The Doomsday Testament(117)
‘He tried to tell me about the Sun Stone, but I wouldn’t listen. I almost spat in his face. “What about the bomb, the bomb with all the power of the sun?” I demanded. “What about Peggy and Elizabeth and Anne” He looked bewildered, he knew nothing of any Peggy or Elizabeth, I was trying to trick him. By now he was weeping and I almost wavered, but I knew I had to harden my heart for the sake of the world.
‘He went down on his knees and asked me to hear his confession, as if that single gesture would gain him absolution for all the sins he forced me to listen to. The deaths of Tibetan monks and Russian slave labourers. Jews shot down for having clumsy fingers or slaughtered for having the temerity to know too much. Yet his greatest sin of all he would not confess. The sin of certainty.
‘When he was finished I shot him through the head and carried his body to the ravine and threw it over. Then I climbed down and did what I could to cover them in a decent fashion.’
In a daze, Jamie walked across to the edge of the gully and looked down. After sixty years there was nothing to see except a jumble of moss-covered rocks twenty feet below and a thin stream barely worth the name running amongst them. ‘He killed them all. They were unarmed. He executed them. It was murder, Sarah, cold-blooded murder. They would have hanged him if they’d found out.’
‘But they didn’t,’ she said firmly. ‘And I’m not sure they would have . . . hanged your grandfather, I mean. The three men he killed were monsters. Each one of them was responsible for hundreds of deaths. Even thousands. You heard what Matthew said about Walter Brohm’s confession? Jews slaughtered for having the temerity to know too much. Well, we found the evidence of that massacre, didn’t we? That alone would have been enough to have Walter Brohm hanged at Nuremberg. And Klosse, with his vile medical experiments on children. Strasser, the executioner. Do you know how many Jews were killed at Kiev in September nineteen forty-one? Thirty-three thousand innocent men, women and children. Come on, Jamie, these people were scum. If anyone deserved killing, they did. Matthew Sinclair did the world a favour when he fired those three bullets and you know it.’
‘Who they were doesn’t change the fact that my grandfather murdered three men in cold blood. He brought them here, he let them eat a last meal and he killed them. He and my mother brought me up to believe in justice, Sarah, but my grandfather set himself up as judge, jury and executioner.’
She gave a long drawn out sigh. ‘Christ, Jamie, you’re doing it again. This isn’t about Jamie Saintclair. It’s about Matthew and the war and the Sun Stone. You read what the journal said about his family. He watched his wife and children being burned alive by German incendiary bombs. That’s enough to drive any man crazy. Yet he fought back. He endured the rest of the war and took part in some of the toughest battles of them all. He was tired and he was sick and what happened in Coventry had overwhelmed his mind. When he met a man who promised to build a bomb that would create a thousand Coventrys in a single night what the hell was he going to do? What the hell would you have done? Don’t tell me you would have watched Walter Brohm and Klosse and Strasser walk away into the sunset en route to their cosy retirement in the States and then waited for the news that America had dropped the world’s most powerful bomb on Moscow, because I won’t believe you. In the same circumstances both of us would have done exactly the same thing, and you know what? We would have been right. Maybe it wasn’t legal, but any way you look at it, it was justice. Remember the bunker? You seem to have forgotten what you promised, but that doesn’t matter any more because Matthew Sinclair, your grandfather, did the job for you. It’s simpler this way.’
Jamie turned away from the ravine. He remembered the hatred he had felt for Walter Brohm in the depths of the bunker, and the silent vow he had made to the girl with the pianist’s fingers. Sarah was right. Justice was done. It was over. ‘What about the Sun Stone?’
He saw the moment of indecision before her eyes hardened. ‘Forget about the Sun Stone. Burn the diary. If we can’t find the Sun Stone with the information we have, what chance is there of anyone else finding it without the book. Give me it. Right now.’ She unhitched her rucksack from her back and opened one of the zipped compartments to pull out a box of matches. ‘Give me it.’
He looked at her outstretched hand, the palm raised, and it reminded him of the hand in the bunker. He was tempted. Sorely tempted. It would be so easy to give it to her and watch the flames eating it, then go home and forget everything. No one else would ever know about the Sun Stone. No one would ever know about Matthew Sinclair and the murder of three Nazis he’d been ordered to protect. ‘It’s not that simple.’