The Final Reckoning

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Luckily Tom had set the BlackBerry to silent; Rebecca hadn't heard Sherrill's text message arrive and now was not the time to tell her what it had said. Besides, it was only confirmation of what Tom had already told her he suspected: that her father had been in New York with a hitman's weapon.

Above all, he didn't want to break the mood that had entered the room, established first by that fleeting embrace and, now, by his sighting of the message on the noticeboard, the plea for the remembrance of a dead mother. There was a hush in the room, a quiet that somehow seemed to connect them. Occasionally Rebecca would meet his gaze, say nothing, then return to prodding the now-limp sandwiches her friends had brought over that morning.

‘Your mother, was that the girl I read about in your father's book?’ It was the first chance he'd had to speak about what he'd read.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Rosa. Was that your mother?’

‘Oh no. That's a long story.’

‘I've got time.’

She smiled, the warmth of it moving across the table and spreading through him. ‘I never met Rosa. She and my father did stay together after the war. And she came here, to England.’

‘But?’

‘But I'm not sure they loved each other in a normal way. They clung to each other. They needed each other.’

For an instant an image floated before Tom's eyes, two teenage children who had witnessed the gravest horror. He pictured young bodies and old faces.

‘They had no children. My guess is that she was infertile. Sustained malnutrition and emotional trauma in the early years of puberty prevented regular ovulation.’

‘Is that your medical opinion?’

There was a glimpse of the crooked smile and it was gone.

‘My father always said the light had gone out. That she had no light left inside her.’

‘Maybe you were both right.’

She turned to look at him, the X-Men power-beam now at half-strength. ‘She died in 1966. My father was still young, relatively speaking. He grieved but he was not a man who could be alone, and a few years later he met a woman here, in London. They married and a few years after that they had me. He was forty-five.’

‘Did that make a difference, having a dad who was a bit older?’

‘Not as much as having a dad who survived the Holocaust.’

Tom nodded, accepting the scolding. He was aware that he had avoided so much as uttering that word.

‘Besides,’ she went on, ‘he was always really fit. Took great care of himself.’

I saw that for myself, Tom thought, the memory of her father's autopsy coming back to him.

‘Did the experience of the war- did the experience of the Holocaust leave a physical mark on him of any kind?’

‘Well, he never had a number on his arm, if that's what you're asking. Sometimes I wish he had.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, that's what people expect, don't they? Holocaust survivor, tattoo on the arm. But they only did that in Auschwitz. Did you know that? That was the only place where they branded the Jews with a number.’ She was speaking faster now, her voice different. It seemed to jangle somehow, like broken glass. ‘But my father was never in Auschwitz or in any death camp. So people couldn't see it. They couldn't tell, just by looking, what he'd been through. And he couldn't say it in one word either. Couldn't just say, I was in Treblinka. Or Sobibor. Or Belzec. Or Majdanek. Mind you, not many could say they were from there because hardly anyone ever came out. Hardly anyone survived those places. So my father either had to tell people the whole story – of the village and the burning barn and the pogroms in Kovno and his mother hanging there from the ceiling and the ghetto and the pits – or he had to say nothing. So most of the time, he chose nothing. He kept quiet. He made no speeches. He went on none of the remembrance tours. He never went back.’

She paused, thinking.

‘I didn't answer your question.’ The tone was the same one he had heard on the phone, Dr Rebecca Merton. ‘You asked about physical signs. There was one.’

‘What was that?’

‘His left foot. He was missing three toes. He lost them to frostbite in the forests, I think. When he was fighting with the partisans. It's in the notebook: how they had to wear felt shoes in the bitter cold. They didn't have any boots. You had to wait for someone to die and take theirs.’

‘And did that affect him? Missing those toes?’

‘Not really. He walked with a slight limp. As if he was carrying a heavy bag on one side. But it didn't stop him keeping in very good shape. He swam, he ran, he used to lift weights.’

There was no point hinting at it. He would have to ask directly. ‘I'm told that your father was found with some kind of metal plate on his leg, taped to his shin. Why might that be?’

She looked at Tom again, her gaze lingering, examining him. ‘I saw my father regularly, including before he made this trip and, I can tell you, he had absolutely nothing wrong with his leg. You must be mistaken.’

Tom wouldn't push it. He would just file the metal shin pad that he had seen with his own eyes among the ever-lengthening list of mysteries attached to this case.

‘And what about you?’ she said, taking the plates to the sink. ‘Do you have family here?’

‘I have a mother in Sheffield. My father's dead.’

‘Will you go and see her, while you're here?’

‘I don't think so. I used to do the dutiful son thing. Now I save the nostalgia for Christmas.’

The phone rang, the landline this time; another condolence call. Rebecca took the cordless phone and headed out into the hall.

While she was gone, Tom surveyed the damaged kitchen. Whoever had come here really had spared no mercy. They had turned the place over with brutal efficiency. Between saying goodbye to Rebecca on the doorstep and her phone call ordering him to rush back, no more than an hour had passed. They had managed to trash this place in less than sixty minutes. What had they been looking for? Was this break-in connected to the killing at UN Plaza or could it have been a coincidence? Either way, some unseen and brutal enemy now clearly had Rebecca Merton in its sights. The thought of it made him bristle.

He looked up to see her, breathless, in the kitchen doorway.

‘I just saw this downstairs, on the doormat.’ She was holding up a large white envelope. ‘Hand-delivered.’

‘What is it?’

She handed it over, sitting herself on the bench next to him, so close their thighs touched. She leaned across as he examined the blank envelope. He could smell her, the scent flooding him with lust. He tried to focus. Inside the envelope were two sheets of paper, soft to the touch, almost furry with age, held together by a single staple. On each of them was the distinct print of a manual typewriter; it was hard to tell, but it could have been a copy, the kind made by an old-fashioned stencil machine. Tom had been taught at Manchester by a professor who had clearly been setting the same reading lists since the 1950s: back in his seminars was the last time Tom had handled a document like this one.

There was no title or explanatory heading. Instead the first page featured only a list of names, apparently arranged alphabetically:

Wilhelm Albert

Wilhelm Altenloch

Hans Bothmann

Hans Geschke

Paul Giesler

Odilo Globocnik

Richard Glücks

Albert Hohlfelder

Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger

Kurt Mussfeld

Adalbert Neubauer

Karl Puetz

Christian Wirth

In each case the names had been neatly crossed out by two inked lines forming an X, the way a prisoner strikes out days on a calendar. Tom turned to the next page. The font was slightly different this time and the names were no longer sorted alphabetically:

Hans Groetner

Hans Stuckart

Joschka Dorfman

Otto Abetz

Theo Dannecker

Karl-Friedrich Simon

Fritz Kramer

Jacob Sprenger

Georg Puetz

Herbert Cukors

Alexander Laak

These names too had all been crossed out, though this time less neatly and in strokes that were not uniform, not even in the same colour ink. It seemed as if the first list had been marked in one sitting, the second at different points over time.

Other than that, the document in his hand gave no clues. Yet the more Tom looked at it, the more convinced he became that this list would explain at last the mystery of Gershon Matzkin.