The Doomsday Testament

LI

They reached the landing outside Jamie’s flat just as an elderly woman was disappearing through the door opposite and the atmosphere lay heavy with the scent of freshly sprayed air freshener.

‘Hello, Mrs Laurence,’ Jamie greeted his neighbour.

She turned to glare at him. ‘I don’t know how you dare show your face after all that noise the other night.’

‘What was that all about?’ Sarah said after the door had slammed shut.

Jamie shrugged. ‘Search me. I thought we’d always got on pretty well.’ As he put his key in the lock an unsavoury odour caught in his throat. He groaned. ‘The fish. That dozy bugger Simon has forgotten to feed them.’

The moment he pushed open the door the smell hit him like something solid, instantly reacting with his gut to fill his mouth with bile. Someone had closed the thick velvet curtains and it took time for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. When they did, they were drawn to a bulky object in the centre of the room that shouldn’t be there. His brain seemed to fragment into a thousand pieces, but somehow he managed to grope for the light switch and Sarah stifled a scream as the full horror of what they’d walked into dawned.

‘Oh, fuck.’ Jamie’s legs threatened to give way and he crouched down with his hand over his mouth. The sound of his thundering heart almost overwhelmed the buzz of the hundreds of flies that had risen from the alien object and now filled the room.

Blood everywhere. Old blood that stained the walls and the carpet a deep brown. But that must have come at the end.

He forced himself to study the scene as if the central figure was not his friend. They had tied Simon — yes, Simon was present somewhere in that bloated, heavily marbled caricature of a human being — to a kitchen chair. He was naked to the waist and his feet were bare. That must be one of his own socks stuffed into the thing’s mouth. Internal gases had inflated the body until the darkened skin threatened to split and vile black fluids flowed from his nose, ears and where the eyes should be. Despite the decomposition it was possible to work out what they had done to him. The faint cooked-meat smell just detectable beneath the overpowering stench of death must have been caused by the blow torch or soldering iron they had used on his nipples and chest. At least four toes, and as many fingers, were missing, which presumably meant they were lying around somewhere among the mess of papers and household items strewn across the carpet. Once they had what they’d come for they had slashed his throat with an obscene, terrible violence that had splattered his life blood across the room, but which must have come as a blessed relief to its victim.

‘They were looking for us.’ Sarah’s voice shook.

Jamie nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He tore his eyes away from the horror that had been his friend and surveyed the rest of the room. Every drawer had been ripped open and turned out on to the floor. The cushions of the sofa were sliced apart and the stuffing scattered. Even the furniture itself had been gutted, leaving the springs sticking out of the cloth. He glanced through to the study and saw a similar picture. In addition his computer had been taken apart and he knew that the hard disk would be missing.

‘I’m to blame for this. I underestimated how much the Sun Stone meant to Frederick and his thugs. When we vanished from Braunlage this is the first place they would have looked for us.’

‘No. You could never have predicted this. No one could. These people are psychopaths; they’ll kill anyone who gets in their way. Maybe we should just give up now?’

Jamie forced himself to look at Simon. Frederick and the Vril would never give up while he and Sarah were still alive. The only way they would ever be free of them was to find the Sun Stone.

‘No.’

Three days passed before the police were satisfied with their statements. It seemed clear to the inspector in charge of the investigation that Simon’s murder was linked in some way to the find of the Raphael in Germany. Jamie had spent two of those days convincing him that he wasn’t trading in stolen artworks from a secret warehouse that the dead man had been tortured to identify.

When they were allowed to leave, Jamie decided to set up home at his grandfather’s house on the grounds that it would be much easier to spot any watchers in the leafy lanes of north Welwyn than in central London. It turned out to be a good decision because a hand-delivered letter was waiting for him inviting him to visit the family lawyer, which presumably meant there was some movement on the sale of the house. While he walked into the town centre, Sarah continued her research.

