The Doomsday Testament

by James Douglas

  He never felt the push. One moment he was on the platform, the next he was in the air, falling and twisting, his eyes wide open and the postered walls spinning. A freeze-frame moment when a female face gaped at him from the opposite side of the track, the mouth torn by a silent scream. At her side a dapper man in a dark suit and a red tie wore an annoyed frown, as if a demented circus performer had leapt out from nowhere to spoil his lunch break. Jamie knew he should move his arms to cushion his fall; do something. But they might have belonged to someone else. His shoulder struck first with a sickening crunch that sent a fireball of pain through his left side, but at least it absorbed most of the impact. When his cheek bounced off concrete with a rattle that loosened his teeth, he knew it could have been worse. A steel rail shone two inches from his eyes. Only now did it register where he was and what was about to happen. His feet. His legs. Where were they? Terror engulfed him like quicksand, forcing its way into his eyes and his mouth and his ears. He lost any sense of self, any control of body. He didn’t hug the concrete, it absorbed him. After a millisecond the lights went out with an explosive whoosh of whirling air that threatened to pick him up, buffeted him as if he was head down in a wind tunnel, tugging at his clothes and tearing at the bond that held him to the oily concrete. He screamed, louder than he’d ever screamed before, fighting with the sound of a million nails being scraped across a million blackboards, magnified a million times. Then it stopped. Dead.

  XVI

  WAS HE DEAD? The question took time to answer. There was a long, breathless pause; an in-between time where he wasn’t quite sure. No, because he could feel his heart beating like a roadman’s jackhammer, his shoulder hurt like hell and a metallic taste told him his mouth was bleeding. For some reason it seemed important that he hadn’t lost any teeth and he ran his tongue over them, checking the molars one by one.

  Someone was screaming quite close by and he could hear a voice shouting for help. He moved his arms and legs. Surprisingly, they were all present and correct. The inky blackness seemed terribly extreme until he realized his eyes were screwed tight shut. Very carefully, he opened them and a low, gloomy tunnel appeared ahead of him split by three rails that ran parallel with his face. He lifted his head an inch to get a better view and clattered his skull against something unyielding and metallic. So that’s what the underside of a Tube train looked like? It came to him in a rush. In that second he realized how close he had come and he had a vision of an alternative end that featured ragged lumps of flesh, splinters of bone and a single eyeball discovered some way down the track.

  That was when the shaking started.

  ‘So you didn’t jump?’

  Jamie looked up at the florid features of the British Transport Police sergeant and answered the question for the fourth time. ‘No.’

  ‘And you don’t think you were pushed?’

  ‘I don’t know. One minute I was standing on the platform, the next minute I was doing a double somersault with back flip in front of forty tons of Tube train.’

  ‘Only the CCTV is pretty poor quality. In the frames that matter there are maybe eight people in close contact with you, but most of the faces are indistinct. It doesn’t show anything except you taking a flyer and none of the passengers we’ve been able to interview noticed anything helpful. Most of them cleared off when they found out you were still alive and kicking. That’s Londoners for you. Always got something better to do.’

  They’d reversed the train from above the spot where he lay and three Tube workers had helped him up from the pit below the track and carefully past the electrified centre rail. After he’d been checked over by a paramedic they’d brought him to the station supervisor’s office that served as the BTP team’s temporary interview room. The walls had recently been painted a dazzling daffodil yellow and the over-heated atmosphere combined with the paint fumes made him feel sick.

  The sergeant studied the report in front of him and shook his head. ‘What I’m saying, Mr . . . Saintclair,’ he pronounced the name with a tight smile that said he didn’t quite believe what he was reading, ‘is that unless you can give us a little more detail, or a reason to think otherwise, at the moment we’re looking at an unfortunate accident that will look bad on our statistics, but won’t require any further investigation. Are you with me?’

  Jamie nodded, not trusting himself to speak. The sergeant was staring at his black eye. Should he have mentioned the attack in his grandfather’s house? If the men who’d beaten him up had wanted to kill him they would have done it there and then, not waited until they had a hundred potential witnesses. Maybe it had been an accident. Even as the thought formed he knew it wasn’t true. There’d been too many accidents lately. The bottom line was that if he told them about the attack he’d have to tell them about Matthew’s journal and the Raphael. For reasons of his own, he didn’t want to do that.

  He declined the offer of a cup of tea and the chance to have a friend collect him. At the sergeant’s request, he signed a health and safety form confirming he was fit and well enough to be released under his own steam. The policeman ushered him to the door. ‘I’d say you used up a couple of your nine lives there, Mr Saintclair,’ he said cheerfully. ‘If you’d landed on the rails instead of in the suicide pit, you’d probably have been electrocuted and you’d certainly have been killed by the train. If you hadn’t stayed still like you did it would have had your head off. Have a good day, sir.’

  Jamie managed a shaky smile of thanks, but by the time he reached the station’s main hallway his head felt as if it belonged to somebody else. Maybe he should have accepted the tea after all? There was a sandwich bar in the foyer, but he wasn’t far from the flat. What he really needed was a seat and some fresh air. He headed for the exit.

