The Doomsday Testament

LVIII

She stared at him. ‘If the Sun Stone has been in the bunker all along surely the authorities would have found it by now? They will treat what’s left in the complex like an archaeological dig, cataloguing everything and removing anything of even the slightest value.’

‘Not necessarily. Remember what I said about the maps?’

‘About Brohm offering the Harz map to Matthew as a decoy?’

‘That’s right. Well, I was wrong. There was no other silk map. But Brohm was pleading for his life. He knew he was going to die, so he would have offered everything, even the Sun Stone to save himself.’

‘But you said the Sun Stone wasn’t there?’

‘No, but what if there is another map. Only it’s not a silk map. It’s the real thing. The original…’

‘… like the Black Sun at Wewelsburg.’

They arrived back at the car. Jamie used the electronic switch to open the boot and they put their rucksacks inside. He reached for the door handle.

‘Wait!’

His fingers froze a centimetre from the black plastic. ‘You can’t get in the car.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because your jeans are covered in mud.’ She pointed to his backside where he’d slid down the gully. ‘You’ll get the seat filthy. Here.’ She handed him his jacket. ‘Sit on that until we get back to the hotel.’

He glared at her. ‘You scared the bloody life out of me.’

‘Good. I think you have every reason to be scared. We both have. The closer we get to the Sun Stone the more dangerous this is going to get.’

The next day, he pushed the Volkswagen to its limit on the autobahn. A hundred miles into the journey the temperature gauge began to rise ominously and Jamie thought he felt a vibration in the engine that hadn’t been there earlier.

Sarah noticed the car slowing.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I think we have a problem. There’s a rattle somewhere there shouldn’t be.’ He pointed to the temperature gauge, which still hadn’t fallen back towards normal since he’d eased off the accelerator.

‘Maybe it’s something to do with your driving?’

He bit his tongue and kept his eyes on the road.

‘Do you think you can fix it?’

‘I can take a look under the bonnet and give a few bits and pieces a good shake, but that won’t mean I have any idea what I’m doing. What about you?’

She waved her manicured fingers in front of his eyes. ‘Does this look like the hand of an auto mechanic?’

‘Do you think it would be able to press a few buttons and call Europcar?’

He felt her staring at him. ‘I wish…’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

Two hours later — after a short stop in town — they drew up next to the police station on the western outskirts of Braunlage. Jamie knew there was no point in going directly to the bunker. It would be sealed off to keep out the kind of treasure hunters and ghouls who were always drawn to such sites. He went into the building while Sarah called the car hire company and asked them to send a mechanic.

‘May I talk to Kommissar Muller?’ The officer at the desk gave him the look cops reserve for ordinary mortals who disturb them while they’re doing something much too important to be interrupted, like drinking coffee and reading the sports pages.

‘The guy who found the bunker, right?’

‘Right.’

‘You are fortunate, she’s just going off duty.’ He picked up the phone and spoke quietly into it. ‘She’ll see you now.’

‘Herr Saintclair, this is a surprise.’ Lotte Muller greeted him with a handshake. ‘Is Miss Grant with you?’

He explained about the car and she shook her head gravely. ‘Yes, hire cars. But what can you do? You are here for a pleasure visit to see our lovely town again?’

Jamie had considered his approach on the drive north. There was no way he was going to tell anyone about what he believed was hidden in the bunker. He also realized it was unlikely that even the people who had discovered it would be allowed back inside just because they asked. That left one option. To lie. ‘I’m afraid not. We’ve been touring. Now we’re on our way to the airport at Paderborn and decided that we would like to pay our respects to the people who died in the bunker.’

‘Respects?’

‘A tribute. It is a British tradition. Just some flowers and the opportunity to say a few words. I’m sure you’ll understand that we were unable to give them the respect they deserved at the time.’

‘You are aware that the bodies have been removed? There is nothing to see.’

Jamie allowed his face to harden. ‘I can assure you that we saw more than enough on our last visit, Kommissar.’

She nodded distractedly. ‘Of course, forgive me. So you would like to go inside the bunker?’

‘If that would be possible. It would take only a few moments.’

