She sat motionless for a few seconds until a faraway machine-gun rattle broke the silence.
‘A woodpecker.’
He felt like strangling her. Instead, he kissed her.
They lay side by side in the grass, staring up at a perfect cupola of pale eggshell blue. Sarah’s hand searched for his and her fingers held him tight. ‘Seriously, Jamie, do you ever wonder what happens after?’ There was a wistful regret in her voice that sent an icicle through his heart.
‘After?’
‘When it’s over. When you know Matthew’s story. When we’ve found the Sun Stone or we haven’t. When we don’t have the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow to chase.’
He shrugged, which was awkward lying on his back. ‘If I do think about it, I think about you and I together, having fun,’ he said, aware that his words lacked conviction. ‘There are still plenty of things we have to do and see. Together.’
She squeezed his hand.
‘Sure there are, Jamie, but don’t you sometimes worry that we’ll be different people then?’
‘Do you?’
She rolled over so she could look into his face. ‘Look, the first day we met, you’d just been pushed under a train, that’s hardly normal circumstances. Since then it’s been a roller-coaster of World War Two puzzles and crazy quests, rabid Nazis, lost masterpieces and long-dead Jews, and this mysterious discovery that might not even exist except in our heads. Hell, we’ve been living on adrenalin and coffee and sex for the last month. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t have missed it for anything, but while we’ve been chasing rainbows we’ve been completely different people from the ones that scrounge a living back in London. Do I know the real Jamie Saintclair? I’m still not sure. And you sure as hell don’t know the real Sarah Grant.’
He got to his feet and dusted himself down, trying not to let her see his disappointment. There were certainly things he didn’t know about Sarah Grant and things he suspected, but didn’t want to know quite yet, but he’d been prepared to discover them in his own time. ‘Maybe that’s true, and maybe it isn’t. But the one thing I’m certain of is that I’d like the chance to find out.’
He set off up the slope, expecting her to follow, but when he looked round a few minutes later, she wasn’t with him. He turned back along the path just as she appeared through the trees, head down and deep in thought. She looked up and he saw she’d been weeping.
‘Hey. Things aren’t that bad. We’ll work it out. I’ll take you for a swanky dinner in the West End when we get back home and we can talk it over. Unless you’d prefer to have a quiet night in.’
She grinned through the tears and nodded. ‘Look, it’s . . . it’s just that I’m confused, Jamie. Everything has happened so fast and there’s been so much going on. I don’t know what’s up and what’s down. Just give me time, huh.’
He bent and kissed her on the forehead. ‘Sure. Come on, it can’t be far now.’
They reached the clearing with the stream after another ten minutes of climbing. Sarah recognized it first. She stopped in her tracks. ‘A runnel through a clearing beside a steep ravine, that’s what Matthew described. I had to look up runnel in the dictionary.’
‘This is it.’ Jamie tried to keep the tension from his voice. He walked to the edge of the gully that slashed the woods. This was the moment he’d been waiting for since he first opened the journal. His imagination had painted a dark, gothic landscape of jagged rocks and brooding, dangerous forest, but it wasn’t like that at all. Around him, the sun’s rays turned the summer leaves into a hundred thousand sparkling emeralds and birdsong echoed among the trees. Still, he had no doubts. ‘This is it.’
He fumbled in his rucksack and his hands shook as he withdrew the yellow-white envelope containing the final diary entries.
LVI
‘8 May 1945, 1 p.m., 3 miles south of Blumberg. We have travelled two hundred and fifty miles over the past seven days and throughout that time I have felt as if a volcano has been building up inside me. Klosse and Strasser might look like a pair of mismatched British Army cooks in their ill-fitting battledress, but the miasma of evil surrounding them is as corrosive as mustard gas. They literally stink of death, or perhaps it is truer to say that the stink of death has never left my nostrils. I have done many things that sickened me during six years of war, but I have never felt dirtier than while helping these men to escape the justice that awaits them back in Germany. I knew now that Klosse was the Nosferatu of the camps. I had seen the camps. The awfulness of Belsen will never leave me; the living turned into walking skeletons, the dead discarded like so much refuse, the smell of decaying flesh and the taste of burning bodies on my lips, the staring eyes of doomed children pleading from the faces of old men. The beaten, the starved, men torn apart by dogs, shot or hanged. Physically destroyed by the inhumanity of their treatment and mentally by the misery of their existence and the removal of all hope. Casual violence is symptomatic of war. The systematic annihilation of a race is beyond comprehension. Yet, if I am to believe Brohm, Klosse’s crimes went beyond even that. He had hovered unseen in the smoke from the ovens and chosen his victims from among the living dead below: men, women and children, every individual specifically selected to suit his purpose; measured, weighed, injected or dosed, analysed and inspected in their agonies, each convulsion recorded, until the last, and finally eviscerated, dissected or disassembled for the knowledge their abused bodies would provide, their organs and parts bottled and stored for comparison with those who had gone before and those still to come. Not human beings. Not even animals. Things. Experiments. And all of it justified in the name of progress. There is no remorse in Klosse; it is plain on his smug Prussian face as he contemplates his new life. I think I have never hated anyone more. By comparison, Strasser is a babe in arms in the pantheon of genocide, a mere torturer; extractor of teeth and toenails, and twister of genitals. A dull bureaucrat driven by ambition and flattery to exchange his pen for a cattle prod and a soldering iron. Strasser is already doomed. Escaping to America will not save him, because he cannot escape from himself. For the same reason, he will never know forgiveness or absolution. The things he has seen and done are devouring him from the inside and the only escape will be oblivion. I can feel no pity for him. His crimes, paltry as they are in this terrible war, surely cannot just be forgotten.