The Excalibur Codex

IX

‘So what do we have?’

Casually dressed in a pink open-necked shirt and mustard-coloured corduroy trousers, Adam Steele sat back in his chair at the head of the long oak table after his butler had cleared away the dishes and decanted another bottle of wine. Charlotte cast a nervous glance into the dining room a few minutes later and asked if they needed anything else. She looked surprised when Steele gestured to her to take a seat. Gault rose and checked the door.

‘All clear, boss.’

‘This is all a bit cloak and dagger, isn’t it?’ Jamie laughed.

Steele sipped his wine. ‘When it’s your million quid, you can do it your way, Jamie, but as long as it’s my hard-earned cash we do it mine, and that means tight security. Christ knows what would happen if another collector got wind of this, or, God help us, the bloody newspapers. No, we keep it within the family for now. Charlotte?’ He produced a wry smile. ‘I apologize for my behaviour earlier. You shouldn’t have to put up with that and I’ll make it up to you. You have a little catching-up to do, so you might want to get out your notebook.’

Charlotte exchanged glances with Jamie and he nodded.

‘So,’ Steele said. ‘What do we have so far?’

Jamie shrugged. ‘Between us Gault and I have checked every major source we could find for the Arthur legend and every reference to Excalibur in your books or on the Internet, and nothing changes my opinion that you’re wasting your money. The earliest mentions of an Arthur are in a Welsh poem, The Gododdin, about a group of British warriors riding to the aid of a southern king facing annihilation by the Saxons. The Gododdin are all but wiped out, but when he’s listing the heroes who made the trip, the writer, a poet called Aneirin, says of one of them ‘he was no Arthur’. This was supposedly written in the sixth century, but there must have been a parallel oral tradition. There’s no mention of a sword in the poem, yet it appears a couple of hundred years later as Caledfwlch, which apparently means “notched by battle”, and the man who wields it is called Arthur.’

Adam Steele nodded, and Jamie realized he was only telling the businessman what he already knew. He paused, pondering where to take the story next. Gault had the look of someone who’d walked into the wrong meeting and his bored eyes wandered restlessly over the paintings of the banker’s uniformly stern, bewigged ancestors lining the wood-panelled walls. Charlotte sat hunched over her notebook with a frown of intense concentration.

‘The twelfth-century chronicler Geoffrey of Mon-mouth, who may or may not have been Welsh, latinized the name of the sword to Caliburnus in his Historia Regum Britanniae, a hotchpotch of tales from the island’s settlement by descendants of the Trojans, through the Roman invasions to Arthur and beyond. He claimed the book was a translation of an earlier British work, but it’s more likely to have been put together from Welsh poems, Bede’s earlier history, the writings of a Northumbrian monk called Gildas, and his own fertile imagination. When it was published he was accused of making up the sections that mentioned Arthur …’ From the bay window came the faint sound of a siren somewhere down towards Piccadilly and Jamie faltered, his mind immediately jumping to the chaos of lights and sirens on the TV the day Abbie died.

‘You all right, Jamie old boy?’ Steele asked eventually.

Jamie blinked and his vision cleared. ‘Sorry, just got a little lost.’ He licked his lips and discovered that they were the texture of sandpaper. ‘Anyway, a couple of hundred years later the Historia must have been picked up by an impoverished knight called Thomas Malory, because an embellished version of the Arthur sections of Geoffrey appear in a book called Le Morte d’Arthur, apparently written while the author was in jail, only now Arthur’s sword is called Excalibur. The Sword in the Stone first appears in a French poem that is actually about Merlin, who as far as we can tell doesn’t appear in the early sources and shouldn’t have anything to do with Arthur at all. That poem is also the source of the Grail legends and the Lady in the Lake. Le Morte d’Arthur picked up and embellished both these stories and is the basis for every unlikely myth, legend and work of fiction that follows.’ Now all their eyes were on him and he met their gaze with a rueful smile. ‘Everybody wants a piece of the Arthur action. He’s linked to most of Wales, Tintagel in Cornwall, Glastonbury, and anywhere that begins with Cam in England, as well as a couple of places in France. There’s even a historian who claims Arthur is Scottish, but they claim that about most things, I find.’

