When he was bored, he would pass the time with riddles. ‘My journey begins at Heini’s centre of the earth. You must look upon the faded map for the sign of the Ox.’ He laughed, because that was the name he had already conferred upon his fellow prisoner, Strasser. I was never sure whether he was making fun of me, and he was insulted that I did not play his little games. Of course, every man has his own centre. Walter Brohm claimed the centre of his world would always be his mother’s spiritual home. Sometimes, I thought the war had driven him mad.
‘WHERE DID YOU get this?’
Back in Jamie’s flat Sarah studied the symbol on the reverse of the silk escape map. Jamie noted approvingly that she was now all business. He pondered just how much to tell her about the map’s provenance.
‘I suppose I inherited it. My grandfather was in the war.’ He turned the cloth over to the escape map. ‘Every Allied airman carried one of these. He must have drawn the symbol on the reverse of it. I think it’s a copy of something he was shown by a German prisoner.’
‘And you think it might lead you to the painting?’
A catch in her voice said she didn’t quite believe it. ‘According to family legend, the prisoner he was guarding mentioned the Raphael.’ He felt a sharp pain like a knitting needle in the chest as he lied. ‘Now we have this.’
She frowned. ‘So it’s a clue. Kind of X marks the spot?’
‘Right. Only by my count, X has nine arms and the spot looks like a spider’s web. And what about the words and the date?’
‘In Faust’s footsteps. D’you know anything about Faust?’
‘Only what I remember from school. Didn’t he sell his soul to the devil?’
‘That’s right. Old, old story, but a guy called Christopher Marlowe made it famous round about the time of Good Queen Bess, called him Faustus, though. The date thirteen fifty-seven doesn’t mean a lot.’
‘Edward the Third was on the throne of England, but most of what is now Germany was ruled by the Holy Roman Empire. What relevance can it have to the Second World War?’
‘Or Raphael?’
‘He lived between fourteen eighty and fifteen twenty; about a hundred and fifty years too late.’
‘So not much of a clue, huh?’
‘Maybe. But the original of this symbol is out there somewhere.’
She looked up. ‘You mentioned Heinrich Himmler.’
‘That’s right.’ He showed her the pictures of marching SS men on the computer, the lightning-flash runes and a picture of a Swastika flag. ‘Notice any resemblance?’
‘Uhuh.’
‘So I dug a little deeper into Himmler and the SS. It turns out that Himmler was obsessed with the occult.’
He smoothed the silk so the full effect of the symbol was visible and she gave a little grunt of recognition. ‘Like a pentagram maybe, but different?’ A pentagram was a five-pointed star associated with freemasonry and paganism that had sometimes been hijacked by Satanists. ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and all that. It might tie in with the Faust angle, too?’
Jamie nodded, impressed. ‘Could be. I hadn’t thought of that. But one of the things I discovered was that Himmler was so taken with the Arthur story that he had his own round table built. And that took me here.’
She squinted at the blurred picture on the screen, trying to make something of it.
‘Some kind of great hall?’
‘That’s right, but look at the floor, just off-centre.’
Her hand reached out and squeezed his and he knew she had seen what he had. Slightly indistinct, but still recognizable as the twin of the one on Matthew’s map, the marble sun symbol with its spray of articulated arms and its sinister presence dominated the room. That was when he made his decision. The sun symbol led them to Wewelsburg. Wewelsburg could lead them to the Raphael. He would accept Matthew Sinclair’s challenge.
‘How would you like to do some European sightseeing?’
XX
‘THE VICTIMS ARE two men of Chinese origin who we believe earlier attempted to eliminate our target. The police are investigating a Triad link, apparently they found a large quantity of heroin in the car.’
Frederick waited for the inevitable explosion and was rewarded by a single word. ‘Clowns.’ He wasn’t sure whether his superior was referring to the dead men or to the police.
A long silence followed while the other man considered the question Frederick had already asked himself. ‘Do we think Saintclair was involved?’
‘It does not seem likely. They were each struck by approximately twenty rounds of soft-point ammunition. Whoever made the hit knew what they were doing. Our people tell us Saintclair has weapons experience, but only at cadet level,’ he said dismissively. ‘He was a toy soldier at Cambridge. I doubt he would know one end of an automatic weapon from the other.’