The Doomsday Testament

II

Jamie Saintclair knew instantly that something was wrong because of the smell, or rather the lack of it. When he arrived at the house on a Sunday afternoon he could expect to be met by the comforting, salty-sweet aroma of roasted beef. Today all he could smell when he opened the back door was sour milk from the open carton beside the stainless-steel sink.

‘Granddad?’

He walked through to the front room his mother had grandly called the lounge, with its fussy ornaments, drab, functional wallpaper, and decades-old furniture. It was cool in here, but that was normal; the old man never turned on the heating before October. What concerned Jamie more was the stillness. The house was always quiet since his mother had died. But never this still.

‘Granddad?’

He opened the door that led to the stairs.

‘Oh, Christ.’

Something sucked the contents of his stomach into his chest and he struggled for breath. He felt as if his feet had been kicked from under him and the roof had fallen in at the same instant. His eyes automatically looked away, as if his mind was convinced that what he’d seen wouldn’t be there when he looked back again.

But it was there, in a tangled heap lying inside the front door at the bottom of the stairs. The long arms and legs that had always reminded him of a demented stick insect splayed at impossible angles and the neck, in its plastic, clerical collar, twisted so that the old man’s dull blue eyes seemed to focus on his left armpit.

‘Granddad?’ Instinct made Jamie reach for the throat to check for a pulse, but he stopped halfway when he realized how pointless the gesture was. If the broken neck wasn’t evidence enough of death, the yellowy-grey pallor of his flesh and the way it seemed to hang off the bones confirmed that Matthew Sinclair had been lying here for days. It looked as if he’d lost his footing on the stairs. Just lately he’d been having trouble moving around, even with the walking stick that Jamie’s subconscious mind noted should have been lying somewhere, but wasn’t.

Jamie slumped down on the bottom stair and closed his eyes. No tears. Not yet. Because the prevailing emotion wasn’t grief, but loneliness. His grandfather was — had been — his last living relative. No uncles or aunts. No cousins, at least that he knew of. He tried to imagine the old man as he had been, and came up with a narrow, bony face dominated by a Belisha beacon of a nose whose rosy light was fuelled by the cheap Scotch he claimed was the only thing that helped him sleep. Grey, thinning hair and benign, kindly amusement in eyes shadowed by the tropical diseases that were the legacy of his years in Africa. A prayer formed in his head, but he knew the old man was already with the God who had sustained him for so long. Matthew had been a ‘good’ man in the truest sense of the word. Every waking hour and spare penny dedicated to helping others. Every new day an opportunity to be a better person.

Jamie put his hand to his mouth and choked back a sob. The guilt that had been lying dormant was growing now — why hadn’t he insisted on staying with him? — but the shock was wearing off. A switch clicked in his head telling him to move: to do something.

He knelt beside the still figure and bent to kiss the cold brow.

‘Goodbye, Granddad.’

It was ten days before he felt strong enough to return to the house, his mind still numbed by that peculiar detachment that follows a period of intense grief. Only now had he been able to overcome the dread that had been keeping him away from the unwanted, but necessary task of sorting out his grandfather’s papers and putting aside anything of monetary or sentimental value before the house clearers came in.

This had been his home for eighteen years, shared with his mother and grandfather, before he’d left for university. Like his mother, the house was a product of the fifties; a functional five-room cube of brown pebbledash with a tile roof, neat windows and a small, carefully tended garden. Semi-detached, of course; she could never have afforded what she called a ‘proper’ house in Welwyn, and Matthew’s meagre church pension didn’t stretch far. He remembered the day she’d died and the unexpected sense of release he’d experienced. At last he’d been free of the smothering influence that had kept him wound tight since the day he was old enough to understand it.

Matthew had changed nothing in the year since she’d gone. The house had become a shrine to her. Every corner had memories for Jamie. Strawberry teas at the kitchen table where she’d wiped jam from his face with a damp facecloth. The scent of her perfume as she’d leaned over him in twin-set and pearls to complete a jigsaw in the front room. His grandfather helping with an elusive Latin verb when he was about twelve, at what must have been one of the hardest times. He shook his head. Where to begin? The papers, he supposed, which were stored in the polished bureau in the corner.

