by F. G. Cottam
My hunting lodge is very fine. It is constructed, walls and roof, from heavy timbers of English oak. They are a foot through and a foot across and massively strong. I gathered the craftsmen who worked the wood and completed the building from among those whose regular toil involves more substantial dimensions. Some I recruited from the naval shipyard at Portsmouth, where they build our fleet of battleships. Others were men who had worked on the strengthening beams in the interiors of our great churches and cathedrals.
Such grand and ambitious projects as the construction of my lodge cannot be scrimped over. They are only ever successfully achieved at considerable financial cost. And, as I earlier wrote, it is a place which has fostered the most blissfully thoughtless moments of a life otherwise subsumed by grief.
But the next few weeks are the last few weeks of the existence of this refuge of mine. For truthfully, it is no longer that at all. I cannot abide the thought of ever sleeping there again. It will be a place tainted and despoiled by its current inhabitants and what they are gathered to achieve there. Its rooms will be malign, its very timbers corrupted by the evil quintet they currently provide with shelter.
When the magicians have presented me with that Almanac and taken up their things and departed, I will first find a safe place in which to secure the book. Then I will return to put my lodge to the torch. I will do this personally, having daubed pitch into its exterior nooks and crannies to encourage and nourish the flames. I will scorch the place off the earth, leave nothing to remind me or anyone else of the dark mischief that has so corrupted the building’s soul.
October 2, 1534
It is finally done. Gunter Keller, the last living of the blighted crew he led, is gone. Gaunt from the poison and lame from the torture when they led him in chains to the stake, he was not the arrogant man who once threatened to put me on the bottom of the sea with a single thought.
Nor did he die easily. It is the custom in this country to strangle the person sentenced to death before the pyre is lit, so they feel no pain; their burning is symbolic, just the denial of a death dignified by an intact corpse and a burial rite.
That was not done in Keller’s case and so his death was as prolonged and agonized as he so fully deserved. It was a good hour between the first flames fluttering at his feet and his last breath. For him, it must have seemed an eternity. A small sample only of the fate awaiting him in Hell.
His death closes the final chapter of a story that began on a bitterly cold night when I rode from London to Hampton Court wrapped in a cloak given me by Catherine, my wife, in the autumn which had just passed. The king was a guest at Hampton Court back then, though I rightly considered it a palace he coveted. Now he resides there in splendour as its owner. Had I known then what the enterprise he outlined was going to cost me, I would have risked his notorious kingly wrath by refusing to play any part in it.
This is because my heart tells me some years on that my part in that enterprise was responsible for the death of Matilda; she was robbed of the life she should have enjoyed into adulthood. And I lost everything.
I have a loving wife and two loyal and obedient sons. I have lands and entitlement. I might be the wealthiest man in the kingdom. I know none with greater worldly riches than mine. I enjoy the gratitude of the monarch, who calls me friend and who has honoured me with the highest offices. Yet I know in my heart I have nothing.
The bitter lesson harshly learned since that long-ago December night is that magic always exacts a price. The cost of it is inescapable. There is always a reckoning to pay. And it is one I know I will go on paying for as long as I continue to breathe.
This I say in God’s eternal truth,
Edmund Joseph Fleury
In a basement room in the bowels of the Bodleian library, Paul Beck looked at his wristwatch. It was midday. He’d read the last entry in the sad story of how a noble man’s life was blighted by kingly hubris. It was a singular tale. But as to the current location of the Almanac of Forbidden Wisdom, in the creation of which its author was so instrumental, it gave no clue at all.
Would Juliet have reached London? It was only sixty miles, but once the priest’s car reached London’s outer suburbs it would become hazardous. Paul thought it a mistake not to have accompanied her, and not only because his last hour or so of research had produced nothing concrete. He was concerned for her safety. The wasteland of England’s former capital was an increasingly wild, desolate, dangerous place.
Paul had told Juliet honestly what he wasn’t. He hadn’t played football in the German Bundesliga. He’d been straightforward about what he hadn’t done, but rather more opaque about those things he had. They called them sins of omission, didn’t they, in the circles Father Gould was used to moving in?
