The Doomsday Testament(112)

‘What happened afterwards. Was there some sort of inquiry?’

The German laughed – haw, haw, haw – as if Jamie had made a hilarious joke. ‘You think anybody cared about a few Bavarian farm boys who were too stupid to surrender when they had the chance? Back then, the only war crimes were German war crimes. The only victims were the Jews. A few months later a graves registration unit turned up and they eventually buried the dead Amis in the military cemetery at Dürnbach, with the shot-down Allied airmen, escaped prisoners who didn’t make it home and the poor bastards the SS marched to death when they closed the PoW camps. Erich and my friends are over there at Saulgau.’

They finished their coffee and sat in silence for a while. Jamie stood up to go. There was nothing else to learn here.

Werner looked up, but the rheumy eyes were still somewhere in the past. ‘Before they moved the bodies to Saulgau, they were stored in the barn. I sneaked in to see Pauli one last time. It was a mistake. He had been under the earth for three months, you understand, and he was no longer the Pauli I remembered. My advice to you, my young friend, is to turn back now. There is no profit in digging up the past. If you continue, all that lies in wait for you is sorrow.’





LIV


THEY REACHED BLUMBERG in the early evening but any chance of continuing on Matthew’s route towards the Swiss border just five miles away was fast fading along with the daylight. Sarah bought a local map from the tourist centre as the staff were closing the doors and Jamie booked them into a gasthaus in the centre of town. When they met outside the hotel, he pointed to hills that formed the southern boundary of the valley.

‘Those must have been where Matthew took the Germans.’

Sarah studied the map she’d bought and shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. I think maybe it’s those high ones in the distance. See . . .’ She showed him the map. ‘There are two hamlets to the south between Blumberg and the Swiss border. Epfenhofen and Futzen. Beyond them is the start of that miniature mountain range he mentioned.’

‘The Hoher Randen?’

‘That’s right. By the look of this, both of them are possibles.’ She studied him seriously. ‘Jamie, why don’t you just read the final pages of Matthew’s journal and get this over with.’

‘Do you think I haven’t been tempted? I’m like an addict with a drugs stash. My fingers keep twitching towards the journal. But I won’t give in because I’m certain this is how Matthew wanted it to be. In a way, this is his true last will and testament. When we go up there tomorrow he’ll be with us. I have a feeling that if we break his rules we’ll never find the answers.’

‘What if you’re wrong?’

‘If I’m wrong, we go home. Maybe we forget the Sun Stone ever existed?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘No, I don’t either. Since Tibet, I feel as if it’s part of me. I suppose we’ll just have to go back and start all over again. Walter Brohm’s Black Sun led us to the Harz and the research facility. On the day he walked away from there he took his research papers, or at least a summary of them, with him. Remember what Matthew said about the day he first met him?’

‘He said two of them were the most evil men he’d ever met. Did that mean he’d already formed some kind of instinctive bond with Brohm?’

‘I think maybe he had, but that’s not the point. One of them had a briefcase on his knee. It has to be Brohm. He must have cut a deal with the Americans. Brohm was a player. He would always keep an ace up his sleeve. When he left the Harz bunker and got rid of all the evidence he had already made sure the crown jewels were hidden in a safe place. The papers in the briefcase were just bait. Enough to tempt whoever saw them, but with the key elements missing. The Sun Stone was Brohm’s passport to a new life in the United States and he would only hand over the location, and that of his main research, when he was in neutral Switzerland.’

‘But once he reached Switzerland, he disappeared, along with the others?’

In the gathering gloom she saw his eyes fix on the fading blue line of the distant mountains. ‘That’s right. And tomorrow I think we’ll be a step closer to finding out why.’

Next morning they set out for Epfenhofen, a tiny community of farms and houses distinguished by an astonishing hangman’s loop of railway line that encircled the place like a noose. From beneath the railway viaduct they studied the tree-covered slope which rose almost vertically from where they stood. To their right, a narrow path led into the trees.

‘This could be it,’ Jamie suggested.