The Final Reckoning (18 page)

‘First, I need you to calm down. We need to be really calm here.’

‘We need to get away.’

‘We can't do that. We need to stay and call the police.’

‘I mean it!’ Rebecca pulled away from Tom's embrace and glared at him. ‘We need to get away. Far away. Somewhere where there are no people.’

‘Come on, Rebecca.’

‘Haven't you noticed?’ Her voice was high, torn. ‘Something very bad is happening here and it's following us. First my flat and now this.’ She pointed at the corpse of Henry Goldman, stiff on the lushly carpeted floor of his study, his face still bearing an expression of open-eyed shock.

‘I know, I understand,’ Tom said, his mind jamming as one thought skidded and crashed into another. It was becoming impossible to deny: danger was stalking them. An image appeared before his eyes, punching him in the guts: he saw
Rebecca, brutally murdered. He pushed it away: the important thing was to stay focused. ‘We can't go anywhere. We have to report this. Right away.’ He was bracing himself for an argument, but they had no choice. Imagine how it would look if they didn't call the police. They had met Henry Goldman that afternoon, for a meeting that had ended inconclusively. Goldman had later called his son, sounding agitated; Julian would be sure to tell the police that. Tom cursed himself for losing his temper in the boardroom earlier: the secretary would confirm Julian's story, telling detectives about the raised voices she had heard. And Julian would then confirm that he had spoken to Rebecca this very evening, reminding her of his father's home address. ‘You need to call the police right now.’

‘Me?’

‘It will sound better coming from you. You're a friend of the family. You have a reason to be here. And you're a woman.’

He picked up the cordless phone charging on Goldman's desk and instantly regretted it: fingerprints. Shit, Rebecca had left her prints everywhere, including all over Goldman's body. She had touched his wrist, his neck. He looked over at the corpse: she had ripped open his shirt, popping the buttons clean off. They would have to explain all this.

Too late to undo his mistake, he dialled 999 and passed the phone to Rebecca. ‘Ask for the police.’

Still breathing fast, she spoke within a few seconds: ‘I'm calling to report a murder.’

‘No!’ Tom shouted the word without making a sound, mouthing it with desperate urgency then shaking his head frantically. He stage-whispered: ‘You're calling to report a dead body!’

She tried to correct herself but the damage was done. Tom imagined a recording of this call played to a jury in the future trial of Rebecca Merton and Tom Byrne for the murder of Henry Goldman. He knew how it would sound. He rubbed his temple.

Once the call was over, she looked at Tom. ‘I'm sorry,’ she said. ‘I don't know—’

‘You need to call Julian.’ Any delay there would look even more suspicious. She took the phone and left the room, though he could still hear her speaking in the corridor. He was struck by how quickly she seemed to have steadied herself; he imagined this was her doctor's voice, used when telling families the worst.

Through the study windows he could now see the blue light of a police car and two uniformed men emerging. Local plods, Tom guessed; the first wave, sent to secure the scene. The big boys would come later, especially once they heard what had happened.

Tom went to the door, shut but unlocked, just as they had found it. He opened the door and gestured for the two men to come in.

They introduced themselves as constables, showed their ID and pulled out their notebooks.
They started with Tom, asking for his details, looking up when he gave an address in New York. Rebecca came in, the four of them standing together in the hall like hosts welcoming guests to a dinner party.

The older of the two men spoke. ‘I would ask you to sit down, madam, but I'm reluctant to do that at this stage, in case you might alter anything that could be of importance.’ As Tom had feared, they were treating this as a crime scene.

‘So why don't you just tell me what happened?’

The policemen nodded as Rebecca explained that Henry Goldman was a friend of her late father's. To Tom's great relief, neither policeman seemed to recognize the name Gerald Merton, even though it had been across all that day's papers. They listened as she said that she had come here to carry on a conversation started earlier today. Then they both picked up their pens and scribbled furiously when she said that they had found the front door unlocked.

