The Doomsday Testament

V

On his way back to the train, Jamie debated whether to bother coming back the next day. He had plenty of other things he should be doing and the Polish veteran’s ramblings, though interesting, were sometimes ludicrous. What was that stuff about Matthew breaking necks, for God’s sake? Still, he wouldn’t decide immediately. Once he was settled in his seat he opened the journal at the page where he’d left off.

As the rampaging Wehrmacht finished off the scattered remnants of Poland’s destroyed army and the Soviet Union joined in, feasting on the defeated nation’s carcass, the Royal Berkshires had embarked for France along with 150,000 soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force. The initial overseas entries, as the battalion deployed inland, leapfrogged erratically between the wide-eyed wonder of a youthful tourist and the excitement of a professional soldier desperate to get to grips with his enemy. Lieutenant Matthew Sinclair also had a touching regard for his soldiers’ welfare. His relationship with his sergeant, Anderson, a man old enough to be his father, seemed to have been particularly close. The cosy, confessional tone of the diaries ceased on 10 May 1940 when the Wehrmacht attacked France and Belgium. Matthew Sinclair was about to get his baptism of fire. His Berkshires were part of the 2nd Infantry Division and on the far right of the British line, south-east of Lille, defending the flatlands around the River Dyle and in the direct line of General Erich Hoepner’s rampaging XVI Panzer Corps.

The first entry of the shooting war was almost comically indignant.

But the horrors that followed chilled Jamie’s blood. The bombs fell so frequently in the following days that Matthew stopped recording them. Meanwhile, the tone of the diary became ever more disjointed and frenetic. Jamie imagined the brief sentences being scribbled in the dark as the writer lay cowering in some water-filled ditch with his ears tuned for the slightest sound of an approaching enemy. Snatches of personal shorthand recorded what may have been momentous happenings, but were forever unintelligible. These pages were torn and mud-spattered and some were missing altogether. On one, Jamie noticed a fine spray of what could only have been blood. Within six days, the BEF was surrounded and fighting for its very survival. The Berkshires were ordered to fall back towards the Channel ports, and Lieutenant Sinclair tersely recorded the disintegration of his battalion as it was chewed to pieces by the panzers, entire platoons and companies wiped out in savage minor engagements that would never appear in the history books.

Jamie read on. Hunger, thirst, strain and exhaustion took its toll on the retreating British soldiers, and his grandfather’s morale collapsed as he played a deadly game of cat-and-mouse amidst the chaos of defeat. At one point it was clear he had to be persuaded not to surrender. That entry was followed by a gap of several days. Then:

The words began to blur and Jamie noticed with surprise that the train was drawing in to Euston station. He felt utterly drained, as if he’d been fighting side by side with the men whose dramatic lives and deaths the diary chronicled in the final days of Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of the Dunkirk perimeter, when Matthew had been among the very last of the three hundred thousand French and British soldiers to leave the beaches.

One thing was certain. He had to know more about Matthew Sinclair’s war.

He phoned ahead next morning to confirm his arrival and found Carol waiting for him at the hospital entrance before she started her shift.

‘You’re a little early. He’s out walking. He likes to take the path through the fields to Dunchurch Road then back again. He should be on his way back now.’

Jamie remembered the pale figure hooked up to the dialysis machine. ‘Does he go alone?’

‘Please don’t underestimate Stan.’ She smiled. ‘The treatment is hard on him, but he’s as tough as a pair of old army boots.’

‘Maybe I could go and meet him?’ he suggested.

‘I think he’d like that. It’s just around the corner and across the main road. You can’t miss it. The path that runs beside the stream.’

He followed her instructions and found a track between two fields. Ahead he could see where a line of trees flanked the stream — actually more a sluggish canal — and beyond them an estate of substantial houses. He would have expected to meet the old man by now, but it was a warm morning and Stan must be close to ninety; maybe he had stopped for a rest? The further he went from the hospital the more his concern grew, but he wasn’t truly worried until he reached the road at the far side of the field. There was no reason the Pole couldn’t have taken a different route back, or been given a lift, but… As he retraced his steps Jamie found himself searching among the tall grass on the verges of the path, and in the glittering shadows beneath the trees.

