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

by Bourne, Sam

  Mom said things like We’ve called the fostering agency and There is an emergency fostering service but none of it really went in. I think she said You need help and She needs help a few times too. I’ve just remembered one other thing as well. She said, I thought of you staying with Aunt Chrissie but that’s not a good idea, not with Matthew being in the house. (My cousin—not my cousin—Matthew is seventeen.) I wanted to say, Why would I say anything about Matthew? He’s never hurt me. The only person who ever hurt me is P. But no words were coming out.

  And so I’m here. In a house in Briarwood that belongs to an Emergency Fosterer. A woman who has children stay here for a few nights when they’ve been kicked out of one place and waiting for the next one. Someone told me not to feel too bad, it happens quite often. She didn’t really talk to me. She just showed me the bedroom, and the small towel and the soap in plastic and pointed at the bathroom down the hall. There are little signs everywhere telling me what I’m not allowed to do. Like, No talking after 9.30pm and Lights out at 9.45pm.

  I don’t like it here. I would say I want to go home, but I don’t want to go there either. Which I guess means I have no home.

  Maggie rubbed her eyes. The journey here had taken its toll, but it wasn’t that that was making her tired. It was the agony of this young girl, the cruelty of her treatment at the hands of this ‘P’ who she had wanted to love as a brother and, most heart-breaking of all, the response of her parents. Or rather the people this little girl had considered her parents. Maggie found herself worrying for Mindy, for the damage these wounds would have inflicted on her. She thought of herself and Liz, still reeling in their thirties from the experience of growing up as the children of a mother who drank too much. She instantly heard her sister’s voice, rebuking her. Say it, Maggie: alcoholic. Not ‘drank too much’. Alcoholic. The first step to defeating it is naming it.

  Maggie smiled, imagining the conversation she and her sister had had a thousand times, usually after Liz had come back from a session with her therapist. But whatever had happened to them – and Maggie refused to believe that her mother’s condition was to blame for her being, as Liz always put it, ‘an adrenalin junkie with a Messiah complex’ – they did at least have each other. Now and at the time. Poor Mindy, alone in this ordeal. In fact, so much worse than alone, because Mindy had believed she had a mother and father who loved her and would surely protect her. Maggie had read the diary: she saw how Mindy unselfconsciously regarded this man and woman, Jim and bloody Carole, as her actual parents. A letter came in the mail saying that I am now theyre daughter and my name is the same as theyres.

  Mindy had been rejected twice over, as a baby and as a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old. Maggie remembered what it was like to be a girl that age: the awkwardness, the burning, hot-cheeked embarrassment, the self-doubt, the self-criticism, the insecurity. And that was how it had been for Maggie, who had her nan, her sister and, on good days, her ma. What must it have been like to endure all that alone, to have been abused and then cast out by the only family you’d ever known?

  Maggie felt her spirits sinking. She worried where this was heading; she was afraid she knew. In a rushed moment, to confirm her darkest expectations, she turned to the last page of the notebook. It was blank. She flicked through the preceding pages to find it, the last page covered with words, and her eye went immediately to the last line and there it was in neat blue biro ink, confirmation that this story had ended exactly as Maggie feared it would.

  Mindy Hagen is dead.

  Maggie snapped the book shut. This was what she had dreaded: that she had been reading an extended suicide note, inscribed over several years, written in real time. She felt a surge of sudden anger towards P, his parents and, unjustly she knew, towards Aunt Peggy. How dare that woman put her through this, making her read this terrible, tragic story – and for what? Mindy was dead, and none of this took Maggie any closer to helping Natasha. None of this explained what she was doing here, in the middle of nowhere, in a cold bedroom in an isolated house on the wrong side of the Atlantic. She wanted to be far away from here, back in Ireland, back when she was Mindy’s age, back when the world was, if not simple, then simpler than this.

