Foretold by Thunder

by Edward M. Davey

  Jenny frowned. “But if you’ve known it was real since Ethiopia, why on earth didn’t you tell me?”

  “You’d have thought I was mad,” said Jake. “And I …”

  “And you what?”

  “Jenny, I …”

  A drawer banged in the kitchen and the words “like you” died on his lips.

  85

  Fendi Selleria looked out of place in Heathrow Terminal Two, Florence decided as the designer bag swivelled to meet her. She had bought it on a whim in Rome with her latest stipend from Beijing; with each success her retainer had increased and she was now a wealthy young lady. Earning more than her father, in fact. She watched without emotion as one of her team rushed to the carousel to pick it up. It was nice to have nice things. But money was no longer her motivation.

  Beijing didn’t know Florence had kept back part of each inscription. The most vital verses – they acted as a spark, igniting the rest of the incantation – these she had hoarded like Croesus. Florence didn’t want some nobody back in Beijing piggybacking off her work, setting themselves up as a rival fulguriator.

  That was her destiny, hers alone.

  Again she felt that curious prickle of energy at the thought of what she was becoming. It branched out through her nervous system like … Florence frowned. The feeling was like forked lightning itself: fingers of energy crackling from her core to the extremities of her body.

  She wanted more.

  After the breakthrough in Ethiopia, Florence had felt herself on the cusp of greatness. Then the heavens called her to Italy. And there was no doubt that the Pian di Civita once held something of great power: Florence felt that same energy thrumming from the hilltops. But there had been a hitch. The tomb had been empty, and since then her powers were rolling back, like a tide drawing out to sea. Without the incantation to dii superiores she knew the All-Seeing Eye would remain occluded, as if suffering from glaucoma.

  After the failure at Pian di Civita she had camped for a week on the hills of Lazio, much of it spent in a trance. Jake’s route – historical detective work – was not for her. Instead each night she sent perverted litanies up to the stars, while her agents huddled together and whispered about spirits and ghosts. But the skies remained sullen.

  Just when Florence feared it had forsaken her, the sign came.

  They were at breakfast in a hotel restaurant, CNN blaring in the background. A glance was enough. Strange that it hadn’t revealed itself to her naked eye – yet she knew it was the calling. By then Florence had learned to let the crackle of her second soul guide her, as a migrating bird is pulled across continents by a call it cannot understand. The finger was pointing the way once more.

  And there was a circuitous feel to this journey, pleasingly so. She was summoned to London.

  *

  “Quickly,” Florence snapped, glancing at her watch. It was gone 2p.m. and she was in no mood to wait – not now she was so close to that thing which had occupied her every waking moment these last three years. The agents were burdened with luggage, but they quickened their pace. Florence’s star was rising in Beijing; her displeasure at the calibre of her previous team had been acted upon and their replacements were hot stuff, subordinate to her every whim.

  They were good, but not good enough to register the smartly-dressed man lingering at arrivals with a copy of the Telegraph, one brogue tapping on the pavement. He looked too pampered to be a threat, too obviously soft.

  That man had murder on his mind.

  *

  Charlie Waits watched Florence’s team head for the motorway in two Mercedes saloons. Moments later the gunmetal BMW swept up with Davis at the wheel; Parr sat alongside him. Nobody spoke as the car purred down the M4. Davis left half a dozen cars between them and their quarry, changing lanes often while Waits ensured they didn’t have a tail of their own. He was rather enjoying all this. Soon the spires of west London’s business district came into view: GlaxoSmithKline, Sega, an office of glass that resembled Noah’s Ark. They skirted Kensington and hit the Paddington flyover, soaring over the West End.

  “They’re aiming for the Chinese Embassy,” observed Parr. “Must be – we’re heading straight to Portland Place.”

  “Shall I bring them to a halt?” said Davis, whose hands gripped and released the steering wheel repeatedly.

  “Not yet,” said Waits. “We’ll make our move once they turn off the main road. Brace yourselves – I fancy this might get a bit hairy, ladies and gentlemen.”

