Peter Wells had come up with the idea for getting rid of gold. It seemed the best way of keeping Barry Fantony busy and ensuring a long period of profitable employment for himself. Michael Fantony found it breathtakingly simple and something that they could use over and over again while preparing for finding the Big Hoard.
  With 158 sixty-pound bars in their various hiding places, it was obvious that they were always going to have a large surplus of silver. There was only so much quality work than a lone silversmith could manage in a lifetime. Even if they converted it to gold at just the value of the metal less a small discount, Michael felt that a trade was worth doing.
  Barry called round at his brother's home in the middle of Saturday afternoon. He seemed less than impressed when Michael told that he was working on a scheme to convert their silver into gold and that he would explain the details in due course.
  "Pardon me for being dense," Barry said after taking a fortifying swig from a can of real Czech lager. "Whatever happens on this new deal, the bottom line is you're leaving us with hot gold to get rid of instead of the hot silver. Big deal! Where does that get us?"
  "Where you want to be," Michael said patiently. "What you've been belly-aching about since April. In an immediate cash-raising situation."
  "Yeah?" said Barry sceptically.
  "What we do is drop molten gold from a great height into water to make nuggets and threads, then we churn it all round in the cement mixer for a while to smooth off rough edges."
  "Why?"
  "Because you can find what's called alluvial gold just lying around in rivers in Scotland. This is gold washed out of ore-bearing seams in the mountains, which ends up in the rivers eventually. And, like the pebbles on Brighton beach, it gets rubbed smooth."
  "You sound like you've been reading that bloody encyclopaedia on your computer again. So?"
  "So all someone has to do is go and see some Scottish lord and get his permission to prospect on his land for a few per cent of the take. Five would be reasonable. Then that someone turns up a month or two later with a big bag of gold, gives the noble lord him his share and the rest is ours quite legitimately. To sell or keep, as we choose."
  "So someone, meaning me, has to spend a fortnight in a tent miles from anywhere in bloody Scotland?"
  "No," Michael said patiently. "You show your face around a bit, but you'll be out in the wilds, or that's what you'll say, and prospecting secretly so no one grabs the loot. So who's going to be surprised if no one's seen you that much?"
  "But I still have to go up there?"
  "Sometimes, I wonder if you really want to become very seriously rich, me old Bazzer. Why not make another holiday of it? Take Jean. In fact, it would be a good idea if you did a bit of prospecting for real to get us a few bits of genuine Scottish gold so we can get the chemical composition right for the bit we give the Scottish lord."
  "You know what, this might just work. How did you think of it?"
  "It's obvious, really, after thinking about your pal Mr. Haig. That's where all his sovereigns came from, from the gold Old Man Fullerton took out of the California gold fields."
  "So where does anyone look for gold in Scotland?"
  "I've done some research. There are actually books in the library about where the gold is in Scotland. And we can use your idea of asking on the Internet. There's bound to be some sad bastard around with nothing better to do this weekend than give us as much information as we need for free."
  "So what's the catch?" said Barry.
  "I'm not sure there is one. Peter is sure he can make the gold look right; not that anyone will be looking at it too closely. It's just a matter of setting it all up."
  "Which will take how long?" Barry said sceptically.
  "I reckon I should have the first batch of gold next week. So it all depends how fast you can sign up some Scottish landowner and find us some bits of the real stuff."
  "Guess who's going to Bonnie Scotland on Monday?" grinned Barry.

Pru invited Nigel Faraday over to the tower for dinner on Sunday evening. She was leaving for Holland on Monday and the meal was intended to be her way of saying thank-you for an enjoyable holiday. They intended to stay in touch, but neither was sure whether anything lasting would come of their good intentions.
  It had been a somewhat oppressive, sticky day. Television weather maps had been following the progress of a smallish storm, which was heading in from the Atlantic. According to the local radio station, lightning was zapping Newquay and North Devon was next on the list before the storm hit Wales. The forecasters had promised much fresher weather for Monday, but that was no consolation for those in the path of the storm's hot breath, especially if they were deprived of the benefit of thick, insulating stone walls.
