The Doomsday Testament(83)

‘I made you a promise last night on the way back here, but it’s a promise that may be difficult to keep,’ Jamie admitted. Privately he was having second thoughts about his rash pledge, but that could wait for another day. ‘I’d like to be able to finish what we started and take the story right to the end. We found the Raphael, but we still don’t know what happened to Walter Brohm. My grandfather’s last mission has a beginning and a middle, but no end. The answers are out there somewhere, but if there’s no more to the diary I’m not sure where else we can go.’

A porter from the hotel approached the table holding a package. ‘This arrived for you this morning, sir. Express delivery.’

Jamie frowned, then remembered his phone call to David and the text he’d sent confirming their new location. With the excitement of the last two days he’d forgotten the young Jew’s promise to dig for more information. He accepted the padded brown envelope and tipped the young man.

‘I hope you’ve not been holding out on me again, Saintclair.’

He saw himself smile in the mirror of her sunglasses. ‘Just a little additional research I commissioned.’ He tore open the envelope and spread the contents out on the table top. Four or five photocopies of faded cuttings from German newspapers with the dates they were filed and the name of the publication apparently written in ink on the original. They were all from the mid to late 1930s. On each of the photocopies, someone had highlighted two words with a yellow marker pen. Walter Brohm.

Sarah dragged her seat round the table so they could read the cuttings together. ‘Tibet?’

‘Yes. Brohm told my grandfather that he had walked in a land of giants and that was where he found it. I asked a friend to check the story out and this is what he came up with.’

‘A well-connected friend?’

‘It looks like he got lucky.’

The reports all documented the same 1937 expedition by a group of German scientists. He scanned the photocopies one at a time in no particular order, but Sarah organized them chronologically and leaned forward in her chair to study them with a scholar’s intensity.

‘Do you notice anything?’ she asked after a few minutes.

‘Only that the papers all hail the triumph of German stamina, ingenuity and scientific achievement over great odds and some of the most difficult terrain in the world. I keep looking for Joseph Goebbels’ byline. The main aim of the trip seems to have been to study the natives. No mention of the occult or seeking the origin of the Aryan race. Why?’

‘In the earliest cutting, which is the announcement that the expedition is going ahead, the report is quite specific about the aims, but, more importantly, the destination, the Guzong crater. But the later editions, after the scientists return, only mention the Changthang Plateau in a wider sense, an area of thousands of square miles. It’s as if they wanted people to forget the original destination.’

‘Or to hide it.’

‘What made you ask for this?’

He took a deep breath. ‘Because Walter Brohm also said he was certain there was more to find.’

She saw what he was thinking before the idea had fully formed in his own head.

‘You can’t be serious.’

But he was.

‘Don’t you see?’ his voice quickened. ‘This is where it all started. It’s where Walter Brohm made his discovery that could change the world. We can’t just stop now. We owe it to my grandfather to find the answer. We owe it to all those people who died in the bunker. We have to find a way to get to this Guzong crater.’

‘It’s crazy.’

‘On the contrary, it’s the logical next step. We can’t go forward, so we retrace Walter Brohm’s steps until we find what he did.’

‘But you don’t have the resources, or the money to finance that kind of trip. Walter Brohm was sponsored by one of Adolf Hitler’s cronies. Somehow I don’t see any rich folks queuing up to hand you cash.’

He’d thought about that. ‘My grandfather’s house will sell eventually. There’ll be some sort of finder’s fee for the Raphael, probably a substantial one. I’ll fund the trip from that.’

‘You are the most obstinate, pig-headed—’

‘I thought you liked the new adventurous me?’

‘Tibet isn’t a place you can just walk in to. The Chinese run it now, and they don’t encourage visitors.’

‘I’ll find a way.’

She shook her head and for a moment he thought he’d lost her. ‘No, we’ll find a way. The Raphael story may not make me rich, but it will help stake an adventure holiday with an eccentric idiot.’