At lunchtime he changed from his suit into casual jacket and jeans and took the train from Victoria station to Welwyn. He still had too much to do before the clearers arrived, and the discovery of his grandfather’s journal had set him back at least twenty-four hours. As he changed trains at Finsbury Park he couldn’t get the diary out of his mind. Nothing had prepared him for the sheer awfulness of his grandfather’s war. He tried to remember Matthew’s eyes. Was there any evidence there that the man behind them had killed and killed again? It was never stated directly in the journal, but there were plenty of hints that couldn’t mean anything else. Hints that put Stan’s boast about breaking necks into perspective. Lieutenant Matthew Sinclair had been forced to kill to survive, and it had changed him. Jamie’s walk from the station to his house took less than ten minutes and on the way he enjoyed the sun on his face and the sound of the birds singing. This was home, familiar and comforting. Welwyn Garden City was well named. It had been planned with wide, tree-lined boulevards radiating from a central square. Of course, it had developed and grown since Ebenezer Howard had designed it in the 1920s, but the original principles still held sway and no one who lived there wanted to live anywhere else.
Before he got started, he switched on the heating and filled the kettle. While it boiled, he leafed through the newspaper he’d bought, which, as it had been for months, was full of the credit crisis. Jamie tended to bypass bad news stories, but he took a certain doom-laden satisfaction that house prices were in free-fall just when he had one to sell. On the upside, if there was an upside to the death of a family member, the place should still provide him with enough money to survive for a few years, even in his present state of semi-permanent business doldrum.
A story on the Foreign pages caught his eye. A security guard at the Menshikov Palace in St Petersburg had died a hero fighting off an attack by suspected Chechen terrorists. Something flared inside him. What did these people think they would gain by destroying some of the most beautiful things in the world?
The puzzling element of the attack was that the terrorists, one of whom had been shot dead, had taken only one item before they set their explosive charges and escaped; a Tibetan artefact that appeared to have little value and even less real interest. Why that, when there were so many more valuable things they could have fenced on the international black market to help fund their cause? The piece was said to have no national or cultural importance, so the authorities were working on the theory that it had some sort of religious significance. In the meantime, a minor international row had broken out over the casket’s ownership. China, which now controlled Tibet, had demanded its return on the grounds that it had been looted from the territory before the war, while Germany claimed that the then Dalai Llama had given its 1937 expedition permission to remove it from the country. A German spokesman said that if found it should be sent back with all the rest of the artworks the Red Army had pillaged on their way to Berlin. The Russian president condemned the outrage while threatening the usual bloody consequences and said the return of the Tibet casket was not subject to discussion. It might have been comical but for the death of the poor guard.
Jamie was upstairs when he heard the sound of a door opening and closing. The only person with a key for the house, apart from himself, was Mrs Jenkins next door who had been Matthew’s housekeeper. He grimaced at the thought of wasting an hour chatting to the old busybody while he should be working. The way things were going he’d be lucky to finish before he flew to Geneva.
Reluctantly, he dragged himself downstairs, hesitating as a thought occurred to him at the spot where he’d found Matthew, before rounding the corner with a welcoming smile that instantly froze on his face.
In the centre of the living room, with a pile of papers in his hand, stood a hard-eyed older man wearing a black leather bomber jacket and dark trousers. In other circumstances, the almost uniform and the close-cropped hair might have marked him as a plainclothes cop. But, if he was, how did he get into the house? The man stared. Everything about him now: the look on his face; his stance, balanced on the balls of his feet; the way he held his hands, said one thing – ready.
‘Can I help you?’ Jamie said warily.
‘You can fuck off,’ the intruder suggested in a flat accent that originated somewhere east of London’s docklands.
The dismissal was meant to intimidate him, but Jamie felt only a curious thrill of anticipation. He had missed out on a light heavyweight boxing Blue at Cambridge after coming up against a combative South African with a titanium chin and a punch like a steam hammer. That, and the close combat training he’d been given in the OTC, had nurtured an unlikely, but surprisingly fierce taste for moderated violence. The only drawback to a fight was the size of the room and the furniture, which precluded any of the Ali-style dancing he favoured. Still, he was certain he could take this guy, even if he was a few pounds heavier and looked as if he could handle himself.