18 May 1940 (near Mons). Cut off from battalion. Sergeant Anderson killed today. Shot through head while counter-attacking German tanks armed with hand grenades. Not sure I can get through this without him. I wept. Hope nobody saw me. We are now just twelve men.
Jamie read on. Hunger, thirst, strain and exhaustion took its toll on the retreating British soldiers, and his grandfather’s morale collapsed as he played a deadly game of cat-and-mouse amidst the chaos of defeat. At one point it was clear he had to be persuaded not to surrender. That entry was followed by a gap of several days. Then:
2 June 1940 Reached Dunkirk perimeter with one sergeant and three men, none from 1st RBR. Waited seven hours on Mole for evacuation. Eventually picked up from beach by chap with motor boat 0100 hours and transferred to destroyer HMS Whitshed. Bombed continuously. Must sleep. God, how good that word sounds. Sleep.
The words began to blur and Jamie noticed with surprise that the train was drawing in to Euston station. He felt utterly drained, as if he’d been fighting side by side with the men whose dramatic lives and deaths the diary chronicled in the final days of Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of the Dunkirk perimeter, when Matthew had been among the very last of the three hundred thousand French and British soldiers to leave the beaches.
One thing was certain. He had to know more about Matthew Sinclair’s war.
He phoned ahead next morning to confirm his arrival and found Carol waiting for him at the hospital entrance before she started her shift.
‘You’re a little early. He’s out walking. He likes to take the path through the fields to Dunchurch Road then back again. He should be on his way back now.’
Jamie remembered the pale figure hooked up to the dialysis machine. ‘Does he go alone?’
‘Please don’t underestimate Stan.’ She smiled. ‘The treatment is hard on him, but he’s as tough as a pair of old army boots.’
‘Maybe I could go and meet him?’ he suggested.
‘I think he’d like that. It’s just around the corner and across the main road. You can’t miss it. The path that runs beside the stream.’
He followed her instructions and found a track between two fields. Ahead he could see where a line of trees flanked the stream – actually more a sluggish canal – and beyond them an estate of substantial houses. He would have expected to meet the old man by now, but it was a warm morning and Stan must be close to ninety; maybe he had stopped for a rest? The further he went from the hospital the more his concern grew, but he wasn’t truly worried until he reached the road at the far side of the field. There was no reason the Pole couldn’t have taken a different route back, or been given a lift, but . . . As he retraced his steps Jamie found himself searching among the tall grass on the verges of the path, and in the glittering shadows beneath the trees.
Stan had worn a black overcoat despite the heat of the day and that was why Jamie had missed him on his first pass. He had to look twice before he climbed down to the river’s edge on legs that seemed to belong to someone else. Gradually, his eyes adjusted to the gloom and realized what he was seeing. Christ. This couldn’t be happening. Not again.
The old man lay face down in the shallows beneath an ancient willow, his body weighed down by the waterlogged cloth of the coat. The black overcoat looked like just another shadow on waters the colour of stewed tea, its folds billowing gently in the almost non-existent current. Jamie struggled through the water until he could take a handful of cloth and heave the body over. As he turned, Stanislaus Kozlowski’s bespoke artificial hairpiece detached itself and floated sedately downstream. Reproachful eyes stared back from features set in the same fierce scowl they had worn in the wartime photograph.
‘You’d be amazed how often it happens, sir.’ The middle-aged constable’s voice was almost resentful, as if the dead man had deliberately spoiled his day. ‘Elderly person goes out for a walk and doesn’t come back. No rhyme nor reason to it, they just decide it’s their time. We find them days, sometimes weeks, later, and there’s always water involved. The young ones, they’ll step out in front of a train, but the old, they head for the sea or the river. Primeval instinct, I reckon.’
‘So you’re certain Stan – Mr Kozlowski – killed himself.’