Of course, thought Tom. That was the crucial detail, the awkward fact that would turn this from the unfortunate discovery of a dead old man into a murder inquiry. He noticed the older officer firing regular glances his way, even when Rebecca was speaking. Wait, thought Tom, till you find out that I have known Rebecca Merton for less than twelve hours. Wait till you discover why I'm in London in the first place. He fought hard the urge to sink his head into his hands.

Soon a doctor arrived, to confirm that Henry Goldman was dead, followed by a second police car, this one containing a photographer, who immediately headed for the study, to capture images of Goldman's body in situ from every angle. Travelling with him was a plain clothes detective. Tom had now met two of these characters in the space of two days, a fact he kept to himself. This man was Asian, prompting Tom to think of Harold Allen, the one-time rising star of the NYPD who had become hobbled by a battle over police racism. That meeting with Sherrill and Allen seemed from a different age; New York felt far more than an ocean away.

The detective asked them all to step outside: he did not want any more footprints in the hallway than were there already. So they stood outdoors, in a huddle on the drive. Tom watched as the constables began cordoning off the entire perimeter with plastic tape.

This more senior man asked the same questions all over again, though now he loaded some with extra and, Tom felt, threatening emphasis.

‘So you came here and let yourselves in, and you felt comfortable doing that because you had visited this house often as a child, am I right?’

‘No, that's not—’

‘And once you're in, you find the body. You find it in the study. Which means you had to go exploring, walking down the corridor and so on, to find it, am I right? And then you, Miss Merton,
once you see it, you start trying to revive Mr Goldman. Kiss of life and so on, am I right?’

‘CPR. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation.’

‘All right. And this is because you suspect what?’

‘I suspected major cardiac arrest. A heart attack.’

‘And Mr Goldman was in what state when you made this effort?’

‘He was dead.’

‘I know that, Miss Merton, I know that.’

‘Dr Merton,’ Tom interjected. She placed a hand on his.
Don't.

The detective now gave a hard look at Tom, as if eyeing a nasty stain on the carpet, before turning back to Rebecca. ‘What I am driving at is that he obviously hadn't been dead for very long. Or you wouldn't have tried reviving him, am I right?’ ‘He was still warm, if that's what you mean.’

‘That is exactly what I mean,
Dr
Merton. Exactly. Thank you. Now what about you, Mr Byrne? What were you doing all this time?’

‘I watched Rebecca try to bring him round. I consoled her once we realized that it was too late. And then we phoned the police.’

‘Yes, the phone call. I'm curious about that. The note I have says that the call that came at 9.55 this evening was to report a
murder.
Now what I don't—’

‘Can I ask you a question, Detective?’ Tom now drew up himself to his full height, more than a foot taller than the policeman. ‘In what capacity are you interviewing us, exactly?’

Rebecca's eyes widened in warning:
Don't get hostile.

‘How do you mean, Mr Byrne?’

‘I mean, are we witnesses or are we suspects?’

The detective suddenly allowed his expression to harden. ‘That's exactly what I'm trying to work out.’

He wondered if he was about to get double-fucked. The punishment had become notorious inside the entire national bureaucracy. Civil servants in every department spoke about it: Defence, Education, you name it. That was the thing about the boss: he'd been around so long, he'd done every job. There was no one over twenty-five and under eighty with even the remotest connection to government who hadn't worked under him at least once. His dressings-down were legendary; there were schoolchildren in backwater towns who knew of them – though they surely did not speak of getting double-fucked.

No one knew when he had done it first, but there were multiple versions of the story. Some said the first victim was the luckless chump who had failed to square three crucial union bosses on the eve of a party election that the boss suddenly realized he was going to lose. ‘What kind of fuck makes a mistake like that, you fuck?’ he had asked
at the meeting of his advisers that journalists later called a pre-mortem. Two fucks in one sentence: a double-fucking.