  She moved towards the door, determined to find Peggy. She was touching the door handle when something made her look back, eyeing the journal lying there on the bed. She had done it too; she had abandoned Mindy, like everyone else in her life. She hadn’t even let her tell her story, rushing to the denouement, cutting to the chase, as impatient as a Washington official who, presented with the text of Romeo and Juliet, or Anna Karenina, would demand the Executive Summary.

  She turned back and, penitent, resumed her place in the journal of Mindy Hagen. She’d only read a few lines when she was caught by a sentence that was wholly unexpected.

  Today I went back to the library. I saw something that gave me an idea. It’s a crazy idea but I’m going to do it. I think it might be my only chance.

  Chapter 37

  Penobscot, Maine

  Glued onto the page was an item cut neatly from a newspaper. The headline immediately made Maggie’s skin tingle.

  US MILITARY FAMILY KILLED IN CAR CRASH

  Parents and daughters left dead in Germany collision

  A serving US Air Force colonel was killed on Tuesday along with his wife and daughters in a road traffic collision near the Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

  A military spokesman said Reed Aldrich Winthrop III, 48, Matilda Winthrop, 45, together with their daughters Annabel and Lilibeth, died from their injuries. The family were evacuated from the scene to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, but the four did not respond to emergency treatment and were declared dead on arrival.

  The youngest person involved, 15-year-old Natasha Winthrop, is unconscious and in a critical condition, according to the spokesman. He later said that her life was in grave danger.

  Paying tribute to Col. Winthrop, the senior ranking officer at Ramstein declared him to be, “One of the finest airmen of his generation. He was a proud and talented aviator, wholly devoted to the Air Force, to his country and to his family. Our thoughts and prayers at this time are with Natasha Winthrop, and we wish her a full and speedy recovery.”

  Contacted for comment, Miss V Winthrop of Pilgrim’s Cove, MA, said only that her “prime concern is the welfare of my niece Natasha” and that she was in touch with the authorities in Germany.

  Maggie gazed at the wall, her skin turning colder with each second. She felt a shiver form around her shoulders, then shudder down her back. She closed the book and marched out the door and into the living room. It was empty, closed up for the night. She looked into the kitchen, similarly quiet.

  She checked her watch. Quarter past ten. But that wasn’t going to stop her. She took the stairs and saw a stretch of light under the door. Allowing herself no time to change her mind, she knocked on the door loudly – too loudly for the house guest of an elderly lady at this time of night.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s Maggie,’ she said, redundantly.

  A pause. Maggie pictured Aunt Peggy on the other side of the bedroom door, weighing up her options, thinking it through. Eventually, the older woman said quietly, even sombrely: ‘Come in.’

  Maggie turned the doorknob warily. Intruding into this woman’s bedroom felt wrong and awkward. She would rather have had this conversation downstairs, a fair distance apart.

  Aunt Peggy was in her nightgown sitting up, her back propped against two pillows placed vertically, her hair pinned up. She would, Maggie saw now, have been a beautiful woman back . . . when? She didn’t know how old she was, whether she was Reed Winthrop’s older sister or younger or why she apparently had no children of her own, or even if she had ever been married. In truth, she knew nothing about her. But she believed she knew one thing – the thing that mattered.

  ‘I’ve read the diary,’ Maggie said, standing at the
end of the bed.

  ‘All of it? All the way to the end?’

  ‘I read enough.’

  ‘Ah, well that depends on—’

  ‘I read up to the moment when “Mindy” sees the report of the deaths of the Winthrop family. I think I can work out the rest.’

  ‘Can you, though, Maggie?’

  Aunt Peggy resettled herself in bed. Maggie caught a whiff of night cream. Peggy nodded towards an old leather chair in the corner. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’

  Maggie wanted to say that she was more comfortable standing, that she was not in the mood for a bedside chat, that she just wanted to get to the bottom of all this and to do it right now. She could feel the fury rising somewhere between her chest and her throat, her anger at being strung along like this, at being duped. Who did these people take her for?

