“‘Our dead friend here was so unfortunate as to run into a couple of murdering Boers. The pair you have met and dispatched. No idea who he is or what his business is, but he seems to have been a messenger of some sort out from Kimberley. My best guess would be that he was a De Beers operative. Look at the table. These are the goods he was carrying stashed away.’

“Ratty, eyeing the gold bars with relish, spoke out of turn. ‘Cor! That’ll be on its way down to Lord Methuen and the Ninth! It’s our next year’s wages we’re looking at! That’s ours, lads! Compliments of Cecil Rhodes!’

“But one of us didn’t have eyes for the gleam of gold. To my horror, Syd grabbed the sugar basin. ‘I know what this is!’ he chortled. ‘My mum took me up west to Fortnum’s in Piccadilly for my twelfth birthday tea. This is sugar! But special coffee sugar! It’s rock candy sugar crystals! She let me eat a whole basin-full and didn’t make me have coffee with it.’ Before we could say anything, he’d licked his finger and was sticking it into the pile of rough diamonds. Abel managed to get to his hand and smack it away from his mouth just in time.

“We explained the nature of his ‘coffee crystals’ and what the army’s new rule on looting implied for us, should anyone decide to take things the wrong way and make an example of any poor innocent trooper. Death or imprisonment, in short. Everyone agreed that disclosure—and as soon as possible—was called for, and that in the meantime, it should stay where it was, safe on the table under everyone’s gaze. We made practical plans for the concealment of it, should we be attacked. I wrote out the letter, we all signed it as witnesses and I put it underneath the sugar basin.”

Catching Redfyre’s exasperated sigh, the prisoner nodded and laughed. “I know! But there were no army regulations to cover these very particular circumstances! And, funnily enough, the table really was the safest place. Every man became its guardian dragon. Whenever anyone entered the room, he would automatically run a checking eye over the haul. We got so used to seeing the bars of gold, no one batted an eyelid when Abel reached out casually one morning and grabbed one to use as a paperweight to hold down his mother’s recipe for beef stew while he chopped and scraped and filled a saucepan.