  Haig had been round the dining room with the vacuum cleaner during the afternoon. As his sister left the cooking to carry on unsupervised while she worried about getting the table decoration exactly right, he was going round the room with a duster, making sure that it would not disgrace Pru.
  "Are you going to have to close the shutters?" Pru asked as she rearranged the roses in her centrepiece for the umpteenth time.
  "Probably not," said her brother. "It's not going to be that much of a storm. We're not going to see half the village go flying out into the Bristol Channel."
  "I was just wondering how the room would look if we used candles instead of the chandelier."
  "What, gas-powered ones, like old Fullerton used?"
  "He had gas-powered candles?" Pru said sceptically.
  "Oh, yes. He was a great one for gadgets. And there's less bother. All you have to do is replace the little incandescent globes on them every so often. No trimming wicks or mopping up candle grease."
  "Still, I suppose gas candles are par for the course if you're living in a pretend lighthouse. Do you ever think there's something terribly symbolic about that? Living in a tower? Dot was hinting she thinks there is."
  "What, you mean I'm symbolically inhabiting my own male member?" grinned Haig. "Or a huge artificial one as an expression of wishes unfulfilled? I thought Freud had been discredited more or less completely by now."
  "Dot reckons he's due for a revival. That seems to be the general trend of one of the book clubs she's in."
  "I sometimes wonder if our big sister comes from the same planet as us, the sort of book clubs she joins. And what about you and the girls living here?"
  "The implications of that are too horrible to consider," grinned Pru. "What do you think?"
  Haig inspected the centrepiece thoughtfully. "I think it looked much better five minutes ago, before you started messing with it."
  "Bastard!"
  "I should be very careful about saying that to your twin brother, Prune. I think the place looks fine. I mean, you don't want it looking too domesticated in case Nigel thinks you ought to give up leaping around and settle down as a housewife."
  "God! What an awful thought."
  "Does he know you're not the settling-down kind?"
  "I think he realizes that you and I don't fit into the normal run of things."
  "And he's just a holiday fling before you head off back into the jungle?"
  "It's Holland I'm going to, Jezzer. Bits of it are quite civilized. Allegedly."
  "I'll take that as a yes," grinned Haig.
  "What about the cat?"
  "What about him?"
  "Is he likely to come in here and go walk-about on the table when no one's looking?"
  "Not if we keep the door shut until Nigel gets here."
  As if on cue, the doorbell rang.
  "Panic!" yelled Haig. "We're not ready for you!"
  "Yes, we are," laughed Pru. "Get the sherry poured while I let him in."
  Well-trained in the art of visiting, Nigel had decided not to bring flowers for Pru if she was leaving the next day. He had settled instead for a box of liqueur chocolates.
  "I'd have thought you'd have the hatches battened down," Nigel remarked when he reached the dining room. "It's really chucking it down in Bideford, and parts of Cornwall have been blacked out."
  "I'm surprised you dared venture out if it's that bad," grinned Haig.
  "It would take more than a bit of a hurricane to stop me having dinner with Pru," Nigel said gallantly.
  "Give this gentleman a glass of sherry," ordered Pru. "He sounds like someone we should encourage."
  "Does sherry go with Cambodian cuisine?" remarked her brother.
  "A good sherry goes with anything," said Nigel. "I suppose you'll be up at the crack of dawn, Jay? Out with the old metal detector to see what the storm stirred up? It should have blown over by then."
  "Unfortunately, the tide's going out at the moment. You need everything stirred up with the tide coming in to the bay to do any good."
  "Yes, of course," nodded Nigel.
  "But I may be able to get some routine prospecting done tonight. If so, I need this storm to be over by about a quarter to eleven."
  "You won't get any complaints from me if it is," said Nigel. "I felt a bit of a fraud actually driving here instead of walking. Isn't your cat enormous?"
