To Kill The Truth

by Sam Bourne

  ‘Land registry records in the Carolinas show a steady increase in transaction activity in the latter part of the decade, increasing at a rate which, when annualized, suggests a median percentage gain of between one and one point five per cent per annum . . .’

  Uri raised his palms. ‘I surrender! No more, please.’

  They were closer now. She was standing near to his chair, separated by no more than a couple of feet. They were in a hotel bedroom. She let the laughter subside and did not fill the silence that followed. She felt the atmosphere change, grow thicker, as she knew it would. It was filled with everything they were not saying.

  It was he who broke away first, showing her his back so that he could return to his screen. She felt the same sting she experienced during that dread hour in The Dubliner. Milder this time, of course. But the same message.

  Not rejection, exactly. It was more pained than that; she could see it in the way he was hunching over his machine. As if this was difficult for him, as if he too were feeling what she was feeling. Though what that was, exactly, she would have struggled to articulate.

  She cleared her throat, a signal to herself as much as to him. Focus.

  As she spoke, she took a pace back, expanding the space between them. If there had been a barometer in the room, it would have recorded a small drop in pressure.

  ‘This is definitely strange.’

  He looked over his shoulder at her, his fingers still on the keyboard. ‘What is?’

  ‘That they’re both so boring.’

  He laughed.

  ‘I mean it. You’d have assumed that a historian who gets killed would have been “controversial”. You know, one of those guys who goes on TV saying “The Pope killed Kennedy” or something.’

  Now Uri was standing upright. ‘But they’re the opposite.’

  ‘Exactly. They’re just quietly being Mr Gradgrind, compiling their little logbooks of facts.’ She saw Uri’s expression. ‘OK, big logbooks of facts. But they’re not letting off fireworks. They’re not toppling any icons.’

  ‘So why would anyone want them dead?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I don’t think—’

  There was a ping. His phone, not hers.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I set up an alert: any stories about historians or deaths.’

  She stepped closer, so she could see the screen in his hand. She caught the scent of him, reviving a memory of nuzzling into his neck.

  ‘There.’ It was a story from the Los Angeles Times. She could make out the headline – ‘Tributes paid to husband-and-wife duo, chroniclers of a century’ – but had to inch nearer to read the story.

  Stanford staff and students mourned the double loss of two of the faculty’s leading lights Tuesday, as the deaths were announced of a couple who had helped shape the teaching of US history at the college.

  Lindsey Dunn, 61, and Stuart Dunn, 64, were both tenured professors at the department, where they had taught since the mid-1980s. Known to generations of students, they were consecutive heads of the department—the husband succeeding the wife—over a period that spanned two decades. At the time of their deaths, they were still both active on campus.

  The college authorities gave no indication of the cause of death, but the Stanford police department said they were not looking for anyone else in connection with the incident. Speaking on condition of anonymity, one official indicated that the couple had taken their own lives in what seemed to be a suicide pact. “We found them together,” she said.

  ‘OK,’ Uri said, closing down the screen. But Maggie was already back at her laptop, Googling the names.

  ‘There,’ she said. She was pointing at the list of published articles under Stuart Dunn’s name.

  Patterns of slave ownership in the pre-revolutionary period

  The role of the plantation in the economy of the Deep South

  Agriculture and bondage: slavery and the cotton trade

  Uri went back to his machine, where he now pulled up a record of Lindsey Dunn’s work.

  The economic impact of the civil war on the Carolinas

  Mistress of the big house: new perspectives on the wives of slave owners

  Race and territory: cross-currents in the antebellum south

  Maggie felt herself pale. Two dead historians of slavery and the civil war might be a coincidence, but now there were four. ‘Uri,’ she began. ‘We need to think this through. Let’s see what we know—’

  But Uri wasn’t listening. He was still at the computer, now back at the LA Times story announcing the Dunns’ death. He scrolled down to the bottom, reading the paragraphs they’d initially ignored.

  Speculation centered on suggestions that the couple might have recently learned of a terminal medical diagnosis, though friends said they had no knowledge of any health problems. They were, however, said to be particularly subdued by the death of their colleague, former Stanford professor Jerome Payne, who was killed in a car crash on Sunday in Ithaca, New York, near Cornell University where he held his last post. The Dunns had collaborated with Prof Payne on several research projects and shared common areas of interest and expertise.

  Paying tribute to the couple, a statement from the president’s office praised them as, “Models of cool-eyed, methodical scholarship. In their writing and their lectures, they both preferred light to heat, led not by ideological zeal but a simple hunger for knowledge. Their only agenda was faith in the evidence and the importance of facts . . .”

  ‘So not four,’ Maggie said. ‘Five. And all of them obsessed with facts, not polemic.’

  Uri nodded. That look she remembered so well had returned. His eyes seemed to be imploring her for answers.

