The Doomsday Testament

LIII

‘They flew into Munich this morning and hired a car. Current location unknown, but it looks as if they are following the route taken in the journal, so we know where Saintclair will end up and we’ll be waiting for them.’

The man with the ponytail listened to Sumner’s explanation with increasing irritation. ‘Not good enough. Your report states that Saintclair paid a visit to his mother’s solicitor?’

‘That’s right, but despite repeated attempts by our sources the lawyer refused to reveal why our man went there.’

‘Yet within hours of attending that meeting Saintclair discovers a sudden renewed interest in the journal. That means he has new information, or he’s been given something that has made him re-evaluate the information he already has. Somehow, the journal is still the key to the Sun Stone. Saintclair is the key to the journal. I want him found.’

He put down the phone and pressed a key on the intercom on his desk. ‘Have the plane prepared. We’ll be flying to Europe first thing in the morning.’

Jamie turned off the autobahn and on to a much narrower road that took them through a patchwork of heavily cultivated fields. Small agricultural communities flashed by the windows and within ten minutes they were on the outskirts of Bad Saulgau, which was a much larger town than Matthew’s journal had hinted. Clearly it had prospered and expanded in the years since the war. They negotiated their way to the centre and parked.

‘Where do we go from here?’ Sarah asked.

‘I’d like to see the site where they were ambushed and Matthew won his Military Cross.’

She looked sceptical. ‘I don’t see how we’re going to find it. We have no idea which road they took out of this place. How will you know?’

‘I’ll know.’ He took the map from her and studied the country to the south-west. ‘This is the most direct route to Blumberg, the next place mentioned in the journal.’ He traced his finger along the line of a road leading south-west towards the town of Ostrach. ‘There are a couple of places that might have been nothing but a few scattered houses back then. What we really need is a nineteen forties map.’

‘We have one.’ Sara grinned and retrieved the silk escape map from the rucksack, along with the journal. She opened the journal at the page recording the ambush. ‘I could see the snowcaps of Switzerland shimmering in the distance. They hit us just after dawn between Saulgau and some one-horse hamlet that wasn’t worth a name,’ she read aloud, comparing the silk map with the modern road map. ‘Look, you’re right, there are a few places that fitted the description back then.’

Jamie drove slowly from the outskirts of town, studying the terrain around them. It was raining again and where the Alps should be there was nothing but filthy grey murk.

‘If we’re looking for a forest we’ve come to the right place,’ Sarah said helpfully, as they passed yet another broad stretch of woodland.

He ignored her sarcasm. ‘These are conifers, evergreens, Matthew said the wood where they were ambushed was beech. At this time of year the leaves will be bright, emerald green.’

‘You mean like that,’ she said a few moments later.

He drew to a halt and studied the copse she had indicated. It didn’t look much. The trees were mature enough to have been growing for more than sixty years, great broad trunks and wide canopies, but there didn’t seem to be enough of them to be called a wood. Behind the stand of beeches another conifer plantation spread into the distance. A couple of miles up the road stood a few isolated buildings that might have fitted the description some one-horse hamlet that wasn’t worth a name.

Jamie studied the buildings across the wind-ruffled wheat fields. ‘I suppose the only way to find out is to ask.’

The first door they knocked on was opened by a young woman who answered their questions politely, but was unable to help them. She directed them to the house furthest away from the road. ‘Talk to old Werner. He was here then.’

‘Guten tag.’ The thick-set figure worked steadily with a hoe in the centre of an immaculately tended vegetable garden. He looked up and nodded at Jamie’s greeting. Werner had pale unreadable eyes, a bulbous nose and ruddy, time-worn features framed by heavy grey whiskers. As Jamie and Sarah waited by the house he came towards them using the hoe as a crutch to offset a pronounced limp.

‘May I help you?’ he asked.

Jamie explained why they were in the area and Werner’s face clouded.

‘Englanders, yes?’

Jamie nodded. He didn’t see any point in explaining Sarah’s ancestry.

The old man gave a bitter laugh. ‘What is it you English say — “Don’t mention the war”? Good advice. It is a long time ago, better to forget, especially around here. Don’t be deceived by the pretty scenery. Bad things happened, just as they happened everywhere. Bad things.’ He leaned on the hoe, and sighed heavily, staring at the ground.

Sarah opened her mouth to protest, but Jamie shook his head. There was no point in stirring up unwanted memories. He thanked the German for his time and turned to go.

They were halfway to the car when Werner surprised them. ‘Ach, wait,’ he called. ‘It was a long time ago, but maybe an old man keeps things locked away for too long. Perhaps it is time to face it. Come, I will make coffee.’

While they sat in the tiny kitchen, Werner served his coffee without asking how they liked it; strong, dark and with a liberal lacing of schnapps. He hunched over his mug and stared at the table, his face wearing the pained expression of a man entering a confession box. Eventually he said: ‘Yes, it happened as you said. Right across there. Of course, most of the old trees are gone now, replaced by that olive desert you see. Not many people left to remember it, but I was here.’ He looked up from under the thick grey brows. ‘You say your grandfather was one of the men in the second jeep?’

Jamie nodded.

‘Then your grandfather probably killed my brother.’

