The Final Reckoning

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Tom could see the dilemma that must surely have formed in the detective's mind within a few minutes of getting here. Rebecca and Tom were clearly respectable folk, a doctor and a lawyer, and they had done the respectable thing, sounding the alarm immediately. In ordinary circumstances, the police would simply thank them for their act of public-spiritedness and send them on their way.

But there was the stubborn matter of that front door. People didn't just come home without closing their front door properly. Someone other than Henry Goldman must have come into that house, which suggested Goldman's death had not been entirely down to natural causes. And there was Rebecca Merton's phone call: why would she have said she was reporting a murder?

So the detective was faced with a quandary. He could work on the basis that a crime had been committed and treat Tom and Rebecca as useful witnesses. He would show great courtesy, of course, without ever losing sight of the possibility that these two might be the killers: iron law of any murder inquiry, don't rule anybody out.

But there was a risk to that approach. If he eventually charged them the information he had gleaned while treating them as mere witnesses would be compromised. Interviewing suspects was a wholly different business: they had to be formally cautioned and told their rights, with a solicitor present. So while the detective might very much like to have Tom Byrne and Rebecca Merton talk with their guard down, he couldn't get away with that indefinitely. This, Tom understood, was the policeman's dilemma.

A harsh beam of light swept across the driveway: it would be Julian. Without waiting for permission, Rebecca broke off and walked towards his car. Tom saw the look of apprehension on the detective's face: if he regarded Rebecca as a potential suspect, he wouldn't want her chatting with the son of the deceased, filling his head with her version of events.

‘I'll tell you what I think we should do,’ the detective said suddenly. ‘Why don't we all go down to the station? We can have a chat, take a full witness statement from you both and then we can see how things look in the morning.’

‘After the autopsy, you mean.’

‘Yes. That should make things much clearer. Am I right, Mr Byrne?’

The police moved fast after that. Tom was sure it was because they wanted any time Rebecca had with Julian kept to a minimum.

‘We have a car here. Why don't we take you down to the police station right away?’ the detective said.

‘We'll be fine. We've got our own car.’

‘You've both undergone a traumatic experience tonight. Our guidelines on victim support say that often people who have experienced trauma are too shocked to drive. Even when they don't realize it.’

Tom acquiesced, though he could not abandon the suspicion that the detective's primary, if unauthorized, purpose was to give the Saab a quick once-over, before his not-at-all-suspects had a chance to clean it up.

They were taken to Kentish Town police station, a horrible, poky hole of a place, full of fluorescent-lit rooms and hard plastic chairs. They were interviewed separately, as Tom fully expected. And, no less predictably, the lead detective decided to interview Tom first. He soon realized Rebecca Merton's connection to events in the news. Tom explained that that was why they had been to see Goldman, because he was an old friend of her father's and, to Tom's great relief, the detective pressed the point no further. Doubtless, he was saving that line of inquiry for the day when Rebecca and Tom were upgraded to official suspects – rather than objects of mere, unofficial suspicion – and he could question them properly.

The prospect filled Tom with dread. As if this whole business was not complicated enough already. Where on earth would you start? With the gun in Gerald Merton's hotel room? With the notebook? With DIN? And how would Rebecca explain why she had not reported the burglary at her home?

Tom thought again of Jay Sherrill. He knew he ought to phone him, at least go through the motions of bringing him up to speed. But what the hell would he say? ‘Oh hi, Jay. Look, funnily enough I'm helping some police with their inquiries here too. Isn't that a coincidence?’ It would all sound too far-fetched, too wild. He had already thrown Sherrill the morsel about Merton as a former vigilante. The rest would have to come later. This was a puzzle, Tom was now convinced, that would only be solved by him and Rebecca – without any help or interference from a police department, whether in London or New York.

‘Come this way, please.’ A junior officer led them both to some electronic gizmo, like the one at American airports, where you press your finger on a glass and have your prints taken.

‘Why do we have to do this?’ Tom asked, earning a glare from Rebecca. ‘Will these prints be entered on a database? How long will they be kept?’

The detective smiled. ‘Once a civil liberties lawyer, always a civil liberties lawyer, eh, Mr Byrne?’ He told them they had nothing to worry about; this was only to exclude them from the inquiry, to enable the police to identify any prints they picked up from the scene. ‘It's voluntary: you can say no if you want. But if you say yes, it will help.’ The details would be destroyed and, no, they would not be added to the national database.

