The Final Reckoning

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

‘This is all that came, nothing else?’

‘That's it.’

‘No note?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Did they buzz on the door when they delivered it? Do you know when it arrived?’

‘It was on the mat when I went down just now.’

‘OK.’ Tom went straight to the window, looking for the man he had seen before: no sign. He began to pace, working out his line of questioning, when he caught Rebecca looking at him, her eyes sweeping up and down his body. Aware that she'd been noticed, she looked away.

‘First off, do any of those names look familiar to you?’

She looked unsure. ‘No.’

‘Could you have met any of them? Might they be friends of your father's, business associates?’

‘My father owned a dry cleaning shop on Stoke Newington Church Street.’

‘Right. So not much in the way of business associates then.’ He attempted a smile. ‘Could any of them be relatives, distant family members?’

‘I'm telling you, I don't recognize any of them.’

Tom looked back at the list. A hunch was beginning to form.

Her computer was gone – proof, along with the upended bookshelves and filing cabinet, that it was information, not saleable goods, that the intruders had been after – but the cables and modem were all still in place. He took out and connected his own laptop and, once the Google page was displayed, Tom entered the first of the names. An entry on Wilhelm Albert, fifth Duke of Urach, born in 1957, appeared: not what he was expecting. He tried the second name. Wilhelm Altenloch was a major in the Nazi SS in Bialystock. He looked up at Rebecca, standing over his shoulder.

Hans Bothmann was identified as the Kommandant of the Chelmno death camp, where he had directed mass killing operations from spring 1942 to March 1943. Google drew a blank on Hans Geschke but Paul Giesler had a Wikipedia entry all his own. He was an early recruit to National Socialism, signing up to Hitler's fledgling movement in 1924, rising to be Gauleiter of Westphalia South and, by 1942, Munich and Upper Bavaria. His claim to fame was the supervision of the Dachau concentration camp; apparently, when the liberators were approaching, he drew up a last-minute plan to ensure they arrived too late – by exterminating all the camp's Jews.

Rebecca leaned forward to get a closer look at the screen, one loose curl of her hair brushing Tom's face.

Odilo Globocnik had an entry too, one befitting a senior SS apparatchik and former police leader in Lublin, credited with overseeing the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units who massacred Jews throughout Poland from 1942 to 1943.

The pattern grew clearer with each entry. SS Colonel Albert Hohlfelder, decorated for his work sterilizing Jews and other slaves through mass exposure to X-rays. SS Lieutenant General Dr Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, member of the planning staff responsible for the comprehensive liquidation of the Jewish ghettoes of Poland. SS Lieutenant Kurt Mussfeld, supervisor of Auschwitz crematorium number two in 1944. Christian Wirth, assistant to Globocnik, and responsible for implementing the principles of the T-4 euthanasia project, in which the disabled were gassed or killed by lethal injection, on a dramatically larger scale by developing extermination camps which served as state-of-the-art, industrialized factories of death.

‘So we have a list of big-time Nazis,’ Tom said finally, pushing the chair back from the desk.

‘I don't understand.’

‘Can you think of any reason why anyone would want to hand-deliver this to you? Anonymously?’

Her eyes were aflame with something Tom could not quite interpret. Was it grief, burning anew? Was it anger, at such manipulation? Was it fear at being menaced by violent intruders and anonymous callers? Tom could have looked and looked into those eyes, without ever being certain.

‘I have no idea what any of this means, Tom,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘But I know someone who might.’