  Biffo paused in the doorway of the dining room, assessing the threat potential of the people present. Haig pointedly moved a spare chair over to the bookcase. Biffo looked at him with big, green, inscrutable eyes, then he plodded over to the chair and gained the window ledge in two bounds.
  "I'm sure I've seen him in the village," Nigel added. "Looking out from someone's front window."
  "Yes, he's got two homes, apparently," said Pru. "Sit down, everyone. I'll send the starters up."
  "A bit more impressive than a hatch in the wall between the kitchen and the dining room," Nigel remarked as Pru headed down the stairs. "Having a hoist going up through the floor."
  "It must have been hell in old Fullerton's day," said Haig. "When they still had the gazebo thing on the top of the tower. Having to get a ten-course banquet up all the stairs to the roof."
  "And he's supposed to have held his banquets on night like this, with a storm raging around him. Strong nerves, your Victorians."
  "Great faith in their engineering," nodded Haig, transferring dishes from the hoist to the table.
  "God! You should see those black clouds heading this way!" Pru said as she rejoined them.
  "I don't know," said Haig. "You'd never think this one had chased tornadoes in Kansas or actually filmed hurricanes from inside the eye on a US Air Force plane, would you?"
  "It's different when you've got a job to do," protested Pru.
  "Instead of just having to sit here and take it?" said Haig. "Okay, I surrender. Switch the lights on, see if I care about the electricity bill, and I'll close the shutters."
  "Do you want any help?" Nigel said doubtfully.
  "No, thanks," smiled Haig. "It's all done electronically by the touch of a button. And when we're safe, Pru can scare us to death with stories about typhoons in the South China Sea."
  The night was going very dark very quickly. Closing the shutters made little difference. As Pru told her brother, they would have had to switch the light on anyway. Biffo stared indignantly at Pru when the shutters cut off the view from his window. Then he closed his eyes and went to sleep.
  After the meal, the Haig's and their guest took their coffee, liqueurs and the liqueur chocolates to the drawing room area. As soon as they had settled themselves, Biffo bounded down from his window ledge and approached.
  "What's that cat sitting there for, looking at me?" Pru said suspiciously.
  "Because he wants to leap onto your lap, either for a kip or to sink his claws into your knees," said Haig.
  "In that case, he can stay where he is."
  "No offence to Biffo, but he looks like he weighs a ton," said Nigel.
  "Half a ton, certainly," said Haig. "But I find it a very revealing gesture. You can never know exactly where you are with human beings. They're such a shifty lot. But it's different with a cat. If he takes the trouble to come all the way over here, climb up our stairs and pick you out in a room full of people to have a kip on, you can be sure he likes you. Especially if he does it regularly."
  "Sometimes he just comes and sits next to you," said Pru. "Letting you know he's your friend. And keeping in with everyone who knows how to use a tin-opener."
  "No problems with him marking his territory?" said Nigel. "A neighbour two houses from us has got a black and white cat. He comes and wees on our dustbin quite regularly."
  "Cats conquering new territory by marking it with their scent," Pru quoted. "They can do this by spraying, rubbing against things or sleeping on them. But friend Biffo seems to know that spraying indoors is socially unacceptable."
  "He doesn't seem to be bothered by that thunder we had. Mind you, your walls are thick enough to tone it down to a mutter."
  "Yes, I hardly noticed it," said Pru. "You forget just how insulated you can be in this place. At our sister Dot's place in Edinburgh, you can feel the whole house shake if a heavy lorry goes crashing along the road outside. I can't imagine how big the lorry would have to be to shake this place."
  "Sirens, too," said her brother. "You don't hear any from one week to the next living here. That's something I relearn every time I go to London or somewhere like that; how to tell police cars from ambulances and fire engines."
  "And bloody car alarms," said Pru.
  "Don't talk to me about car alarms," said Nigel. "We had one across the road that went off between eleven o'clock and half past practically every night. Just about everyone in the road must have asked Dad or myself how they were fixed for suing the owner. Fortunately for good neighbourly relations, the lady changed her car and the problem went away."