The room seemed to go cold and Jamie felt Sarah’s hand close on his beneath the table.

‘I’m sorry.’

Werner shrugged. ‘It was a long time ago. Erich was seven years older than me, loyal and brave; he died fighting for what he believed, but he killed a lot of my friends and he gave me this.’ He thumped his leg and they heard the sound of hollow plastic muffled by his thick Tweed trousers. ‘You have heard of Werewolf?’

‘My grandfather mentions it in his journal. Some kind of Nazi guerrilla organization.’

The old man shook his head. ‘A joke. Broken-down SS like Erich leading boys who should still have been at school against men with machine guns and tanks. He was convalescing here, after being wounded in the head on the Ostfront, when the local gauleiter ordered him to organize a Werewolf cell and harass the enemy. I was fourteen years old and frightened. Just a boy. Hitler was dead. People said the war was finished, but Erich would not believe it. I just wanted it to be over and be at home with my mother. You are surprised? You thought we were all fanatics in the Hitler Jugend?’

Jamie smiled politely.

‘There were nine of us. Myself, Erich, my friend Pauli and a few others from the school. We made camp in the woods on the other side of the road — like being a boy scout except we had a machine gun and a few old Mauser rifles and a couple of fausts. Truth is, I think the war had driven Erich mad. He said we should take the fight to the Amis. Some of the boys started crying. I told him: “No we are going home.” He was my brother, I thought he would listen, but he screamed that I was a traitor and hit me in the mouth with his pistol. When I said I would not fight, he shot me in the leg.’ He turned to Sarah. ‘Do not be sorry for me. I was fortunate. In Erich’s eyes I was guilty of mutiny and he had every right to shoot me dead or string me up from the nearest tree. It happened to many. Of course, the other boys were too frightened then to do anything. They carried me to this house, my mother’s house, and left me here.’

Werner slurped at his coffee and licked his lips.

‘Mama did her best with the leg, but when the gangrene came…’ He shook his head at the memory. ‘But that was later. Three days after Erich wounded me I heard the shooting and the explosion, over there. I wanted to go, but I couldn’t move and I think Mama would have stopped me in any case. But I could see from the window the jeep burning and the flashes of the tracer rounds from the woods. When the firing stopped I was torn. Should I be elated at my friends’ victory? Was I a coward, who had walked away from them? And what would the Amis do when they discovered this thing? Erich had boasted about a place in France that the SS had taught a lesson, and I had heard him talking in his sleep about things that happened in Russia that freeze my blood even now. Surely the Amis would burn our farm and hang us all? Then the shooting started again and I knew that the weapons doing most of the firing were not German. It only lasted for a moment. Then silence. All I could hear was Mama sobbing. I think she knew even then that Erich was dead. A few minutes later there were four or five individual shots. Very slow, very deliberate. Each one like a punctuation mark. I knew they were shooting the wounded. Before they went, the Amis buried their dead and left our boys for the crows.’

‘They shot wounded children?’ Sarah demanded incredulously. ‘But the war was over. They knew that.’

‘Oh, yes, young lady, they shot little Pauli and the rest. I saw the bodies when they were brought here to be buried. You say the war was over, but war doesn’t end just because someone says it is ended. It finishes when people stop shooting at each other. Erich’s war was only ever going to finish when he was dead. The pity is that he took so many good boys with him.’

Jamie struggled to make sense of what he was hearing. He had read Matthew’s account of the ambush as a heroic charge against a determined enemy and superior odds. The references to boys and children were clear enough, but somehow, in reading the journal, his mind had only absorbed one side of the story. Matthew’s enemy had been hard-eyed fanatics, however young. They had struck, like cowards, from the forest and he had paid them back in their own coin. Only now, as old Werner rummaged through a drawer and produced a sepia-tinged picture of a grinning schoolboy football team, did he fully understand how young they had been. Had Matthew looked into an injured child’s eyes and pulled the trigger? If he had, it turned everything he had learned on its head.

‘I’m on the right, the big lad with the blond hair. Star centre forward. Pauli is the dark-haired kid in the front row. He was a good pal, Pauli. A good pal.’

‘What happened afterwards. Was there some sort of inquiry?’

The German laughed — haw, haw, haw — as if Jamie had made a hilarious joke. ‘You think anybody cared about a few Bavarian farm boys who were too stupid to surrender when they had the chance? Back then, the only war crimes were German war crimes. The only victims were the Jews. A few months later a graves registration unit turned up and they eventually buried the dead Amis in the military cemetery at Dürnbach, with the shot-down Allied airmen, escaped prisoners who didn’t make it home and the poor bastards the SS marched to death when they closed the PoW camps. Erich and my friends are over there at Saulgau.’

They finished their coffee and sat in silence for a while. Jamie stood up to go. There was nothing else to learn here.

Werner looked up, but the rheumy eyes were still somewhere in the past. ‘Before they moved the bodies to Saulgau, they were stored in the barn. I sneaked in to see Pauli one last time. It was a mistake. He had been under the earth for three months, you understand, and he was no longer the Pauli I remembered. My advice to you, my young friend, is to turn back now. There is no profit in digging up the past. If you continue, all that lies in wait for you is sorrow.’