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‘Then I need you to close this thing down, Tom. Make it go away. This is just too much of an embarrassment. We can't have the grieving family on television holding up pictures of Grandpa, wanting to send the bloody Secretary-General or fuck knows who else to jail. You need to go to England, find the family and do whatever it takes to make it go away. Put on the English accent, do the whole thing.’
‘I don't need to put on an English accent.’
‘Even better. Play the charming Brit and offer a gushing apology, massive compensation package, whatever they want. But no grandstanding, OK? No photo-ops with the Secretary-General or any of that bullshit. He's new. We can't have him associated with this.’
Tom took a drag of his own cigarette. He could see the politics clearly enough: his departure had left no Brits in the Office of the Legal Counsel. Plus it probably helped to have an outside lawyer do this: arms' length, so that the UN itself would be less tainted by whatever shabbiness Tom would have to resort to in order to get a result.
But it was hardly a top-flight legal assignment. He would not have to liaise with Foreign Office lawyers or diplomatic officials. He would probably have to deal with some London ambulance-chaser desperate to get his hands on a pot of UN cash. Bit of a waste of his CV: eleven years as an international lawyer with the UN and before that a legal resumé that included spells doing litigation in a City firm and three years as an academic at University College, London.
‘There are plenty of Brits around who could do this, Henning. Maybe not at the most senior level, but just below. Perfectly capable lawyers. Why me, Henning?’
‘Because you're a safe pair of hands.’
Tom raised an eyebrow: a lawyer who'd left the UN the way he had was not what you'd call a safe pair of hands. Come on, the eyebrow said, tell the truth.
‘OK, you're not a conventional safe pair of hands. But you're someone I can rely on.’
Tom made a face that said flattery wasn't going to work.
Henning sighed in resignation. ‘You know what they're like, the young lawyers here, Tom. Christ, we were both like that not so long ago. Full of idealistic bullshit about the UN as “the ultimate guarantor of human rights” and all that crap.’
‘So?’
‘So we don't need any of that now. We need someone who will do what needs to be done.’
‘You need a cynic.’
‘I need a realist. Besides, you're not afraid to put the rulebook to one side every now and then. This might be one of those times.’
Tom said nothing.
‘Above all, I know that you'll regard the interests of the United Nations as paramount.’ The hint of a smile playing around the corner of Henning's mouth gave that one away. He couldn't risk some British lawyer who might – how would one put it? – lose sight of his professional allegiances. Always a risk a Brit might give a call to his old pals at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, just to keep them in the loop. Lunch in Whitehall, a bit of chit-chat, no harm done. But there was no risk of that with Tom Byrne, graduate of Sheffield Grammar and the University of Manchester. He could be relied on not to betray the UN to his old boy network for one very simple reason: he didn't have an old boy network.
‘You know me: I'm a citizen of the world.’
‘I knew I could rely on you, Tom.’
‘You did a lot for me, Henning. I haven't forgotten.’
‘After this, we're even. Really. Which is not to say you won't be properly rewarded.’
‘Not the usual crappy UN rates?’
‘Separate budget for this, Tom. Emergency fund.’
‘So I'm to give the family whatever they want.’
‘Yep. Your job is to make sure that, after today, none of us ever hears another word about the dead old guy. When he gets buried, I want this whole thing buried with him.’
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_e9a6f78a-c4e3-57b6-8216-82a3d5fd9e84)
Henning led them through the press gauntlet, the pair of them using their shoulders to carve a passage. Reporters threw questions at Henning even though they clearly had no idea who he was but he said nothing until they had reached the entrance of the makeshift tent that contained the dead man's body.
‘Tom, this is Jay Sherrill. The Commissioner tells me he is one of his elite, first grade detectives.’