The officer’s look hardened and Jamie realized he’d overstepped some invisible mark. ‘Based on our initial investigations and unless you have reason to believe otherwise, sir?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘No immediate signs of violence visible on the victim. You’d have noticed if there had been undue disturbance of the grass, wouldn’t you, sir, when you marched through our potential crime scene in your size-ten boots?’
Jamie bridled at the implied criticism. ‘I thought my first priority was to help Mr Kozlowski.’
‘Of course you did, but then he was already dead.’ He raised a hand to forestall any argument. ‘It’ll be up to the Coroner to decide cause of death. We have your address, sir, in the event we have to contact you again? You’ll probably be called as a witness.’
Back at the hospital, Jamie tracked down Carol to the ward where he’d first met the Pole. It was obvious she’d been crying.
‘Not very professional, is it?’ she said with a wet smile. ‘But I’d grown very fond of old Stan. He could be sharp, but he was also brave and generous and kind.’ She shook her head and he wondered if she had been half in love with the old man.
He told her what the police had said and she nodded distractedly. ‘That’s true. You can never tell with the elderly. Sometimes it’s as if a switch has been flicked. But Stan, he seemed so keen to continue his talk with you. I just can’t . . .’
She sniffed and Jamie laid a comforting hand on her arm. ‘I got the idea he had a lot to tell me. It crossed my mind that he might have written some of it down?’
‘I can have a look,’ she said warily. ‘But I’m not sure I’d be allowed to hand it over to you even if he had. It would be the property of his next of kin.’
‘Don’t worry; it was just a thought. I’m sure you have enough on your plate already.’
She pursed her lips. ‘There’ll be some kind of inquiry. Should we have allowed him out on his own? I’m not certain now, but he was so insistent.’
‘Maybe this isn’t the time for it, but I had one other thing I wanted to ask,’ Jamie said. ‘Stan mentioned that he was going to tell me what he had told the other guy. Does that ring any bells with you?’
Carol’s face set in a frown. ‘Actually, it does. About ten days ago he had a visit from a Polish gentleman doing some sort of research on the lives of exiles still in this country. I wasn’t on duty, so I didn’t see him, but afterwards Stan became quite animated. It was obvious that he’d stirred up memories Stan had buried a long time ago. I think it was one of the reasons he was so determined to get in touch when he heard your grandfather had died. He said he and Matthew had been part of something important and it was time to tell the story. I have a friend in the local newspaper and he’d agreed to come here to interview Stan about it.’
Jamie thanked her again and set off along the corridor, his head filled with that first glimpse of the old man’s body and weighed down by the questions that would now never be answered.
‘Mr Saintclair?’ He turned to find Carol bearing down on him. ‘I think he would have wanted you to have this.’ She placed the faded photograph in his hand, closed hers over it and walked away before he could say anything.
He looked down at the square of creased paper and wondered what secrets the blank-eyed young faces were hiding.
VI
A NIGHT SEARCHING the internet drew a disappointing blank on anything called Operation Equity that wasn’t about spending billions to rescue banks. By the time he woke the next day Jamie’s hands itched to get back to the diary, but he still had a business to run. He spent the morning working on the itinerary for an upcoming trip to Switzerland to check out the sale of what might be a Watteau once owned by an Alsatian industrialist
and his family. Economically he had to find other reasons to justify the expense. That meant checking out auctions and galleries in Geneva for acquisitions that might yield a small profit. The Watteau itself was such an ugly painting he wondered why anyone would want it back.
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.
‘I believe you’d better leave before I call the police,’ he said politely.
‘Why don’t you make me . . . ?’ He launched himself across the room, swinging a telegraphed right hook designed to break the younger man’s jaw. Jamie saw it come and timed his response to perfection. With a twist of his body, he swayed clear and stepped aside, allowing his attacker’s momentum to take him past. When he was placed just so, Jamie rammed a lightning one-two into his kidneys that brought a grunt of agony.