He’d been part of the same recruitment intake at the embassy as Dan Carter four years earlier. He strongly suspected that their applications had been successful for reasons that were very similar.
FORTY-TWO
There were twenty-four men in the elite combat unit and it was led by a major named John Creed. They were experienced men, having been blooded in the Middle East prior to the European theatre and their disruptive sorties behind the German front line, usually parachuted in with their vehicles tumbling through the air on night parachutes after them. Yvonne Dupont had said the ones she saw had numbered a dozen, but Juliet found no details enabling her to whittle the twenty-four down by half, which was a pity.
They had seen a lot of combat, most of it hand to hand. They had done a good deal of sabotage work and were expert at setting lethal traps for advancing enemy troops. Their snipers had assassinated some very senior enemy commanders. Their mission in France was to harry retreating German forces and to eliminate spies and some of the more vindictive collaborators. This was execution, plain and simple, but it wasn’t ever called that. And the British weren’t the only ones doing it. The Americans were doing it too, with some enthusiasm.
The War Museum archive had photographs of most of the men in the unit, their names handwritten on the reverse side. But there was no mention of what had happened to any of them after the end of hostilities, and twenty-four was too big a number anyway for Juliet to be able to follow up. She needed some lead or clue that would thin them out and leave her eventually with a single, culpable individual. She didn’t feel at all confident of getting that.
The museum itself felt very strange to her. Some Home Office phone calls made on her behalf as she travelled to London had gained her access and cooperation, once she’d briefed the Home Secretary and advised him of her plans. There was a skeleton staff and only emergency power; wall-mounted lights with an industrial look and a feeble, greenish glow.
The quake had left the building largely intact. But the effect of the flood had been to leave the ground floor with a layer of stinking mud nobody had yet attempted to clear up. The place was gloomy, smelly, all but deserted. Looters had smashed a couple of the ground-floor display cases, either to get at pistols in the hope they hadn’t been decommissioned, or to access valuable antique swords. Or possibly both. Shards of glass glinted amid the mud and murk down there.
Juliet was at an upper-floor carrel equipped with a computer. She had access codes to open files that might be relevant to what she was doing. The physical documents concerning Major Creed’s SAS unit were faded and time-worn and fragile with age. They gave little hint of the violence which would have characterized the military lives of the men to whom they pertained.
Some material had been computerized. Juliet switched the machine on and accessed the software package she needed and did a search for Major John Creed. Both sides of a handwritten letter came up. The letter heading told her that it had been sent from Aldershot’s Cambridge Military Hospital. The caption underneath told her the letter had been written when the major was a patient at the hospital after an infected shrapnel wound in his foot gave him septicaemia, from which he fully recovered. According to the caption, Creed lived on until his death from hear
t failure at the age of fifty-nine in 1978.
The letter was dated ‘May 1, 1945’, just a week before the German surrender and V-E Day. Juliet enlarged the size. Major Creed had possessed the small, neat hand of a punctilious man. He’d probably been very thorough in the organization of those executions carried out in a recently liberated area of northern France.
Dear Mabel,
Everything’s absolutely fine at this end. Sawbones no longer talking about the possibility of amputation. I’ll keep the foot, apparently, and therefore the day job. And when this show is over and done with, no golf course will be safe. And we’ll even be able to have a crack again at playing on that tennis court at your father’s place. Not that my fragile ego needs another beating.
TJ came to visit on his leave, which was damned nice of him, even if he is a rum sort of cove. I’ve suspected for a while that there’s something underhand going on under the veneer of schoolboy charm he affects. He’s awfully fond of what he calls his ‘souvenirs’. But there’s a very thin line between taking battlefield trophies and looting. It wouldn’t be one I’d be comfortable treading and I’ve told him more than once that it could end up getting him shot.
