![]() ![]() I won't bother you with the formula, but you see gold can be made to dissolve in a mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acids, and reducing agents - sulphur dioxide or oxalic acid - precipitate the metal as a brown powder. They were surprised when he said the stuff was gold. When this company started breaking the ship up and got as far as the hold they found the timbers ingregnated with a sort of brown powder which they couldn't put a name to. In the summer of 1954, his trawler, homeward bound from India, went ashore on the Goodwins and he sold the wreck for a song to the Dover Salvage Company. We didn't even hear of him until he suffered a slight misfortune. 'I'm not boring you? I do want you to get the picture of the sort of man this is - quiet, careful, law-abiding and with the sort of drive and single-mindedness we all admire. In a period of history when every tomorrow may be the evil day, it is fair enough to say that a fat proportion of the gold that is dug out of one corner of the earth is at once buried again in another corner.'Ĭolonel Smithers broke off. Fear, Mr Bond, takes gold out of circulation and hoards it against the evil day. 'The other and by far the major defect is that it is the talisman of fear. I said that gold has two defects.' Colonel Smithers looked sad. Every year, the world's stock is invisibly reduced by friction. It wears out quickly, leaves itself on the linings of our pockets and in the sweat of our skins. It is brilliant, malleable, ductile, almost unalterable and more dense than any of the common metals except platinum. Gold has extraordinary properties which are being put to new uses every day. New industries need gold wire, gold plating, amalgams of gold. All these new people will be taking tons of gold off the market every year. Others need gold-rimmed spectacles, jewellery, engagement rings. Another percentage needs gold fillings for their teeth. A small percentage of those people become gold hoarders, people who are frightened of currencies, who like to bury some sovereigns in the garden or under the bed. The population of the world is increasing at the rate of five thousand four hundred every hour of the day. ![]() 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. Latest dodge is to fly it in from Macao and drop it by parachute to a reception committee - a ton at a time - like we used to drop supplies to the Resistance during the war.' Gold's been coming into India from all points of the compass. To give an idea, the Indian Intelligence Bureau and their Customs captured forty-three thousand ounces in 1955.1 doubt if that's one per cent of the traffic. We have to make sure the Factory Acts are being observed for safety and health." "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. He was greatly looking forward to hearing about Mr Auric Goldfinger. Now what's your particular problem?' He sat back and lit a cigarette. 'Just come up from our printing works at Loughton.'
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