The Doomsday Testament(104)

Jamie nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He tore his eyes away from the horror that had been his friend and surveyed the rest of the room. Every drawer had been ripped open and turned out on to the floor. The cushions of the sofa were sliced apart and the stuffing scattered. Even the furniture itself had been gutted, leaving the springs sticking out of the cloth. He glanced through to the study and saw a similar picture. In addition his computer had been taken apart and he knew that the hard disk would be missing.

‘I’m to blame for this. I underestimated how much the Sun Stone meant to Frederick and his thugs. When we vanished from Braunlage this is the first place they would have looked for us.’

‘No. You could never have predicted this. No one could. These people are psychopaths; they’ll kill anyone who gets in their way. Maybe we should just give up now?’

Jamie forced himself to look at Simon. Frederick and the Vril would never give up while he and Sarah were still alive. The only way they would ever be free of them was to find the Sun Stone.

‘No.’





* * *


Three days passed before the police were satisfied with their statements. It seemed clear to the inspector in charge of the investigation that Simon’s murder was linked in some way to the find of the Raphael in Germany. Jamie had spent two of those days convincing him that he wasn’t trading in stolen artworks from a secret warehouse that the dead man had been tortured to identify.

When they were allowed to leave, Jamie decided to set up home at his grandfather’s house on the grounds that it would be much easier to spot any watchers in the leafy lanes of north Welwyn than in central London. It turned out to be a good decision because a hand-delivered letter was waiting for him inviting him to visit the family lawyer, which presumably meant there was some movement on the sale of the house. While he walked into the town centre, Sarah continued her research.

‘This stuff on Operation Paperclip is incredible,’ she called as she heard the front door opening an hour later. The lack of reply puzzled her and when she went to investigate she realized instantly that something was very wrong. Jamie’s face wore the haunted look of a man walking away from the fatal accident he’d just caused.

‘What’s happened, Jamie? Is it about the house?’ She saw he was clutching two envelopes, one larger and white, but the paper so aged as to be a faded, marbled yellow, and the other a narrow dun-coloured oblong that might have been from the tax man. He brushed past her into the lounge and collapsed in a chair at the table. He put the larger of the two envelopes on the table in front of him and laid the second aside.

Sarah sat opposite him. She noticed that the yellowing envelope had words written on it in a tight, almost archaic script and she understood instinctively that it wasn’t the solicitor’s writing. With a little effort she made out the inverted words. For the attention of Master James Sinclair. The use of Sinclair proved it had been written and deposited before Jamie’s mother had changed their name to the more upmarket version. It was padded, but not bulky, and clearly contained more than a single sheet. She knew better than to reach for it. Instead, she waited while the silence lengthened to the point where it became unbearable.

‘My grandfather instructed the solicitor to only pass it on after he was dead.’ Jamie’s voice came out cracked, as if all the moisture had been sucked from his throat by the dry, aged object in front of him.

‘What is it?’

The green eyes filled with a combustible mixture of grief and pain, anger and loss that almost made her turn away. ‘The final pages of his diary.’

Her fingers made an involuntary lunge for the envelope, but he put his hand, palm down on top of it. He saw that he’d hurt her feelings, but the hand didn’t move.

‘I need to think about this, Sarah. I’ve read the first few pages, but I couldn’t . . . I want to see it through his eyes as it happened. We need to go back to Germany.’

She reached out and placed her hand over his. The flesh was cold. ‘Then that’s what we’ll do,’ she reassured him. ‘Just tell me where you want to go and I’ll book the flights. Do you want to hear about Paperclip?’

He shook his head. ‘Paperclip can wait. First you have to know what I know.’ He reached into the envelope and counted out four lined sheets of paper, identical to those from the blue journal.

He began speaking in a flat monotone and the first thing she noted was that Matthew Sinclair was no longer in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, but was recording his memories of the period four years earlier, in the summer of 1941. It began as a love story.