‘You say there is no file, Sir Sydney?’ Stuart had not had a personal encounter with his father-in-law since that unforgettable night when he had the dreadful quarrel with Jennifer. Sir Sydney Ryden had arrived at four o’clock in the morning and taken her back to live with her parents again.

Stuart was wearing rather baggy, grey flannel trousers and a blue blazer with one brass button missing. It was not exactly what he would have chosen to wear for this encounter but there was nothing he could do now about that. He realized that the DG was similarly unenthusiastic about the casual clothes, and found himself tugging at the cotton strands remaining from his lost button.

‘That is a matter of deliberate policy,’ said the DG. ‘I cannot overemphasize how delicate this business is.’ The DG gave one of his mirthless smiles. This mannerism-mere baring of the teeth-was some atavistic warning not to tread further into sacred territory. The DG stared down into his whisky and then suddenly finished it. He was given to these abrupt movements and long periods of stillness. Ryden was well over six feet tall and preferred to wear black suits which, with his lined, pale face and luxuriant, flowing hair, made him look like a poet from some Victorian romance. He would need little more than a long black cloak to go on stage as Count Dracula, thought Stuart, and wondered if the DG deliberately contrived this forbidding appearance.

Without preamble, the DG told Stuart the story again, shortening it this time to the essential elements. ‘On April 8, 1945, elements of the 90th Division of the United States Third Army under General Patton were deep into Germany. When they got to the little town of Merkers, in western Thuringia, they sent infantry into the Kaiseroda salt mine. Those soldiers searched through some thirty miles of galleries in the mine. They found a newly installed steel door. When they broke through it they discovered gold; four-fifths of the Nazi gold reserves were stored there. So were two million or more of the rarest of rare books from the Berlin libraries, the complete Goethe collection from Weimar, and paintings and prints from all over Europe. It would take half an hour or more to read through the list of material. I’ll let you have a copy.’

Stuart nodded but didn’t speak. It was late afternoon and sunlight made patterns on the carpet, moving across the room until the bright bars slimmed to fine rods and one by one disappeared. The DG went across to the bookcases to switch on the large table lamps. On the panelled walls there were paintings of horses which had won famous races a long time ago, but now the paintings had grown so dark under the ageing varnish that the strutting horses seemed to be plodding home through a veil of fog.

‘Just how much gold was four-fifths of the German gold reserves?’ Stuart asked.

The DG sniffed and ran a finger across his ear, pushing away an errant lock of hair. ‘About three hundred million dollars’ worth of gold is one estimate. Over eight thousand bars of gold.’ The DG paused. ‘But that was just the bullion. In addition there were three thousand four hundred and thirty-six bags of gold coins, many of which were rarities-coins worth many times their weight in gold because of their value to collectors.’

Stuart looked up and, realizing that some response was expected, said, ‘Yes, amazing, sir.’ He sipped some more of the whisky. It was always the best of malts up here in the DG’s office at the top of ‘the Ziggurat’, the curious, truncated, pyramidal building that looked across the River Thames to the Palace of Westminster. The room’s panelling, paintings and antique furniture were all part of an attempt to recapture the elegance that the Secret Intelligence Service had enjoyed in the beautiful old houses in St James’s. But this building was steel and concrete, cheap and practical, with rust stains dribbling on the façade and cracks in the basement. The service itself could be similarly described.

‘The American officers reported their find through the usual channels,’ said the DG, suddenly resuming his story. ‘Patton and Eisenhower went to see it on April 12. The army moved it all to Frankfurt. They took jeeps and trailers down the mine and brought it out. Ingenious people, the Americans, Stuart.’ He smiled and held the smile while looking Stuart full in the eyes.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘It took about forty-eight hours of continuous work to load the valuables. There were thirty crates of German patent-office records-worth a king’s ransom-and two thousand boxes of prints, drawings and engravings, as well as one hundred and forty rolls of oriental carpets. You see the difficulties, Stuart?’

‘Indeed I do, sir.’ He swirled the last of his drink round his glass before swallowing it. The DG gave no sign of noticing that his glass was empty.

‘They were ordered to begin loading the lorries just two days after Eisenhower’s visit. The only way to do that was simply by listing whatever was on the original German inventory tags. It was a system that had grave shortcomings.’

‘If things were stolen, there was no way to be sure that the German inventory had been correct in the first place?’

The DG nodded. ‘Can you imagine the chaos that Germany was in by that stage of the war?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Quite so, Stuart. You can not imagine it. God knows what difficulties the Germans had moving all their valuables in those days of collapse. But I assure you that the temptation for individual Germans to risk all in order to put some items in their pockets could never have been higher. Perhaps only the Germans could have moved such material intact in those circumstances. As a nation they have a self-discipline that one can only admire.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘As soon as the Americans captured the mine, its contents went by road to Frankfurt, and were stored in the Reichsbank building. A special team from the State Department were given commissions overnight, put into uniform and flown from Washington to Frankfurt. They sifted that material to find sensitive papers or secret diplomatic exchanges that would be valuable to the US government, or embarrassing to them if made public. After that it was all turned over to the Inter-Allied Reparations Agency.’

‘And was there such secret material?’

‘Let me get you another drink, Stuart. You like this malt, don’t you? With water this time?’

‘Straight please, sir.’

The DO gave another of his ferocious grins.

‘Of course there was secret material. The exchanges between the German ambassador in London and his masters in Berlin during the 1930s would have caused a few red faces here in Whitehall, to say nothing of red faces in the Palace of Westminster. Enough indiscretions there to have put a few of our politicians behind bars in 1940… members of Parliament telling German embassy people what a splendid fellow Adolf Hitler was.’

The DG poured drinks for them both. He used fresh cut-glass tumblers. ‘Something wrong with that door, Stuart?’

‘No, it’s beautiful,’ said Stuart, admiring the antique panelling. ‘And the octagonal oak table must be early seventeenth century.’

The DG groaned silently. It was not the sort of remark expected of the right sort of chap. Ryden had been brought up to believe that a gentleman did not make specific references to another man’s possessions. He had always suspected that Boyd Stuart might be ‘artistic’-a word the DG used to describe a wide variety of individuals that he blackballed at his club and shunned socially. ‘No ice? No soda? Nothing at all in it?’ asked the DG again, but he marred the solicitude by descending into his seat as he said it.

Stuart shook his head and raised the heavy tumbler to his lips.

‘No,’ agreed the DG. ‘With a fine Scots name such as Boyd Stuart a man must not be seen watering a Highland malt.’