  But the Chinese delegation weren’t heading for the embassy. Instead the Mercedes cut through the City of London before nosing onto the Embankment, where Britton had been struck dead a few weeks previously. The car only slowed when Tower Bridge poked into view – that, and the Norman fort in its shadow. Once the very name could chill the bones of a Londoner, for tragedy seeped through every murder hole.

  The Tower.

  86

  There it was again, ringing in his head: the tramp-tramp-tramp of leather on cobbles, and below it a baritone of thunder. When he closed his eyes he saw millions of points of light, swirling and flowing and rising into peaks; a few lines of poetry came to him and he murmured them under his breath.

  With domineering hand she moves the turning wheel,

  Like currents in a treacherous bay swept to and fro.

  The poem was ancient, but for the life of him Jake couldn’t place it – the verse must have seeped into his mind during his research.

  “What’s that?” asked Jenny.

  “Oh, some poem,” he said. “It’s about fate. I forget the author.”

  “Don’t think about it, Jake. There’s no point.”

  It was those two dreams. He couldn’t shake them, and for the first time Jake wondered if he was going mad after all. He pressed the palms of his hands into his eyelids until his vision bloomed with primrose and when he opened his eyes – they were bloodshot – his gaze fell on the Dicks Report.

  “Will a hand-written copy be enough for us?” asked Jenny with a glance at the pages. “Can you publish?”

  Jake considered it. “With the sworn affidavit of two ex-MI6 officers it might be usable, along with everything else we’ve got. The footage you shot in Ethiopia is crucial. But …”

  “But what? Tell me.”

  “If we slam all this in tomorrow’s edition, and if people actually believe it – what do you think will happen next?”

  Jenny understood. Every nation in the world would begin the scramble, every fortune-seeker too.

  “I don’t like it,” said Jake. “Whatever it is. It feels unwholesome. It brings glory to one nation and death to the next on nothing more than a whim. And so far all I’ve achieved is placing passages of the work into the hands of the last person on earth I’d want to have them.”

  “She doesn’t have it all, though,” said Jenny. “And Eusebius’s trail ended in Italy, remember? The job’s done, Jake. Hess did it for us.”

  When Jenny looked up Jake was staring at her with such intensity she flinched.

  “Did he though?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did Hess finish it for us?”

  Jenny narrowed her eyes. “Well, he says he did …”

  “Exactly.” Jake massaged his sinuses. “He says he did.”

  “Is there evidence to the contrary?”

  “Hess was the most senior Nazi not to be executed after the Second World War, and he lived until a ripe old age. What does that suggest to you?”

  “I don’t know, Jake. Spell it out for me.”

  “Put yourself in Hess’s boots,” he said. “You’ve betrayed your country. You hope to make a new life in Britain, but you’re not sure what reception you’ll get. You have in your possession a document that could change history. Do you burn it? Or do you keep it? As an insurance policy …”

  Jenny’s eyes flared. “It’s what I’d do.”

  It was then that Jake Wolsey made a last leap of intuition. The human brain, the mi
ght of reason: a match for any ancient lore.

  “I’ll tell you what I’d have done,” he said. “I’d have buried it. Or stashed it somewhere, so I had a chip to bargain with. Wasn’t Hess taken to a local farmhouse when he landed?”

  Jenny was nodding.

  “Listen to this,” she said, reading from her smart phone. “Churchill ordered the prisoner be treated with relative dignity. As befitted a foreign statesman he was permitted to keep his personal effects.”

  Jake’s mouth had become a thin white line. “Before we publish anything I want to go to Scotland,” he said. “I want to find this farmhouse and check out the crash site with a resistance meter, satisfy myself there’s nothing unpleasant there.”

  Jenny shuddered again, and he knew she too felt the fear that had reduced Hess to the rudderless nothing encountered by Dr Dicks.

  The face is bestial, ape or wolf.

  “I know it’s a lot to take in,” said Jake.

  “I can cope,” she said.