  She reached into her bag and pulled out her phone. She would go back to the police department and ask—

  But no sooner had she taken the device off flight mode than it vibrated with a torrent of messages. The first had been sent twenty-five minutes ago, and the rest at five-minute intervals since. They were all from Donna Morrison, Governor of Virginia, and grew increasingly desperate. The last read simply:

  Maggie, please! If you’re in Charlottesville, you need to get down to the UVA library right now. I mean it. NOW!

  Chapter Ten

  Charlottesville, Virginia, 11.53pm

  Afterwards she would wonder if she had smelled it before she saw it, but the sight of it never left her. It was beautiful in its own way, a corona of orange and gold painted across the night sky.

  As the car got nearer, it seemed to fill the windscreen. You couldn’t look anywhere else, your eye mesmerized by those vast, round flames.

  While she drove, Uri was on his phone, thumbing away at the keys. Somehow, without seeing them, she knew his fingers were trembling. Eventually, he read aloud the entry for the section of the university library the governor had told her to head for.

  ‘ “The Special Collection houses over thirteen million manuscripts, three hundred and twenty-five thousand rare books, as well as approximately five thousand maps, more than two hundred and fifty thousand photographs—” ’

  ‘What of, Uri? What of?’ Maggie shouted, turning hard left on a red light.

  ‘What?’ He was staring at the orange sky ahead.

  ‘The books, the maps – what’s it a collection of?’

  ‘Oh.’ He looked back at the phone, shaking in his hands. ‘ “American history and literature . . . with a focus on Virginia and especially African-American history.” ’

  They were near enough to see the impromptu barricade that had sprung up, formed of ambulances and police cars, their lights flashing, and a cluster of red fire trucks. She screeched the car to a stop and they both ran out.

  Only now did she take a proper look at the building rather than the sky. It was impressive, fronted by a colonnade of perhaps a dozen pillars with a tall, central arch marking the entrance. At first glance, it might have looked old, built in the colonial, Georgian style that defined so much of this universit
y. But the brick was too clean, too new for that. Uri had mentioned that this Special Collections building was about fifteen years old and that appearances were deceptive. It was much bigger than it looked, with many of the ‘stacks’ of books housed underground.

  And now it was in flames.

  Each of the six tall windows facing out onto the quadrangle were bright with fire, two of them already engulfed in plumes of hot orange. The glass had long gone, the flames bursting outward and reaching for the sky, like curtains billowing in an unseen wind. At that very moment, a third window shattered, a ball of fire escaping from it as the glass exploded in all directions. The building seemed to be a cauldron shaken by a heat it could no longer contain. Maggie half-expected to see the roof wobbling, like a lid on a pan about to blow.

  A couple of reporters were already here, gathered on the sidewalk bordering the quadrangle. They were talking to someone who seemed to be speaking on behalf of the fire department. Maggie could hear a snatch of conversation, something about the blaze spreading at a terrifying speed, much faster than most fires they’d experienced.

  ‘We attended the scene within two minutes of the alarm being raised, but the fire was already deeply established at that time. We believe the origin may be located in that part of the facility that is below ground . . .’

  At that moment, a team of four firefighters, seemingly just arrived, moved past them.

  ‘Let’s get close up,’ Uri said, pulling out his phone and turning on the camera. ‘As close as we can.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I mean it. The only thing those guys are going to be thinking of is putting the fire out. No one else is going to be looking for who started it. You have to seize the moment, that’s what you always said.’

  ‘I know, but—’

  ‘Come on.’

  He marched off in the slipstream of the firefighters, towards the main entrance. Before the men had a chance to spot them – Folks, I’m afraid you need to head back – Uri took Maggie’s hand and they peeled away, heading for the side of the building. Even with the adrenalin pumping through her, she felt calmed by that gesture: the two of them facing this thing, together.

  The design mimicked the front, with tall sash windows on either side of a glazed, double-height arch. Except here that arch was flanked by two external staircases leading to much more modest doorways. From what Maggie could see, the fire had not yet climbed to that upper level. All the glass was still intact.

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘Let’s get closer, just to see.’

  As they inched nearer, she could still feel the heat, the air itself cooked. As she moved onto the first step, she reached for the handrail, recoiling at the last moment: it would be scalding.

  Once at the top of the stairs, she could see through the glazed part of the door and into the library. She saw a scene that was oddly calm, almost serene: the smooth, polished dark wood of a panelled corridor, lined on each side by glass cases. Inside were open rare books, antique maps and what seemed to be, though the angle was tight, a fragment of an early American flag.

  She pulled down her sleeve to protect her fingers and attempted the door handle. It turned but did not open. She pressed her shoulder against the door, feeling the heat within once more. Now she pulled back and rammed her full weight into it. The door didn’t open, but some part of the mechanism did seem to give, encouraging her to make another attempt.

  She pushed hard, the shoulder taking the impact. Did the door buckle? It seemed to. One more go, then another and finally it was open.

  The heat was instant, like stepping into an oven. It took her a few seconds to adjust. Only then did she absorb the noise, the commotion coming from below: firefighters shouting, hoses at full blast and, loudest of all, the crackle of flames.

