Mark you,' Colonel Smithers waved his pipe airily,'that's only seventy per cent profit. He will be given one thousand seven hundred pounds for your five-pound bar and you're a richer man than you might have been. Your friend flies off to Bombay and goes to the first bullion dealer in the bazaar. You could easily afford a hundred pounds for the job. All you have to do is cut your bar into thin sheets or plates-you'd soon find someone to do this for you - and sew the plates -they'd be smaller than playing cards - into a cotton belt, and pay your friend a commission to wear it. You've got a friend going to India or perhaps you're on good terms with an airline pilot or a steward on the Far East run. That would make it worth around the thousand pounds. Now, the law says you have to sell that to the Bank of England at the controlled price of twelve pounds ten per ounce. That'll be twenty-four carat -what we call a thousand fine. Never mind for the moment where you got it from - stole it or inherited it or something. Supposing you have a bar of gold in your pocket about the size of a couple of packets of Players. Despite his prosiness, Bond was beginning to take to Colonel Smithers. Bond knew the voice well, the voice of the first-class Civil Servant. It said that he knew most things connected with that line and that he could make a good guess at all the rest. It was the voice of the specialist in a particular line of law enforcement. 'All right.' Colonel Smithers now talked in the soft, tired voice of an overworked man in the service of his Government. Perhaps they'll find a way of mining gold. They're already mining oil under the sea. Perhaps the position isn't as bad as you think. He said, 'You certainly make a fascinating story of it. We have to make sure the Factory Acts are being observed for safety and health."īond, smothered by this cataract of gold history, found no difficulty in looking as grave as Colonel Smithers. "Sorry, sir, routine inspection for the Small Engineering Section of the Ministry of Labour. We dressed a couple of the Gold Squad up and sent them down to knock on the door of Mr Goldfinger's factory at Reculver. Figures showed the natural progress of a well-run jewellery business. Income tax and super tax paid promptly each year. Twenty thousand pounds at Barclays in Ramsgate. Had a quiet look at his bank balance and tax returns. But could we pin it on him? We could not. Goldfinger had been refining down his old gold, precipitating it into this brown powder and shipping it to India as fertilizer. These gave all the cargoes as mineral dust base for crop fertilizers - all perfectly credible because these modern fertilizers do use traces of various minerals in their make-up. 'The usual nosey parker in the salvage firm gossiped to one of the Dover Customs men and in due course a report filtered up through the police and the CID to me, together with a copy of the cargo clearance papers for each of Goldfinger's trips to India. 'You could get a small premium in most countries -Switzerland, for instance-but it wouldn't be worth your while. The Gold Squad retired discomfited, our legal department decided the brown dust in the trawler's timbers was not enough to prosecute on without supporting evidence, and that was more or less that, except' - Colonel Smithers slowly wagged the stem of his pipe -'that I kept the file open and started sniffing around the banks of the world.' There were traces of gold about, of course, and furnaces to heat up to two thousand degrees and so forth, but after all Goldfinger was a jeweller and a smelter in a small way, and all this was perfectly above-board. Mark you, he may have been tipped off by his bank manager or someone, but that factory was entirely devoted to designing a cheap alloy for jewellers' findings - trying out unusual metals like aluminium and tin instead of the usual copper and nickel and palladium that are used in gold alloys. Come in." Mr Goldfinger positively welcomed them.
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