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?”
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 might 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.”