He kept it up for half an hour, sorting through insurance documents and gas bills, before boredom inexorably drew him to a collection of his mother’s leather-bound photo albums. He flicked through the pages of regimented pictures, each perfectly positioned and in its proper place. The early ones were mostly photographs of him as a baby, alone or with his mother or grandparents. But here was five-year-old Jamie, deadly serious, ready for his first day at school in cap, purple blazer and tie, with his proud mother at his shoulder. In the picture, her hair was a dark, lustrous brown. How could he have forgotten that? Margaret Saintclair had been a snob, an unbridled and unapologetic snob who had somehow kept her status as an unmarried mother from her toffee-nosed acquaintances as she’d clawed her way to become chairwoman — not chairperson, God forbid — of the local bridge club. For all her faults she had loved him, and loved him as only the single mother of an only child can show love: single-mindedly to the point of obsession. It had taken him a long time to understand what she and his grandfather had gone through to ensure that he was equipped to take on the world. In a way, she had donated thirty years of her life to him. She’d even given up her name — plain old Sinclair — as part of the plot to give him the best possible chance when he went to Cambridge: driven, almost bullied, by her to win a scholarship from the local grammar school.

As he leafed through the pictures he realized that he’d always thought of his mother as old, but she hadn’t been old at all. She wasn’t quite sixty-three when she died.

Another picture. Her proudest moment, his graduation with a First in fine arts and modern languages. Jamie barely recognized himself in the stern-faced young man in the one-size-fits-all, hired robe, even though the photograph had been taken less than ten years earlier. While the other students had spent most of their time drinking and carousing, he’d never been able to escape his mother’s telepathic control. If he remembered correctly, the popular term for the image he’d created for himself had been ‘Young Fogey’ and he’d cheerfully embraced it, right down to the tweed jacket and briar pipe, for Christ’s sake. Oh, he’d had his moments, and the girls who seduced him, usually for a dare, had gone away pleasantly surprised and reasonably well-satisfied, but he’d never indulged in that relentless pursuit of the female flesh his fellow undergraduates felt was their duty.

He shook his head at the memory and, still carrying the album, climbed the narrow stairs past the row of plaster flying ducks that guarded the hall like a flight of Spitfires. He knew he should be doing something more productive, but he was unable to break the lethargic grip of the past.

Matthew’s bedroom door stood ajar and he walked through with the feeling of a child entering a forbidden garden. It was years since he’d been inside this room. Perhaps fifteen feet by twenty, the only furnishings were a white melamine dressing table, a shallow cupboard where the old man kept his shoes, and an enormous, clumsy oak wardrobe that must have come from a second-hand shop. The room still carried a faint, sweetish scent of ill-health and when he lay back on the quilt he was surrounded by Matthew’s presence. He felt a sharp prickle behind his eyes. Pull yourself together, Saintclair.

He sat up and reopened the album. A newspaper cutting with a photograph of an adult Jamie holding a small painting in a gilt frame. Had he really made them proud? He supposed the cutting was proof that he had, but it was a pride built on false pretences. When his mother heard he had set up his own business after eight years jobbing for Sotheby’s and moved into an office in Old Bond Street, she’d insisted on opening a bottle of her carefully hoarded Asti Spumante. He’d never invited them to the office and hadn’t had the heart to reveal it was little more than an extended cupboard with a posh address. A decanter of whisky stood on a bedside table. He smiled as he heard Matthew’s soft voice — ‘purely medicinal, my dear boy’ — and poured himself a small glass. He studied the photograph more closely. The painting had brought him short-lived fame, and even shorter-lived fortune.

It was one of Rembrandt’s earlier works, a portrait of some rosy-cheeked Dutch merchant and not a particularly impressive one, but a Rembrandt nonetheless. Until 1940, it had hung in solitary splendour in the Paris mansion of the Mandelbaum family, cloth exporters for five generations and proud of it. Over the centuries the Mandelbaums, French Jews of German extraction, had weathered many storms, but the hurricane that blew in from the Third Reich that summer had well and truly sunk them. Monsieur Mandelbaum, who had waved away offers of sanctuary from his customers in England, took one last look at his Rembrandt on Friday 14 June as the Germans marched into Paris, then blew his brains out, leaving Madame and five little Mandelbaums to be evicted, registered, classified and eventually deported, via the transit centre at Drancy, to the extermination camp at Auschwitz. By the time the fighting ended, only a single little Mandelbaum, Emil, had been left to emerge miraculously from amongst the corpses and the living dead, like a ten-year-old version of one of Lowry’s matchstick men.

