To Kill a Man - Maggie Costello Series 05 (2020)

by Bourne, Sam

  That still left several other unanswered questions. How did the source, whoever it was, come to have these computer records? Had the police obtained them in the last few hours, as part of their investigation into Winthrop? It could have been them who wanted them made public, prosecuting their case against Natasha before the jury of public opinion, especially, perhaps, after the revelation of the dead man’s identity had turned her into a hero. The timing wasn’t quite right though: Todd was named on Monday evening, while this envelope had been mailed earlier that day.

  Maggie examined the postmark again, just to be sure. The stamp looked real enough, but she thought of Liz, her computer geek sister, and the miracles her high school students were able to pull off, twisting and moulding photographs to look any way they wanted. Might the apparently inky stamp be a digital fake? Maybe.

  Either way, the police surely had easier, swifter and more direct ways of releasing information than shopping a memory stick around Washington news desks and doing it by snail mail. Or was this the work of a single, partisan detective, who had passed the records to a Capitol Hill contact, confident that politics would do the rest? Another thought struck. Perhaps the police had nothing to do with it. Ideologically driven folk worked in phone companies and internet service providers too.

  Still on her feet, she was back at the kitchen table. She pecked at a few keys on the keyboard and brought up the TMZ story detailing Natasha’s search history. All this focus on how the records might or might not have surfaced was, Maggie understood, so much displacement activity. It enabled her not to look at the picture the records painted, of a woman whose sexual interests apparently shaded beyond play-acting dominance and submission into something much darker. If these records were accurate, Natasha Winthrop had sought out sexual violence. Whether that was the pretence of it, the simulation of it, or the thing itself, Maggie had no way of knowing.

  And yet, without that knowledge, she could take this no further. Winthrop might have believed herself to be playing a sex game, while her attacker was bent on inflicting grave harm. Had Natasha misunderstood him that night? Or had he misunderstood her? There was only one way to find out.

  Chapter 17

  Quincy, Illinois

  ‘That’s OK, if you want to finish up while we start, that’s no problem at all. That’s good pizza, right? One of the perks of the job, my friends.

  ‘So, why don’t I get this party started? As I mentioned, I’m Alex, I’ll be your facilitator tonight. I hate that word too – I see you, Sharon! – but all it means is, I’ll be the one asking the questions, just kind of moving the ball along. Key thing you gotta know is, I don’t have any opinions at all. I’m serious! What I mean is, if I ask you about a thing, that’s not because I think that thing or that I want you to think that thing. It really is just a question. All right? And this is not Jeopardy, OK: there are no right or wrong answers. I really want to stress that: no right or wrong answers. Whatever you say is valid, because it’s your opinion. That’s why we’ve brought you here, and given you pizza and Coke – and Diet Coke too, Lauren, don’t say we don’t look after you guys! Because we want you to feel relaxed and because – genuinely – we really value what you say. Your opinion is what we want to hear. Don’t worry about what other people think, or what I think, just say what you think. Yeah? Are we good? All right. Opening topic – remember, no “good” or “bad” answers – where do you guys get your news?’

  Dan Benson looked up from his phone and through the glass: glass on his side, a mirror on theirs. He had witnessed a hundred of these in his old job, maybe more. And he knew the right pose to strike was jaded DC professional, dragged out to some motel in Nowheresville, Flyover Country, against his will. But – big but – the truth was, he was an addict. He loved focus groups, way more than was healthy. For him, it was the closest he ever got to being a reporter out on the campaign trail, trekking through the hog farms of Iowa or the snows of New Hampshire, talking to real-life, actual voters, taking the pulse of the American people. Except you didn’t have to schlep around in muddy boots, shivering in the cold outside a Dairy Queen or a Wendy’s, approaching total strangers like a homeless person (except weirder, since you had a notebook in your hand), because you were indoors, cosy and safe on the other side of that mirror, observing but unobserved. He loved it.