Tom was hardly reassured. He guessed that if someone had broken into Henry Goldman's home, the intruder would have taken the elementary precaution of wearing gloves. Which meant the only prints that would be on the door, the walls, the study desk and on Goldman himself would belong to him and Rebecca.

Finally, some three and a half hours after they had first driven past Hampstead Heath, the detective told them he would hope to have autopsy results in the morning: if Goldman had died from natural causes, no trace of any poison or narcotics in his bloodstream, then this would not be a murder inquiry at all. Tom and Rebecca would hear no more about it. And with that he sent them on their way.

They stepped outside into the chill air of a prematurely autumnal night and realized they had no means of transport. Tom was poised to go back inside the police station and ask for the number of a local mini-cab company when a taxi came by, its orange light glowing with the promise of refuge. They fell in and headed east.

His head was pounding. He had had only a few hours sleep since Sunday night, thanks to a combination of the Fantonis, Miranda and the flight from New York, and it was now officially Wednesday morning. And he wasn't thirty any more. But the exhaustion went deeper than mere lack of sleep. It was the fatigue that comes from long and sustained frustration, continued grappling with a problem that refuses to be solved.

Both he and Rebecca were too tired to talk. He looked out of the window. No matter how much had changed in London, it still seemed dead at night. Not in the bits they show the tourists, the West End or the theatre district, but in the London of Londoners, the places where people lived. That was still one of the obvious contrasts with New York: the absence of delis, coffee shops and bookstores that functioned late into the night.

A few hours ago Stoke Newington Church Street would doubtless have been humming, men in bicycle helmets emerging with a single bag of shopping from the organic supermarket, couples perusing the shelves of the Film Shop, ‘specializing in world cinema’. Tom imagined the kind of people who lived here, the right-on lawyers and leftie NGO staffers. In another life, it could so easily have been him. But right now, there was nobody around. Just a couple of stragglers emptied out of the bars and a slow beast of a street-cleaning vehicle, flashing and beeping along the kerb.

He didn't want to be here, bouncing once more up and down the speed-bumped, concussion-inducing streets of the London Borough of Hackney. He had wanted to go back to Rebecca's flat or, more ambitiously, his hotel, if only to get some rest, but she had rejected that idea instantly. In the police car, he had tried to touch her hand but she had brushed him away; not angrily exactly, but with a sort of suppressed irritation, as if now were not the time. He wondered if she had misunderstood him, if she thought he had been claiming an attachment that was not yet certain, rather than simply consoling her.

She had been terrified, that much was clear. He guessed that Rebecca Merton, hardened no doubt by a few years in A &E, had nevertheless not had much experience of either the police or the law. The very words – questioning, witness, crime scene – were enough to make most people lose their heads. Hence the error in the 999 call.

But Rebecca had already been in a fragile state when they pulled into Henry Goldman's oversized driveway. Tom was in danger of forgetting that not yet forty-eight hours had passed since her elderly father – her only family in the world, by the looks of things – had been shot dead thousands of miles away and in circumstances that remained baffling. Her home had been the target of a violent robbery, and now an old friend of the family lay dead – hours after revealing the secret life of a shadowy, lethal organization in which both their fathers had been players. He might try to reassure her that Henry Goldman's death was surely a coincidence, that he probably got out of his car with chest pains, lacked the strength to close his own front door properly and staggered into his study, clutching at his heart, before falling to the floor. Tom could argue that they certainly needed more information before they jumped to any other conclusion. But he had succumbed to the same nauseous fear as she had the minute he saw the corpse. The old lawyer had surely been murdered – and she could be next.

Someone out there was hunting for information about the life and curious career of Gerald Merton. They had upended Rebecca's apartment looking for it and, surely, they had come after Henry Goldman for the same reason. After all, wasn't that why he and Rebecca had travelled to Canary Wharf and then Hampstead, because Goldman was one of the very few men alive with detailed knowledge of DIN? The question that rattled around Tom's mind now was whether these pursuers knew of Goldman's knowledge independently – or whether they had simply trailed after Rebecca. He now thought it likely they had been followed as early as yesterday morning, that the thieves had been able to break into her flat because they had monitored her movements and knew she was out.

‘I've worked one thing out,’ he said finally, breaking the exhausted silence that had held since they had left the police station. ‘The fire alarm.’

‘What about it?’

‘It wasn't a coincidence. The timing.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It's an old tactic. The Trots did it all the time when I was a student. A meeting wasn't going their way, they'd just yank the fire alarm: meeting abandoned, live to fight another day.’

‘You're saying Henry Goldman pulled the fire alarm because he didn't like what we were asking?’ She was looking at him as if he were an especially slow child.