Stan had worn a black overcoat despite the heat of the day and that was why Jamie had missed him on his first pass. He had to look twice before he climbed down to the river’s edge on legs that seemed to belong to someone else. Gradually, his eyes adjusted to the gloom and realized what he was seeing. Christ. This couldn’t be happening. Not again.

The old man lay face down in the shallows beneath an ancient willow, his body weighed down by the waterlogged cloth of the coat. The black overcoat looked like just another shadow on waters the colour of stewed tea, its folds billowing gently in the almost non-existent current. Jamie struggled through the water until he could take a handful of cloth and heave the body over. As he turned, Stanislaus Kozlowski’s bespoke artificial hairpiece detached itself and floated sedately downstream. Reproachful eyes stared back from features set in the same fierce scowl they had worn in the wartime photograph.

‘You’d be amazed how often it happens, sir.’ The middle-aged constable’s voice was almost resentful, as if the dead man had deliberately spoiled his day. ‘Elderly person goes out for a walk and doesn’t come back. No rhyme nor reason to it, they just decide it’s their time. We find them days, sometimes weeks, later, and there’s always water involved. The young ones, they’ll step out in front of a train, but the old, they head for the sea or the river. Primeval instinct, I reckon.’

‘So you’re certain Stan — Mr Kozlowski — killed himself.’

The officer’s look hardened and Jamie realized he’d overstepped some invisible mark. ‘Based on our initial investigations and unless you have reason to believe otherwise, sir?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘No immediate signs of violence visible on the victim. You’d have noticed if there had been undue disturbance of the grass, wouldn’t you, sir, when you marched through our potential crime scene in your size-ten boots?’

Jamie bridled at the implied criticism. ‘I thought my first priority was to help Mr Kozlowski.’

‘Of course you did, but then he was already dead.’ He raised a hand to forestall any argument. ‘It’ll be up to the Coroner to decide cause of death. We have your address, sir, in the event we have to contact you again? You’ll probably be called as a witness.’

Back at the hospital, Jamie tracked down Carol to the ward where he’d first met the Pole. It was obvious she’d been crying.

‘Not very professional, is it?’ she said with a wet smile. ‘But I’d grown very fond of old Stan. He could be sharp, but he was also brave and generous and kind.’ She shook her head and he wondered if she had been half in love with the old man.

He told her what the police had said and she nodded distractedly. ‘That’s true. You can never tell with the elderly. Sometimes it’s as if a switch has been flicked. But Stan, he seemed so keen to continue his talk with you. I just can’t…’

She sniffed and Jamie laid a comforting hand on her arm. ‘I got the idea he had a lot to tell me. It crossed my mind that he might have written some of it down?’

‘I can have a look,’ she said warily. ‘But I’m not sure I’d be allowed to hand it over to you even if he had. It would be the property of his next of kin.’

‘Don’t worry; it was just a thought. I’m sure you have enough on your plate already.’

She pursed her lips. ‘There’ll be some kind of inquiry. Should we have allowed him out on his own? I’m not certain now, but he was so insistent.’

‘Maybe this isn’t the time for it, but I had one other thing I wanted to ask,’ Jamie said. ‘Stan mentioned that he was going to tell me what he had told the other guy. Does that ring any bells with you?’

Carol’s face set in a frown. ‘Actually, it does. About ten days ago he had a visit from a Polish gentleman doing some sort of research on the lives of exiles still in this country. I wasn’t on duty, so I didn’t see him, but afterwards Stan became quite animated. It was obvious that he’d stirred up memories Stan had buried a long time ago. I think it was one of the reasons he was so determined to get in touch when he heard your grandfather had died. He said he and Matthew had been part of something important and it was time to tell the story. I have a friend in the local newspaper and he’d agreed to come here to interview Stan about it.’

Jamie thanked her again and set off along the corridor, his head filled with that first glimpse of the old man’s body and weighed down by the questions that would now never be answered.

‘Mr Saintclair?’ He turned to find Carol bearing down on him. ‘I think he would have wanted you to have this.’ She placed the faded photograph in his hand, closed hers over it and walked away before he could say anything.

He looked down at the square of creased paper and wondered what secrets the blank-eyed young faces were hiding.