Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

Rebecca leaned forward to get a closer look at the screen, one loose curl of her hair brushing Tom's face.

Odilo Globocnik had an entry too, one befitting a senior SS apparatchik and former police leader in Lublin, credited with overseeing the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units who massacred Jews throughout Poland from 1942 to 1943.

The pattern grew clearer with each entry. SS Colonel Albert Hohlfelder, decorated for his work sterilizing Jews and other slaves through mass exposure to X-rays. SS Lieutenant General Dr Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, member of the planning staff responsible for the comprehensive liquidation of the Jewish ghettoes of Poland. SS Lieutenant Kurt Mussfeld, supervisor of Auschwitz crematorium number two in 1944. Christian Wirth, assistant to Globocnik, and responsible for implementing the principles of the T-4 euthanasia project, in which the disabled were gassed or killed by lethal injection, on a dramatically larger scale by developing extermination camps which served as state-of-the-art, industrialized factories of death.

‘So we have a list of big-time Nazis,’ Tom said finally, pushing the chair back from the desk.

‘I don't understand.’

‘Can you think of any reason why anyone would want to hand-deliver this to you? Anonymously?’

Her eyes were aflame with something Tom could not quite interpret. Was it grief, burning anew? Was it anger, at such manipulation? Was it fear at being menaced by violent intruders and anonymous callers? Tom could have looked and looked into those eyes, without ever being certain.

‘I have no idea what any of this means, Tom,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘But I know someone who might.’

Rebecca drove them through a north-east London landscape that would have been utterly alien to the Tom Byrne who grew up in Sheffield more than three decades earlier. A single, endless street seemed to pass not through neighbourhoods so much as entire continents. Turkish newsagents and kebab sellers gave way to clusters of Vietnamese restaurants, which in turn were replaced by Polish delicatessens, then storefronts promising internet access and cheap calls to Nigeria and Sierra Leone.

Out on the pavements were women whose heads were covered by hijabs, and others concealed behind the full-face niqab, a tiny letterbox slit for their eyes. Brushing past them were ultra-orthodox Jewish men whose costume was familiar to Tom from New York: dressed head to toe in black, their heads covered either in homburgs or, occasionally, striking fur numbers from a mysterious, long-vanished age. Also hurrying to prayer, though in a different direction, were Muslimmen, some in the knee-length kurta, with a kufi, a netted white skullcap, on their heads. Tom eyed up a crowd at a bus stop: a student in the shirt of the Brazilian national football team, two black men, a turbaned Sikh and three white women with prams that looked sufficiently rugged to negotiate serious off-road terrain. His expression must have been obvious because Rebecca, from the driving seat of her ancient Saab, said, ‘I see this is your first visit to the Kingsland High Street.’

They parked up and walked past a Kurdish greengrocer and a newsagent promising Muslim-friendly, porn-free shelves, until they arrived at a shabby shop front that announced itself as the Kingsland Law Centre.

Rebecca pushed the door open in a manner that suggested to Tom she had been here before. Inside, a bicycle was propped up in the entrance corridor which led to a staircase and, Tom guessed, some above-the-shop flats. There was a second door on their left which they went through.

The front half of the office was laid out like the waiting area of a down-at-heel doctors' surgery: three chairs arranged around a forlorn, fake wood table. On it were copies of Hackney Today , dated from three months earlier. The chairs were taken by men who Tom, expert in these matters after eleven years at the UN, would have guessed were Somali. One was holding a leaflet entitled Your asylum rights in the UK.

Behind a flimsy partition, a conversation that was clearly meant to be private was audible.

‘Sorry, Lionel, I need to ask you again. Have you stopped taking your medication? Do I need to call someone for you?’

Even without trying, Tom could see over the screen. Towards the back, seated in front of a desk like a customer visiting a bank manager, was an unshaven man in a baseball cap, surrounded by half a dozen plastic bags. He was muttering, not pausing to interrupt his own monologue even when spoken to directly.

Behind the desk was a man no more than thirty years old with looks that were also familiar to Tom now, though they would have been downright exotic in the Sheffield of his youth. He was handsome with a head of dark curly hair and tortoiseshell glasses. In New York, Tom would have bet with confidence that this was a Jewish lawyer and he guessed the same now.

Rebecca smiled in the man's direction with a look that suggested the indulgence of an older sister; he held up a hand in silent greeting, without interrupting his discussion with Lionel.

The unanswered phones, the threadbare carpet, the chaos: it all combined to trigger a wave of memory. Tom had briefly worked in a legal aid practice like this one when he had returned to Sheffield soon after graduating. His father's emphysema had finally caught up with him and his mother had asked Tom to return, to ‘give your old man a decent send-off’. The clientele was not quite as diverse as this lot, Tom acknowledged, but the atmosphere was the same: a tiny, no-budget practice permanently on the brink of drowning in an ocean filled with sharks.

‘Rebecca, I'm so sorry.’ The lawyer had come over now, leaving Lionel to gather up his bags. His voice conveyed condolences for her father in a tone that suggested he knew them both. ‘I've been trying to call, left a couple of messages. I guess you've been swamped. We're all so shocked.’

Rebecca waved the apology away, then swivelled to make introductions. ‘Julian, this is Tom Byrne from the United Nations. Tom, this is Julian Goldman, legal linchpin of the Hackney community – and the grandson of one of my father's oldest friends.’

Julian's smile at that, his bathing in Rebecca's recognition, told Tom all he needed to know: that this was a bright young man who had been in love with Rebecca for years, probably since childhood.

‘Lequasia, can you get us some coffee?’ he called out to a secretary Tom hadn't noticed.

Seated at a desk next to Julian's, Lequasia was surely no more than eighteen, with extravagantly straightened hair and a current commitment to admiring a set of improbably lengthy nails rather than answering the phones. She looked up now with an expression that combined indolence and derision in equal measure.

‘Come, sit over here.’ Julian grabbed a couple of stiff-backed, plastic chairs and arranged them in front of his desk.

Tom noticed that he had placed Rebecca's chair close to his own.

‘What about funeral arrangements? Is there anything I can do?’

‘When they rang to tell me what had happened, they said there'd be a delay. For an autopsy.’ She was speaking softly, Tom noticed. He wondered how much she would tell him; they had not discussed it on the way here. In New York, Tom Byrne would never have gone into a meeting to discuss the monthly stationery order without some kind of game plan. Yet here they were, winging it, with no strategy whatsoever. It was another reminder that he was losing control of this case – if he had ever had it.

‘Are you thinking of taking action against the-’ Julian shot a glance at Tom, ‘- at the people responsible for this?’

Here comes the ambulance-chaser, thought Tom.