‘Not him.’

‘But no one else was in that meeting, Tom.’

‘No one else was in the room, I grant you that. But that doesn't mean no one was listening.’ He thought back to the notorious second resolution vote in the lead-up to the Iraq war, when the six waverers on the UN Security Council – the Swing Six, they were called – discovered they had all been bugged by the British and the Americans. ‘I don't know how they did it, but they did it.’

‘And who's they?’

‘I wish I knew.’

Tom's phone rang. At this time of night, it could only be New York. He looked down at the display: Henning.

‘Hi.’

‘You don't sound pleased to hear from me.’

‘Sorry. It's been a tough few hours.’ Tom closed his eyes in dread at the mere thought of Munchau discovering what had just happened: a UN representative in the custody of the Metropolitan Police in connection with a suspected homicide. It wasn't enough that the UN had been involved in the death of one old Jewish man, they had to be tangled up with another. He wondered how long he would be able to keep it quiet.

‘Well, maybe this will help. Your former colleagues here came up with a few names.’

‘What?’

‘You know, for your geriatric club? Seventy and over?’

‘Oh, that. Right.’ He had clean forgotten about it; that phone call to Henning, that hunch, felt like it happened years ago.

‘Stay focused, Tom.’

‘I'm sorry; with you now. What have you got?’

‘Well, it's preliminary research, but they say they'd be surprised if anyone else turns up.’

‘Go on.’ Now that he'd been forced to click his mind back into gear, he was excited. This could be the breakthrough they needed: one elderly German, a plausible target for DIN's last mission, and they would have this whole business explained.

‘Well, first, you won't be surprised to hear that there are none on the permanent UN staff. Retirement at age sixty, strictly enforced.’

‘Sure.’

‘But there are three visitors we've counted who are over seventy. All in town this week.’

Tom nodded, unseen; his pulse quickened.

‘The Chinese have brought a veteran interpreter, Li Gang. Legend has it he did Mao and Nixon, though I don't believe it. I mean, they-’

‘What about the other two?’

‘Well, the President of the State of Israel is here. He's eighty-four.’

‘And the other one?’

‘Foreign minister of Ivory Coast. Seventy-two. Been in the job on and off since the seventies apparently.’

‘Thanks, Henning.’

‘No use?’

‘It was only a hunch.’

Tom almost had to smile at the irony of it. He had noticed that before, how fate seemed to have a sense of humour. If you wanted to pick three people less likely to be Nazi war criminals you couldn't do much better than representatives of China, Ivory Coast and – just to put it beyond doubt – Israel. It was not just a dead-end. It was a dead-end sealed off with a bricked wall.

By now they had arrived at Kyverdale Road, home of the late Gerald Merton. Rebecca had insisted on it: if they couldn't find out whatever it was Goldman wanted to tell them from Goldman himself – and they couldn't – they would have to see if there was some clue, some hint, that her father had left behind.

As they pulled up and paid the fare, Tom wondered if this was the first time she had been back to her father's place since his death. He braced himself to see Rebecca hit by yet another emotional freight train: how much could one person endure?

He watched her produce a ring of keys, choose one and turn it in the lock. She did not linger in the hallway but strode up the thinly carpeted stairs. The smell was just as he expected: stale and musty. On the third floor, she made for the first door by the staircase. Tom noticed her hands trembling as she unlocked the door. As she switched on the main light, she gasped.

Tom peered past her. The place had been ransacked, worked over just as thoroughly as her own apartment. The cushions were slashed, the books strewn on the floor like casualties in a battlefield. Even the carpet had been rolled back to expose the dirty, dust-caked floorboards underneath. At least two now jutted out, as if they had been prised up, then banged roughly back into place. There were a couple of paintings on the walls, an abstract collage in the hallway and a sub-Chagall knock-off depicting what seemed to be a rabbinic violinist in the living room. Both were now badly askew.

Even with the light on, the place was cast in a stubborn gloom. Heavy brown curtains were drawn across the windows. Tom waded through the wreckage, trying to construct an image of how the place would have looked. The kitchen was small and off-white, the appliances museum pieces from the 1970s. There was a basic two-person table by the wall. Close by, also intact, was a catering pack of a dozen cartons of orange juice. Next to it sat a similarly cellophane-wrapped bulk load of baked bean tins. Gershon Matzkin had clearly never forgotten the lesson of the Kovno ghetto: always keep food, just in case.

