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

by Bourne, Sam

  ‘Jesus,’ Maggie said. It was the first word she had uttered.

  ‘So now you know why I was prepared to drive through the night to get here. Maggie, I do not exaggerate when I say that every second away from this place feels like an unconscionable waste.’

  An older woman had appeared, greeted instantly with a warm hug by Natasha. For a moment, Maggie wondered if this was Great-Aunt Peggy, before remembering that the woman who had brought up the young, orphaned Natasha had herself died. Maggie was used to thinking that no one in the world had a smaller family than she did: just Liz really. But this woman, Natasha Winthrop, had no one. Despite all her glamour and success, Maggie felt sorry for her.

  ‘Maggie, this is Molly. She’s a dear, dear friend who also happens to look after this impossible house. Molly, this is my good friend Maggie Costello – am I saying that right? “Costello”, is that right, Maggie? That would be so Washington for me to be mispronouncing your name this whole time.’

  ‘Not at all. In Ireland we tend to say “Costello”, you know, with the weight on the first syllable, but literally no one here ever—’

  ‘Well, Costello it is. Costello. Costello.’

  ‘There’s no need. I’m not one of those—’

  ‘I absolutely insist. So, Molly. Meet Maggie Costello.’

  They shook hands, both smiling at the awkwardness of it, both aware that they were moons and Natasha was the sun.

  ‘So. A swim, Maggie? In the ocean? To cool off from that horrid journey. Icy at this time of year, I know, but so invigorating. Or shall we lend you some,’ and here she gave a conspiratorial wink to Molly, simultaneously injecting a note of intrigue into her voice that was almost lascivious ‘. . . running kit?’

  And so Maggie had succumbed, accepted a pair of Natasha’s old sneakers – fancier than anything Maggie owned – and followed her along the path through the trees and to the beach. Before she knew it she was out here, the sound of the surf in her ears, the air misted with spray, the light a prism of colours, the autumn sun a rebuke to the clammy offices, chiming phones and constant clamour they had left behind in Washington, DC.

  After perhaps forty minutes, and to Maggie’s relief, they headed back to the house at walking pace. En route, Natasha pointed out the cove where smugglers had brought liquor to the Cape during Prohibition, hauling barrels of Scotch ashore in the dead of night. ‘I always thought that that whisky must have tasted especially good,’ she said. ‘Forbidden fruit and all that.’

  Next she guided them behind the sand dunes and onto a trail through the woods, stopping to show Maggie the trees she remembered from her childhood. They stopped at the hollow where Natasha had once curled up and hid for hours, with only a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird for company. ‘I think I probably decided to become a lawyer inside this very tree.’

  Eventually, they wended their way back to the estate, a gardener advancing with a tray of tall, cold glasses to mark their return.

  ‘This is the bit that makes it all worth it,’ Natasha said as she passed Maggie a glass. Only when Maggie brought it to her lips did she realize that this was not a tumbler of fizzy water, ice and lemon but an enormous gin and tonic. They clinked glasses and Natasha said, ‘To getting it right.’

  A moment later, the tour resumed, as Natasha pointed out the vegetable garden, the croquet lawn and the grass tennis courts. The place was ridiculously gorgeous.

  ‘So this was your childhood,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Not my entire childhood. I spent most of it in Germany, of course. On the base. Even once I’d moved back, I only ever summered here. The rest of the year I was in boarding school. But, yes, those were magical times. Extraordinarily privileged.’

  ‘If you run for president, you’ll need to explain this to people somehow.’

  ‘Maggie, I’ve told you. That is such nonsense.’ A pause. ‘If I ever had to explain myself, I’d just tell the truth. I was born into great privilege, but I’d give every last piece of it back to have what most people take for granted.’

  Maggie knew what Natasha meant, but she wanted to hear it. She waited, keeping her gaze on Natasha, who spoke eventually.

  ‘There’s no one left now. Everyone else has gone. It’s just me and the sea.’