  She looked at the ground beneath her feet, checking whether she was safe to move forward. It was a floor of grey stone tiles, apparently solid. She took a step.

  The heat came through her shoes, which forced her forward again, like a barefoot child skipping from one foot to another on a roasting summer beach. She was halfway down the hallway now, able to read the place names on the eighteenth-century map behind glass: Charles City County, Warwick County . . .

  She looked over her shoulder, checking for Uri. Was he still at the door? Had it slammed shut after she forced it open?

  With a glance upward, she clocked the series of sprinklers studding the ceiling, each of them dry and inactive. In the corner was a CCTV camera, which she looked at for a half second longer than it demanded. Something about it was not quite right.

  The rational voice within her was becoming more insistent: time to go. Uri had suggested they take a look and she had taken a look. Maggie had just made the executive decision to side with reason over intuition and leave when, in an instant, the entire space filled with thick black smoke.

  It was coming from the open stairwell, with its wide, curving staircase, at the end of the hallway. She’d glimpsed the staircase when she first broke in. It was clearly the architectural centrepiece; all corridors and hallways led to it. But it meant this upper level was vulnerable to what was happening below.

  Some door must have yielded downstairs. She pictured it, the billowing cloud a living thing, hammering against the door down below, pressing against it, until the door could take it no longer and finally gave way. And then the smoke, free to roam, rushing for the stairs and filling every corner it could find.

  Now it was here and Maggie was choking. A moment later she was down on the ground, whether because she had been knocked to her feet by the force of the cloud or because she had once read that firefighters drop to their hands and knees to stay below the smoke, she wasn’t sure.

  The task was to get back to that door, and to Uri who was surely on the other side of it, hammering to get in. The door was there, she knew that, not ten yards away. She just had to get there.

  She began to inch along the floor, holding her breath to avoid taking in the acrid fumes that now enveloped the hallway like the thickest fog. She was moving forward when, sooner than expected, she hit something solid.

  Surely she couldn’t be by the door already. She extended her fingertips. Solid wall, hot to the touch. She moved her hands left and right to where the door should be. But just wall.

  She reached upwards. Ah, glass. But it was a large expanse of glass and it was thinner than the panel of the door she had rammed open just a few minutes ago. She let her hands pad either side, expecting to sense either timber frame or more solid wall or even, please God, the cool of outside air. But it was all glass, now too hot to touch.

  Of course. She was not by the door at all. She had merely crossed to one side of the hallway. These were the display cases she was touching.

  But which side was she on? There were glass cases on both. She looked in the direction she felt sure must be the doorway out, but all she could see was black smoke. She squinted the other way: more smoke. She was in the centre of a dark cloud. Perhaps it was the fumes, or the heat or the panic, but she had no idea which way was out. She needed to breathe, though she didn’t dare.

  Finally, there was a light. To her right, she saw it and for a precious, deluded split-second she thought it must be the world outside – perhaps the flashing lights of the emergency crews coming through that door she’d forced open. But as the light got stronger she understood. This was a fireball, perhaps fifteen foot across, and it was coming towards her.

  The next three or four seconds passed like long minutes. First, she calculated that, given that the ball was coming from inside, the exit could only be the other way. Lying flat on the roasting ground, she hauled herself forward, like a commando in the mud of an assault course. The movement made her choke and, in a reflex action, she took a breath.

  Its impact was instant, as if she’d been punched hard in the head. She was dizzy and sick. Everything in her body cried out for rest. She wanted desperately to surrender, to succumb to the sleep that seemed to
be enveloping her just as surely as the smoke. She felt her head dip onto her hands. The temperature, already scalding, rose. The ball of fire was getting closer.

  Chapter Eleven

  Northern Virginia, three months earlier

  Some people would hate to think of themselves as a cog in a machine, a link in a chain. But Ben Hudson found it reassuring. There was a system and so long as he did his bit, nothing could go wrong. He could begin his shift at seven am, clock off at four and know that he would be paid for that day and, if he did the same for four more days that week, he would be paid for the week.

  Better still, there was no grey area about whether he was doing his bit right. He’d once worked in a flower shop, during that first summer after he’d left school, and he’d regularly be pulled aside by the manager, to be told how he’d looked at the customer wrong – You need to look them in the eye, Ben – or been too friendly or not friendly enough.

  There was none of that in this job. If you got it right, the bar scanner made a single beep and displayed a green tick. Get it wrong, and you’d see a red cross and hear a different noise. Green or red; no greys.

  So as he drove the armoured van away from the centre of the city, following the instructions on the company-mandated GPS system, he knew he was doing his bit right. He could hum along to the music on the radio knowing that he had completed the first stage of the ‘work order’ on his handheld device and that he was on his way to completing the second.

  That first task had been to drive to the library, park in the designated area, then present himself at the front desk where he’d been met by a woman from the library’s IT department. She had handed him a sealed blue box, the size of a small briefcase, which he had duly scanned – beep, green tick – and taken from her. He had then followed procedure by turning the two separate locks on the van and placing it in the secured storage area. And now he was returning to head office.