‘First grade? That sounds junior.’ He couldn't help it: the guy looked about nineteen. Maybe early thirties, tops. Neatly pressed shirt; studious absence of a tie; sleek, hairless, handsome face. Tom could have drawn up a profile of Jay Sherrill then and there: one of the fast-track Ivy Leaguers favoured by all urban police forces these days. They were the young guns who spoke and dressed more like management consultants than cops. Had probably done a fortnight on the street and was thereafter catapulted to the first rank of the force. Tom had read an article about men like this in the New York Times magazine, how they never wore uniform – they were ‘out of the bag’ in NYPD jargon – and how they did their own hours. They were the new officer class.
‘Young, sure. But with a ninety-six per cent conviction rate.’ The accent was posh Boston; he sounded like a Kennedy.
‘Ninety-six per cent, eh? Which one got away?’
‘The one with the best lawyer.’
Henning stepped in. ‘All right. As you know, Commissioner Riley and I have agreed that the UN and NYPD are going to work closely on this one. And that means you two fellows. Are we clear?’
‘We're clear,’ said Sherrill, making a pitch for the high ground of maturity. ‘Mr Byrne, I'm on my way to meet the head of security for this building. You're welcome to come with me.’
Tom dutifully followed, noting Henning's schoolmasterly gaze. He would behave himself. ‘Let's hope you're the first person he's spoken to,’ he offered, in a tone he hoped suggested a truce.
‘You worried he might have talked to the press?’
‘No, I'm worried he might have talked to someone in this building. It leaks.’ Tom was thinking of his own mission to London, what he would say to the family. He didn't need a whole lot of rumours reaching them before he did.
As they walked through the visitors' marquee, now closed to the public, and into the eerily quiet foyer of the main building, Tom raised a palm in farewell to Henning, off to a meeting of the top brass. He realized what a pushover he had been. The Tom Byrne of more than a decade ago would have been appalled. But that Tom Byrne was long gone.
They rode in an empty elevator to the first floor. For Tom, being back in this building was at once instantly familiar and yet, after more than a year's absence, oddly nostalgic too – like coming back to your own city after a long trip abroad.
Harold Allen was waiting for them. Tom had never spoken to him before, but he recognized him. He'd once been the most senior African-American officer in the NYPD before he had famously sued his own force for racial discrimination. Once tipped as a future commissioner, he was now in charge of a mere corner of the city he might have led – and, thought Tom, even in this small patch he had managed to run headlong into a weapons-grade scandal. The anxiety was carved into his face. He showed his guests to a round table in the middle of the room, a few paces ahead of his own desk. Tom noticed the multiple framed NYPD citations for bravery on the wall.
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.’
CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_9b5398b0-e00e-59a8-8b48-b3d281a82787)
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?’
She stepped closer and, with no hesitation, pulled back one eyelid, then another, as roughly as if she were checking on a roasting chicken.
For that brief second, the inert lump of dead flesh, a butcher's product, was transformed back into a man. The eyes seemed to look directly at Tom's own. If they were saying something, Tom had missed it. The moment was too short.
‘I'm sorry, can I see his eyes again?’
‘Pretty striking, huh?’
Tom hadn't noticed it the first time but now, as she pulled back both lids, pinning them with her latex thumbs and holding the position, he saw immediately what she meant. They were a bright, piercing blue.
‘He was strong, wasn't he?’ Tom pointed at the thickness of the dead man's upper arms. When his father had hit his seventies his arms had thinned, the skin eventually flapping loosely. But this corpse still had biceps.
‘You bet. Look at this.’ She pulled back the rest of the sheet revealing a flaccid penis, its foreskin drooping limply, before prodding the man's thick thighs: the butcher's shop again. ‘That's some serious muscle.’
‘And that's unusual for a man this age?’
‘Highly. Must have been some kind of fitness freak.’
‘What about that?’ It was Sherrill, anxious not to be forgotten – and to remind Tom who was in charge here. He was gesturing at a patch of metal bandaged to the dead man's left leg like a footballer's shin pad.
‘That appears to be some kind of support. It's unusual. When plates are used in reconstructive surgery, they're inserted under the skin. This is obviously temporary. Maybe it was used as a splint after a muscle strain. Odd to use metal though. It will probably become clearer once we see the deceased's medical records.’
