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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 heavilylined, 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
    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 zipsouth 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