Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

‘I'm not.’

‘So death is not the great leveller after all.’

‘Not in The Jewish Chronicle. There it is, Social and Personal. Enter Sid Steiner there.’

He did and three came back. Tributes to a ‘Dear brother, now at peace and sadly missed’ and ‘thoughts with the family at this sad time’, but none that struck Rebecca as the right Sid Steiner. Either the age or the family names were wrong.

Tom put the machine to one side and shifted position to face her. ‘Is it possible he died quietly, without an announcement?’

‘No. If you're as Jewish as Sid Steiner, you die in The Jewish Chronicle.’

‘So where is he?’

‘I don't know.’

‘OK,’ said Tom. 'We'll do this the old-fashioned way. We'll get some sleep and in the morning we'll start working the phones.

On an improvised bed of slashed cushions and a torn sofa, Tom tried to slip into sleep. Rebecca was next door, in her father's bedroom. He knew he was exhausted, that the days seemed to have merged into a single stretch of time without rest. And yet his mind was sprinting.

A succession of images was flipping through his head like the pages of a child's flick-book. He saw a boy in ghetto rags, then an old man shot on the steps of the UN, then a woman's body swinging from a rafter, then the smiling pathologist in New York, then Rebecca's crooked smile and then, without warning… Rebecca.

There she was, framed in the doorway, the bedroom light revealing her shape. She was wearing only a shirt.

Tom brought himself up so that he was resting on his elbows. He didn't say a word, and neither did she.

Their kisses were as hungry now as before – hungrier for having been thwarted. The touch of her skin, the scent of her, sent such a voltage through him he felt he might be burning. And there in the shadows, their sweat and their taste mingling, the moment he entered her was as if they had entered each other. The intensity of it, so great that it banished all awareness of their surroundings, frightened him.

Afterwards, the silence seemed to bind them together. Her head lay on his chest and it was the sensation of a tear falling onto his skin that made him speak.

‘Rebecca?’

He could feel her trembling now, a quiet sob.

‘Is this because… of here? Because of where we are?’

‘No.’

‘What is it?’

‘I just wish this hadn't happened like this.’

He stroked her hair, certain that his first instinct had been right: it was madness for them to have made love here, in the home of her dead father.

She spoke again. ‘With all this going on, I mean. I wish it could have happened another way. I'm so sorry.’

‘I can handle it if you can.’

The silence returned, but this time Tom knew it was the prelude to another question.

‘How come there's no Mrs Byrne?’

‘Is it that obvious?’

‘It is to me. Was there ever one?’

‘No. I used to be married to the work. And then, after everything that happened, I sort of shut out the future, along with the past. Made my home in the present. I couldn't plan much beyond dinner reservations.’

‘You're speaking in the past tense.’

‘Maybe I've changed.’

‘When?’

‘In the last day or two.’

She got up, headed for the kitchen and returned with a glass of water. She drank from it, passed it to him, then lay back down, skin touching skin.

‘How come there's no Mr Merton? Sorry, I mean-’

‘It's OK. Well, there's the patients. They take a lot out of you.’

‘But that's not the whole story.’

‘No. The truth is, it was hard with my dad. I was his only child. And then, after Mum died, I was his only family. Marrying someone would have felt like I was-’

‘-leaving him.’

‘Maybe.’

‘What would he have thought of me?’

‘Well, you're not Jewish for a start.’

‘So?’

‘So, let's not get into it. That's a whole other psycho-drama you don't need to know about.’

‘Rebecca-’

She turned swiftly to face him and placed a finger on his lips. ‘Don't. Don't say anything.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I'm trying to be like you. I grew up my whole life either drowning in the past or worrying about the future. I want to see if I can enjoy the present. Just for once.’

When he woke a little after eight Rebecca was no longer lying next to him. She was up and dressed, explaining that she had been too impatient to sleep. She wanted to start the search for Sid Steiner immediately.

She reached for the phone, tried directory enquiries first, and in vain, then turned to the phone book. She circled one number and dialled it, only for the call to be fielded by an answering machine. The voice belonged to Sid Steiner – but it was an accountancy practice in Hendon, no connection.

‘All right then,’ said Tom, swallowing his pride. ‘What about this Dan, then?’

‘That was twenty-five years ago. I was about seven years old. I have no idea where he is now.’ Tom was relieved: she hadn't said it was a childhood crush.

‘You haven't stayed in touch at all? Do you know where he works?’

She shook her head. Then she brightened, instantly reaching over for Tom's BlackBerry. ‘Can you get Facebook on this?’

Tom felt a sudden awareness of the age gap between them: he relied on old-fashioned, steam-powered email. Still, at least he knew what she was talking about. ‘I'm sure I can. Why?’

‘Because that'll be the easiest way to find Dan Steiner.’

Sure enough, once logged on, it took a matter of seconds in the search box to generate an image of a depressingly handsome man about Tom's age, with a full head of dark hair.

‘I could just poke him,’ Rebecca said. When she saw Tom's startled expression, she smiled. ‘That's not what it sounds like. It's a Facebook thing.’

There was only one space left in the car park; the rest were taken up with three mini-buses which, Tom noticed, were equipped even on the outside with assorted ramps and handles for wheelchair access. The building itself was large, fashioned out of the grey concrete that seemed to have been the only material available to the architects working when Tom had come of age: Sheffield had been full of dull, faceless exteriors like this too. The housing benefit office, the local library, the council: in the 1970s all British buildings looked like this. They walked up the ramp, pausing by the entrance for Tom to roll two quick cigarettes, both making rapid work of sucking them down to a tiny stub. Rebecca had only ‘poked’ Dan Steiner an hour ago. He had – entirely unsurprisingly in Tom's view – responded immediately, happily supplying Rebecca with a phone number. She had wanted to call him there and then but Tom had vetoed it: if they were being followed, if their meeting with Henry Goldman had somehow been bugged, then it made no sense to use the phone in her father's flat. If their pursuers had been in there to wreck the place, it wouldn't have cost them too much effort to put an ear on the phone line. They had driven instead to a phone box three streets away, bringing the admission from the thirty-one year old Rebecca Merton, child of the cellular generation, that she had never used one before. Once guided by Tom, glad for the excuse to be crammed in the booth with her, so close their faces almost touched, she placed the call. She accepted Dan's condolences, asked charmingly after his wife and children, then asked if she might make contact with Dan's elderly father. She screwed up her eyes with that last request, bracing herself for Dan breaking the news that his father had moved to Israel or Manchester or even that he had, despite The Jewish Chronicle , died recently – but instead he gave her the address of the old age home on Stamford Hill where his father now lived. It was a five-minute drive from her own father's place: the last two boys of the poker club had somehow stuck together.