  ‘I tell you one thing that surprised me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘One little detail that I was not expecting at all.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I will. But first: a refill.’

  They were in the room Natasha referred to as the ‘small kitchen’, though the description was comically inaccurate. It was a room generous enough to hold a thick, gnarly farmhouse table, a fireplace wide enough to stand in, as well as a heavy, oil-fired range. Maggie suspected that this room had once functioned as the servants’ kitchen, though she hadn’t dared ask. She had played the awestruck sightseer enough for one day.

  After the run on the beach and the drinks in the garden, Maggie had cleared her throat to initiate the talk they needed to have. She would begin with the phone records, and move on to the Langley postmark – or withhold that fact, depending – and then make her demands. She had rehearsed the speech in her mind on the flight up here: Natasha, I cannot even begin to do an effective job for you unless I have all the facts. If you want me to help you, you have to trust me.

  But Natasha had hushed her, insisting they each take a shower and then talk over dinner. She had despatched Molly to show Maggie her room – towels on the bed, stunning view of the ocean – and then disappeared into the ‘library’, which Maggie assumed was an office. That worried her: surely they needed to talk before Natasha started making calls.

  She had tried again over dinner. But Natasha had raised her palm in protest, joking that she had her own ‘due diligence’ to exercise. She wanted to know everything about Maggie. How and why she had left Dublin; about her first job with an NGO, and how that had led Maggie to serve as an improbably young mediator between armed factions in the Congo war; the secondment to the UN, followed by ad hoc work for the US State Department, including in the Middle East, and the eventual move to DC. She was especially fascinated to hear about Maggie’s brief stint as a couples’ counsellor, deploying her mediation skills between warring spouses rather than armed factions. (‘You’d be amazed how similar the work is,’ Maggie had said. ‘First job is to find out the red lines, then work back from there.’) Then Natasha wanted to know what it was like to be a foreigner in America, about taking US citizenship, about whether Maggie felt Irish or American or both or neither. She wanted to glean every detail about life on the campaign team of their party’s last successful presidential candidate, her eyes bright as she lapped up the stories of Maggie’s spell in his inner circle in the White House. And then she listened, head resting on her right fist, her face a picture of sympathy, as Maggie described the torrid period she had spent working for his successor, as a holdover in the early days of the current administration. Maggie recounted the craziness that had unfolded there and her role in it – ‘However bad you imagine it was, it was so much worse’ – and everything that had happened since.

  Throughout, Maggie tried to bring Natasha back to the business in hand. ‘Enough about me,’ she would say. ‘Much as I love talking about myself, we really must . . .’ but Natasha would not be diverted. ‘If we are to work closely together, I need to know who you are,’ she said. ‘If I am to put my life in your hands, then I need to take a good look at those hands.’

  And so, Maggie had answered her questions and, truth be told, she had enjoyed it. How many times had she done the reverse, listening as a man delivered a monologue about his life and times? Uri was an exception: he was a listener as well as a talker. It was one of the things she loved about him. But most of the time, in Washington especially, Maggie was the one asking the questions, offering an encouraging nod of the head, murmuring her understanding and appreciation: the perfe
ct audience. Now it was Natasha who was in the stalls, granting Maggie the stage. Even when Maggie sought out Natasha’s opinion on an issue, she would speak – often passionately, sometimes movingly – but she would also listen. Maggie had watched a lot of politicians in her time, up close. But she couldn’t think of another who listened the way this woman listened.

  Still, once Molly had come in to clear away the plates and they had moved to a pair of armchairs, Maggie was adamant.

  ‘We need to talk about this,’ she said, holding up her phone. ‘You’ve left this story unanswered for nearly twenty-four hours. That’s a disaster, in terms of both the politics and the law. You don’t need me to tell you about the police inquiry: this is obviously going to be their number one lead. I don’t know what you could have done, maybe nothing, but they’ve had the field to themselves for a full day. As for the politics: fucking horrendous.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘You’ve seen what people are saying.’

