“I woke up earlier than the others one bright morning on tea-making jankers. It was day eight. The day after the funeral. I ran an eye over the table. Right number of gold bars. Diamond dross in the basin. Or was it? Something wasn’t quite right. At that precise hour. the sun was slanting down through a high slit window and catching the rough stones. Where it should have been striking sparks of amber and red through the dust, there was barely a responding gleam. I gave it a closer look and ran a finger through it. It wasn’t my imagination; the dust hadn’t merely settled differently over the crystals. I stirred Abel awake and he came to have a look with me. ‘Tip it out,’ he advised.

“We poured it onto a clean tea cloth and examined it. The surrounding earth was the same. But the lumps were different. Abel fetched the magnifying glass he used for starting fires, peered and passed it to me. ‘Some bugger’s done a switch,’ I concluded. ‘These pieces are not crystalline. And they’re all the same colour. Grey—dark to light. He’s left one or two of the smaller diamonds on top for show.’

“‘And I could take you straight to the very patch of river gravel, not fifty yards from here, that these ugly lumps came from,’ Abel said. ‘Who the hell? When?”

“‘Remind me, Lieutenant . . . Did we have visitors yesterday between the hours of sun up and sun down? Did Lord Methuen pop in for tiffin? Did Her Majesty come to tea?’

“‘Bloody didn’t! And there was somebody here in this shack all day, coming and going, but always in pairs—as scheduled. None of us goes anywhere without his shadow around this place. I get sick to death of seeing your ugly mug every time I turn my head!’

“‘It has to be one of us, Abel, doesn’t it?’”

“‘Or two of us.’”

Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Cambridge, Friday, the 16th of May, 1924

Outside the Wren Chapel, a dinner-jacketed Digby Gisbourne consulted his pocket watch. Two minutes before six. He resumed his pacing to and fro across the portico. He resented performing this menial welcoming duty, which could so easily and more properly have been done by the appropriate college servant, but of course, he hadn’t dared make his views clear to the formidable Fanshawe. Too-big-for-his-boots Rendlesham had stepped in, frozen him and ticked him off for complaining when he’d raised the matter. Hadn’t young Gisbourne understood that discretion—nay, secrecy even—was the quality to which their group owed its existence? And, as the youngest member, Gisbourne must expect to take on subaltern duties. It was no time at all since he was at Harrow—he could hardly have forgotten how these things work?