  But she also knew that the fastest route to the information she needed did not include a detour over whether she should be standing or sitting. Best to comply and let this woman start talking. Grudgingly, like a teenager in a strop, she moved towards the chair and then, in a small and equally juvenile gesture of defiance, moved the chair closer towards the bed. I’m not going to sit where you tell me to sit. Finally, she sat.

  ‘Good. I wanted you to read it in her own words but—’

  ‘Whose own words? Mindy’s? Or Natasha’s?’

  ‘I wanted you to read it in her own words, but I can see you’re impatient.’

  ‘You’re bloody right, I’m impatient. I think you’ve been leading me a merry dance. And not just me, for that matter.’

  ‘Please, Miss Costello. Just listen.’

  Maggie leaned back, and put her hands on her lap. All right, the gesture said, I’m listening.

  ‘Good,’ Aunt Peggy said, with the patient condescension of an elementary school teacher, which she might well have been. ‘So you’ve seen the news report of the car accident, in Germany.’

  Maggie nodded.

  ‘Well, as Mindy records in her diary, that gave her an idea. She had a very small amount of money, a tiny amount from working a few hours every Saturday. But early the next morning, while the temporary foster mother was asleep, she collected her things and crept out of the house. She took a bus into the centre of Little Rock and walked again until she reached the Greyhound bus station. From there she took a bus to Boston. Remember, this was a fourteen-year-old girl, who’d never been out of Arkansas. And she did this on her own.’

  Maggie said nothing.

  ‘I think often of that journey. Thirty hours on that bus, a girl on her own. Mindy was very pretty, and she had been used for sex since she was ten years old. Men can detect that, I think. The bad ones. I wonder what she had to fend off during that journey. I imagine her trying to sleep, not sure if it was safe.’ She paused and looked towards the curtained window. ‘Knowing it wasn’t safe, is more accurate.’

  The silence held for a moment or two, as both imagined that journey. Maggie kept her gaze fixed on the older woman, as other memories began to encroach. Of childhood stories at her nan’s house; of sitting close to the bed in her mother’s dying weeks. Maybe it was being perched at the edge of the Atlantic, in far eastern Maine, but Ireland had felt strangely close since she had got here.

  ‘From Boston, she could afford one more bus. After that, it was hitchhiking. At night. I dread to think what price she might have paid for some of those rides. And then several stretches on foot. But somehow, two or more days after she crept out of that house in Little Rock, she turned up at Pilgrim’s Cove.

  ‘Of course, the staff didn’t want to let her in. This waif off the streets, with her peroxide-blonde hair and that southern accent. After that journey on the bus, and hitchhiking and Lord knows what else, she looked a terrible mess. I dislike the expression “trailer trash” very much, but I’m afraid that is what she looked like.’

  Maggie nodded, not in agreement but to confirm understanding.

  ‘It was only fortunate that I was out in the garden. I remember it as if it were today. I was pruning my favourite Falstaff roses: beautiful, dark crimson-red flowers. They bloom continuously, you see. I found them a great consolation, in that period.’ She paused at the memory. ‘I heard the commotion for myself. The head gardener was arguing with her, telling her she couldn’t come in. But she was asking for me by name. I remember, that’s what struck me as odd. She knew my name. And she was clearly not a reporter or anything like that, though we had had one or two of those in those days. That much was obvious.

  ‘I put down my secateurs and wandered over. I still had my gloves on. I remember hanging back, lurking really, behind the birch tree, observing this little scene. I don’t think she could see me, but I could see her.’ Aunt Peggy gave a small smile, her eyes far away. ‘The determination on that face. She wasn’t screaming, but she was loud. And forceful. She didn’t touch Henry – the gardener – she didn’t push her way in or anything like that. She didn’t need to. It was quite clear, she would stand her ground. Whatever it took.’

  Maggie cleared her throat, about to speak. But if that was meant as a cue, Aunt Peggy didn’t take it. Maggie could see that Peggy was no longer in this room. She was in Pilgrim’s Cove, in that garden more than two decades ago, watching this fourteen-year-old force of nature.