  Jenny smiled at him, defiant again, and Jake knew he was developing feelings for this person stronger than anything he’d known; stronger than whatever presence Dr Nesta had detected in the darkness of space; stronger than the bonds of predestination that tied every human to their path.

  “Let’s get to Scotland then,” he said.

  “We may as well visit Mytchett Place first, it’s only in Surrey. And didn’t we read that Hess was held prisoner in the Tower of London too?”

  Jake said nothing.

  The Tower.

  Thunderstruck.

  “The Tower,” said Jenny when she saw it too. “It was struck by lighting two days ago.”

  “The reason Niall was late for our meeting.”

  For thirty seconds all Jake and Jenny did was breathe. They heard the noise of a bus pulling up sink through the walls, the heavy groan of its departure; a child playing in the flat above and thudding floorboards as a parent gave pursuit.

  Jenny’s phone began ringing and they both jumped.

  “Then there’s no time to lose,” she said. “Hold on, let me get rid of this.”

  But when she listened to what the caller had to say her face collapsed downward as if the muscles beneath had been torn away.

  “No, Daddy,” she whispered.

  *

  Jenny wept at last: it was silence, stillness, the salt water painting translucent stripes down her face. Her father did the talking, words of sadness, words of beauty, words human beings hear once or twice in a lifetime and are meant for them alone. Her knees pointed inward, like those of a child starting school. She had lost her mum.

  And Margaret never did return to her kitchen.

  Neither of them knew how long Jake held her; minutes became hours and passed in a blur. De Clerk poked his head around the door and, seeing something significant was happening, darted away.

  More of that poem had come to Jake; it was Roman, he was certain now.

  No cries of misery she hears, no tears she heeds,

  But, steely hearted, laughs at groans her deeds have wrung.

  He held Jenny tighter: trying to channel strength into her, afraid for them both, but there was nowhere to escape from it.

  This was the fabric of reality.

  On nothing more than a whim …

  It was late afternoon when Jenny thought about the future, the fifty-fifty chance she would share her mother’s fate. She had to know.

  Abruptly she turned to face Jake. Their faces were inches apart, and for an instant he feared she might try to kiss him. Letting her do so now would be wrong and he would resist her if she tried. But Jenny was in a different place; her eyes crackled with some new determination.

  “The Tower,” she said. “Let’s go and get it.”

  87

  In its time the Tower of London has played many parts – prison, palace, mint and zoo – and staring at the citadel Jake saw how its tangled history had been converted into stone. Medieval walls were overlaid with Tudor and Georgian additions and a terraced street protruded over the walls; the cube-shaped White Tower rose above the hotchpotch. When it was built this was one of the tallest buildings in Europe. Now the keep was dwarfed by Gherkin, Shard and Tower Bridge alike, yet still it held its own, drawing the eye back.

  The queue to get in was six abreast and foreign tongues commingled in the spring air; there were interested glances at the blonde with the expensive camera as Jenny and Jake strolled to the entrance.

  A Beefeater stopped the pair with an open hand. “There is a queue, you know.”

  “Jake Wolsey, reporter. And this is my photographer.”

  The Beefeater was unimpressed.

  “I’m here to interview the Constable of the Tower.”

  “He’s expecting you, is he?”

  “We’ve got an appointment.”

  There was a cursory bag search and they were in.

  Rudolph Hess had been imprisoned in a building known as the Queen’s House, a wattle-and-daub lodge in the central courtyard. It was the finest surviving pre-Tudor house in London, protected by moat and wall from the Great Fire of 1666. But there was a complication. The Queen’s House was now the private residence of the Constable of the Tower, and this was no lowly guardsman. Only a General or Field Marshal could take the role, personally appointed by the Queen. The incumbent, General Sir Richard Mayflower, had been commander of the British Forces in Afghanistan; he’d briefly run the whole shebang, during the interregnum between two American commanders.

  But there was always a way of getting in to these places.

  Wearing his journalist’s hat Jake had cooked up some feature about interviewing residents of historic houses. And the Tower’s press office jumped at the chance for free publicity, strong-arming the general into giving up an hour of his time. The plan was for Jenny to ask Sir Richard to show her the most photogenic rooms, leaving Jake to scour the chamber in which Hess was held prisoner.

