War Game

'Why lawyers?'

'You don't want young Charlie to get his hands on his ton of gold. And the easiest way to do that would be to prove it isn't his.'

The Minister nodded. 'And how would we do that, Dr.

Audley?'

Audley shrugged. 'I'm not a lawyer. But . . .'

'But?'

'Well, I would think you could make a damn good case that it belongs to the Crown, for a start.'

'How do you make that out?'

Audley thought for a moment, imposing the facts on the first cutting's interpretation of the treasure laws. 'Okay. Charlie found it, and he found it on his own land —correct?'

'Correct.'

'So if it had been lost then he gets the full market value—

right?'

'Yes.'

'Uh-huh. But it certainly wasn't lost— as if anyone could lose a ton of gold on dry land. It was hidden by—' Audley stopped abruptly.

'By Colonel Nathaniel Parrott,' said Stocker.

Audley stared from one to the other of them. It just couldn't be as easy as this, with Stocker and the Minister listening dummy5

politely and answering politely, and helping him out every time he stumbled. Because if there was one thing the Minister and the Department had at their beck and call it was a complement of sharp Government lawyers.

'Go on, Dr. Audley,' said the Minister.

Audley shook his head. 'There's no point. If you could take it away from Ratcliffe legally then you wouldn't be here now.

Which means that somehow he's got you by the short hairs.'

The two men exchanged looks. Then the Minister nodded.

'Yes . . . well, you're substantially correct on both counts, I must admit. We would prefer not to see a fortune pass into Charlie Ratcliffe's hands, for reasons which don't concern you directly . . . And we naturally did look very closely into the legal possibilities. In fact it was the first thing we considered.'

And that figured, thought Audley with a twinge of personal bitterness. When it came to separating people from their money by fair means or foul, Her Majesty's Civil Service had nothing to learn from the Great Train Robbers.

'We even contemplated encouraging the Spanish Government to raise the issue of original ownership.' The Minister's nose wrinkled with instinctive distaste.

'You mean—Parrott's ownership? Back in the seventeenth century?'

'That's right.' The distaste was masked now. 'But there are certain—ah—legal difficulties in that area.'

dummy5

Not to mention political ones, thought Audley. To sup at that Spanish table any British politician would require a very long spoon, and a social democrat like this man would never be able to find a spoon long enough for safety.

'In any case there seems to be little doubt that Parrott was the owner, in fact and in law, by inheritance from his father,'

the Minister continued. 'And that he hid it, intending to recover it later. That presumption is overwhelming.'

'It could have been the other fellow who hid it—Steyning.'

'It makes no difference. Parrott was the owner. And the moment he was dead it belonged to his heir.'

His heir. That was the point, of course; all that flummery from 'our legal correspondent' about treasure troves and fine points of English law paled into nothing if there was an heir.

Because then a much older and stronger law could be invoked: that it was someone's property, protected even in this semi-socialist society by the most sacred laws. Only in Charlie Ratcliffe's own revolutionary Utopia, where all property was theft, could there be any argument about that.

Which was an irony because—

'His heirs,' said the Minister. 'And their heirs, Dr. Audley.'

Audley had reached the same point of repetition as he spoke, but he still stared across the car incredulously. After three hundred years—after three hundred years, then this was a coincidence which overshadowed that irony as a skyscraper dummy5

did a mudhut.

'Minister—are you telling me that Charlie Ratcliffe is Nathaniel Parrott's heir?'