The Doomsday Testament

LVII

‘Read the rest, Jamie. Matthew wanted you to see this. You won’t understand why unless you stay with him to the end.’

‘I…’

‘Read it. What happened to Walter Brohm? What happened to the Sun Stone?’

In a daze, Jamie walked across to the edge of the gully and looked down. After sixty years there was nothing to see except a jumble of moss-covered rocks twenty feet below and a thin stream barely worth the name running amongst them. ‘He killed them all. They were unarmed. He executed them. It was murder, Sarah, cold-blooded murder. They would have hanged him if they’d found out.’

‘But they didn’t,’ she said firmly. ‘And I’m not sure they would have… hanged your grandfather, I mean. The three men he killed were monsters. Each one of them was responsible for hundreds of deaths. Even thousands. You heard what Matthew said about Walter Brohm’s confession? Jews slaughtered for having the temerity to know too much. Well, we found the evidence of that massacre, didn’t we? That alone would have been enough to have Walter Brohm hanged at Nuremberg. And Klosse, with his vile medical experiments on children. Strasser, the executioner. Do you know how many Jews were killed at Kiev in September nineteen forty-one? Thirty-three thousand innocent men, women and children. Come on, Jamie, these people were scum. If anyone deserved killing, they did. Matthew Sinclair did the world a favour when he fired those three bullets and you know it.’

‘Who they were doesn’t change the fact that my grandfather murdered three men in cold blood. He brought them here, he let them eat a last meal and he killed them. He and my mother brought me up to believe in justice, Sarah, but my grandfather set himself up as judge, jury and executioner.’

She gave a long drawn out sigh. ‘Christ, Jamie, you’re doing it again. This isn’t about Jamie Saintclair. It’s about Matthew and the war and the Sun Stone. You read what the journal said about his family. He watched his wife and children being burned alive by German incendiary bombs. That’s enough to drive any man crazy. Yet he fought back. He endured the rest of the war and took part in some of the toughest battles of them all. He was tired and he was sick and what happened in Coventry had overwhelmed his mind. When he met a man who promised to build a bomb that would create a thousand Coventrys in a single night what the hell was he going to do? What the hell would you have done? Don’t tell me you would have watched Walter Brohm and Klosse and Strasser walk away into the sunset en route to their cosy retirement in the States and then waited for the news that America had dropped the world’s most powerful bomb on Moscow, because I won’t believe you. In the same circumstances both of us would have done exactly the same thing, and you know what? We would have been right. Maybe it wasn’t legal, but any way you look at it, it was justice. Remember the bunker? You seem to have forgotten what you promised, but that doesn’t matter any more because Matthew Sinclair, your grandfather, did the job for you. It’s simpler this way.’

Jamie turned away from the ravine. He remembered the hatred he had felt for Walter Brohm in the depths of the bunker, and the silent vow he had made to the girl with the pianist’s fingers. Sarah was right. Justice was done. It was over. ‘What about the Sun Stone?’

He saw the moment of indecision before her eyes hardened. ‘Forget about the Sun Stone. Burn the diary. If we can’t find the Sun Stone with the information we have, what chance is there of anyone else finding it without the book. Give me it. Right now.’ She unhitched her rucksack from her back and opened one of the zipped compartments to pull out a box of matches. ‘Give me it.’

He looked at her outstretched hand, the palm raised, and it reminded him of the hand in the bunker. He was tempted. Sorely tempted. It would be so easy to give it to her and watch the flames eating it, then go home and forget everything. No one else would ever know about the Sun Stone. No one would ever know about Matthew Sinclair and the murder of three Nazis he’d been ordered to protect. ‘It’s not that simple.’

She shook her head and now her eyes were filled with a mixture of anger and pity. ‘You’re wrong, Jamie, it is that simple. Give me the book.’

‘We owe it to Tenzin not to give up. Have you forgotten that he sacrificed himself to save us? Just because it happened six thousand miles away doesn’t make it any less real.’

‘Tenzin was a dead man walking and you know it. He’s not here now, but maybe if he was he’d be giving you the same advice. Let’s walk away from this now, Jamie. For us. Let’s go back to London and get on with our life and forget we ever heard of the Sun Stone.’

He noticed the way she said life singular, not lives, and a little bolt of hope shot through his heart. She was saying she would be his and that made it all the more sensible to hand over the journal. There was only one problem.

‘If I give up now, I wouldn’t be the man you met at the Tube station, or the man who was going to fight a helicopter gunship for you. I’d just be the same old loser I was before I found you. Matthew would have wanted us to see this through.’

He walked back to the gully edge and studied the long drop. ‘I need to go down there.’

She came to his side. ‘Are you crazy? You’ll break your neck.’

He laughed. ‘You’re talking to someone who’s climbed the Himalayas. This is a piece of cake.’

She shook her head. ‘All you’ll find down there are a few mouldy old bones picked bare by rats.’

He ignored her and dropped to his belly, slithering backwards until the bottom half of his body was over the edge and his feet scrambled for a toehold. Before he started climbing down, he looked up at her. ‘What if Walter Brohm didn’t have one map, but two? What if he waved the Harz map at my grandfather as a decoy while the map that points the way to the final location of the Sun Stone was hidden somewhere else? It could be down there, still in his pocket. I can’t take the chance.’

With a rush of falling soil he was gone, half sliding, half scrambling down the sheer dirt face. He grabbed a tree root to slow his progress, but it only unbalanced him and he ended up rolling the last few feet and landing in an undignified dusty heap among the rocks beside the trickling water of the stream.

‘I’ll give you a two for style, but you get top marks for comic interpretation.’ Sarah’s voice came to him from above. ‘What can you see?’

He looked around. Matthew said he had covered the bodies in a decent fashion. That meant there should be some kind of cairn.