There was a radio and a vase and several framed photos, the glass broken on almost all of them. He peered closely at one holiday snap, showing a tanned man, his shirt off, with his right arm around a woman and his left around a young girl, all seated at a table in an outdoor cafe in bright sunshine. The girl was about twelve and gawky, all elbows and bony shoulders. But the crystal green eyes were clear even then. The woman was dark-haired, too, but her eyes were unlike her daughter's, warmer and darker.

Tom focused on Gershon. He looked at least ten years older than his wife, already bald, the prodigious crop of hair on his chest silver. But his body was in remarkable shape, the muscle firm and toned, the chest and stomach hard and flat. And his eyes were as luminous as his daughter's.

Tom went back out into the living room, examining the slashed remains of a single well-worn armchair by the window. Next to it stood a table bearing a telephone and a radio-cassette player, a hulking relic of the 1980s. All over the floor, emptied out from a large, glass-fronted cabinet, were candlesticks, assorted silver knick-knacks, a few books and many more family photos. One caught Tom's eye: Rebecca with a wide smile and a mortarboard, her whole life ahead of her.

He found her in the bedroom contemplating another depressing scene: clothes strewn across the carpet, cupboard doors flung wide open. Each sock drawer had been emptied; ties dangling like forlorn party decorations. Tom expected her to sink onto the bed and burst into tears, but instead she went back into the living room. A look of relief passed across her face. ‘They're still here.’

She knelt down and began poring over the framed photographs dumped on the floor. Tom joined her, instinctively searching for any pictures from the 1940s, from the dawn of DIN. Perhaps they would find an image of the teenage Gershon Matzkin in the forests in his patched-together uniform, maybe with his lover and partner-in-grief, Rosa. But most of the snaps were of Gershon's post-war self, settled in Britain: the newly minted Gerald Merton.

Rebecca studied one of these images closely. It was in that peculiar shade of dull orange that seemed to veil all colour photographs from the 1970s and it showed five men beaming widely, four of them wearing large square glasses. Tom recognized Gerald, his wide sideburns flecked with grey. All five were in black tie, though they had their jackets off. The one on the far right was raising a glass.

‘Joe Tannenbaum. He must have died soon after this picture was taken,’ Rebecca murmured. ‘And Geoffrey Besser, he died about ten years ago.’ Her finger hovered over the last man in the shot, cheerfully drinking to the health of the photographer. ‘I can't remember him though.’

‘What is this picture?’

‘These were my dad's best friends.’

Tom looked at her face, scanning it for a sign of nostalgia or reminiscence. But her brow was furrowed.

‘I don't understand. What are you looking for?’

‘Sorry. I should have said. This would have been my cousin's wedding in 1976. And this group here,’ she angled the picture for him to look at it properly, ‘this is the poker club.’

Tom took a step back, crunching a picture book of Jerusalem under foot as he did so. The photo showed five middle-aged men, their jowls thickening, their heads getting balder, probably laughing at a corny joke. They were five survivors of the inferno who had made new lives in London: Gerald Merton with his dry cleaning shop and Henry Goldman's father, wholesaler of ladies' outerwear. Looking at this photograph, no one would have guessed what these men had been capable of – the focused, unwavering campaign of targeted killings they had pursued across several continents. And no one would have known the hell they had endured to make them do it.

‘There's Henry Goldman's father, just there,’ she pointed, her voice still quiet. ‘The only one I don't know about is this bloke here. Sid something, he was called.’

Tom looked hard at the man she indicated, the one with the raised glass. Now that he knew the story of this band of brothers, was he deluding himself or could he really see something else in these five faces? Gerald Merton had a wariness in his eyes discernible in every photograph Tom had seen. But there was something like it in the gazes of the other men, too. A steel below the surface, despite the apparently avuncular smiles. And then Tom saw it.

‘Is that what I think it is?’ he asked, pointing at the blur of grey on the forearm of the Sid whose last name Rebecca could not remember. His sleeve was rolled up, his forehead twinkling with sweat, perhaps the aftermath of a strenuous dance. Tom had been to a Jewish wedding once, a friend from college. Those traditional dances were quite a workout.

‘Yes, that's what you think it is. Sid was in Auschwitz.’ And her finger hovered over the blurred image of a number, tattooed on the arm of a man, raising his glass at a wedding more than three decades earlier.

Tom couldn't help but stare into his eyes, barely visible behind the thick apparently tinted glasses. What horrors had they seen? Had the images lingered? Could Sid see them even then, on a night of dancing, sweaty dress shirts and toasts?

‘Sid Steiner! That was his name. Sid Steiner.’

‘Is he alive?’

‘I have no idea. But I think we'd better find out.’