  ‘Eventually I approached, and asked what was going on. Instantly, Mindy looked at me. And – this is the strangest thing – the moment I looked into her eyes, I knew instantly. It was as if I knew the whole story. Everything that had happened, everything that would happen. I knew what she would ask, and I knew I would say yes.’

  ‘What did she ask?’

  ‘She asked to come inside. We sat at the table under the white oak. Henry brought out some lemonade, and she drank a full glass and then another. He brought out some food too, and she devoured that. I don’t think she’d eaten for twenty-four hours. But I knew that wasn’t what she was there for.

  ‘Straight away, she said, “I’ve come here to make a plea.” It was clear she had planned very carefully what she was going to say. No doubt she had rehearsed it in her mind, during that long journey. A lawyer making an argument.’ Another smile. ‘“I’ve come here to make a plea,” she said. “I hope your great-niece, Natasha, lives. I hope she makes it. But if she doesn’t, then give her identity to me. Don’t register her as dead. Give her identity to me.”

  ‘“Why on earth should I do that?” I said. And she handed me that journal you’ve been reading. Right there and then. I sat and read it at that table in Pilgrim’s Cove, with my gardening gloves on my lap. While she sat opposite me.

  ‘When I finished it, at the very same point you’ve reached, as it happens, I looked at her. And she looked back at me and we said nothing for a full minute or more. And then she said, in that southern accent of hers, “Let me start a new life, Miss Winthrop. Let your family’s name live on. Let something good come out of all this horror.”’

  Maggie could not speak for a while. Instead, she kept looking at Peggy, trying to read in those eyes the calculations that the woman would have made more than twenty years earlier. Newly bereaved, having lost her nephew and almost all his family, what would she have made of Mindy Hagen, the girl washed up on the Maine shore like a creature from another world? How would she have looked at her? Maggie pictured the older woman, assessing Mindy, sizing her up, deciding whether her story was true. The fatefulness of that moment, a moment that would change both their lives forever. The weight of that decision and the reverberations that would be felt for years to come – the decision to perpetrate a lie, to replace one life with another.

  But Peggy did not meet her gaze. She was far away, her eyes glazed with memories. Maggie had so many questions to ask, but none of them felt right for the quiet, intimate atmosphere that now filled this room. What had happened to the real Natasha Winthrop? Did she get buried somewhere else, separated from her family?
Was her body still there in a plot in Germany, or perhaps on Cape Cod, alongside her parents and sisters, unmentioned on a tombstone recording the deaths of four Winthrops when it should have been five? How had Peggy got away with not registering the death of her great-niece? Perhaps the death had been registered, but only in Germany and not in the US. Maggie had heard of such cases: it was a loophole undercover police officers had used to construct false identities, taking the birth certificates of children who had died abroad and so left no record of death. Or maybe the explanation was simpler than that, the oldest explanation in the book, in fact: maybe Peggy Winthrop had got her way, and been allowed to cut crucial corners, because she had money.

  But those questions just fed other ones. How on earth had she turned Mindy into Natasha? It would have been a transformation worthy of Pygmalion. Mindy had turned up at Pilgrim’s Cove in late June. Peggy would have had only the summer to teach her how to speak like the orphaned daughter of a New England WASP, the scion of a Mayflower clan with a long, officer-class pedigree in the US military, in time for the new term at boarding school. It would have been a completely daunting mission.

  Except Mindy would have had several crucial advantages. First, Maggie remembered what teenage girls were like: their focus was, always and forever, themselves rather than anyone else. If a new girl turned up claiming to be an expat orphan, no one would have looked too deeply. Second, the young were nothing if not adaptable. Maggie had known people at university who’d changed their accents in a week, let alone three months. Third, if Mindy Hagen was tough enough to have dragged herself from the outskirts of Little Rock, Arkansas, to Pilgrim’s Cove, Massachusetts, with nothing but one scrap of newspaper, twenty-odd dollars and a hunch to go on, then washing the dye out of her hair and the southern out of her accent would not have been beyond her. She was resilient and clever, her diary was evidence enough of that.