Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

No wonder she had looked so shaken: that simple piece of paper must have looked like a message from the grave, Gerald Merton pleading to be remembered.

In the silence, pregnant with poignancy, she didn't hear the dull vibration of Tom's BlackBerry, tucked inside his jacket pocket. He waited till she had turned back to the bookshelves to pull the device out and watch the screen light up. It was a message from Jay Sherrill and it consisted of only a single line:

Prints on gun match Merton's.

‘Thanks for seeing me, Commissioner.’

‘No need to thank me. Me who asked you to report direct to this office.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So what you got, Sherrill?’

‘Progress, sir. And in an unexpected direction.’

‘Usually say “shoot”. Not quite right in this context, I grant you. Why don't you go ahead?’

‘The starting assumption yesterday morning was that Gerald Merton was an innocent old man, a tragic case of mistaken identity.’

‘That's right.’

‘Well, some of our early findings shed doubt on that basic assumption.’

‘Do they indeed?’

‘Yes, sir they do. The first alert Intel Division had was a meet-up at the premises of an arms dealer-’

‘The Russian.’

‘Yes. His phone number appears on the cellphone of Gerald Merton. Second, an overnight search of the deceased's hotel room has produced a weapon, a polymer-framed revolver, with steel inserts, Russian made.’

‘Hitman's friend.’

‘Precisely, sir. Serious calibre. It was secreted in the room at the Tudor Hotel where Mr Merton was registered. And third, the gun has Merton's fingerprints on it, sir. All over it.’

Riley sat back in his chair, testing its recline mechanism to the full. He did not break eye contact with the detective. He was assessing him, like a head teacher weighing up a bright pupil. ‘That's all fascinatin', Sherrill. Really is. Anyone else in NYPD know about this?’

‘No, sir. You asked that I report only to you.’

‘Good work, Sherrill. Let's keep it that way.’ He let his seat spring forward, then he leaned forward some more. ‘How'd your interview with the Watch Commander go?’

Sherrill went back to his notes, flicking through to the right page. He hadn't expected this. The Watch Commander's testimony had been wholly predictable, nothing compared to what Sherrill had found on Merton. Why had the Commissioner not reacted to what was clearly the biggest news here?

‘Watch Commander Touré reported that a phone call had come to him from his liaison at the NYPD, suggesting a heightened state of vigilance in respect of a man wearing dark black coat, woollen hat and-’

‘And when'd this come through?’

‘At approximately 8.49am, sir.’

‘And when was the shooting?’

‘8.51am, sir.’

‘Now, what do you notice about those two times, Detective?’

‘They are two minutes apart, sir.’

‘My, that Harvard education is worth every cent! Exactly, Mr Sherrill. Exactly! Which tells us what?’

‘Well, it could be a coincid-’

‘No coincidences in police work, Mr Sherrill. It tells us there was live intelligence, that's what it tells us.’

‘You mean that someone had seen the suspect approaching the United Nations building?’

‘That's exactly what I mean. Now, what was the precise wording of the message received by the Watch Commander at the UN?’

Jay Sherrill turned one more page of his notebook. He looked back up at the Commissioner. ‘It was an urgent warning, sir. Urging UN to be on the lookout for a possible terror suspect.’

‘Urgent, you say. Almost as if they knew he was on his way.’

‘But that makes no sense, sir.’

‘And why's that, Mr Sherrill? Why does it make no sense?’ Riley was leaning back again. He was enjoying himself.

‘Because anybody who actually saw Gerald Merton would have seen that he was, in fact, a very old man. The very opposite of a terror suspect.’

‘You'd think so, wouldn't you, Mr Sherrill? You and I would certainly have done that, wouldn't we?’

Now it was the detective's turn to study the face of his boss. Slowly, out of the darkness, a picture was emerging, a glimpse of what might be in the Commissioner's head. He didn't yet fully comprehend what his boss was after, but now, at last, he had an inkling of it. Whatever else, it was not a simple resolution of the killing of Gerald Merton.

‘What do you want me to do, Commissioner?’

‘An excellent question, Detective. I want you to find out who exactly fed that urgent advisory to Watch Command at the UN and on what basis they gave it. Because a crucial mistake was made in this case, the mistake that led that unlucky Belgian policeman-’

‘Portuguese.’

‘Whatever. It led an unlucky, terrified cop to make a fatal error. We need to find the precise source of that original error. I want to know which part of the law enforcement apparatus of this city-’

‘But it may not have been a mistake, sir. The gun, the fingerprints-’

Riley held up his right palm, in a gesture of hush. ‘All in good time, Mr Sherrill. All in good time.’

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.’