  ‘Wait up!’ She was at his shoulder before he registered that the words were aimed at him.

  He stopped and turned towards the voice. The first thing he noticed were the red streaks in her hair that told him she was the girl from the platform. Mid-twenties, dressed in denim and leather, with an attractive face that might fairly be described as elfin, tilted slightly as it looked up at him. On closer inspection she had the kind of skin that shone with a sort of subdued golden light, like the setting sun through thin summer cloud. Eyes a little too wide apart, pencil-thin arched brows and a snub nose that didn’t quite fit with the rest, but somehow added to the charm of the whole. She was frowning and pearly, slightly protruding front teeth nibbled her lower lip. Despite his condition, he found it incredibly sexy. He realized he was staring, but her eyes held his and he was reluctant to break the moment.

  ‘Can I help you?’ His voice sounded weary in his own ears. He tried to offset it with a smile of encouragement that, he decided on reflection, probably made him look like Mr Bean.

  ‘I thought you were a goner.’ The words contained the slightest American drawl. New York? No. A bit too refined. Something inside his head said Boston, but he didn’t know why. ‘You didn’t look as if you had a chance. I almost fainted.’

  ‘So did I.’

  She smiled and he noticed for the first time the sparkle of a tiny diamond stud at the edge of her left nostril.

  ‘Sarah Grant.’ She held out a slim hand. ‘At least you’ve kept your sense of humour.’

  He took it, surprised at the strength of her grip. ‘Jamie Saintclair.’ When he tried to focus on her eyes the world started to come and go in waves. She said something and the words floated away before he could absorb them.

  He shook his head to clear it. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I said I wondered why someone would want to kill you.’

  ‘Excuse me.’ He staggered past her and vomited copiously in the general direction of a nearby waste bin.

  ‘Feeling better now?’ She had found a park bench in a small, rather unkempt public garden not far from the station, where they sat drinking coffee from over-sized cardboard cups and watching the late-afternoon traffic stream by.

  ‘Mmmh. Sorry about th
at. Not the most pleasant way to introduce oneself.’

  She shrugged. ‘You never know when the shock will hit you. You didn’t get much sympathy, though.’ She had the kind of voice he associated with dental nurses, soft and reassuring, with just a hint of welcome authority.

  ‘No,’ he said, remembering the large and very outraged cleaning lady who had looked as if she was about to brain him with her mop. ‘Why didn’t you tell the police?’

  She chewed her lip the way he’d discovered she did when she was thinking. ‘The usual reasons. I didn’t want to get involved. You give a statement and your name goes on a list. You never know when it’s going to come back and bite you on the ass. Then again, what could I tell them? I had an impression of someone in the crowd pushing in your general direction. I couldn’t tell them who did it; in fact, it wasn’t until after they’d taken you away that I realized what I’d seen. Once you disappeared under the train it was as if my brain was encased in concrete. I couldn’t even scream.’

  ‘I could,’ he said with conviction.

  ‘A big crowd gathered, but once they found out you were alive they drifted away.’ She stared at him. ‘I think some of them were disappointed.’

  Now it was his turn to shrug. ‘It’s human nature. If there’s a disaster, people want to say they were there. Bad news is like a magnet if you’re a certain kind of person. You see a crowd and you join the back of it. You work your way to the front. You don’t know if you’re going to see somebody pull a rabbit from a hat or a man lying bleeding on the pavement. You’re disappointed if it’s the magician.’

  She nodded. ‘Anyway, I made myself scarce, but I kinda felt an obligation to make sure you were all right.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You smiled at me.’

  He laughed. ‘What makes you think I don’t smile at everyone?’

  Her expression stiffened and she moved to get up. ‘If you’re going to make fun of me . . .’

  He put a hand on her arm. ‘Please, I didn’t mean anything. You’re the only one who’s given me a thought since it happened and I appreciate that. And you’re . . .’

  ‘I’m what?’ she demanded.

  ‘Er . . .’ Christ, thirty years old and he was still acting like a tongue-tied teenager around an attractive woman.

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I appreciate your . . . concern.’

  She studied him and he noticed that her hazel eyes had flecks of gold around the pupils and the skin around them crinkled when she grinned. ‘Well, a girl does like to be appreciated.’

  He took a deep breath. ‘Look, you don’t even know who I am, apart from the fact that I smile at pretty girls and I have a predilection for jumping in front of trains, neither of which is much of a recommendation.’

  ‘Pre-dil-ection.’ Her slow drawl stretched the word out on a rack. ‘I like that. All right, Mr Jamie Saintclair, who are you and why would someone want to kill you?’

  XVII

  4 April 1945

  WALTER BROHM HUDDLED miserably in his commandeered greatcoat among five hundred other men in a makeshift prisoner of war cage north of Leipzig. He had traded the black and silver of the SS for the uniform of a Wehrmacht private, hoping that such a lowly rank would allow him to slip through the Allied net, or, at worst, secure his early release if he was captured. The fighting had pushed him south into the path of the American Third Army, but that had suited his purposes perfectly. He’d met Americans before the war and knew them for a kindly, quite innocent people who’d believe anything as long as it was accompanied by a convincing smile. How wrong he had been.

