The Final Reckoning

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

He would have preferred to have gone somewhere else, somewhere with more people, but without the car they couldn't be choosy. So they would take their chances and simply make the ten-minute journey back to the internet café on Kingsland High Street. The second Tom walked out of the front door, he scanned the street. He saw two women pushing buggies, one on a mobile phone. It could be an ingenious cover – or nothing at all. He looked in the other direction. A postman – or was that a disguise for a lookout? Thudding over the speed bumps was a white van with two young men inside. Had it been parked until Tom emerged? Did it contain not plungers and pumps, as promised by the ‘DrainClearers’ sign painted on the side, but state-of-the-art surveillance equipment? Tom shook his head, aware that all he could do was keep looking over his shoulder, cross the road at the first sight of anyone suspicious and stick to busy streets.

It made him feel grateful that Gerald Merton had stayed in Hackney, even to the end. Well-to-do areas were almost always deserted, especially at this time of day. Kids ferried to and from school in the sealed capsule of a four-by-four; fathers returning from work in a sleek, insulated BMW; any chat with neighbours done indoors and by telephone or, for all he knew these days, computer. But in a poorer part of town, a place like Hackney, life was lived on the street. There were always people around, waiting for a bus or picking up a bottle of milk and a packet of fags from the shop. In the residential areas kids still played football in the middle of the road. They weren't told by their mothers to stay indoors, for fear of what other, rougher lads might do to them. They were the kids other kids were frightened of.

Tom appreciated it all, as they made the three or four turns towards the high street en route to the grandly titled Newington International Call Centre.

‘I've been thinking,’ Rebecca said, looking left and right as they crossed Cazenove Road. ‘Shouldn't we have heard from the police by now? About the autopsy.’

‘No news is good news. If they'd found anything, we'd know about it. If there were drugs or poison in Goldman's bloodstream, you, Dr Merton, would definitely know about it.’

‘So the police will say he died of natural causes?’

‘And therefore it's not a murder inquiry.’

‘But it should be.’

Tom thought about repeating his earlier reassurances – that Goldman's death might have been no more than a coincidence – but he couldn't do it.

They'd reached the internet café where he was gratified to see the same melancholy clientele gathered for the afternoon shift. The fake-wood phone booths were again filled to capacity; most of the computer terminals were in use. As Tom handed over a couple of pound coins, reserving the machine at the end of the row, an older, bearded man, in traditional ultra-orthodox Jewish garb, got up from the next seat along. Now there were two spaces, one for each of them.

He went straight to Google and typed in the two words which had struck him with such force in Gershon's flat. It had been such a basic error of logic he was almost embarrassed by it. What had been his request to New York? To come up with a list of everyone over seventy who was present for the week-long General Assembly. He had drawn a blank, presented with a roll-call that included a Chinese interpreter and an Israeli head of state, among others. The opposite of a list of Nazi war criminals.

But when Rebecca had complained that ‘Everyone's too bloody old,’ he had instantly seen it. Just as she had been raised in the shadow of the events of the Nazi era, so had many others of her generation. And not all of them were children of the victims. Some were the children of the perpetrators. They too might have been drawn into this strange, left-over riddle, still unfinished after all these years. They might have been enlisted into this posthumous battle just as Rebecca had been, fighting the wars of their fathers. Except these men, the ones Tom was imagining, would be fighting on the other side.

Which is why Tom so badly wanted his hunch to be wrong as he typed into the Google search field the two words that made his heart heavy.

Henning Munchau.