  Focus grouping had been one of his core duties in his last job, the one he had walked away from just twenty-four hours ago. A ‘defection’, political Twitter had called it. Benson had been re-reading some of those tweets again just now, albeit in his ‘lurker’ account, the anonymous one he maintained for precisely this purpose – liking and bookmarking in a manner impossible under his own name. The story had broken (with a little help from his own fair hand) via an Axios reporter, and had set the tone for the rest of the coverage:

  INBOX: Top Steele staffer defects to Harrison campaign. Hiring of Dan Benson, longtime aide to House Intelligence Chairman, confirms Harrison winning the money/endorsement/talent game. Prediction: Steele ain’t running. And if he was, he ain’t now.

  Most of it was positive and, crucially, all of it was clueless as to the timing. Most Hill reporters simply assumed that Dan had started working for Harrison the moment his move had been announced, not before. That assumption was helpful. The last thing he needed was for people to start working back through his schedule, realizing what he was doing and who he was with during his last day on the chairman’s payroll . . .

  Now, though, he had put his phone away and was staring hard through the glass. In the past, when he had done focus groups for Steele or for senate colleagues on the judiciary committee, usually to test out the favourables/unfavourables on a Supreme Court nomination, things would stall right at the start. The facilitator would hold up a picture, saying, ‘Can anyone tell me who this is?’ and there’d be a circle of blank faces as they contemplated a judge they’d never heard of. Not this time.

  Every single person in that room was nodding in recognition at the picture of Natasha Winthrop. Benson made a mental note: Don’t ever let that photograph make it within one thousand miles of one of our ads. It looked like the cover of People magazine, Winthrop’s teeth white and dazzling, her eyes and earrings sparkling, the hair short, dark and perfect.

  One of the focus groupers was speaking. A white man, early fifties, assertive – always the first to speak, in Dan’s experience. ‘. . . don’t normally watch those things, I’m more of a Monday Night Football guy, but she was something else. She lit the place up.’

  A black woman in her thirties, who had identified herself earlier as a dental nurse, agreed. ‘My son was laughing at me, ’cause I kept wanting to put C-SPAN on.’ The others laughed warmly, several of the women nodding. ‘Those hearings were electric. The way she tore into all those – excuse me for saying it – but all those men, just showing them up like that. Sheesh.’

  So far, so familiar. Benson had seen the polling data; he didn’t need to be told that Winthrop’s performance as the lead inquisitor for Steele’s committee had made her a star. Still, seeing the data on a laptop screen was one thing. Hearing it from actual human beings, live and unprompted, was something else. Not for the first time, he wondered if his boss – his new boss – could ever defeat such a candidate, should it come to that. Or was Senator Tom Harrison fated to be yet another establishment frontrunner steamrollered by a national phenomenon?

  The facilitator had moved on to recent events. ‘Now the person we’re talking about was in the news recently. Anyone want to tell me why?’

  ‘She killed that evil rapist with her bare hands.’ It was the dental nurse, quick as a flash. The others were agreeing.

  The moderator was looking around the room, trying to draw out those who had so far said nothing. He lighted on Eleanor, a white, retired schoolteacher. ‘What did you think about all that, Eleanor?’

  The woman paused, as if weighing up her desire to speak against
the propriety of doing so. She pursed her lips slightly, a gesture that instantly encouraged Benson. She cleared her throat.

  ‘I know they want us to believe she killed that man in self-defence and all that. But I don’t know. It just don’t sit right with me.’

  ‘What don’t sit right?’ It was the nurse, not the moderator.

  ‘What happened. In her house.’ A pause. ‘And before.’

  Dan leaned forward, his face just inches from the glass.

  Alex, the facilitator, broke the brief silence. ‘What happened before, Eleanor?’

  ‘I don’t know whether I like to talk about such things. I’m surprised the rest of you don’t bring it up. Y’all saw it as well as I did.’

  ‘Oh, OK, OK.’ The white guy. ‘You’re talking about those dating sites.’

  ‘If that’s what they call them.’ Eleanor’s arms were now firmly folded. ‘I don’t think it was a date she was looking for. Least not a date as I understand the word. I think she was looking for sex. Unnatural sex.’