Now the aide who cursed his luck to be travelling with the boss during this crisis was ready to place a bet that he was in line for the same treatment. Never mind what the outside world saw – Mr Eloquent Orator and Man of Letters – he knew that his boss could be a crude and brutal bully. He hadn't stayed at the top for so long by being sweet.

Still, it was late afternoon and it had been a long day. And he was old. Maybe he wouldn't have the energy for such histrionics. The aide hoped.

He knocked on the door of the boss's suite and let himself in. Unsurprisingly, the old man was dressed in a suit and shirt without a crease between them, his face clean-shaven. He was sitting at a table set for afternoon tea – one of the boss's anglophile affectations – with a clear, picture window view of Manhattan easing its way towards dusk.

‘Any news?’ he said, before the aide had even crossed the room. No hello, no invitation to join him, not even a look round. These were not good signs.

‘Some news, sir.’ He cursed himself for not having rehearsed this moment; he should have sat down with a pen and paper and worked out precisely what he was going to say.

‘Umm?’

‘Good news and bad news, you might say.’

‘What's the bad news?’

Damn.

‘Well, it only really makes sense once you've heard the good news, sir,’ the aide began, incredulous that he could have walked into so obvious a cul-de-sac. ‘Which is, that Henry Goldman will be giving us no further trouble, sir. He did not manage to pass on the, er, critical information to the subj— sorry, the people we're following, sorry, I mean the people we're watching, that is to say, are interested in—’

‘You're babbling. What's happened?’

‘Goldman is dead, sir.’

‘What? How?’

‘Tonight. At his home, sir.’

The old man's face was reddening. ‘Are we responsible?’

‘Not in any way that could be proved, I don't think, sir.’

‘You don't THINK?’ The boss slammed his fist on the table, sending cutlery, plates and a milk jug leaping into the air. ‘What do you mean, you don't
think?
What the fuck happened there?’

Here we go, the aide thought. It's coming.

‘Was I not clear in my instructions?’ Now the voice was low, calm – which only made it more terrifying. ‘Was I in any way unclear? Or did I spell out, in words any moron could understand, that there were to be no casualties? We could
persuade, even intimidate, but nothing more. Did I not make that CRYSTAL CLEAR?’

‘Our men were following those orders, sir.’

‘Don't be an idiot.’

‘The trouble is, Goldman had a weak heart. The minute he saw them, there in his house, he started shouting, then clutching his chest. They didn't touch him. It just happened.’

‘Did they try to save him?’

The aide hadn't even thought of that. ‘I don't think so, sir.’

The boss was no longer shouting. ‘I think in my day, men on such a mission would not just have left a man dying. They would have done something.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The old man was slumped in his chair; he looked somehow smaller. ‘Did they find anything?’

‘Yes.’ He was about to say that that was the good news, but thought better of it. ‘As it happens, Goldman was going through some papers when our men arrived. They haven't had time to analyse them yet but they believe they relate to our issue.’

‘What if there are other papers?’

‘He was going through a box, sir. It seemed as if everything had been kept in one place. Probably hidden.’

‘And those papers are safe now?’

‘Perfectly.’

‘Any mention of,’ his voice trailed off, as if he were embarrassed, ‘by name, I mean?’

‘Don't yet know that, sir. There's some translation work to be done.’

‘What about the girl and that man?’

‘They discovered Goldman's body.’

‘Are they in trouble?’

‘Our information is that they've been taken away by police and arrested. They're in custody now.’

The old man rubbed his chin. Whether he was pleased or dismayed by this last item of news the aide could not tell. The boss was simply processing the information, calculating.

Finally, he threw down his napkin and pushed back his chair. Then, barely audibly, he muttered, speaking more to himself than to the official who was still standing by the table, like a waiter poised to clear away the plates. ‘What have we started here?’ he said. And with that, he waved the man away.

The aide receded from the room in soft steps, closing the door behind him almost noiselessly. No double-fucking then. The boss had been subdued rather than livid. And, in a curious way, that was altogether more frightening.

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.