’t very bright. But Maestre’s still scheming to get hold of the gold. It’s time to get out now.’

Then Sandy did turn to look at Harry. His face was expressionless, but his eyes were full of pain and anger. ‘I trusted you, Harry, you were the last person in the world I still trusted.’ He smiled thinly. ‘Never mind, eh? It’s all turned out for the best.’ He sat back for a moment, reflecting. Harry noticed a tiny twitch above his left eye. He felt ashamed, too ashamed to reply despite what Sandy had done. Sandy turned back to Hillgarth. ‘You’re the Alan Hillgarth who used to write adventure novels, aren’t you?’