This isn’t rhetoric either. Military discipline is much more severe in wartime for reasons that are bloody obvious (please excuse my French). A Beretta pistol is a very nice thing to own and I’m told some very fine wristwatches are manufactured in eastern Germany, but neither artefact is worth the price of standing in front of a firing squad. TJ has put paid to enough men personally to know that no one comes back from the dead. That’s very much a one-way street.
There was some sort of commotion after TJ left. An orderly got the jitters rather badly in the mortuary. Started spouting nonsense, had to be sedated in the end, which was ironic in his own hospital. Or it would have been when he came around afterwards on a ward.
What else can I tell you? The food here’s improving, unless I’m just getting used to it. The staff are as cheerful and friendly as ever. A chap could get used to being waited on, and on a serious note, I’m getting stronger and feeling more my old self every day.
Wishing our Edinburgh home wasn’t quite so far away, because what with the requisitioning of train tickets and the petrol ration, it makes travel so ruddy difficult generally, and I know visiting me here is impossible.
For that reason, missing you terribly, Mabs, and can’t wait to get out of here and hold you in my arms again.
Much love,
Johnnie
Juliet switched off the computer. She went through her list of names. There were five possible men from his unit the major could have been writing about. They were Trevor John Gordon, Tommy Jackson, Tim Jessup, Tony Jones and Terry James Fisher.
She got up from her chair and phoned Father Gould. He answered on the first ring.
‘Home safe?’
‘Everything is relative these days, Professor Harrington.’
‘As I told you in the car, please call me Juliet.’
There was silence on the line. Then he said, ‘Please call me Tom, Juliet.’
‘Do you believe in coincidence, Tom?’
‘It’s not mathematically impossible. But not generally.’
‘When your unimaginative altar boy heard the unrestful dead that day, wasn’t one of the others named Jackson?’
‘You know that. His name was on the list we compiled just this morning for the Met Police Commissioner.’
‘Tell me about him.’
‘Peter Jackson. Normal boy with a tragic recent history. Parents both killed in their car at the end of last year in a motorway collision. Has rather a neglected look about him. Devout boy, sweet-natured.’
‘The police will talk to him today, if they haven’t already.’
‘His sister told me he was on a fishing trip to Ireland with his grandfather.’
Juliet was quiet, thinking. Then she said, ‘Do you believe that?’
‘I was disinclined to believe her there on the doorstep; she sounded a bit glib. But then she invited me in. Would she have done that if Peter had been skulking up the stairs with the Almanac of Forbidden Wisdom? I didn’t think so. She was far too cool a customer.’
Juliet was quiet again, remembering the verbal profile the Home Secretary had sketched of the Almanac’s likely user on that day less than a week earlier in her office at the university. Someone with an adolescent’s sullenness and anger, he’d said. Someone spiteful and uncaring.
‘What’s her name, Father?’
‘Dawn.’
‘How did she strike you?’
‘Extremely bright, and I use that adjective intentionally. Almost certainly on the autism spectrum, though at the less severe end. An Asperger syndrome sufferer.’
Juliet ended the call and her phone immediately registered another.
‘Juliet Harrington.’
‘Dan Carter.’
‘Desperate Dan.’
‘What?’
‘Sorry, a joke. I know who you are, what you do. How can I help you?’ Juliet asked.
‘It’s more a case of how I can help you,’ Carter said. ‘Are you anywhere near a fax machine? Or if you give me your email address, probably best to send you a scan.’
‘A scan of what?’
‘A drawing, Professor. You know about our material witness to a wartime theft?’
‘Yvonne Dupont,’ Juliet said.
‘She called me this morning and I drove out and met her for lunch. Transpires she’s an excellent draughtswoman. Attended art school a few years after the end of the war. She gave me a detailed likeness of her jeep-driving thief. If you can cross-reference it with a photo of the chaps in that unit, I think we’ll possibly have our man.’
Juliet gave Dan Carter her email address. A minute later she switched the computer back on and opened what he’d sent. It was done in charcoal and depicted a handsome man whose dark, side-parted hair was rather long for that of a serving soldier. He had a moustache and was good looking in a rakish, Errol Flynn sort of way. It was a period face, that of a man probably in his late twenties.