  ‘That don’t mean he got a right to rape her.’ The nurse thumped the table as she spoke.

  ‘I never said he had.’

  ‘So what are you saying then?’

  ‘I’m saying that . . . what I’m saying is that, there’s more to this than meets the eye. That’s all.’

  The nurse folded her own arms now, to match her antagonist, then did a quarter-turn, showing Eleanor her shoulder. But, Dan noticed, the rest of the group, or at least those who had kept quiet, seemed to side with Eleanor. They didn’t want to do so out loud; perhaps they were worried about adopting a socially unacceptable position in public. (And, by God, if Dan hadn’t seen that phenomenon at work before.) And yet their gut instinct was suspicion. Natasha Winthrop was gorgeous, exciting and TV gold. They were thrilled to watch her. But that didn’t mean they trusted her.

  Dan Benson sat back in his seat, letting it rock on its hind legs. Here, at last, was something he could work with.

  WEDNESDAY

  Chapter 18

  Cape Cod, Massachusetts

  Maggie had only to close her eyes and she was back in Ireland. A deep breath through her nostrils, and it was Saturday afternoon on the beach at Sandymount, the air cool, its scent combined with the spray of the waves. The spell did not end even when she opened her eyes to see Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and the mighty Atlantic rather than Dublin Bay and the Irish Sea. The only difference between now and then was that in those days she could run around, seemingly for hours, without ever feeling a hint of strain; now she could hear herself panting.

  No such trouble for Natasha, she couldn’t help but notice, who was now a good fifteen yards ahead. Maggie suspected the idea had been for the two of them to take a run together, chatting away as they jogged along the beach. But Maggie could run or she could talk: she could not do both. Perhaps Natasha, able to speak steadily even as she pounded along the shore, found it awkward, being together in silence like that. Or maybe she found it frustrating, having to keep her speed down to allow Maggie to keep up. Either way, Natasha was now surging ahead, a trim, taut figure that testified to someone who knew how to run. The sight brought back a set of feelings Maggie thought she had left behind in adolescence: jealousy, admiration, pleasure, inadequacy, desire, all jumbled together in a strange, vaguely unsettling stew.

  If she’d have known it would have been like this, she’d never have said yes. If Natasha had baldly invited her to come running in Cape Cod, she would of course have said no. But it hadn’t happened quite like that.

  Instead, after Maggie had paced around her apartment a few more times, she had sent Winthrop a message:

  We need to talk.

  A reply had come seconds later.

  We do.

  Maggie suggested they meet at Winthrop’s office. Natasha said no, she no longer considered her office ‘secure’, which Maggie took to mean that it was no longer leakproof, rather than unsafe. Maggie was thumbing out some alternative venues, including her own apartment, when the phone started ringing. It was Natasha’s voice, against the hum of traffic. She was driving, she said, already on her way northward. It would be a nine-hour drive: ‘Just the thing to clear my head.’

  Maggie urged her to turn around, this very moment. It was madness to leave DC. It would look like an admission of guilt. Natasha needed to be in town to put out a response to the phone records, and to strategize next steps. Going to ground now would look awful, confirmation that the story was indeed as bad as it looked, if not worse; so bad in fact that Natasha Winthrop dared not show her face. And that was before you even got to the legal implications, given that the police were bound to press hard on this new line of inquiry. What if the police demanded to bring Natasha in for more questioning, as was highly likely, only to find the subject of their inquiry had absconded?

  Natasha had laughed at that. ‘No one’s absconding. I’m not fleeing the country. I’m not defecting to Moscow.’ She urged Maggie to calm down, get some sleep and then catch the early shuttle to Boston the next day. Natasha would pick her up at the ferry terminal in Provincetown. ‘Oh, and bring sturdy shoes,’ she said, before hanging up.