In the long silence that followed Jamie could hear the sound of some ancient clock ticking the seconds away. Adam Steele took his time before venturing an opinion. ‘Yet Wulf Ziegler believes he stole a sword later identified as Excalibur for Reinhard Heydrich, who wasn’t a man prone to mistakes?’

‘True,’ Jamie conceded. ‘But Heydrich was a man known to indulge in smoke and mirrors from time to time.’

Steele pursed his lips as if he’d sucked on a lemon. This wasn’t what he wanted to hear. ‘My instinct is that Ziegler is telling the truth as he saw it. You’d agree?’ Jamie nodded, he’d made his point. They both knew that even if the sword was genuine and it had been where Ziegler’s informant claimed in 1941, there was no guarantee they’d be able to track down its present whereabouts. A lot of things had vanished during the Second World War and stayed vanished. If it existed, the chances were that it was in a steel box at the bottom of the Elbe or rusting away in some Bavarian salt mine. One thing was certain, Reinhard Heydrich wasn’t telling. Himmler’s mastermind of the Final Solution had died in Prague in the spring of 1942 from a bad case of the after-effects of hand grenade fragments in the lower intestine. But Adam Steele’s confidence wasn’t to be dented by a little problem like a sixty-odd-year time lapse and a room full of dead witnesses. There had never been any doubt about the decision. He grinned. ‘Then we proceed on the assumption that he found what he believed he found. You still think Dortmund is the place to start?’

Jamie nodded. ‘Whether you believe him or not, Ziegler left a lot of unanswered questions. Why didn’t he give us a description of the sword? He must have seen it. If we knew what it looked like, it would at least give us a hint whether it was worth chasing after. If Excalibur exists it isn’t a medieval sword, but much earlier. We need to know one way or the other. We have only the slightest hint where the ritual took place—’

‘Wewelsburg, surely?’ Steele interrupted, telling Jamie he hadn’t read the codex as carefully as he might have. ‘Himmler’s Camelot.’

‘Wewelsburg is the holy of holies Ziegler refers to earlier.’ Gault’s head came up sharply as the art dealer corrected his boss. ‘It’s in northern Germany, not the east. And then there’s the cryptic reference to Adolf Hitler — in a place not far from where the Führer charted the course of the Thousand Year Reich — once we work that out we’ll have a clue, but we need more information. He mentions the Polish invasion, so it’s likely to be somewhere in Poland, but inside the German zone after the country was carved up in nineteen thirty-nine. Which takes us to who took part? Heydrich, almost certainly — it was his party. The others were all of the rank of Obergruppenführer in nineteen forty-one and members of Himmler’s SS inner circle, so we should be able to track down their identities. I have some ideas about that. Ziegler’s informant was a Gruppenführer, an SS general, but not one of the chosen few and he must have been several ranks lower in the early part of nineteen forty-one. That means there were others involved in the ritual, perhaps observers or helpers.’

‘How does that help?’ Charlotte asked.

‘The men who played the key roles would all have been in their forties and will almost certainly be dead, if not in the war, then of old age. According to Ziegler, the Gruppenführer was in his mid twenties, so there’s at least a chance he might still be alive. The first step is to talk to Ziegler’s family. If he made a will he must have left his worldly goods to someone. Maybe they’ll give us more clues.’

Steele rose from the table and stalked the length of the dining room, his voice shaking with passion.

‘Can you imagine what it would be like to hold the sword of Arthur?’ The legend says he’s sleeping in a cave waiting for the call to save Britain in its time of need. I find that comforting, although I can’t quite bring myself to believe it. But, make no mistake, this is our time of need.’

The banker stopped abruptly and his dark eyes challenged anyone in the room to deny it. He fixed on Jamie. ‘The attack that killed your Abbie was just the start. Britain looks for strong leadership. The forces of darkness aren’t just gathering, they’re upon us. What if a man could stand up holding Excalibur high for all to see and offer that leadership? What could that man not achieve?’

Jamie felt a tightening in his chest at the throwaway use of Abbie’s name, but he managed a smile. ‘I hope you’re not thinking of going into politics, Adam?’

Steele’s expression didn’t alter. ‘Find it for me, Jamie.’