She sorted through the photos in front of her. Like the charcoal sketch, they were black and white. She found a photo of Tommy Jackson among them, a snapshot really, slightly blurred. But the resemblance was striking. Unless he had a twin in the unit, he was Yvonne Dupont’s chateau thief.
Her phone rang again. Paul Beck.
‘I think I know who’s got the Almanac. I think I know where it is,’ Juliet said.
‘Who has it?’
‘An adolescent girl named Dawn Jackson. Her great-grandfather stole it. She must have found it quite recently among the things he left behind.’
There was a silence. Then Paul said, ‘She’s dangerous, isn’t she?’
‘She’s powerful with that book. And she’s completely reckless,’ Juliet said.
‘Sit tight until I get there. I hired a car just after midday. I’ll be with you in less than an hour.’
‘We should call the police.’
‘And they turn up with dogs and a loud-hailer and a battering ram. And how does Dawn react to that?’
‘OK,’ Juliet said.
But she didn’t do nothing. She called back Father Thomas Gould to get Dawn Jackson’s address.
Paul arrived, as he’d said he would, within the hour. Juliet was delighted to see him. It was close to six o’clock by then and the museum’s official closing time. But they had a pass key to one of the rear entrances as part of their access-all-areas security clearances. She ran to him and hugged him hard and he hugged her back and they kissed.
‘If we ever get out of this I’m going to ask you to marry me,’ he said.
‘Like I said before, you’re on the rebound, Paul.’
‘Like I said before, it’s because of you I’m not.’
‘Desperate Dan for best man?’
‘Dan Carter can be godfather to our child. He’s a good bloke.’
‘It’s a pretty dream,
’ Juliet said.
Paul shook his head. He said, ‘We’ll go into it wide awake.’
‘Only if we survive this nightmare we’re living in.’
He looked at her seriously. He said, ‘There’s something you don’t know about me. I wasn’t always a translator. Not for a living, I mean. I spent five years as a special forces soldier in the German Army. I was an officer in the Kommando Spezialkräfte, or the KSK.’
Juliet said, ‘That sounds a lot more impressive than playing in the Bundesliga.’
‘We were seriously underpaid.’
‘I’ll bet there was plenty of job satisfaction. And I’m sure the work was varied.’
‘My point is that there are things I’m trained to do. I can get us through a locked door. I’m good at evasion. We need a plan for Dawn Jackson. I think that involves you distracting her while I find the book.’
‘If it isn’t sitting on her lap. My understanding is that no military plan survives the first few seconds of action.’
He smiled. ‘That’s true. But I’m good at improvisation.’
‘How good?’
‘Five years at the sharp end. And I’m still alive.’
‘How does the plan start?’
‘Under cover of darkness. We wait for nightfall, Juliet. Then we move.’
FORTY-THREE
Dawn Jackson was currently what she’d often heard described as ‘on the horns of a dilemma’. She was still irritated by the thought of Handy Andy Baxter using Pete’s key and stealing through the house to have a nosy while she studied in the library for tests she was pretty sure now she wouldn’t sit this term. If ever, frankly.
She wanted to get even with Andy and she’d thought of several ways in which she could do it. For a start, she could single out Andy’s dad for the blindness spell, so he’d lose his job; maybe then, as a consequence of that, Handy Andy would become homeless. Or she could blind Andy’s mum. You weren’t in all fairness much good as a librarian if you were blind, unless all the books were written in braille.
Or she could kill one or both of Andy’s parents with the lullaby spell that put people to sleep for ever. If Andy’s mum and dad died, Andy was the prim sort who would respond by immediately dialling nine-nine-nine. It wouldn’t occur to him to do the sensible thing and bury their bodies in the garden at night and just keep quiet. Although that might unravel a bit when the mortgage payments stopped going through. Andy’s parents probably didn’t own their property outright as her grandfather had. And they probably didn’t have a couple of grand hidden in a rolled-up sock in their bedroom wardrobe either.