Predictably, the committee had proposed to the government that the Federal side be supported, provided it could show it was going to win and win quickly, and provided corroborative evidence from British sources on the spot confirmed this. The committee then sat back and watched the government, on Foreign Office advice, make another monumental African cock-up. Instead of lasting six months, the war had lasted thirty. But the businessmen were sick to their teeth at the whole mess and would, with hindsight, have preferred a negotiated peace at month three rather than thirty months of war. But Harold Wilson, once committed to a policy, was no more going to concede that his minions might have made a mistake on his behalf than fly to the moon.

Manson had lost a lot in revenue from his disrupted mining interests and because of the impossibility of shipping the stuff to the coast on crazily running railways throughout the period, but MacFazdean of Shell-BP had lost a lot more in oil production.

Adrian Goole had been the FO’s liaison officer on the committee for most of the time. Now he sat opposite James Manson in the alcove dining recess, his cuffs shot the right inch and a quarter, his face registering earnest intent.

Manson told him some of the truth but kept the reference to platinum out of it. He stuck to a tale of tin but increased the quantities. It would have been viable to mine it, of course, but quite frankly he’d been scared off by the close dependence of the President on the Russian advisers. The profit-participation of the Zangaran government could well have made it a tidy sum, and since the despot was almost a puppet of the Russkies, who wanted to increase the republic’s power and influence through wealth? Goole took it all in. His face wore a solemn expression of deep concern.

“Damnably difficult decision,” he said with sympathy. “Mind you, I have to admire your political sense. At the moment Zangaro is bankrupt and obscure. But if it became rich— Yes, you’re quite right. A real dilemma. When do you have to send them the survey report and analysis?”

“Sooner or later,” grunted Manson. “The question is, what do I do about it? If they show it to the Russians at the embassy, the trade counselor is bound to realize the tin deposits are viable. Then it will go out for tender. So someone else will get it, still help to make the dictator rich, and then who knows what problems he’ll make for the West? One is back to square one.”

Goole thought it over for a while.

“I just thought I ought to let you chaps know,” said Manson.

“Yes, yes, thank you.” Goole was absorbed. “Tell me,” he said at length, “what would happen if you halved the figures showing the quantity of tin per rock-ton in the report?”

“Halved them?”

“Yes. Halved the figures, showing a purity figure of tin per rock-ton of fifty per cent the figures shown by your rock samples?”

“Well, the quantity of tin present would be shown to be economically unviable.”

“And the rock samples could have come from another area, a mile away, for example?” asked Goole.

“Yes, I suppose they could. But my surveyor found the richest rock samples.”

“But if he had not done so,” pursued Goole. “If he had taken his samples from a mile from where he actually operated. The content could be down by fifty per cent?”

“Yes, it could. They probably would, probably would show even less than fifty per cent. But he operated where he did.”

“Under supervision?” asked Goole.

“No. Alone.”

“And there are no real traces of where he worked?”

“No,” replied Manson. “Just a few rock chippings, long since overgrown. Besides, no one goes up there. It’s miles from anywhere.”

He paused for a few instants to light a cigar. “You know, Goole, you’re a damnably clever fellow. Steward, another brandy, if you please.”

They parted with mutual jocularity on the steps of the club. The doorman hailed a taxi for Goole to go back to Mrs. Goole in Holland Park.

“One last thing,” said the FO man by the taxi door. “Not a word to anyone else about this. I’ll have to file it, well classified, at the department, but otherwise it remains just between you and us at the FO.”

“Of course,” said Manson.

“I’m very grateful you saw fit to tell me all this. You have no idea how much easier it makes our job on the economic side to know what’s going on. I’ll keep a quiet eye on Zangaro, and if there should be any change in the political scene there, you’ll be the first to know. Good night.”

Sir James Manson watched the taxi head down the road and signaled to his Rolls-Royce waiting up the street.

“You’ll be the first to know,” he mimicked. “Too bloody right I will, boy. ’Cause I’m going to start it.”

He leaned through the passenger-side window and observed to Craddock, his chauffeur, “If pisswilly little buggers like that had been in charge of building our empire, Craddock, we might by now just about have colonized the Isle of Wight.”

“You’re absolutely right, Sir James,” said Craddock.

When his employer had climbed into the rear, the chauffeur slid open the communicating panel. “Gloucestershire, Sir James?”

“Gloucestershire, Craddock.”

It was starting to drizzle again as the sleek limousine swished down Piccadilly and up Park Lane, heading for the A40 and the West Country, carrying Sir James Manson toward his ten-bedroom mansion bought three years earlier for him by a grateful company for £250,000. It also contained his wife and nineteen-year-old daughter, but these he had won himself.

An hour later Gordon Chalmers lay beside his wife, tired and angry from the row they had had for the past two hours. Peggy Chalmers lay on her back, looking up at the ceiling.

“I can’t do it,” Chalmers said for the umpteenth time. “I can’t just go and falsify a mining report to help James Bloody Manson make more money.”

There was a long silence. They had been over it all a score of times since Peggy had read Manson’s letter to his banker and heard from her husband the conditions of future financial security.

“What does it matter?” she said in a low voice from the darkness beside him. “When all’s said and done, what does it matter? Whether he gets the concession, or the Russians, or no one. Whether the price rises or falls. What does it matter? It’s all pieces of rock and grains of metal.”

Peggy Chalmers swung herself across her husband’s torso and stared at the dim outline of his face. Outside, the night wind rattled the branches of the old elm close to which they had built the new house with the special fittings for their crippled daughter.

When Peggy Chalmers spoke again it was with passionate urgency. “But Margaret is not a piece of rock, and I am not a few grains of metal. We need that money, Gordon, we need it now and for the next ten years. Please, darling, please just one time forget the idea of a nice letter to Tribune or Private Eye and do what he wants.”

Gordon Chalmers continued to stare at the slit of window between the curtains, which was half open to let in a breath of air.

“All right,” he said at length.

“You’ll do it?” she asked.

“Yes, I’ll bloody do it.”

“You swear it, darling? You give me your word?”

There was another long pause. “You have my word,” said the low voice from the face above her.

She pillowed her head in the hair of his chest. “Thank you, darling. Don’t worry about it. Please don’t worry. You’ll forget it in a month. You’ll see.”

Ten minutes later she was asleep, exhausted by the nightly struggle to get Margaret bathed and into bed, and by the unaccustomed quarrel with her husband.

Gordon Chalmers continued to stare into the darkness. “They always win,” he said softly and bitterly after a while. “The bastards, they always bloody win.”

The following day, Saturday, he drove the five miles to the laboratory and wrote out a completely new report for the republic of Zangaro. Then he burned his notes and the original report and trundled the core samples over to the scrap heap, where a local builder would remove them for concrete and garden paths. He mailed the fresh report, registered, to Sir James Manson at the head office, went home, and tried to forget it.