‘Nothing.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘There’s nothing down here. No burial. Nothing that would mark a grave. The rocks are scattered about. Wait.’ Something a little further downstream caught his eye and he worked his way towards it. He picked up a fallen branch and dug at a ragged piece of material sticking out of a patch of sand between two large boulders.

‘What is it?’

His heart quickened and he excavated deeper. Cloth? No, something more substantial than cloth. Leather.

‘For Christ’s sake, Jamie!’

‘I think I may have found Walter Brohm’s briefcase.’

Getting back up took longer than coming down, but eventually he made it caked in dirt, sweat running down his face and some shapeless, weather-stained remains under his left arm. Sarah accepted it with distaste, brushing off sand and wriggling aquatic insects.

‘You sure this is Walter Brohm’s case? It looks like crap to me.’

‘You’d look like crap if you’d been buried in mud for sixty years. If you look closely you can see the SS insignia stamped in the leather. I’m surprised it’s survived at all. It must have been made for Brohm from some kind of specially reinforced hide, crocodile or buffalo, maybe. Look, the brass catches are still intact.’

He took the case from her and studied the furred green locks.

‘Let me,’ she demanded. ‘What makes you think there’ll be anything in there? Surely Matthew would have searched it before he threw it away.’ She rummaged in her rucksack, came up with a substantial Swiss army knife and opened the largest blade.

‘I’m not so sure. You heard what he said about Brohm. He wanted nothing to do with his research or the Sun Stone.’

Sarah worked at the brass with the knife point. ‘He took the map of the Black Sun,’ she pointed out.

‘Yes, but only because Brohm said it would lead him to the Raphael, which would have had some value to him.’ As he said the words, it was as if someone whispered in his ear, but he couldn’t catch the message. He looked at the trees, thinking it must have been the breeze, but there was no wind.

‘Are you all right?’

He blinked. ‘I think so. I thought… Anyway, I don’t think Matthew would have wanted to dirty his hands with what was in the briefcase. Whatever was in it — Brohm’s research papers, maybe even some clue to the location of the stone — will still be in there and it might have survived. Stranger things have happened. You only have to look at the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Vindolanda Tablets.’

‘Got you.’ She’d given up on the locks and used all her effort to slice through the thick leather at the back of the case. ‘You were right, it was made to last. I suppose you should do this.’ She handed it back to him and he pulled apart the leather, allowing them both to peer inside.

‘Bugger.’

All that was left of the contents was a sodden mass of brown sludge.

‘So what do you think happened to the bodies, if there were any bodies here at all?’ Sarah asked as they were packing up, the galling disappointment of failure still creating a barrier between them.

‘Oh, the bodies were here.’ Jamie looked around the clearing distractedly. ‘I think the briefcase proves that. You saw the SS flashes on the leather and it was exactly where it would have been if my grandfather had thrown it away. In a way it makes sense. This must be a popular hiking trail, and probably has been for decades. Matthew wouldn’t have been able to bury them properly, only cover them with rocks and a few branches. The corpses could have been exposed by animals or the first decent spate. With dozens of people a week passing on the trail it was only a matter of time before they were discovered. Three skeletons in the remains of British uniforms, but without any form of identification. Remember old Werner telling us about the cemetery where they buried the escaping Allied prisoners of war who didn’t make it to the Swiss border. I’m betting that’s where Walter Brohm, Gunther Klosse and Paul Strasser ended up. Three British soldiers “known unto God”. I don’t know whether Matthew will be laughing or crying.’

‘And now?’

He hesitated because he wasn’t quite sure how to explain. The sensation had been so strong that it had been like someone physically standing beside him. ‘You asked me earlier what was wrong. It was because I suddenly had a feeling that we were very close to something important, but I was missing it. It was as if someone was screaming at me in a vacuum; I could see their lips moving but I didn’t know what they were saying. Can you understand that?’

‘Yes, but I still think we should take this chance to walk away, go right back down that hill and leave all the dead bodies behind us. Old Werner was right when he said digging up the past would only bring us grief.’

Jamie shook his head. ‘I can’t, Sarah. I’ll take you back to the airport and you can go home, but I have to keep looking. Maybe I’ll never find it, but I have to try. If I gave up now I’d be letting too many people down. You as much as anybody.’

She smiled, but when she replied there was a catch in her voice. ‘Don’t be an idiot. If we do this, we do it together. Christ, what have I done to us, Jamie?’

It seemed an odd question and he decided not to answer, because there was no answer. Instead, he asked: ‘What was I saying when I suddenly came over all queer?’

Sarah laughed and it rid her of the melancholy that seemed to permeate this place. ‘The one thing you’ll never be is queer, Mr Saintclair. You were talking about the Raphael, how Brohm had told your grandfather that the map would lead him to the Raphael.’

‘Yes.’ She could almost feel his excitement as he scrambled for the journal. ‘But that wasn’t exactly what he said. In the journal Matthew is always very careful to be precise, even when he’s under pressure. Here, you read it, exactly as he records it.’

She accepted the book and opened it where he’d placed the final page. ‘He took out a silk escape map with some sort of Nazi symbol on the reverse. This, he said, would lead me to the Raphael and everything else. Is that enough, or do you want more?’

He frowned, his face lined with concentration as he spelled out the words that had seemed to whisper to him earlier. What was it? What had he missed? The first sentence couldn’t have any hidden message, it was just a general description of the map. So it must be in the second. This, he said, would lead me to the Raphael and everything else. Ten words, without the attribution. Ten little words. Christ, could it really be that simple?

‘Everything else.’

‘What?’

‘Brohm told Matthew that the silk escape map would lead him to the Raphael and everything else. We were so blinded by the Raphael that we missed it. It was right there under our noses.’