  ‘Actually, I haven’t. When I come up here, I try to turn off Twitter. Detox.’

  ‘Right.’ Maggie collected herself. ‘I mean, that’s admirable. But . . . Jesus. You’re in the middle of a Category Five hurricane, and you don’t even look?’

  ‘Calmest place to be in a hurricane. And no, I don’t look.’

  ‘Good. Keep it that way.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘But take it from me—’

  ‘Will do.’

  ‘It’s ugly.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And we’re now twenty-four hours behind. Also, though you keep saying you’re absolutely positively definitely not running, if by any chance you changed your mind, you’d need to register your candidacy in precisely six days. So these are—’ She heard Stuart’s voice, sardonic in these situations. ‘Sub-optimal conditions.’

  ‘I know, Maggie. And I’m sorry. But I needed time to think.’

  ‘OK. So you’ve had time and now you need to talk. To me. You need to tell me—’

  ‘I know. That’s what I’ve decided, too.’

  ‘—everything. Because otherwise this can’t work.’

  ‘I came to the same conclusion. While we were out running.’

  ‘What conclusion?’

  ‘I just had to get there in my own time. To tell you.’

  Maggie went quiet. Goldstein’s first rule of conversation and especially interrogation: Silence is golden. Natasha got out of her seat, whisky glass still in hand.

  ‘First thing to say: the story is true.’

  Maggie said nothing.

  ‘The browsing history. It’s an accurate history of my internet use and searches.’

  Maggie exhaled sharply. Not in relief, but in the manner of a weightlifter girding herself for a heavy load.

  ‘I did look on those dating sites. BDSMdate, Perversions, Kink, whatever they’re called. I looked through them all. Very thoroughly.’

  ‘OK.’ Maggie could hear the tone in her own voice, the strained patience. She sounded as if she were addressing someone holding a firearm, urging them to put down the gun.

  ‘I had been doing it for a while. Whoever has those records will have more. The police will see that.’

  ‘All right.’ Let’s do this nice and slow.

  ‘We could say that I’m into it. That I have a thing for rough sex. That I wanted to meet men who would play out a rape fantasy with me, who would burst into my home and pretend to rape me. We could say that.’ A beat. ‘If you think there would be any advantage in it.’

  ‘I can’t imagine there’d be huge advantage in that, to be honest, Natasha, no.’

  ‘Depends what the alternative explanation is, doesn’t it?’

  That stopped Maggie. She paused for one moment, then another, then another. ‘Let’s forget what’s advantageous and what isn’t. We’ll come to that. For now, the only question is: what’s the truth?’

  Natasha drained her glass, pulled herself up to full height, gave her head a slight shake, as if she had just splashed cold water on her face, and said: ‘I was using those sites to lure Jeffrey Todd to my home.’

  Chapter 19

  Cape Cod, Massachusetts

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s why I was on those sites. I was looking for him. With a view to engaging in a deliberate act of entrapment. I wanted him to come to my home and attempt a rape. I would then have the evidence to convict him, once and for all.’

  ‘I don’t underst—’

  ‘What don’t you understand?’

  ‘Any of it. All of it.’ Maggie could hear the irritation in her own voice. For a split-second she imagined trying to explain this to someone else or, heaven forbid, the public. ‘You wanted this man to come and rape you, so that you could catch him red-handed in the act of rape? How did you know that . . . I mean, how did you find . . .’

  ‘OK, I’ll back up.’ Natasha went over to the fireplace, where a couple of logs were giving a soft, warming heat, just enough to take the edge off an autumn evening in an old house. She picked up a poker and gave the logs an unnecessary prod. Maggie watched her, trying to square the information she had just received with the legal counsel in front of her, who had won squeals of adoration from the cable TV commentariat a couple of weeks earlier, setting off a round of feverish presidential speculation. The two hardly seemed to compute.

