The Doomsday Testament(118)

She shook her head and now her eyes were filled with a mixture of anger and pity. ‘You’re wrong, Jamie, it is that simple. Give me the book.’

‘We owe it to Tenzin not to give up. Have you forgotten that he sacrificed himself to save us? Just because it happened six thousand miles away doesn’t make it any less real.’

‘Tenzin was a dead man walking and you know it. He’s not here now, but maybe if he was he’d be giving you the same advice. Let’s walk away from this now, Jamie. For us. Let’s go back to London and get on with our life and forget we ever heard of the Sun Stone.’

He noticed the way she said life singular, not lives, and a little bolt of hope shot through his heart. She was saying she would be his and that made it all the more sensible to hand over the journal. There was only one problem.

‘If I give up now, I wouldn’t be the man you met at the Tube station, or the man who was going to fight a helicopter gunship for you. I’d just be the same old loser I was before I found you. Matthew would have wanted us to see this through.’

He walked back to the gully edge and studied the long drop. ‘I need to go down there.’

She came to his side. ‘Are you crazy? You’ll break your neck.’

He laughed. ‘You’re talking to someone who’s climbed the Himalayas. This is a piece of cake.’

She shook her head. ‘All you’ll find down there are a few mouldy old bones picked bare by rats.’

He ignored her and dropped to his belly, slithering backwards until the bottom half of his body was over the edge and his feet scrambled for a toehold. Before he started climbing down, he looked up at her. ‘What if Walter Brohm didn’t have one map, but two? What if he waved the Harz map at my grandfather as a decoy while the map that points the way to the final location of the Sun Stone was hidden somewhere else? It could be down there, still in his pocket. I can’t take the chance.’

With a rush of falling soil he was gone, half sliding, half scrambling down the sheer dirt face. He grabbed a tree root to slow his progress, but it only unbalanced him and he ended up rolling the last few feet and landing in an undignified dusty heap among the rocks beside the trickling water of the stream.

‘I’ll give you a two for style, but you get top marks for comic interpretation.’ Sarah’s voice came to him from above. ‘What can you see?’

He looked around. Matthew said he had covered the bodies in a decent fashion. That meant there should be some kind of cairn.

‘Nothing.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘There’s nothing down here. No burial. Nothing that would mark a grave. The rocks are scattered about. Wait.’ Something a little further downstream caught his eye and he worked his way towards it. He picked up a fallen branch and dug at a ragged piece of material sticking out of a patch of sand between two large boulders.

‘What is it?’

His heart quickened and he excavated deeper. Cloth? No, something more substantial than cloth. Leather.

‘For Christ’s sake, Jamie!’

‘I think I may have found Walter Brohm’s briefcase.’

Getting back up took longer than coming down, but eventually he made it caked in dirt, sweat running down his face and some shapeless, weather-stained remains under his left arm. Sarah accepted it with distaste, brushing off sand and wriggling aquatic insects.

‘You sure this is Walter Brohm’s case? It looks like crap to me.’

‘You’d look like crap if you’d been buried in mud for sixty years. If you look closely you can see the SS insignia stamped in the leather. I’m surprised it’s survived at all. It must have been made for Brohm from some kind of specially reinforced hide, crocodile or buffalo, maybe. Look, the brass catches are still intact.’

He took the case from her and studied the furred green locks.

‘Let me,’ she demanded. ‘What makes you think there’ll be anything in there? Surely Matthew would have searched it before he threw it away.’ She rummaged in her rucksack, came up with a substantial Swiss army knife and opened the largest blade.

‘I’m not so sure. You heard what he said about Brohm. He wanted nothing to do with his research or the Sun Stone.’

Sarah worked at the brass with the knife point. ‘He took the map of the Black Sun,’ she pointed out.

‘Yes, but only because Brohm said it would lead him to the Raphael, which would have had some value to him.’ As he said the words, it was as if someone whispered in his ear, but he couldn’t catch the message. He looked at the trees, thinking it must have been the breeze, but there was no wind.