The Doomsday Testament(67)

‘He died young?’

Jamie gave a sheepish smile. ‘He was thirty-seven. One theory is that, the er, cause was overdoing it in the bedroom with a lady friend.’

‘He died of an overdose of sex!’

‘It’s possible.’

Her laughter rang through the trees.

‘OK,’ she returned to her subject, as the ground began to fall away beneath their feet. ‘So let’s accept that you’re right and Brohm was referring to the Raphael? Who’s to say he didn’t just see it hanging on a wall somewhere. You have an unproven link between Hans Frank and Reinhard Heydrich, but as far as I can see, none at all between Heydrich and Brohm.’

‘That’s true, but I would refer you to the circumstantial evidence, m’lud.’

‘Carry on,’ Sarah said graciously.

‘We know Hans Frank had the painting, that’s a given?’ She nodded and he continued. ‘In nineteen thirty-nine Frank became governor of that part of Poland which wasn’t incorporated into Germany or Russia. It gave him power of life and death over millions of people, and he wasn’t afraid to use that power. In one single Aktion, he had thirty thousand Polish intellectuals arrested. Seven thousand were shot.’

‘A bastard, then.’

‘A bastard, but it seems not a big enough bastard. Some people, most of them in the SS, thought he was being too soft on the Poles. Within months of his appointment they were undermining his authority and challenging every decision he made. By December ’forty-one he was on the brink of being sacked. To survive, he needed an ally, a powerful one.’

‘Heydrich?’

‘It’s possible. At the time Heydrich was chief of the RSHA, the Reich Main Security office, and was probably the most feared man in Germany after Hitler and Himmler. Let’s say, for instance, Frank wanted to send Heydrich a sweetener. Well, you don’t just wrap a million quid’s worth of masterpiece in brown paper and stick it in the post. Ideally, he would have handed it over himself, but Heydrich was busy in early nineteen forty-two and so was Frank. The next best thing would be to send it by a trusted messenger.’

‘So?’

‘On the twentieth of January nineteen forty-two Reinhard Heydrich and Josef Buhler, Frank’s deputy, were in the same building in Berlin, in fact, in the same room.’

He saw he had her. ‘How do you know that?’

‘Because the twentieth of January nineteen forty-two was the day fifteen men, including Heydrich, Buhler, Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann, gathered in a Berlin suburb for the Wannsee Conference to resolve the Final Solution of the Jewish Question. The meeting that decided the fate of six million people.’

Sarah choked. ‘I’m beginning to think this painting is cursed.’

‘You don’t have to touch it. I’ll take care of that.’

‘So Heydrich has the painting. Now tell me how it gets to Brohm.’

‘Ah well, this is where the evidence gets even more circumstantial, that is to say . . . flimsy.’

‘Convince me.’

Jamie forced a path through a thick clump of bushes that barred their way. ‘OK. Everything I’ve read about Heydrich makes me certain he would have been amused that Frank believed he could be bought with some daub, even if it was a Raphael. As soon as he saw it he would have wanted to find a way of rubbing Frank’s nose in it. He would also have wondered if the gift was part of some kind of plot against him. So he’d get rid of it as quickly as he could. But to who? Hitler and Goering would be the obvious candidates – they both wanted the painting when it was originally looted. To give it to Hitler would be to acknowledge its worth, so that was out. Heydrich despised Goering almost as much as he despised his boss Himmler. So why not give it to an old friend?’

‘What makes you think Heydrich and Brohm were friends?’

‘This is the flimsy part. They were contemporaries in the Nazi party, which was a relatively small organization when they joined in nineteen thirty-one. Heydrich was in the SS from the start, but Brohm wasn’t far behind him. Brohm must have needed funding and support for his research in the early days, who better to call on than Heydrich?’

‘You’re right. Wafer thin.’

‘That’s what I thought until I remembered that on January the twenty-fifth, five days after Heydrich would have received the Raphael, Walter Brohm celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday and—’

This time they both heard the snap of a branch. For a moment they stared at each other, an identical question in each of their eyes. Run or hide? But the noise had been very close, somewhere in the bushes they’d just come through. Hide. Jamie dropped to the ground and waved Sarah silently back to a clump of fern where the knee-high green fronds formed a sanctuary big enough for one person. While she wriggled away, he crawled through the undergrowth into the closest patch of brambles, ignoring the thorns that twisted around his legs as if they had a life of their own. He almost panicked when something caught his rucksack, but in the same instant the ominous rustle of bushes a few feet away made him freeze. One man? It seemed unlikely. He strained his ears and heard more stealthy movement behind him. More than one, then. But only one to worry about, for now. Footsteps in the undergrowth, slow and deliberate, each footfall measured and testing the grass beneath his boots so as not to repeat the mistake that had given away his position. Jamie heard the instructor’s voice from the escape and evasion course in his head and he willed himself to be part of the landscape; a stone, a tree, a bush. He kept his eyes down, relying on his ears, so that whoever was hunting them wouldn’t be alerted by a flash of pale skin among the foliage. He picked up the soft whistle of controlled breathing. A whisper of cloth on cloth. That close. A walking boot appeared in the grass and nettles in front of his eyes and he had to suppress the urge to cry out. Every fibre of his being screamed at him to flee. Ever so gently, the boot lifted and was gone. He waited, measuring the seconds, before risking a glance with a single eye that rewarded him with the sight of a retreating back in a green anorak, mousy hair cut short and a single earphone that he doubted was connected to an iPod. Something else, too, that chilled his blood. A red flower among the bracken where no red flower should be. Not a flower, then. Red hair. Sarah’s hair.