Lotte Muller hesitated. She had orders to keep the bunker secure, and she was a great believer in obeying orders. But Jamie Saintclair and Sarah Grant had found the bunker and the Raphael, and despite the extra workload it had brought, she was grateful to them for the opportunities it created. She made her decision.

‘Very well.’ She smiled tiredly. ‘I finish my shift in a few minutes. I will drive you there. No,’ she raised a hand as Jamie opened his mouth to protest. ‘I insist. Your car will stay here. There is a rental garage in town and I’m sure the mechanic will be here very quickly. They are extremely efficient.’

Ten minutes later she joined Jamie and Sarah in the car park. Sarah carried a large bunch of colourful flowers and Lotte nodded approvingly. ‘They are lovely,’ she said. ‘We have very similar blooms in the town square. They are just reaching their peak in time for the summer.’

As they got into the black BMW Sarah attempted to disguise the fact that the bouquet had no florist’s wrapping and some of the stems still had the roots attached.

Lotte Muller took the southern route from the town. She noticed Jamie’s puzzlement.

‘This is not the most direct route, but it will save another hike through the forest,’ she explained. ‘We discovered the main entrance to the bunker in the hills to the west of the river. It was a working quarry and a sub-camp of the Dora-Nordhausen konzentrationslager, but it closed towards the end of the war and never re-opened. The current owners of the site, a company registered in the Cayman Islands, have gone to great lengths to keep people away. Given the circumstances, the company is naturally part of our inquiry, but so far we have had little success discovering who is behind it.’

After crossing the river they turned north, and a little later left the main road on to a forest track.

‘Of course, the bunker is still a murder scene, but we have completed our initial investigations in the area where the bodies were discovered. The strangest thing is that they were all already dead.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Sarah leaned forward from the back seats.

‘You noticed that many of the bodies were in a remarkable state of preservation? It seems that conditions within the bunker were conducive to partial mummification. Our initial forensic investigations showed that several victims had similar tattoos on the inside of their left forearm. You understand the implications of this?’

Jamie shook his head, but Sarah said she did.

The police chief explained. ‘Whatever you think of the Nazis, Mr Saintclair, they were extremely thorough. Every concentration camp prisoner received a personal identification number. At first, the numbers were sewn on their prison clothes, but because of the nature of the camps the clothing must be reused: again and again and again. So instead of on the clothing, the number would be written on the prisoner. Much more economic and efficient, yes? When the prisoner was disposed of, his number was disposed of with him.

‘Fortunately, some records from the camps still survive and we have been able to identify those victims whose tattoos are still readable.’

‘Who were they?’

‘To the best of our knowledge, they are all either scientists or technicians.’ She pointed to a file in the compartment beneath the passenger window. ‘Please. The most well known was a man called Abraham Steinberg, a Berlin physicist who, before the war, worked closely with some of the scientists who were eventually involved in the Uranverein project. Many of his Jewish colleagues found ways to escape Germany, but poor Herr Steinberg elected to stay with his family.’ Jamie opened the file and found himself staring into the face of a stern, bearded man standing behind a workbench filled with scientific equipment. He turned to the next sheet and his heart lurched. ‘Another of the victims — the youngest we have identified — is his niece, Hannah Schulmann, a laboratory technician who worked closely with him.’ Lotte gave a sad smile. ‘She was nineteen years old.’ In the black-and-white photograph Hannah Schulmann had the ethereal, cinematic beauty that in other times would have won her a place on the screen. A softness and a sensitivity that surrounded her like a halo. Her dark eyes sparkled with humour and her smile showed tiny pearls of perfect white teeth. The eyes drew him in, and he choked, making the women stare. So much life. So much potential. Wasted. A terrible darkness descended on him and he felt a hatred for Walter Brohm and his like that made him wish it had been his finger on the trigger and not Matthew’s.

‘All of the dead have one thing in common,’ Lotte Muller continued gently. ‘They were part of a transport of three hundred prisoners from Mauthausen which arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau on the twenty-fourth of February nineteen forty-three. On arrival they were taken directly from the train to the gas chambers. Odd, don’t you think, that for two years this facility appears to have been staffed by ghosts?’