The intruder turned and stretched, rubbing at his lower back. He was hurt, but he’d been hurt before. Warier this time, he tested Jamie with a couple of jabs, one of which stung the younger man’s shoulder. So, he fancied himself as a boxer? That suited Jamie just fine. He hunched his shoulders and raised his guard. In the next minute and a half he connected with two good shots to the head that left the other man bleeding from the nose and lip, following them with a right to the solar plexus that doubled him in two. Jamie stepped forward to finish him off, but the intruder had other ideas. The twinkle of a knife point betrayed the blade in his right hand and Jamie felt a surge of adrenalin as he understood the battle was now in deadly earnest. He was close to the kitchen door, but there was no question of retreating. Dropping into the classic self-defence crouch, the voice of his close combat instructor whispered in his ear: It’s all about the timing, laddie. Let him make his move, then use his own momentum to hurt him. But his opponent was better with the knife than he had been with his fists. As he feinted a darting jab to the body, the point came slicing up towards Jamie’s eyes. Forced to retreat, he stumbled on a chair and fell to the carpet. As he tried to squirm away, he found the other man looming over him and probing for the opening he needed. ‘Now we’ll hear you squeal, you bastard.’ Helpless, Jamie waited for the knife to plunge. Instead, the man glanced away, distracted for a vital second. Jamie saw his chance and brought his heel up hard into his opponent’s unprotected groin. With a groan, the intruder doubled over and dropped the knife. Jamie hauled himself to his feet. Very deliberately he brought his knee up into the man’s face, sending him backwards over a chair.
‘Right you bastard,’ he said. ‘What—’
The whole world went dark.
He found himself hovering just below wakefulness. He couldn’t be entirely certain where he was, but a combination of scents, sounds and the feel of threadbare linen sheets told him it must be hospital. The pain was out there waiting for him. He decided to let it wait a little longer.
The next time he came to, he realized how sensible his earlier decision had been. From a delicate point just below his waist to the top of his throbbing head, his body was one big ball of suffering, an all-over toothache only time would cure. He had a vague memory of being in a fight, but felt as if he’d been run over by a bus.
He risked opening his eyes, or, rather, an eye singular; only one appeared to be working. A female figure rose at the end of the bed and he recognized his secretary. ‘Hello, Gail,’ he croaked. ‘Are we still in business?’ She looked up in alarm and he saw something in her eyes. He wondered why he’d never realized how much she cared for him. As he tried to think of something clever to say, she waved to someone beyond his line of vision and a large, uncomfortable-looking man hove into view, accompanied by a young nurse.
The nurse placed a cool hand on Jamie’s brow, shone a light in his good eye and asked with a professional smile if he felt up to answering a few questions from Sergeant – a cough from the background – sorry, Detective Sergeant Milligan.
‘Tell him if he’s here to arrest me, I surrender.’
She laughed in a way that he found reassuring. ‘It may not feel like it, Mr Saintclair, but your injuries are mostly superficial bruising. No broken ribs or internal injuries, thankfully. The blow to your head was the one we were worried about, but any concussion you have is mild.’
‘They gave you a right going-over,’ DS Milligan confirmed. ‘You were lucky.’ Jamie had a flash of his attacker’s face as he stood with the knife at the ready and silently agreed. He was lucky to be alive. Whoever had hit him from behind must have hauled the knife-man off before he could do any real damage, then allowed him to have a little fun just to even things up.
‘Why . . . ?’
‘That’s what we’re trying to find out, sir. I’m afraid the house is a bit of a shambles, although you won’t be worrying too much about that just now. This sort of thing often happens after the death of someone who lives alone. The crooks see the notice in the paper and reckon the house will be empty. We’ll have to ask you to check if anything is missing, but for the moment all we know is that they didn’t take any of the valuables that would normally be targeted by people like this. Very professional. No stone unturned, if you see what I mean, but it appears they were after something specific. You wouldn’t know what that might be? No Picassos stored at your granddad’s, given your profession and all? No little stashes of diamonds the taxman doesn’t know about? Not that it would be any business of mine.’
The Doomsday Testament Page 5
