The Doomsday Testament (7 page)

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.’

Jamie tried a smile, but it was too painful, and he had a feeling that shaking his head would be worse.

Milligan got the message and nodded sympathetically. ‘Well, if anything does come to mind . . .’ He asked for a description of the attacker, which Jamie gave him, and left.

Jamie asked the nurse to prop him up in a sitting position and he and Gail talked about his trip to Switzerland – postponed – and the other appointments she’d have to cancel. ‘I thought you might need this.’ Gail handed over his antiquated leather briefcase. When she had gone, he opened it and pulled out the journal.

It was only when he had it in his hands that he realized just how
specific
it was.

THE BRITISH EXPEDITIONARY
Force which landed in France lost thirty thousand men defending Dunkirk. Lieutenant Matthew Sinclair had come close to losing his sanity. Matthew recorded his landing on British soil in a flat, laconic single sentence that was followed by one of the now familiar gaps. The next entry revealed that, while Winston Churchill was exhorting his countrymen to fight on the beaches and the landing grounds, the journal’s author had been lying in a hospital bed not dissimilar to the one presently occupied by his grandson.

After a short leave spent with his parents in Kidderminster, in the summer of 1940 Matthew was posted back to his battalion at a bleak training camp somewhere in the Midlands. The 1st Royal Berkshires had ceased to exist as a fighting unit and all Lieutenant Sinclair’s energy was devoted to reforging it. It was exhausting work, with few opportunities for relaxation, but during that time something wonderful happened. Matthew Sinclair fell in love.

Now the journal transformed from a record of military life to the diary of a love affair. The girl’s name was never mentioned, but Matthew’s heart soared and his prose soared with it as he attempted to articulate the strength of first his attraction, then his affection and finally – and when he read some of the entries Jamie found himself blushing – their mutual passion.

The intensity of Matthew’s love grew so powerful that it was painful for Jamie to relive, and he had to skip over the next few entries. Then, at some point in the late spring of 1941, it vanished. What was more, it vanished in a flurry of violence, the ferocity of which was still evident in the ragged edges of pages torn from the spine of the journal. Jamie found himself mirroring the pain Matthew must have felt in that moment when his fingers had brutally removed the evidence of the final months of the affair. The next entry might have provided some kind of explanation, but it had been written by a man either drunk to the brink of insensibility or distressed beyond despair. Words had not been written, they had been smashed into the page, only to be scored out with enough force to tear through the three following pages, or smudged by some liquid whose origin Jamie could only guess at. But if the words were unreadable, the emotion Matthew Sinclair was expressing in his savage frenzy was clear. Hatred. A murderous unquenchable, all-consuming hunger for revenge.

Two days later he had requested a transfer to the Commandos.

The Commando special service brigades were born out of Churchill’s impatience at being unable to retaliate at the Nazis poised on France’s Channel coast. Thousands of men from the remnant saved at Dunkirk volunteered for the chance to get their own back and by 1941 the unfit and the unsuitable had been weeded out at secret camps in the Highlands by the toughest training regime in the British army. Now they were an élite service, ready to fulfil the prime minister’s vow to ‘set Europe ablaze’ and the perfect haven for a man bent on bloody murder or getting himself killed. Yet Matthew’s time with the Commandos was short-lived and characterized by frustration, self-pity and heavy drinking that was evident in the number of pages stained by the bottom of a glass. Whilst Matthew fretted to get at the enemy, Churchill limited Commando incursions to pinprick operations for which he was never chosen. By August his patience had run out and he volunteered for a new and untried outfit called the Special Air Service, then operating in North Africa. Jamie had the impression Matthew’s superiors were glad to see him go. You had to be even crazier to volunteer for the SAS than the Commandos.

Disappointingly, it rapidly became clear that his secretive new employers were a great deal more stringent about diary keeping than the regulars. Between August 1941 and October 1944 the journal contained a single entry – a cryptic reminder, at the end of 1943, for an appointment:

M suggests meeting at Baker Street re: Jedburgh after I’ve knocked the sand from my boots. 10 a.m. Sounds interesting
.

The war ground towards its inevitable end, with the Nazis squeezed between the twin jaws of the Allied forces and the Red Army. Now the regular entries resumed. Lieutenant Sinclair had been promoted to captain and placed on light duties as a liaison officer in northern Holland, and then in Germany where his fluency in the language would have been invaluable. No mention of Stan, but Jamie had an image of him looming in the background, a permanent reminder that war was no laughing matter. He flicked over the following pages until he reached the entry for 1 May 1945.

News of Hitler’s death came through this morning when we were close to Leipzig, where we are working with Patton’s Third Army. There is a feeling that it is all over and that we will soon be going home. I suffer it as much as anyone, but I must ensure the men don’t drop their guard. It would be stupid to get yourself killed now, after all we’ve been through
.

Jamie lay back and closed his eyes. Reading the journal had affected him like no other book had. When he’d started, it had been in the hope that it would bring him closer to the grandfather he’d never truly known. Yet he
found
he still had more questions than answers. There was anger, too, real anger, at the true scale of their deceit. He knew it was selfish, but he felt that Matthew and his mother had not only robbed him of a hero, but of a father figure who might have shaped his identity in a different way, perhaps even changed the course of his life. Each individual is unique, but they are as much the products of their upbringing and childhood influences as they are of their DNA. What type of man would he have become if he’d known his grandfather had won the Military Cross? It would have given him something to look up to, perhaps made him strive harder. He would have approached challenges in a different way. He knew now he could have beaten the South African who had given him a battering in the boxing ring if only he’d known how much aggression he was truly capable of. His rejection of Sandhurst had been partly, maybe mostly, because he didn’t think it was
his kind of thing
. But it
was
his kind of thing. Soldiering was in his blood. If they had only shown him the journal when he was eighteen he wouldn’t have become the frustrated failure he feared, deep down, he really was.

Just as maddening were the questions that remained unanswered. The gaps that persisted in his knowledge were as wide as those in the entries in the book. Was it only fatigue that caused the breakdown at Dunkirk? What had happened during the three years of silence in the SAS? What had ended the love affair that promised so much? And what was the significance of the Baker Street entry? He knew those questions would continue
to
haunt him. In some ways, he wished he’d never found the journal. Life had been simpler before he’d opened the blue leather covers. Lost in thought, he flicked over the next page.