It is a truism that the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. It is also a fact that occasionally, when one's luck is down, or fortune is playing fickle, then the law of sod will come down upon you like the monsoon rains and drench one in misery. If the Bandit had been blessed with a third crew member, his name would have been Murphy, and he would have been telling us both for hours that whatever could go wrong will go wrong, over and over and over again.

It began with a slight faltering in the breeze, just as the sun kissed the horizon directly in front of us - a fractional lessening of strength, like God had stopped blowing for a moment to catch his breath, before continuing to blow with gusto. It caused Bandit to stumble in its stride, coming upright momentarily, then, when the breeze continued hard once more - this time from a more southerly direction - she laid right over, burying the lee rail right under and sending white water splashing across her deck. It wasn't a problem for the yacht, indeed it hardly checked her speed, but something down below tumbled out of a locker, making a loud clattering, banging tinkling noise that sounded like several hundred wine glasses being broken all at once.

Henry and I looked at each other as the cacophony of noise faded away to a last few plinks and tinkles. Henry didn't move, his eyes seemingly transfixed on mine as he awaited my reaction. His mouth was open slightly in a comical mask of surprise and shock. I actually thought for a moment that he was going to say something stupid like, 'whatever could that have been?'

I didn't give him the chance. "Henry, I'm going below."

Henry didn't move until I was half-way down the companionway ladder into the gloomy interior of the yacht. He couldn't just leave the tiller and follow me below without the Bandit coming up into the wind and stopping. Frantic scurrying about told me Henry was retrieving the piece of rope from the locker used to tie the tiller. By the time Henry had faffed about getting it right so the boat kept on sailing along in something like the right direction, my eyes had adjusted to the relative darkness below. When Henry came barrelling down the ladder a few minutes later, I was still stood at the bottom, taking in the sight before me.

"Charles, I can explain," said Henry.

"Oh, I doubt that. I doubt that very much."

The last of the sun's golden light coming through the cabin windows was refracted and reflected in a myriad tiny rays of rainbow light; subtle colours of green, red and blue played around my feet, turning the floor into sparkling carpet that tinkled as the Bandit rolled and spilled more gems, diamonds and rubies from a box that had tumbled out of an open port side locker.

I bent down and picked up a handful of precious stones, letting them run through my fingers and tried to calculate how many lifetimes of wealth I could see spread out before me. The box in which the stones had been kept was lying open on its side at my feet. I picked it up, and saw it was a security box of the type held in secure deposits in discreet banks. I had one myself in a branch of Hoare & Sons in London, although not by any means as large as this one. If looked as if it had been full to the brim... And then my eyes fell to the open locker from which the box had fallen. Within were several more boxes, some grey, others black, some larger or smaller than the one I held in my hand.

Placing the empty deposit box on the floor, I reached into the locker and pulled out another. It was so heavy I had to use two hands and strained to lift it onto the chart table. Behind me, Henry began making small distressed noises. When I moved out of his way, he dove to the floor and began to scoop the gems and diamonds back into the box once more.

I opened the deposit box I had placed on the chart table. Inside were numerous small gold bars. Picking one up, I held it to the light so that I could see the franking more clearly. I could make out a swastika.

"Oh, Henry. What have you done? What have you dragged me into?"

I began pulling more of the boxes out of the locker. Some contained small gold bars, some bags of diamonds, others jewlery. One contained thick wads of what looked like bank bonds, and another contained huge bundles of cash - Deutschmarks and Francs, mostly. All of them were old notes - printed in the years just before the outbreak of the second world war. A feeling of deep unease settled in my stomach as I went through the contents, a certainty that what I was seeing laid out before me were the ill-gotten spoils of war.

"Henry, how could you? You know what this is? All the people this belonged to - they're all dead!" The thought of where the gold had come from caused a wave of nausea to wash over me. I felt the need for fresh air, and turned to leave the cabin.

"Wait!" shouted Henry, who scrambled up from the floor and grabbed my wrist. "I can explain, really I can!"

The look of anguish on his normally suave and confident face made me pause. I looked down at his hand where it gripped my wrist and Henry let go. He seemed to collapse on himself, settling back onto the cabin floor in a dejected heap, and began to weep. "I know it's wrong. I knew when I saw it, ...where it must have come from. I read the reports and stories just like you did. I saw the trials.

My surprise at Henry's change from cocky hustler to weeping repentant was absolute. How could he think I would be taken in by this shameful attempt at emotional blackmail? But then...

"I begged her not to go back. I pleaded. I was in love, Charles."

"What do you mean, Henry? Who are you talking about?"

"Isabelle. She was my girl. We were in love. I begged her not to go back, I begged her!"

It took some time to get the whole story. Henry was by parts upset, then angry, and - finally - hopeless. It transpired that in the summer of 1935, when he was seventeen, Henry had got a job at a family-owned shop that made and sold furniture in the east end of London. The owner thought he had 'the gift of the gab', and lavished high praise on him for the way he persuaded his customers to buy his wares. Things were going well. Henry had found his natural gift for talking people into a deal, he was earning a modest but regular wage and was on a promise of a bonus at the end of the year.

Henry didn't care about that however, for he was happy enough as it was, being close to Isabelle. Isabelle was sixteen when Henry met her, and the daughter of the shop's owner. Sweet and innocent and beautiful, he fell instantly in love. And much to his own amazement and delight, it wasn't long before Isabelle proclaimed herself similarly besotted with him. Henry worked twice as hard, applying himself to being the best salesman he could be in order to prove himself to her father.

All was going well, until the spring of 1936. It was then her father announced his intention to return to Germany for a few months. There had been some trouble involving the nazi's and his brother and cousins. He would try to persuade them to come back to England with him. Isabelle's mother had died when she was small, and there was no close family with whom she could stay with, so she was going with him. It would be an adventure, she said. A chance to see the country her father and mother had grown up in. It wouldn't be long, she said.

Henry had pleaded with her and her father to stay behind with him. But ultimately, her wish to go and her father's own doubts as to the suitability of such an arrangement won the argument over, and Isabelle Berkovitz left with her father for Berlin in May, 1936. She never came back.

"So of course I know where this all came from. I know how horrible this all is. That's why I couldn't leave it there. I had to take it with me."

I was still reeling from the shock of Henry's revelation to hear what these last words meant. Thier implications sank in over the course of several minutes, during which time I pulled Henry to his feet and poured him a whisky. He drank it in one gulp, pulling a face and holding out the chipped cup for another.

"What did you mean," I said slowly, "when you said you couldn't leave it there. Isn't this what you agreed to smuggle?"

Henry shook his head sadly and dropped his head once more. "No," he said. "That stuff's in the starboard locker..."