Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

I saw that for myself, Tom thought, the memory of her father's autopsy coming back to him.

‘Did the experience of the war- did the experience of the Holocaust leave a physical mark on him of any kind?’

‘Well, he never had a number on his arm, if that's what you're asking. Sometimes I wish he had.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, that's what people expect, don't they? Holocaust survivor, tattoo on the arm. But they only did that in Auschwitz. Did you know that? That was the only place where they branded the Jews with a number.’ She was speaking faster now, her voice different. It seemed to jangle somehow, like broken glass. ‘But my father was never in Auschwitz or in any death camp. So people couldn't see it. They couldn't tell, just by looking, what he'd been through. And he couldn't say it in one word either. Couldn't just say, I was in Treblinka. Or Sobibor. Or Belzec. Or Majdanek. Mind you, not many could say they were from there because hardly anyone ever came out. Hardly anyone survived those places. So my father either had to tell people the whole story – of the village and the burning barn and the pogroms in Kovno and his mother hanging there from the ceiling and the ghetto and the pits – or he had to say nothing. So most of the time, he chose nothing. He kept quiet. He made no speeches. He went on none of the remembrance tours. He never went back.’

She paused, thinking.

‘I didn't answer your question.’ The tone was the same one he had heard on the phone, Dr Rebecca Merton. ‘You asked about physical signs. There was one.’

‘What was that?’

‘His left foot. He was missing three toes. He lost them to frostbite in the forests, I think. When he was fighting with the partisans. It's in the notebook: how they had to wear felt shoes in the bitter cold. They didn't have any boots. You had to wait for someone to die and take theirs.’

‘And did that affect him? Missing those toes?’

‘Not really. He walked with a slight limp. As if he was carrying a heavy bag on one side. But it didn't stop him keeping in very good shape. He swam, he ran, he used to lift weights.’

There was no point hinting at it. He would have to ask directly. ‘I'm told that your father was found with some kind of metal plate on his leg, taped to his shin. Why might that be?’

She looked at Tom again, her gaze lingering, examining him. ‘I saw my father regularly, including before he made this trip and, I can tell you, he had absolutely nothing wrong with his leg. You must be mistaken.’

Tom wouldn't push it. He would just file the metal shin pad that he had seen with his own eyes among the ever-lengthening list of mysteries attached to this case.

‘And what about you?’ she said, taking the plates to the sink. ‘Do you have family here?’

‘I have a mother in Sheffield. My father's dead.’

‘Will you go and see her, while you're here?’

‘I don't think so. I used to do the dutiful son thing. Now I save the nostalgia for Christmas.’

The phone rang, the landline this time; another condolence call. Rebecca took the cordless phone and headed out into the hall.

While she was gone, Tom surveyed the damaged kitchen. Whoever had come here really had spared no mercy. They had turned the place over with brutal efficiency. Between saying goodbye to Rebecca on the doorstep and her phone call ordering him to rush back, no more than an hour had passed. They had managed to trash this place in less than sixty minutes. What had they been looking for? Was this break-in connected to the killing at UN Plaza or could it have been a coincidence? Either way, some unseen and brutal enemy now clearly had Rebecca Merton in its sights. The thought of it made him bristle.

He looked up to see her, breathless, in the kitchen doorway.

‘I just saw this downstairs, on the doormat.’ She was holding up a large white envelope. ‘Hand-delivered.’

‘What is it?’

She handed it over, sitting herself on the bench next to him, so close their thighs touched. She leaned across as he examined the blank envelope. He could smell her, the scent flooding him with lust. He tried to focus. Inside the envelope were two sheets of paper, soft to the touch, almost furry with age, held together by a single staple. On each of them was the distinct print of a manual typewriter; it was hard to tell, but it could have been a copy, the kind made by an old-fashioned stencil machine. Tom had been taught at Manchester by a professor who had clearly been setting the same reading lists since the 1950s: back in his seminars was the last time Tom had handled a document like this one.

There was no title or explanatory heading. Instead the first page featured only a list of names, apparently arranged alphabetically:

Wilhelm Albert

Wilhelm Altenloch

Hans Bothmann

Hans Geschke

Paul Giesler

Odilo Globocnik

Richard Glücks

Albert Hohlfelder

Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger

Kurt Mussfeld

Adalbert Neubauer

Karl Puetz

Christian Wirth

In each case the names had been neatly crossed out by two inked lines forming an X, the way a prisoner strikes out days on a calendar. Tom turned to the next page. The font was slightly different this time and the names were no longer sorted alphabetically:

Hans Groetner

Hans Stuckart

Joschka Dorfman

Otto Abetz

Theo Dannecker

Karl-Friedrich Simon

Fritz Kramer

Jacob Sprenger

Georg Puetz

Herbert Cukors

Alexander Laak

These names too had all been crossed out, though this time less neatly and in strokes that were not uniform, not even in the same colour ink. It seemed as if the first list had been marked in one sitting, the second at different points over time.

Other than that, the document in his hand gave no clues. Yet the more Tom looked at it, the more convinced he became that this list would explain at last the mystery of Gershon Matzkin.

‘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.