‘This stuff on Operation Paperclip is incredible,’ she called as she heard the front door opening an hour later. The lack of reply puzzled her and when she went to investigate she realized instantly that something was very wrong. Jamie’s face wore the haunted look of a man walking away from the fatal accident he’d just caused.

‘What’s happened, Jamie? Is it about the house?’ She saw he was clutching two envelopes, one larger and white, but the paper so aged as to be a faded, marbled yellow, and the other a narrow dun-coloured oblong that might have been from the tax man. He brushed past her into the lounge and collapsed in a chair at the table. He put the larger of the two envelopes on the table in front of him and laid the second aside.

Sarah sat opposite him. She noticed that the yellowing envelope had words written on it in a tight, almost archaic script and she understood instinctively that it wasn’t the solicitor’s writing. With a little effort she made out the inverted words. For the attention of Master James Sinclair. The use of Sinclair proved it had been written and deposited before Jamie’s mother had changed their name to the more upmarket version. It was padded, but not bulky, and clearly contained more than a single sheet. She knew better than to reach for it. Instead, she waited while the silence lengthened to the point where it became unbearable.

‘My grandfather instructed the solicitor to only pass it on after he was dead.’ Jamie’s voice came out cracked, as if all the moisture had been sucked from his throat by the dry, aged object in front of him.

‘What is it?’

The green eyes filled with a combustible mixture of grief and pain, anger and loss that almost made her turn away. ‘The final pages of his diary.’

Her fingers made an involuntary lunge for the envelope, but he put his hand, palm down on top of it. He saw that he’d hurt her feelings, but the hand didn’t move.

‘I need to think about this, Sarah. I’ve read the first few pages, but I couldn’t… I want to see it through his eyes as it happened. We need to go back to Germany.’

She reached out and placed her hand over his. The flesh was cold. ‘Then that’s what we’ll do,’ she reassured him. ‘Just tell me where you want to go and I’ll book the flights. Do you want to hear about Paperclip?’

He shook his head. ‘Paperclip can wait. First you have to know what I know.’ He reached into the envelope and counted out four lined sheets of paper, identical to those from the blue journal.

He began speaking in a flat monotone and the first thing she noted was that Matthew Sinclair was no longer in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, but was recording his memories of the period four years earlier, in the summer of 1941. It began as a love story.

Jamie’s emotionless voice faded and the only sound in the room was Sarah’s sobbing.

‘You realize what this means?’ he said harshly. ‘My grandfather had another wife. Another family. If the Germans hadn’t killed that woman and her children Jamie Saintclair wouldn’t have existed. They died, so that I could live. How do you think that makes me feel?’

Her reaction astonished him. She lifted her head and her eyes flashed. ‘They had names,’ she snapped. ‘Peggy and Elizabeth and Anne. Don’t try to kid yourself that if you don’t give them names they don’t exist as real people, the way the Germans do by not mentioning the Jews. Spare me your fucking self-pity, Jamie. Matthew left you those pages so that you would understand. Don’t tarnish his memory and theirs by using it as an excuse to feel sorry for yourself. If you want to sit here and mope, that’s fine by me, but I’m going to pack.’

He let her get to the door.

‘We fly in to Munich, but we do this my way.’

She turned and gave him her hard stare.

‘All right,’ she agreed. ‘We’ll do it your way. But just remember, Jamie Saintclair, that I like you how you are now. The guy who was prepared to take on the Chinese army and the Indian air force just for little ol’ Sarah Grant. Not the way you were before somebody threw you under that train. Don’t go all boring on me.’

He nodded and when he lifted his head the old Jamie was back. ‘At least we know what we’re fighting for. Maybe you should tell me what you found out about Operation Paperclip?’

She shook her head. ‘I need to book our flights for tomorrow and I suspect it will mean an early start. I’ll explain on the plane.’ They headed for the stairs and she glanced back at the table. ‘You forgot your other envelope. What is it anyway?’

He picked up the letter and put it in his inside pocket.

‘Just a detail my mother left me to sort out.’