  Haig finished his coffee and drained his liqueur glass. "Well, if you'll excuse me, I'll leave you to it. I want to see how I'm fixed for getting out into the bay tonight. Unless you'd like to come with me?"
  "No, thanks," Pru said firmly.
  Haig climbed to the top room of the tower and opened the shutters. It was very dark outside, but the rain seemed to be light and concentrated by gusts of wind. If he looked to the west, and used a little imagination, he could just see a lighter band in the darkness at the horizon. The so-called storm was just the weather equivalent of mild indigestion; unpleasant briefly and soon gone.
  Haig switched on his computer and used the modem card to dial into the local 24-hour weather service. Radar maps showed that the thunder and lightning was giving everyone in West, Mid and South Glamorgan a hard time. There were clear skies above Cornwall, which was good news for engineers struggling with repairs to the power lines. If the warm, south-westerly wind continued to blow, the rain would have gone by the time he ventured out into Farnescombe Bay.
  Haig switched off the computer and went down to the kitchen. Ever hopeful, Biffo joined him in case there was any grub going. Haig cut up some surplus slices of chicken for him, then got on with the washing up; a job that consisted mainly of stacking items in the dishwasher. The chore reminded him that he would be on his own for a week when Pru left in the morning, apart from the cat's irregular visits. That thought reminded him that he had to be up early in the morning to drive Pru to the airport at Barnstaple.
  Her new assignment started officially at the beginning of October. As usual, Pru had got herself onto the payroll a week early so that she could be settled in a new place when the work started. She was fluent in five languages and she could get by in eighteen others. The Dutch would have to put up with her German for a while if they didn't speak English.

Jean and Barry Fantony set off on Sunday and drove in easy stages to Scotland. They had acquired five different types of anti-midge defences – creams and electronic devices – by the time they reached their destination in the forests to the west of the Great Glen on Monday afternoon.
  Michael had composed the letters that Barry had sent by fax to the Marquess of Arvonie. He had deliberately picked a youngish landowner with scientific interests after identifying a promising Highland gold-bearing region. The marquess was in his early thirties, he was a graduate in computer studies (just a pass degree due to his busy social life at university, but it was a degree) and he had redirected some of his family's investment portfolio to computer hardware and software manufacturers.
  Jean navigated the motor caravan along a winding but well-paved road after they left the A82 and turned away from Loch Ness. Both had been keeping a lookout for the famous monster. Nessie had not shown himself or herself. Arvonie House sprang out at them before they were ready for it, appearing in front of them as they reached the end of a long bend in a disciplined forest.
  "Imagine living here," sighed Jean, gazing at the solid and dependable granite building.
  "Makes the paper-boy earn his wages," said Barry. "And it's a fair drive down to the supermarket or the local pub. Do you think we should drive round the back in our grotty old motor-caravan?"
  "I bet it cost a lot more than that Range Rover parked over there."
  "I suppose you're right." Barry slowed and turned across the broad, flat area in front of the house. He noticed that a surveillance camera was tracking him.
  The marquess himself, a tall, dark-haired man with a posh English accent rather than a Scottish Highland one, welcomed the visitors at the front door. He led them across a vast entrance hall and up a grand staircase to the first floor. His study looked out over a formal garden and then an ornamental lake. Everything was surrounded by trees with mountains behind them.
  The marquess guided them to a sitting area around a low table in front of his picture window. A young woman in a business suit served coffee and then disappeared with the contents of the marquess's out-tray.
  "I must say, I found your approach somewhat unusual, Mr. Fantony," the marquess told Barry. "We know there is gold around here, but the quantities are vanishingly small and people tend just to sneak onto the grounds and help themselves. I don't think anyone's ever asked permission. Never mind offered me a formal contract."