After the war Emil was claimed by relatives in the United States and he spent the next sixty years trying to forget the screams, the sight of hanged men and women and the never-ending stink from the crematorium chimneys. But a year earlier he had been tracked down by the son of an old business acquaintance of his father’s who suggested he reclaim the Paris property and asked what had become of the celebrated Rembrandt. Emil had only a vague memory of the painting, but by then being a retired stockbroker, he certainly knew its potential worth.

For a successful art dealer, tracking down stolen property, especially property stolen half a century earlier, is the professional equivalent of walking blindfold through a minefield. So it was unsurprising that Emil had trouble finding someone reputable to help him seek out the Rembrandt. At the time, Jamie was conspicuously lacking in obvious signs of success and the jury was out on his reputation after a series of auction ambushes that had left both him and his clients out of pocket. The two men had been introduced by Simon Marks, a merchant banker and former Cambridge classmate of Jamie’s, who had watched and despaired at his friend’s pitiful efforts at building a business.

‘Either do it to make money or don’t do it at all, old son,’ Simon had advised him. ‘Emil is rolling in cash, he’ll pay you a daily stipend and your expenses while you look for the bloody thing, and a whacking great finders’ fee in the unlikely event that you ever lay hands on it.’

Luck, his languages and what he liked to think was a modicum of good judgement had all played their part in what followed. As he told Simon: ‘The Nazis were just as efficient at cataloguing what they pinched as they were about everything else. Emil’s Rembrandt was one of thousands of artworks hoovered up by Hermann Goering’s Reichsleiter Rosenberg Institute for the Occupied Territories. Once I discovered that, there were three possibilities. First, it could have been destroyed during the war: possible, but most stolen artworks survived. Second, some resourceful, high-ranking Nazi could have smuggled it out as working capital using one of the Odessa escape pipelines: again possible and if that’s what happened the most likely route was by Spain or Switzerland to South America. The third option — less likely — was that it ended up stored in a big cave in the Bavarian Alps and some enterprising GI lifted it to take home to his ma in Pittsburg.’

Good fortune came when investigating Option Two. He had followed a trail from a Madrid art house that led him by a circuitous route to Option Three and the jackpot. An auctioneer in Santiago knew a dealer in Buenos Aires who thought he had seen the self-same painting on the wall of the Argentine Embassy in Panama. A trip to the Canal Zone and a friendly cultural attaché who was terribly proud of the embassy’s prized artwork confirmed the identification. The look on his young host’s face when he suggested the Rembrandt might be stolen property almost broke Jamie’s heart. It was the first of many moments of unease created by his new career path. Tracing the painting’s course backwards led him to an American veteran who had indeed taken the Rembrandt home to show Ma, only in Omaha, not Pittsburg, then sold it on. The chain included a respected New York art dealer who had been creative with the Rembrandt’s provenance and whose reputation was now damaged beyond repair. Jamie had savoured his moment of triumph — but it was short-lived. Only too quickly he realized that it made him about as popular in the tight-knit art community as a dose of bubonic plague. Suddenly the small galleries, which had once greeted him with a sympathetic smile and had always been happy to throw him a few crumbs, didn’t want to know him. The big dealerships didn’t even return his phone calls. Still, he had the money to tide him over. At least he did until the New York dealer’s lawyers got involved. The suit never came to court, but keeping a lid on it had cost him most of what he’d been paid to find the painting. His only consolation was that the publicity the find generated and Emil Mandelbaum’s endorsement resulted in a slow stream of commissions from Jewish families who likewise wished to be reunited with their treasures. The work kept him afloat and occupied, but he had never been able to repeat that initial success and he was beginning to wonder if the luck that had brought him the Rembrandt was the beginner’s variety.

