The Excalibur Codex

XI

Dorstfeld, where the Ziegler family lived, lay on the west side of the city of Dortmund, the opposite from the airport, and they checked into their hotel before Jamie called the number he had been given. The phone was answered with a grunt and in a thick Westphalian accent that his brain took a few moments to decipher.

‘Herr Ziegler? Herr Rolf Ziegler?’

‘Wait. Old man? It’s for you.’

Jamie heard the rustle of feet across a carpeted floor and a hard voice confirmed: ‘Ziegler.’

He sensed the reluctance at the other end of the line as he explained that he wanted to ask a few questions about the will of the late Wulf Ziegler. ‘We will only take up a few moments of your time, Herr Ziegler,’ he assured the man at the other end of the phone, ‘and of course, we’ll be happy to pay you for your trouble.’ He saw Gault’s eyebrows rise and shrugged. It was Steele’s money.

‘How much?’

‘Shall we say two hundred and fifty euros?’

A short pause. ‘Where are you staying?’

‘The Park Inn.’

‘I don’t know it.’

‘It’s in the city centre on …’ He grabbed for a piece of the hotel’s headed notepaper. ‘Olpe?’

‘Sure. You got a car it will take you ten minutes. Drive out to the fifty-four at Sudwall and turn right. Keep going until you hit Rheinischestrasse — you’ll know when you see the old Union Brewery building up ahead — then follow it until you cross the bridge. When you can see the steel works you’re there.’

‘The steel works?’

‘You can’t miss it. It’ll be on your right. We’re on Joachimstrasse, directly across the road from the old offices. Look for the blue block. Number thirty-four on the second floor. Okay? Opposite Aldi.’ Jamie repeated the instructions and Charlotte took them down on her notepad. ‘When you gonna be here? We’re just about to eat.’

Jamie looked at his watch: just gone six. ‘Can we say eight o’clock?’

With what might have been a grunt of acknowledgement the line went dead.

They had a light meal in the hotel restaurant and Jamie managed to prise a little history from the soft-spoken Gault, who it turned out had served in Iraq and Afghanistan and a few other places he was even less eager to discuss. ‘I wouldn’t have thought there was much call for the web-footed persuasion in Afghanistan, given that there’s very little water there,’ Jamie teased.

‘You had to be there.’ Gault grinned, taking no offence at the land-based soldiers’ derogatory label for the amphibious variety. ‘Admittedly, it was drier than you’d like up in the Shahi-Kot Valley and Tora Bora wasn’t exactly tourist territory, but the one that took the school prize was Qala-i-Jangi Fort. Six hundred Terry Taliban prisoners and their Al-Qaida mates bust into the armoury and were about to break out into open country, armed and dangerous, when we got there. Eight of us. We kept them pinned down with an MG till the Northern Alliance arrived and a few of us even snuck into the jail and tried to rescue a CIA bod, who’d got himself captured. The Yanks wanted to give my boss on that mission the Congressional Medal of Honor, but some bastard politician at Westminster vetoed it.’ Jamie found himself the focus of what might be called a significant look. ‘One of the reasons I hate bastard politicians. Time we had a few military men running the country, eh?’ Jamie didn’t rise to the suggestion and Gault shook his head. ‘Anyway, what I’m saying is it’s not only the SAS that can crawl around in the dark, Mr Saintclair. Though I guess you wouldn’t know that, what with your less than glorious military record.’

Jamie let the jibe at his two short weeks at Sandhurst slide by like a straight right in the boxing ring. ‘Not everybody’s cut out for soldiering, old boy. Taking orders turned out to be not my cup of tea. If you liked it so much, why didn’t you stay in? You’re not that old.’

‘I didn’t have any choice, old boy.’

Before Jamie could ask the obvious question, Charlotte, who seemed to have appointed herself his minder, interrupted sweetly. ‘Isn’t it time we were going?’

The evening light was fading as they drove out of the hotel car park in the hired black Audi. The street lights showed a Dortmund of steel, brick and glass, with hardly a piece of dressed stone in sight. Jamie reckoned it must be one of the most modern centres he’d ever been in. A city born in the nineteen fifties, and still to mature fully. He mentioned it to Gault and the SBS man, who was at the wheel, laughed.

‘If we’d been here sixty odd years ago, there’d have been nothing but rubble for miles around. This is the industrial heart of Germany. Dortmund was right in the middle of Bomber Harris’s Battle of the Ruhr. In the summer of nineteen forty-three the RAF visited Dortmund about once a week with four or five hundred Lancasters. By the time they’d finished you’d be lucky if there was one stone standing on top of another.’ He drove out onto a wide highway and followed the line of the rebuilt city ramparts northwards until they reached an intersection marked by a brick tower topped by a huge spotlit letter U. ‘Left here, I think,’ Charlotte said. Jamie heard Gault mutter something under his breath about ‘not being fucking blind’.

To their right, running like a broad river through the centre of the city, was a floodlit expanse of rail tracks, which split a couple of hundred yards later to create a concrete peninsula that Gault reached via an iron bridge. ‘Jesus, what a fucking shithole,’ the former SBS man said as an enormous industrial building that must be the Union steelworks reared up to fill the skyline ahead. They continued on until they reached the first actual old building Jamie had seen since their plane landed, a four-storey block of red brick and sandstone decorated with enormous Romanesque pillars. Gault took the first street on the left and turned into the almost empty car park of the supermarket, choosing a space to the rear away from the lights.

They studied their surroundings. The back wall of the shop was to their right, with the usual collection of bins and a cage full of discarded cardboard just visible in the shadows. Ahead, a row of modern, brightly painted tenements blocked the view. Jamie’s eyes were drawn to the block in the centre, a sickly duck-egg blue, with lights shining on every floor.

‘Okay,’ Jamie said eventually. ‘We play this just as we discussed. Gault and I will go in and talk to the son. Charlotte will stay with the car, in the driver’s seat with the engine running.’

‘Isn’t that a little over-cautious?’

‘You’re not in Hampstead now, Charlotte,’ Jamie said evenly. ‘And that’s not a Waitrose. Strange things happen in Germany, or at least they happen to me. Better safe than sorry. Right, Gault?’

Gault nodded. ‘And you don’t go for a drive to look at the sights and you don’t nip into the supermarket to see what you can pick up for tonight’s supper.’

From the back seat came the sound of a wounded snarl as the rear door opened. ‘I wish you’d stop treating me as if I’m some kind of idiot. I’m Adam’s PA, not his bloody bimbo.’ The two men exited the car and Charlotte threw herself into the driver’s seat, refusing to look at either of them. They heard the door slam shut and engine start as they walked warily across the almost empty car park towards the bright lights of Wulf Ziegler’s home.