‘The order I made was placed and the paperwork sorted before the crisis blew up, but the Czechs honoured the deal, which was pretty straight of them considering they had Adolf breathing fire. Not that they were surprised; they knew Hitler was bound to come after them once he’d swallowed up Austria. How did you know about the false End User Certificate, by the way?’

‘Our military attache in Prague got wind of it and sent a standard report to London. That was where the Irish connection first raised questions, given how sensitive we are in Blighty about possible shipments to the IRA.’

Cal was thinking that such an explanation did not clarify why Peter was here.

‘We had to be sure, Cal, they were going to where the certificate said. I also have to admit it was a damn clever ploy, given our chaps are busy licensing the same weaponry for use by the British army and, of course, the Irish would follow suit, piggybacking on our research and approval. I hope it was worth whatever you forked out to get the Czechs to fall for it.’

If it was clever, the real reason that he had been successful in his purchase was more to do with the Czech factory having no desire to question him too closely about his bona fides: his papers were in order as far as they could see and the people he claimed to represent appeared sound.

In reality they were not looking too closely; they badly wanted his money, or to be more precise, the Spanish republican gold with which he was prepared to pay, as did a government under threat from a powerful neighbour, keen to amass foreign exchange, so extracting a false certificate from the relevant Czech ministry had been something of a formality in which no one had even demanded an illegal payment.

It was a good deal; the weapons he had bought were perfect for guerrilla warfare, a new pattern of easily portable light machine guns deadly in that kind of close combat. It was a ground and vehicle weapon, and added to that, so low was the recoil, they could be fired from the hip while on the move, all of which Peter listened to with polite interest; if he knew Cal was stalling, which he was, he gave no indication of it.