The Doomsday Testament(20)

News of Hitler’s death came through this morning when we were close to Leipzig, where we are working with Patton’s Third Army. There is a feeling that it is all over and that we will soon be going home. I suffer it as much as anyone, but I must ensure the men don’t drop their guard. It would be stupid to get yourself killed now, after all we’ve been through.

Jamie lay back and closed his eyes. Reading the journal had affected him like no other book had. When he’d started, it had been in the hope that it would bring him closer to the grandfather he’d never truly known. Yet he found he still had more questions than answers. There was anger, too, real anger, at the true scale of their deceit. He knew it was selfish, but he felt that Matthew and his mother had not only robbed him of a hero, but of a father figure who might have shaped his identity in a different way, perhaps even changed the course of his life. Each individual is unique, but they are as much the products of their upbringing and childhood influences as they are of their DNA. What type of man would he have become if he’d known his grandfather had won the Military Cross? It would have given him something to look up to, perhaps made him strive harder. He would have approached challenges in a different way. He knew now he could have beaten the South African who had given him a battering in the boxing ring if only he’d known how much aggression he was truly capable of. His rejection of Sandhurst had been partly, maybe mostly, because he didn’t think it was his kind of thing. But it was his kind of thing. Soldiering was in his blood. If they had only shown him the journal when he was eighteen he wouldn’t have become the frustrated failure he feared, deep down, he really was.

Just as maddening were the questions that remained unanswered. The gaps that persisted in his knowledge were as wide as those in the entries in the book. Was it only fatigue that caused the breakdown at Dunkirk? What had happened during the three years of silence in the SAS? What had ended the love affair that promised so much? And what was the significance of the Baker Street entry? He knew those questions would continue to haunt him. In some ways, he wished he’d never found the journal. Life had been simpler before he’d opened the blue leather covers. Lost in thought, he flicked over the next page.

2 May 1945 As the German army began to collapse in front of us I was summoned to Major Fitzpatrick and briefed for one final mission . . .





VIII


‘YOU CALL YOURSELF professionals? I could have picked a child from the street to do a better job.’ The figure behind the desk stared at the two men in a way that made them feel as if he was sizing up their organs for a transplant. They called themselves Campbell and McKenzie, but their closest contact with Scotland had been through the mouth of a whisky bottle. McKenzie raised a hand to gingerly touch his bruised nose, but dropped it when he noticed the pale lips tighten in the unlined, expressionless face. It was a face that might have belonged to an albino, but for the eyes, which were points of lifeless pewter. When you looked again you realized that the odd colouring of the skin was less a matter of pigment than of a life lived in permanent shadow. Despite the setback at the target house the two men regarded themselves capable of handling any situation that could be resolved by force, but from the first they had sensed something in this man that made them wary. A dangerous stillness that took them back to days in South Armagh. Days when shadowy men whose abilities they’d learned to respect appeared from nowhere for operations that resulted only in clean kills. The leaden eyes pinned them remorselessly as the pale man continued in a deliberate, faintly accented English. ‘This was to be a discreet, low-profile operation with minimal disturbance to the house and no – I repeat, no – violence. Yet what do I read on the police computer? A man we may require to cultivate is assaulted and taken to hospital with concussion. The property ransacked and overrun with investigators – now wondering why someone would go to so much trouble without stealing a single item. Any fool would have understood the need to take a few pieces of jewellery or the television set.’

‘He hit Mac and—’ Campbell, the man who had brained Jamie with his grandfather’s ceramic tea caddy, was silenced by a raised hand.

‘That is of no consequence now. What matters is that you will stay within reach of the grandson, but not so close that he might be alerted. If the journal exists, the chances are that this Jamie Saintclair now has it. For the moment, we will maintain electronic surveillance. When the opportunity arises you will enter his apartment and his office and carry out a search. Do you believe you can achieve that, gentlemen . . . discreetly and without violence?’