  "Not that I can offer you any guarantees I'll find more than a few bits and pieces of gold, your lordship," Barry said. "But I have some promising places to look, and I thought it would be better to do it officially rather than have your gamekeepers popping off at us with shotguns."
  "I don't think they're actually allowed to do that," smiled the marquess. "Is your method a secret, by the way? It's not something to do with dowsing, by any chance? My gillie did once report seeing some character walking along a shallow burn in wellington boots, waving a couple of coat hangers."
  "Secret?" said Barry. "Well, yes and no. It's all done by computers, but I don't know enough about them to understand how it's done."
  "Ah, you have a mastermind crunching the numbers for you?"
  "That's right. He sits at home and does the computing while I go and do the looking. If you're willing to sign the contract to let me look."
  "Yes, I thought I'd better meet you first, but I see no harm in it, to coin a phrase. All you want is a simple right of access to my property, as marked on the Ordnance Survey map you included, subject to any restrictions imposed by me or my employees. And in return, you undertake to surrender five per cent of any gold or other values that you find."
  "That's about it, your lordship," nodded Barry.
  "And you're not planning any major excavations?"
  "If I do find anything, I should be at or near the surface. I don't plan to go deeper than a couple or three inches. Or if I do want to do any serious digging, I'll ask your permission first. But I don't plan to."
  "That sounds entirely reasonable. And may I assume the arrangement will remain confidential? I don't want people digging up the estate the way they were digging up that chap Haig's garden in Devon. Did you read about that?"
  Jean Fantony opened her mouth, then closed it again. She had just remembered that Barry had told her not to mention Jeremy Haig to avoid raising the subject of metal detectors.
  "Must have missed that," said Barry.
  "Chap who found the sovereigns? Yes, apparently he made a video of three sinister types digging up his garden the other morning. Who suffered the indignity of having their pictures splashed all over the papers. Seems they actually believed he'd buried his sovereigns again in the garden!"
  "Some people will believe anything," grinned Barry.
  "I see you brought your own mobile hotel with you. I trust it's comfortable, Mrs. Fantony?"
  "Oh, yes," said Jean. "It's called multi-functional in the catalogue, which means you can convert the middle bit into a bathroom, a kitchen or living space according to what you need it for when you need it."
  "And it's got all the latest pollution control equipment to make sure that all waste of any sort is neutralized by various biological agents to make it totally harmless," Barry added.
  "Sounds interesting. You must give me the guided tour sometime. And perhaps I could give you my guided tour in return."
  "We'd love to," said Jean.
  "But we'd like to have a look at a couple of sites for our base of operations first," said Barry.
  "Of course. You'll want to be well settled in before dark. Shall we sign our contracts?"
  Barry took out his executive ballpoint and approached the desk. Michael Fantony had predicted that the Marquess of Arvonie was the sort of person who would fall for a high-tech con-trick. Given two apparently honest young people, who were offering something for nothing on the basis of what a computer had told them, he seemed to have nothing to lose. If everything went well with Michael's deal later in the week, everyone would make a profit very soon.

Michael Fantony had devised his own system for visualizing the space taken up by precious metals for transport and storage. A sixty-pound bar of silver had the same volume as half a dozen one-pint cartons of milk. When converted to gold, four silver bars would yield a gold block filling the space of one and a half bags of sugar. And while Michael knew that it would take someone with the muscles of a weight-lifter to shift 240 pounds of silver at once, even an accountant could manage a kilogram and a half of gold. The move to gold made a lot of sense.
  Peter Wells had been very busy since Michael had come up with his scheme. He had been stuck with the job of converting four regularly shaped bullion bars into scrap. He had achieved his object by sawing the bars into irregular pieces, collecting the sawdust in tough, plastic bags and melting and recasting some of the pieces as cubes in obviously home-made moulds.
  "So your reckon this will do us?" Wells said as Michael inspected collections of plastic bags in each of four metal cases of the type used for toolkits. Wells had decided that they made silver easier to carry while looking quite innocent.
