Stuart remembered the lump sum he had received two years ago when he decided to sign the contract for a further ten years’ engagement. It had seemed an enormous amount of money at the time, but so much of it just drained away. It would be extremely difficult to repay it. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘You’d have to sell off your little weekend cottage and so on. Don’t do it, my boy. My wife sold off some fields near where we live in the country. She was sorry afterwards. The way the market is now, it’s better to hold on to property.’ The DG smiled again. He wanted Stuart to know that he had sifted through every available piece of information about his financial affairs. He wanted Stuart to realize right now that there was no alternative to keeping at this job. The last thing he wanted to tell the Prime Minister was that he had just lost his best-or at least his most suitable-field operative. ‘And there could be liabilities arising from the divorce.’ The silence seemed to last for ever.

‘I’ll keep at it,’ said Stuart.

‘Good man,’ said the DG. Now that he had won he could afford to be generous. ‘You’d put us in a devil of a pickle if you wanted to get out now. The PM’s meetings in Lusaka with the Commonwealth Heads of Government will give her a chance to achieve something that every previous PM has failed to do.’

‘You mean a settlement… changes in the Zimbabwe-Rhodesia constitution?’

‘Exactly, Stuart.’ The DG seemed surprised that Stuart knew about the story which was being told interminably in all the papers and news magazines. ‘And I think she’ll do it, Stuart.’

‘She’s had some amazing successes already, sir.’

‘She has. And between you and me, old chap, it’s making her the very devil to work with. A new broom sweeps clean and all that. I have a feeling that if we don’t whitewash old Winnie in just the way that Mrs Thatcher and the Conservative Party have always liked him to be… I think we might be in for the new broom business here. You see what I mean?’ The fire flared as the ball of paper was heated to combustion point. Then the ball of ash lifted gently from the coals and toppled into the hearth.

‘I’m an admirer of Sir Winston myself, sir.’ Stuart drained his glass.

‘Of course you are. We all are! He was a great man. That’s the essence of the matter. We must do a good job on this one because it’s something we all believe in. Luckily, I can assure you that the Hitler Minutes are forgeries. We have to make sure everyone knows it.’

Stuart said nothing. He knew the papers were not forgeries. There would not be such a fuss about forgeries. Perhaps the DG read Stuart’s thoughts for he touched Stuart’s arm and turned him towards the door, as a torpedo might be aimed at an enemy cruiser. Stuart walked to the door and turned for a moment before opening it. The DG looked up and raised his eyebrows. They were big bushy eyebrows surmounting a large craggy face.

‘Yes, Stuart?’

‘If, in the line of duty, you had to give orders for the expedient demise of two men, you’d not necessarily feel you had to tell me about that, would you?’

The house was still, and there was no sound of traffic. The DG stood for a moment and pondered the question, as if a profound philosophical principle were at stake. He rolled on his toes like a dancing master about to demonstrate a particularly tricky step. ‘I would use my judgement, Stuart.’

By Monday, July 23, it was becoming increasingly easy for Sir Sydney Ryden to believe that fate was working against him. He dined that evening at the Beefsteak, an old-established gentleman’s club consisting of little more than a small ante-room, an office, a few armchairs-providing a view of some public lavatories and a war memorial-and a narrow room in which members and their guests dined, all at the same long table.

Fortune placed Sir Sydney next to a bearded TV scriptwriter with decided views upon the government’s promised cuts in the civil service. ‘Take the Home Office,’ said the scriptwriter, reaching for a silver-plated cow which had been emptied of milk, ‘Half the people there are making tea whenever I have been inside the building. You are not at the Home Office, are you?’

‘No, I’m not,’ said Sir Sydney gravely.

The scriptwriter tilted the silver cow so that he could use its nose to draw patterns on the table cloth. ‘I did a documentary there last year. Disgusting waste… We said that in the programme, of course.’

‘Most interesting,’ said Sir Sydney. He glanced round to see if his host had yet escaped from the man who had button-holed him with a request about joining the club committee.

‘What part of the civil service are you with?’ the scriptwriter asked, having failed to discover this by means of indirect remarks.

‘The Foreign Office,’ said Sir Sydney Ryden.

‘They are helping us with a programme we’ll air next April,’ said the scriptwriter. He confidently assumed that everyone was fascinated by a behind-the-scenes glimpse of television. Sir Sydney sipped his port and hoped the young man would talk to his host and leave him alone. He would have made his escape, except that there was still a small matter of paying his share of the cost of the cigars.

‘… and the Germans had put all their gold down into this salt mine… ’ he suddenly heard the scriptwriter saying. ‘The greater proportion of the entire German gold reserves and God knows what documents and stuff… ’ Sir Sydney’s stomach tightened and the port suddenly became vinegar in his mouth. He turned to the bearded man and nodded.

‘Really. And this was your idea?’ said Sir Sydney encouragingly

‘Some looney historian from one of those dud universities in the Midlands. A professor he was… ’ The bearded man laughed. ‘You should have seen him. I wouldn’t have given him a job as a cleaner. But he had the stuff all right. Unusable, mind you. Scriptwriting for TV is a very specialized technique. The Beeb gave him a few quid and sent him packing. The poor old fool was furious but there was nothing he could do about it. “Sue the BBC,” I told him, “and see where that gets you.” One of my people took over the project and started it rolling so that we can air it on the anniversary of the end of the war. That’s when the Yanks got to the mine and found the loot there.’

Sir Sydney relit his cigar, noting with some satisfaction that the flaming match did not tremble. ‘Tell me how your script begins,’ he said, this being the simplest way to have the story retold while he gave his full attention to it.

By now the scriptwriter was steering the silver cow round the salt and pepper so that it left tracks in the table cloth. ‘It’s not my script,’ he said. ‘I’m what they call a script editor. I phone up any writers I think might be able to handle it. We’ve had a four-page outline. The actual script won’t be ready until next month, as I remember.’

‘It must be an awfully interesting job,’ said Sir Sydney and gallantly sat through another half-hour of finer points of script editing until the subject of the salt mine was quite, quite cold.

The next morning Sir Sydney arranged an urgent meeting with the assistant director at the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. The DPP is the official department which advises law-enforcement agencies about the legal aspects of serious criminal proceedings. The assistant director promised Sir Sydney that they would support an action against the BBC or any of its employees, and any other person concerned, should they not cooperate with MI6 in its endeavours to suppress the publication of material which was protected by the Official Secrets Act, as clearly this was.

On that same day Sir Sydney Ryden arranged a meeting with the chairman of the BBC board of governors. Without going into any detail, he explained that the revelation of certain aspects of the recovery of the treasure in the salt mine would not be in the public interest.