  His problems had started when his staff car had been strafed by a rocket-firing American fighter. He’d only just escaped with his life by diving into a nearby ditch and had watched as the Mercedes was turned into a fireball along with his driver and his carefully hoarded supplies. All he had been left with was his pistol and his briefcase and he’d almost lost that to some cowardly scum of a deserter who thought it must contain food and got a bullet in his guts for his trouble.

  After that scare he’d kept off the road, but he soon realized that the stamina that had taken him across the Himalayas in the thirties was long gone. After three days he was a stumbling wreck on the brink of starvation, forced to drink from stagnant pools in the forest. The water had saved him from dying of thirst, but within hours of consuming it he had come down with dysentery. He was finished.

  He’d hidden his briefcase and pistol and, nearly shitting himself with sickness and terror, given himself up to an American combat patrol. They had first lived up to his earlier hopes by providing him with food and water and telling him to hand himself in to one of the supply units following them, but it wasn’t long before a staff officer appeared and demanded to know why they ‘hadn’t shot the Nazi bastard’. For a few minutes his fate had been in the balance, but he had cut such a forlorn figure that the officer had eventually relented and put him in a jeep to be taken to the nearest collection centre.

  Now here he was with his arse in a puddle and the rain dripping from his nose. His comrades, who could sense he was no more a landser than a chimpanzee, watched him suspiciously. It was only a matter of time before someone gave him up to the guards.

  And it was about to get worse.

  He hadn’t realized the screening would be so thorough. This hunger for revenge and determination to ensure the Nazi hierarchy had no possibility of escape seemed very un-American. Every prisoner was being strip-searched and interrogated, regardless of rank. It wouldn’t take the Amis five minutes to find out that he didn’t know a machine gun from a panzerfaust, even if they didn’t find the SS tattoo that verified his blood group. They might very well shoot him on the spot.

  Well, if he couldn’t trick his way out he’d buy his way out. The key was to convince them to let him recover the briefcase and, even in his current pitiful state, Walter Brohm was capable of that. It contained only a general summary of his research and findings, but it would be enough to save his neck if he could get it into the right hands. Of course, they would be able to do nothing without the stone and his detailed notes. He would only hand over their whereabouts when he was somewhere much safer than this. He had heard Rhode Island was pleasant at this time of the year.

  He pushed himself to his feet and approached the nearest guard, who eyed him suspiciously and kept the muzzle of his carbine pointed exactly at Brohm’s midriff.

  ‘I would like to speak to your commanding officer. I have information that will be of considerable interest to his superiors.’

  XVIII

  ‘SO YOU HUNT down pictures and stuff stolen by the Nazis?’ He knew she was trying to sound enthusiastic, but he heard the doubt and he could hardly blame her. It didn’t seem like a very grown-up occupation.

  ‘It’s not even as exciting as it sounds,’ he apologized. ‘I read catalogues, check out art sales and spend most of my time on the phone. I’m more likely to be looking for a pair of candlesticks than a painting.’

  He was usually shy at first with women, but she was deceptively easy to chat to. Maybe it was because she was American; open, talkative, interesting and interested. They discovered they had shared likes: climbing and walking. And pet hates: anyone who wandered around listening to rock music on earphones when they could be listening to the birds singing. Their musical taste differed, but there were areas for negotiation. Sarah liked the new album by Robert Plant and Alison Kraus, although she thought Plant was talented but ancient. Jamie confessed to a secret hankering for old Johnny Cash standards and a love of Mahler inherited from his mother. He found himself relaxing and revealing things he hadn’t even told his best friends.

  ‘Do you think your work could have anything to do with why whoever it was tried to whack you?’

  Her words produced a photoflash memory of the train thundering by an inch above his head. All it would have taken was a single hanging wire . . . She noticed his look, and placed a hand on his arm; the
warmth injected new life into him and for the first time since leaving the Tube station he felt like facing the world.

  ‘What are you smiling about?’ He shook his head and she turned a quizzical eye on him. ‘OK.’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t mind a man having secrets. Makes him more interesting. But you didn’t answer my question.’

  ‘About my work?’ She nodded. ‘I doubt it. I’m sort of between jobs at the moment.’

  She grinned. ‘Me too.’

  ‘Hold it,’ he said. ‘I notice all we’ve done is talk about me. Your turn.’

  ‘OK, but I’m hungry; how about lunch?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I was certain he was dead.’

  Charles Lee tossed the remains of his cigarette from the car window and studied the couple talking together on the bench. He should have done the job himself. His partner had been too impatient – a young man’s flaw; one learned patience as one grew older. He would have shadowed Saintclair and bided his time until he was certain of the outcome. True, the attempt should have succeeded, but that wouldn’t be in his report to the agent from Beijing. Better that the younger man was at fault. There would be a little residual fall-out, but he would survive, and that was what mattered.