  And that’s what had happened, though it had taken a while for them to meet up. Maggie paced around MacMillan Wharf for several minutes before they found each other. For one thing, Natasha had arrived in a beaten-up vintage Saab that seemed designed to elude attention. Maggie had all but ignored it, assuming it to be abandoned. Even when she squinted inside, she had looked away. The woman in the car looked old, with a full head of silver hair.

  But then a window had been wound down, a waving hand had emerged and Maggie had crossed the street to take a closer look. Once she was near enough, the old woman had said firmly, ‘Get in’, and the voice confirmed it. It was Natasha Winthrop.

  Once they’d driven off, she pulled off the silver hair-do and chucked it onto the back seat. ‘The one great advantage of this boy’s haircut of mine. A wig just slides right on it. Fantastically convenient.’

  ‘You mean, this is not the first time you’ve gone out in disguise?’

  ‘Only since the hearings. It became tedious. I couldn’t go to Safeway; everyone wanted a stop-and-chat. But when I popped that thing on, I could whisk round in ten minutes. I fear this is something that awaits us, Maggie: there is nothing more invisible than an older woman.’ She held up her hands in the manner of a monster from a horror movie, as if the very notion of a woman over the age of fifty was terrifying. ‘I’m rather looking forward to it in a way. Imagine the things you could do if no one noticed you were there.’

  Maggie found herself smiling, involuntarily. She had given Natasha that little lecture about not looking like a fugitive, and here she was all but wearing camouflage.

  Maggie kept smiling, probably inanely, as Natasha powered along Route 6 in fourth gear, the Saab as heavy as a submarine. Something about Winthrop’s brio, her aristocratic confidence, her cavalier disregard for the usual proprieties was energizing. Maggie had met plenty of men like that – again, they were copiously represented among the Oxbridge boys in the press, diplomatic and NGO corps in Africa – but their upper-crust insouciance, their casualness and, above all, their sense of entitlement had always left her cold. Somehow, though, Winthrop was different.

  The obvious explanation was that she was a woman, who, no matter how well-born, would have had to fight hard to get to where she was now. Still, that was only part of it. The larger explanation, Maggie knew, was harder to pin down. It was located somewhere in that gleam in Natasha’s eye, the playful, conspiratorial hint that there was a joke to be had and that both she and Maggie were in on it. Maggie might not know it yet, but she would, in time. Or at least that was the promise hinted at by that look in Natasha’s eyes.

  Soon they were off the main road, turning down a winding lane through woods and past lakes – or ‘ponds’, as Natasha called
them. The houses were becoming larger and more infrequent. Eventually, there was a small turning, and a narrower lane. It took Maggie a moment to realize that they were on private property, that the fields and lawns on both sides were all part of a single estate. The lane finally widened out into a sweeping gravel driveway and before them stood a wide, old house, its roof slate-grey, its window frames a clean, brilliant white, its bricks a weathered reddish-brown, so weathered that Maggie knew that she was not looking at mere colonial-style but the thing itself. The house formed an L-shape, with a mighty, aged American beech tree in the front lawn. Natasha came to a stop, pulled on the handbrake and said, ‘Here we are then. Home.’

  Maggie got out of the car, but said nothing. It wasn’t so much the scale of the house – she had been in more than enough McMansions, including the homes of multiple party donors in the affluent suburbs of Chicago or Philadelphia, to know that size and taste were often in inverse proportion – but its solidity, its rootedness. Such places were so rare in America that it briefly floored her. The Winthrops, Maggie knew, were one of the original Boston Brahmin families, that handful who could trace their roots to the very first colonists to set foot in the New World, those who had arrived dreaming of a new England. Here was the proof.

  ‘We often get that,’ Natasha said, smiling widely at Maggie’s dumbstruck silence. ‘Pilgrim’s Cove is a magical place. Come inside.’

  The name should have been the clue, but it hardly prepared her for what came next. Natasha pushed open the wide, solid front door and they were in a hallway. But beyond that, and opened up, was a living room whose back wall was formed of a series of tall glass doors, looking out to the sparkling blue of the ocean. The house backed right onto the beach.