Sam Bourne: The Final Reckoning

Sherrill wasted no time on pleasantries. ‘As you can imagine, I've got a few questions for you, Mr Allen.’

‘Yeah, you and this whole goddamn building.’

Tom listened and took notes as Allen talked through the sequence of events: the initial tip-off from the NYPD about the Russian; the recorded phone call from the hotel room to reception; his own instruction to his watch commanders to be on the lookout for a man fitting the description the police had provided; how that message had been passed onto the guards at the gate, including one Felipe Tavares; the confusion and finally the shooting. A tragic case of mistaken identity.

‘Where is Officer Tavares now?’

‘He's with one of the NYPD support officers.’

Tom's forehead crinkled into a question mark.

‘Getting counselling.’

‘Counselling? I see.’ That would look great in the Daily News. ‘Minutes after they'd murdered a pensioner, the authorities sprang into action – pouring out tea and sympathy for the killer.’

‘Yes, Mr Byrne, counselling. I guess you've never been on the front line in law enforcement. Tavares is in a state of grave shock. He's a good man. Just came from him now.’

‘How's he bearing up?’ It was Sherrill, his voice softened.

‘Keeps moaning and repeating, “That could have been my father. That could have been my father”. He's in a bad way.’

‘Do we know how old the dead man was?’

Allen got up and walked back to his desk. He was heavy, wide; probably had been fit enough as a young man, thought Tom, eyeing the commendations on the wall. But somehow he had let it go. He returned with a single sheet of paper. ‘Seems like he was seventy-seven years old. Name of Gerald Merton. Place of birth, Kaunas, Lithuania.’

‘Lithuania? Not many Gerald Mertons there,’ said Sherrill, with a smile that conveyed he was pleased with himself. ‘Does it say when he went to England?’

‘Nope. Just the date and place of birth.’

‘What is that you're looking at, Mr Allen?’

‘This is a photocopy of his passport.’

‘His what?’ No softness now.

‘His passport. One of my men removed it from the pocket of the deceased, seconds after he was killed. Wanted to check his ID.’

‘I strongly hope you're joking.’

‘I'm afraid not, Mr Sherrill. We put it back, though.’

‘Have your men never heard about preserving a crime scene, about contamination of evidence? My God!’

‘Handling a homicide is not what we do here, Mr Sherrill. It's never happened before.’

Tom saw an opening. ‘Can I see that?’

Allen handed over the piece of paper, but with visible reluctance. That was par for the course at the UN; people were always clinging onto information, the only real currency in the building.

Tom stared at the copy of the photograph. It was grainy, but distinct enough to make out. The man was clearly old, but his face was not heavily lined, nor thin and sagging. Tom thought of his own father in his final months, how the flesh had wasted away. This man's head was still firm and round, a hard, meaty ball with a close crop of white hair on each side. None on top. The eyes were unsmiling; tough. Tom's eye moved back to the place of birth: Kaunas, Lithuania. Under nationality, it stated boldly: British Citizen.

He passed it to Sherrill who scanned it for a few seconds and then said, ‘We'll need to have copies of all the paper you've got in this case.’

‘You got it.’

‘And I think we need to speak with Officer Tavares.’

‘That may be difficult. He's not in a state right now-’

‘Mr Allen, this is not a request.’

Allen's temples were twitching. ‘I'll see what I can do.’

Tom understood that the NYPD had made a priority of this case: the deployment of summa cum laude Sherrill proved that. He understood why they had done it, too: the politics of New York City meant that even a terror-attack-that-wasn't, since it involved an iconic target, had to get the full-dress treatment. Still, it was hard not to be impressed by seeing it in action.

By the time Sherrill had returned to the makeshift tent the corpse had already been zipped up in a body-bag and despatched to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. The post-mortem would begin immediately: preliminary results would be in within a few hours. Sherrill gestured to one of the multiple police cars still idling outside UN Plaza, its driver clearly a personal chauffeur, urging Tom to get in and join him on the back seat. This, Tom guessed, was not how the NYPD investigated the average crackhead slaying in Brownsville. The journey was short, a quick zip south along First Avenue, which had once been Tom's daily route home. The traffic was circulating again; people were out shopping. For them, the death at the UN had been a morning inconvenience that had now passed. Just past the Bellevue Hospital, Sherrill tapped on his driver's shoulder and leapt out when the car halted. ‘Ordinarily no one's allowed to witness an autopsy,’ he explained to Tom. ‘But I find a sheet of results doesn't give the full picture. And they don't say no to first-grade detectives.’

They waited only a few minutes at reception before a middle-aged woman in surgeon's scrubs appeared. When Sherrill introduced Tom she gave him an expression he translated as, ‘OK, Mr UN Lawyer. Prepare yourself for an eyeful…’

She opened a pair of double doors by punching a code into a keypad and led them down one corridor, then another. There was no smell of rotting flesh. Instead he saw fleetingly, through one half-opened door, the familiar paraphernalia of an office: zany decorations, including a stray thread of ribbon leading up to a sagging helium balloon; he heard a radio tuned to some Lite FM station. At last she walked them into what seemed to be a hospital ward. The odour of disinfectant was high.

‘All righty, let's put these on.’ She handed them both green surgical gowns and hats, pulled back a green curtain and there it was. A slab on a gurney, under a rough sheet.

She moved a pair of spectacles from her head and settled them on her nose. ‘Here's where I got to before I was so rudely interrupted,’ she said, pulling back the sheet.

The body was on its side, a vast hulk of pale white flesh like the underside of a fish, though now tinged with green. Was that the light reflecting off the curtains? Tom couldn't tell. Strangely, his eye found the unbroken flesh first. The wound, the torn opening in the back, ringed by frayed threads of red, he only saw later, and when he saw it he could not look away. It was the depth of it that appalled him, the deep, red depth of it.

‘… consistent with severe trauma to the trunk, shattered shoulder blade, ruptured lung and exploded right ventricle…’

Tom was not listening. His eye was still gazing into the crimson gash, now congealed. It had the broken, rough edges of a hole in a plaster wall, as if a fist had punched right through it.

‘Let me turn him over for you.’

The two men had been standing opposite the pathologist, with the body between them and her. Now, they moved around so that they were alongside her. There was no smell yet, but the sight was powerful enough. Tom felt a hint of nausea.

‘You can see the exit hole here. Which means you'll have to be looking for a bullet.’

Tom focused on the dead man's face. The passport photograph must have been recent; the same full, roundness of head was still visible, hard as a billiard ball. He moved his hand forward, contemplating a touch.

‘Don't!’

He looked up at the pathologist, who was holding two latexed hands up in the air. ‘You don't have gloves.’

Tom gestured his retreat and took the opportunity to ask a question. ‘Can I see his eyes?’