  "Looks good to me," said Michael. "A job very well done, Peter."
  "After all that work, do I get to hear what the plan is for turning it into gold?"
  "I suppose so. No names, but I've heard about a bendable bullion dealer, if you know what I mean?"
  "The sort of bloke who'd sue the life out of you if you called him a crook, but who'll have your gold fillings if you don't keep your mouth closed?"
  "Something like that," smiled Michael. "I've arranged to swap this silver for gold on behalf of an unnamed client of mine. Gold that he's been buying as scrap from a foreign government. It's one of these schemes that aren't actually illegal but you don't want to talk about them."
  "Sounds like Oliver North stuff."
  "Yes, it is. The French government is busy selling arms to a country that's okay to buy them, and then their interest in the arms ends. But their client country is then selling the arms on to a country that's everyone's enemy."
  "Including France's?
  "Probably. Anyway, the payment is being made via this precious metal scrap deal. I don't know any of the details, but I assume the proceeds all end up in the Bank of France somehow."
  "And where's all this gold come from?" frowned Wells. "Someone pulled off a bullion job?"
  "No, it's all entirely legitimate. Apparently, there are vast amounts of gold to be recovered by processing old electronic equipment because the manufacturers use a lot of gold for connectors, and so on. These days, when nobody can be bothered to repair anything, they just rip out a whole circuit board and shove a new one in when something breaks down. There are people who buy up these junked circuit boards and obsolete equipment, and ship them to some Third World country where the labour cost is peanuts."
  "And the natives strip out the precious metals, probably poisoning themselves while they do it? Okay, I can see how that works, but how do we get from silver to gold?"
  "Probably because someone wants to keep any details of the deal as vague as possible, the type of metal isn't mentioned specifically in the paperwork. It's just listed as precious metal scrap to a certain value. So as long as we keep the value the same, it can be both silver and gold as easily as just gold."
  "Smart!" approved Wells.
  "And if my bullion dealer wants to think our silver comes from another Third World recycling project, where the profit is going into some dictator's pocket rather than his country's treasury, that's his problem."
  "The whole thing sounds fire-proof, Mr. F."
  "Yes, the beauty of the scheme is that only the description of the stock changes, not the value. The Revenue and Excise authorities see no difference in the amount of cash passing through the business and so they can't accuse our bullion dealer of swindling the government out of its share of taxes. All he has to do is make a slight adjustment to his records of his stock – so many thousand pounds worth of silver scrap instead of so much gold scrap."
  "Blame the computer if anyone notices anything?"
  "That's right. Someone made a mistake putting the details on a piece of paper into the computer. He or she put a tick in the wrong box."
  "So how much gold are we getting? Is he giving it to us gramme for gramme?"
  "Nearly. We're getting one thousand four hundred and forty-four grammes of gold, which gives him a five per cent profit on the deal."
  "Six hundred quid."
  "More or less. Which is also what you've earned for your last week's work."
  "Nearly what I'm worth," grinned Wells. "So he's happy with that sort of profit margin?"
  "Yes, if he can pocket that much in gold, tax-free. And we expect to do a lot more business in the future."
  "And I suppose you're a lot happier with your ninety per cent than a poxy ten from an insurance company."
  "It certainly seems a more reasonable return on the investment," smiled Michael. "So, if you can deliver these boxes to this address and collect the gold." Michael handed Wells a slip of paper torn out of the middle of a fax.
  "And then get on with making the alluvial gold for your brother to find? Assuming he actually finds any up there."
  "Exactly."
  "I wonder if this Scottish lord really believes he's going to see anything?"
  Michael Fantony shrugged. "Barry has an honest face. And so does his wife. I'll see you again the day after tomorrow to see how you're getting on."
  Michael had decided that he had no need to make any more actual exchanges of silver for gold. Once Barry had shown some gold to a third party, such as a bank where he had stored if for safe-keeping, the Marquess of Arvonie would be satisfied that he really was finding it on his estate. Future transactions could be purely electronic.
