The Doomsday Testament (6 page)

As the rampaging
Wehrmacht
finished off the scattered remnants of Poland’s destroyed army and the Soviet Union joined in, feasting on the defeated nation’s carcass, the Royal Berkshires had embarked for France along with 150,000 soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force. The initial overseas entries, as the battalion deployed inland, leapfrogged erratically between the wide-eyed wonder of a youthful tourist and the excitement of a professional soldier desperate to get to grips with his enemy. Lieutenant Matthew Sinclair also had a touching regard for his soldiers’
welfare
. His relationship with his sergeant, Anderson, a man old enough to be his father, seemed to have been particularly close. The cosy, confessional tone of the diaries ceased on 10 May 1940 when the
Wehrmacht
attacked France and Belgium. Matthew Sinclair was about to get his baptism of fire. His Berkshires were part of the 2nd Infantry Division and on the far right of the British line, south-east of Lille, defending the flatlands around the River Dyle and in the direct line of General Erich Hoepner’s rampaging XVI Panzer Corps.

The first entry of the shooting war was almost comically indignant.

My initial experience of battle was entirely farcical as we weren’t allowed to move to our positions in Belgium until the Germans attacked first. As a consequence we were quite ill-prepared for them. Nevertheless, I feel very excited because this is what IT has all been for. First bombs fell during afternoon stand down
.

But the horrors that followed chilled Jamie’s blood. The bombs fell so frequently in the following days that Matthew stopped recording them. Meanwhile, the tone of the diary became ever more disjointed and frenetic. Jamie imagined the brief sentences being scribbled in the dark as the writer lay cowering in some water-filled ditch with his ears tuned for the slightest sound of an approaching enemy. Snatches of personal
shorthand
recorded what may have been momentous happenings, but were forever unintelligible. These pages were torn and mud-spattered and some were missing altogether. On one, Jamie noticed a fine spray of what could only have been blood. Within six days, the BEF was surrounded and fighting for its very survival. The Berkshires were ordered to fall back towards the Channel ports, and Lieutenant Sinclair tersely recorded the disintegration of his battalion as it was chewed to pieces by the panzers, entire platoons and companies wiped out in savage minor engagements that would never appear in the history books.

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.

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.