  Natasha topped up her glass, did the same for Maggie, and returned to her chair. ‘Before I came to Washington, I was in the DA’s office in Manhattan, as you know. Everything came through that office: murder, assault, theft. Sexual violence wasn’t my area, but I took an interest. I had a very formidable colleague who specialized in rape. At the team meetings, she would talk often about the extraordinary difficulties in getting results in such cases: as I’m sure you know, the statistics are jaw-dropping. Guess what percentage of rape cases in this country leads to an arrest.’

  Maggie waited for the answer, realizing only when Natasha raised her eyebrows that it was she who was meant to supply it.

  ‘I don’t know.’ She thought of a number, then, knowing that the stat was going to be awful, she halved it. ‘Thirty per cent? Twenty?’

  ‘Somewhere between five and six per cent.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes! And how many rape cases do you think end in a conviction?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Less than one per cent. Nought point seven per cent, to be exact. And not even all of those go to jail. That’s just one in every one hundred and forty-three cases. Which means one hundred and forty-two rapes happen without a man ever being held to account.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘It’s quite something, isn’t it? My colleague’s case file was full of the most appalling stories, Maggie. You can’t imagine. People who had suffered prolonged, brutal sexual violence. At the hands of husbands, fathers, step-fathers, boyfriends, uncles, co-workers, bosses, first dates, fifth dates, clients, customers, strangers, friends, priests – you name it.

  ‘And of course, most of these cases had gone nowhere. Because that’s what always happens. On the rare occasions when a man is arrested – remember, just five or six in every hundred – most of those never even get referred to a prosecutor, let alone to court. Police say there just isn’t enough there. And if by some miracle the case does make it to trial, then the chances are high that it’ll end in an acquittal. Which means the vast majority – more than ninety-nine out of every hundred rapes – get off.

  ‘Countless reasons for that, of course. My colleague would go into all of them, chapter and verse: the myths that exist about rape, the things people – police, jurors, prosecutors, for heaven’s sake – believe. You know: “Look how that woman was dressed, she was asking for it.” Or: “She’d been drinking, she was asking for it.” Or: “She once watched porn, she was asking for it.” Or: “It’s
only rape if she’s black and blue all over.” Or: “It’s only rape if it’s done by a stranger.” You’d be amazed at how all this stuff persists.

  ‘But the biggest problem is the obvious one: there are never any witnesses. Except the victim, of course. “He said, she said.”’

  ‘So you thought you’d change that. Lure a rapist into trying his luck against a lawyer who was ready.’

  ‘Yes. I mean, not quite. We’re running ahead. Can we go back to the DA’s office?’

  ‘All right. The DA’s office.’ Maggie drained the last drops of whisky from her glass.

  ‘I became rather fascinated with my colleague’s case file. Obsessed would be too strong a word, but I was curious. As I mentioned, it wasn’t my own area of law – by then, I was beginning to take an interest in public administration, Guantanamo and so on, some human rights law – but I would keep an eye on it. And Caroline liked to have someone she could vent to, at the end of a long day. Feet on the desk. Glass of vodka for her, whisky for me.’ Natasha looked at Maggie with a smile that was impossible not to reciprocate.

  ‘Anyway, there was one name that recurred in the file. He’d been arrested in one jurisdiction and released for lack of evidence; then his name popped up a few months later, somewhere else. Pure luck that Caroline learned of the second case, which was in New Jersey. Or not luck, exactly: a diligent cop. Both went to trial which, given the stats we discussed, is quite something: it means he was either the most extraordinarily unlucky chap ever to walk the face of the earth or a rather prolific rapist. Statistically, he’d have needed to commit one hundred and ninety rapes just to be arrested twice, let alone come to trial.

  ‘Needless to say, he was acquitted in both cases. He did get sent to jail once. Not for rape, though, even though that’s what they hauled him in for originally. He was convicted on a lesser charge of battery: I suspect the prosecution just took whatever they could get. Lucky for him, that meant he was never on any sex-offender register.’