  Peter Wells would deliver silver scrap to the bullion dealer's agent. The dealer would adjust his records to show that he had received silver and gold scrap from one source, and gold scrap from Barry. Barry would receive a cheque for his gold, and declare it as income like a good citizen after paying his five per cent to a silent partner.
  The beauty of the scheme was that it would provide Barry with the pocket money that he kept going on about, and it would keep him occupied until the following year, when the Fantony brothers could put one of their big-money schemes into operation.
  Stormy weather at the weekend, and Barry's recent trip to Farne, had suggested another way to find the ‘Viking' silver. Michael was looking into ways of arranging his own version of the storm tide as an alternative to burying it. Peter Wells had suggested a solution to the container problem: the finder could say that he had found the loot washed up on a beach in a clay pot of some sort.
  The pot was broken, showing off the contents, but the finder, probably Barry, had been able to use the bottom part to carry silver to the motor caravan, where he had transferred it to a modern carrier bag. The bottom part of the pot had then been left somewhere in all the excitement. Michael felt that the disappearing pot was a sound solution to the problem of what the silver had been in when found.

Jean and Barry Fantony returned in triumph to Roehampton with a few scraps of gold. Jean had been very sceptical at first, but finding three tiny flakes of gold among gravel at a bend in a river had convinced her that there really was gold in the area. Leaving Jean showing off their twenty-six flakes of gold to Michael's wife, Beryl, the brothers retired to Michael's study for a discussion of tactics.
  "You've really surpassed yourself there, Bazzer," grinned Michael, offering his brother a can of the decent Czech lager.
  "Yeah, I know, you were laying bets I wouldn't find anything, you rotten sod," grinned Barry. "But it was bloody hard work getting even that much. How the hell are we going to explain finding a worthwhile amount?"
  "You can find decent concentrations of it. Other people have. And you've got the power of the computer on your side, don't forget."
  "The marquess was quite interested in what the computer does. Even if he's not asking how it does it."
  "What if I told you it finds the gold by using a program that analyzes a databank of information on known Highland gold-bearing strata and published finds?"
  "Yeah, I thought it would be something like that," Barry said sarcastically.
  "But it also uses authenticated but unpublished material. And that's what gives us our edge in finding it. Like I said, we don't need to have the actual program. We just have to look as if we do."
  "And talk a load of bullshit that might sound right to someone who uses a computer from time to time."
  "Correct. Well, apart from the prospecting, did you have a good time?"
  "Jean was a bit worried about a gang of bikers that were supposed to be having a summer camp in the hills. One of the locals warned us to look out for them; but we didn't see any sign of them. But we did meets some California chemist bloke camping out in the wilds and testing an anti-insect gadget. He was expecting to make his fortune out of it. The only snag was it's heavy on the batteries, which makes it a lot dearer than the creams."
  "How did you get on with the local wildlife?"
  "Okay, really. We left them alone and they left us alone. Oh, yes, and we got the tour of the marquess's stately home. Which was dead posh. And he had the tour of the motor caravan. He thought the pollution digester on the bog was dead good, the way it converts sewage and garbage into a non-toxic sludge."
  "It's the sort of high-tech gadget that would appeal to someone like him. Like the idea of some anorak at the other end of the country using a computer to find gold in his back yard."
  "Did you get the silver swapped?"
  "Yes, we're all systems go on that when you give Peter his samples so he can get the exact composition right."
  "If I can get them off Jean."
  "Peter was suggesting he could put them in a clear block of plastic as a sort of ornament for Jean."
  "Yeah, she'd like that."
  "And it would also mean that he could substitute a few bits for any he has to use in the analyzer. Who's to know if they're in the middle of a block of plastic?"
  "Right. As long as there's twenty-six bits about the right size, she'll never know," nodded Barry. "So we're on for what? Eleven or twelve grand on the first job?"
  "Yes, I think it's a reasonably modest start," said Michael. "Right, shall we rejoin the ladies?"