  The Beefeater led them past Traitors’ Gate, where Anne Boleyn had arrived by boat, lifting her dress over effluvial waters before her appointment with the block. Then came the Bloody Tower, where two princes had met their end.

  Jake caught Jenny’s eye as they threaded through the complex. She smiled sadly and, with an effort, looked ahead. Finally they penetrated the inner wall. To the east of the courtyard stood the keep, sucking the tourists in, and to the west was what might have passed for a village green; ravens trotted about with clipped wings. Beyond that stood the Queen’s House, busby-wearing Fusiliers standing guard. The Beefeater led them to the door and knocked three times. It was opened by a red-faced man with a shock of white hair. His back was very straight and his jaw looked as if it had been hewn from iron and bolted to his head as an afterthought.

  “Wolsey, is it?” He crushed Jake’s hand. “Richard Mayflower. And this is …?” The general’s eyes darted to the left.

  *

  Sir Richard led them through the house, stopping at rooms of interest. At one point he announced they were in the room where Guy Fawkes was interrogated; Jake could feel history seeping from the floorboards.

  “We’re particularly interested in seeing the room where Rudolf Hess was held,” said Jenny.

  “Ah! Well, you’re in luck.” Sir Richard seemed able only to grin or frown, face segueing between the two states on order. “That happens to be my sitting room. I was thinking we’d take tea in there while your colleague gets this wretched interview out of the way …”

  The room was built for the medieval stature and Jake ducked to avoid the beams. Antique rugs were cast about and a red-brick fireplace dominated the far end of the room. Framed photographs were everywhere: Sir Richard meeting the Queen, Sir Richard shaking hands with President Obama, Sir Richard with his arm around General Colin Powell.

  The interview began. The general wasn’t a bad old boy when he got going, with plentiful anecdote and a good line in self-deprecation. And all the while Jake was studying the room, wondering where he would sta
sh a document of importance if he was a desperate man.

  Presently Jenny announced she wanted to photograph the house – would Sir Richard accompany her?

  “Charmed.” Sir Richard ordered another grin. “You’ll be all right amusing yourself here, I trust, Wolsey?”

  The general escorted her out, chest thrust forward as if headed for the ballroom. Jenny looked back as they promenaded from the room – she was rolling her eyes.

  First Jake checked the fireplace, exploring the brickwork with his fingers.

  A brick was loose.

  Jake clawed it out to reveal an empty space and a few crumbs of desiccated mortar. The rest of the brickwork was solid; so were the flagstones. Next he inspected the floorboards, but there no nail out of place, no suggestion of a compartment. Jake strained his ears for the general’s return. Nothing could be heard but the collage of creaks and tics as the timber-framed lodge breathed, shifting itself minutely. Jenny was doing well; Jake hoped the old goat wasn’t being too lecherous. But he was ten minutes into the search and he’d got nowhere.

  Jake paused, forcing himself to think. The windows consisted of diamond-shaped panes held in place with strips of lead, the White Tower distorted by imperfect glass. Aged planks formed a box beneath the window to sit on – Jake pictured Hess rocking there for hours as his predicament hit home. He knocked on the window box. It was hollow. And the cracks between the planks were wide enough to slip sheets of paper through.

  Jake snatched up a poker – its end tapered like a crowbar – and listened for the general’s return. He dreaded to imagine what Sir Richard would do if he caught him tearing up the period features. But there was no sign of the general and Jake smiled at the thought of Jenny leading him on, endlessly retaking the same photograph.

  He squeezed the poker into a crack between the beams and pulled. There was no give at all; the oak was centuries old and hard as steel. Jake heaved again, putting his back into it this time, but still the wood held. He clambered onto the window seat, bent double to avoid the ceiling. A group of Chinese tourists peered up at him from the green, but there was little light in the room and the warped glass would hide his vandalism. Jake stamped on the poker; the plank snapped with a sound like a gunshot.