He pulled himself off the bed and tentatively opened the top drawer of the dressing table. No hidden surprises. Carefully folded handkerchiefs, socks laid out just so, uniformly white vests and pants that probably dated back decades. He’d wondered if the old man still kept his mother’s correspondence, perhaps a perfumed love letter from Jamie’s father whose name she had never revealed, but there was nothing.

He turned his attention to the wardrobe, breathing in a mouthful of mothballs and well-worn tweed as he opened it. At the same time he caught a glimpse of himself in the full-length mirror on the back of the door. The man staring out at him was tall, angular and still carried the vaguely foppish air cultivated at Cambridge. His grandfather’s death had marked him in some way, but he couldn’t really say how. Perhaps it was the slight bruising below the eyes that made him look older than his thirty years, or a set to the thin lips that hadn’t been there previously. Wholesome, verging on handsome, with a steady green-eyed gaze that was more shrewd than intelligent; dark, unruly hair that flopped over his eyes and a hard edge that, strangely, only women seemed to notice. Who are you? he asked the man in the mirror. Where did you come from?

He rummaged through the dark suits, threadbare white shirts and ancient clerical gear, checking pockets, then began on the wardrobe floor, where Matthew had stored his supply of gardening magazines. Nothing there for him to worry about. He turned away, his mind already on the next room. As he did, he caught the faint gleam of metal in a tiny crack at the junction of the floor and the walls. With growing puzzlement he crouched to identify it, but it was only when he removed the magazines and tested it that he realized the floor consisted of a removable plywood panel. His heart beat a little faster. As he raised the wood his eye found a sharp-edged metal box in the darkest corner of the recess.

The box was about the size of an old-fashioned biscuit tin and covered in chipped dark green paint, which gave it a distinctly military look. A patch of bare metal had revealed its hiding place below the wardrobe. When he lifted the box the contents rattled intriguingly. He placed it on the bed with the same feeling of anticipation as when he’d first laid eyes on the Rembrandt, like a clock wound too tight with the springs threatening to explode free. A rusting metal clasp held the box closed and with a deep breath he carefully unclipped it, levered the lid free and lifted it open.

His first impression was of a hotchpotch of army memorabilia; a few tarnished medals, dusty strips of ribbon, worn badges and scraps of time-stained paper. But as his eyes took in the individual elements he realized it was much more than that. The maroon booklet half hidden among the medal ribbons could only be a soldier’s pay book. What he had before him was a man’s whole identity. He felt a surge of exhilaration and had to suppress a shout of triumph. This was his father’s identity. With shaking hands he lifted the booklet and opened it, eyes greedily searching for the name. ‘Shit!’ The word echoed from the walls and he could feel his mother’s posthumous disapproval.

Matthew Sinclair.

Not the father he’d never known, but the grandfather he had. Dotty old Granddad Matthew who had sat Jamie upon his knee quoting endlessly from the scriptures and expecting him to enjoy strange stories told in his fluent German. Who had taken him to his first art gallery and taught him the importance of composition, form and line as they stood in front of an enormous Civil War portrait of some curly-wigged knight. His gentle, kindly grandfather, who quite literally would not have squashed a fly, had been a soldier. It didn’t seem possible, but the evidence was here on the bed.

He laid the pay book aside, picked up the medals one by one and placed them on the quilt; two silver circles about twice the size of a ten-pence piece, three bronze stars differentiated only by the colour of their ribbons, and — he hesitated, half-recognizing what he had in the palm of his hand — a fine silver cross with a crown embossed at the end of each arm. He turned the cross over and read the inscription on the reverse side: Cptn M. Sinclair (Royal Berkshire Regiment) 8 May 1945. The cross, though Jamie could only hazard a guess at which award it was, meant Matthew Sinclair had not only served in the army, he had fought, and fought well. And there was more. Now that he’d almost emptied the box he found two small scraps of cloth nestling at the bottom. One was a set of parachute wings and the other the instantly recognizable winged dagger of the Special Air Service.

Jamie stared at the badge in disbelief. He felt excited and robbed at one and the same time. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he demanded of the empty room. His mother had not just cheated him of his father, she’d cheated him of his grandfather as well. The sweet, eccentric old man he’d lived beside all those years had been a war hero. Yet neither of them had ever mentioned it.

He was so angry he almost missed the battered journal that had been hidden beneath the box.