by Bourne, Sam
She looked again at the file, trembling in her hand. It had to be a coincidence. Surely it was just one of those uncanny instances of history repeating itself.
But then she read the report again, individual lines jumping out at her. ‘I didn’t mean to kill him. I just wanted to make him stop’ . . . put his hands around her throat . . . she believed she was going to die . . . reasonable and proportionate use of force . . . ‘I know, because I killed him.’
Natasha had used more or less the same words about herself, more than a decade later. She knew they worked, because they had worked before. This woman saved my life.
Maggie thought about the woman whose home she had stayed in just yesterday, how they had run on the beach and talked long into the night, how her eyes had sparkled with righteous anger at a world that needed fixing and her own conviction that she might be the person to do it. Was that woman capable of doing this, plotting in cold blood the murder of another human being, and doing it so meticulously that she had already gamed out her legal defence? More than that, had she actually constructed this crime as a re-enactment of a previous homicide, in order to proof it against a guilty verdict? Was this woman really capable of such cold calculation, capable too of disguising it in a cover story, earnestly told, that cast her as a terrified victim who had acted out of the natural, spontaneous instinct for survival, when the truth was there had been no spontaneity or instinct, just a deliberate, premeditated plan for murder?
Calm down, Maggie told herself. Coincidences happened; history did sometimes repeat itself. Put this story away and keep looking.
She clicked next on a file simply labelled ‘Finances’. Inside were PDFs of Natasha’s last seven years of tax returns, as well as related files detailing her income and expenditure for each of those years, including the related invoices and receipts. They were immaculately maintained. Maggie thought of the filing system for her own accounts at home: a pile of receipts weighed down by an unwashed tea mug on her desk. Once it became unmanageable, the pile would be shovelled into a shoebox along with anything else to do with money and then stashed under Maggie’s bed. Then, with hours to go till the filing deadline, she would get on her knees, retrieve the box, call her accountant and plead for mercy. Liz had seen her ‘system’ once and placed her hand over her mouth in horror. Maggie had said, ‘Look, I know it’s a mess.’ Liz had responded that, ‘This isn’t just a “mess”, Mags. This is a threat to the integrity of the US taxation system. I’ve a good mind to call the fecking IRS and report you myself.’
The contrast with Winthrop’s set-up could not have been sharper. Each file, labelled by financial year, contained a master spreadsheet, with tabs colour-coded by category: travel, equipment, and the like. Within those columns, each figure was a clickable link. Maggie clicked one for $1008.42 and brought up a copy of a hotel bill in Atlanta. That gave her an idea.
She scanned first through the equipment column, but could see at a glance that the figures weren’t what she was looking for: she wanted a number that was roughly the same each month, and relatively low.
There.
Right first time. A click on a charge for $68.06 brought up a PDF of Natasha’s cellphone bill. Five pages of it, but there on the last two was what Maggie was looking for: the itemized section, detailing each call whose cost was not already included. Maggie knew to look for it because it was the same on her own bill. On hers, it mainly showed calls to Liz’s landline in Atlanta – usually the sequel to an attempt to speak via the latest app recommended by her sister, an attempt ultimately aborted once patchy Wi-Fi had rendered Liz’s voice as either alarmingly robotic or so faint she sounded like a distant sprite trapped underground. That, and the occasional call to a hotel room to speak to Uri when he was on the road, venturing into red states that, when it came to cell reception, were a universe of black holes.
She was looking for the most recent bill she could find, hoping it would . . . what? Reveal a series of calls with Todd, proving that Natasha had known her victim? Or perhaps a call history with a Russian oligarch, who would turn out to be either Natasha’s pursuer or her prey. Something that would explain – or at least explain better than Natasha had – why it was that, of all the rapists in all the world, she had lured Jeffrey Todd to what had turned out to be his death.
If Maggie had been hoping for a cluster of calls to a single number in a concentrated period, say, in the hours before Todd had entered Winthrop’s home – and of course that was exactly what she’d been hoping for – she didn’t find it. Even this most recent bill only went up to last month. There were a few numbers that recurred, often for calls lasting two or three minutes. But none in a stack, and none that obviously related to that fateful night.
Still, something leapt out. There was a number that appeared at precise intervals. Maggie consulted the calendar on her phone and saw that Natasha had called the number every Sunday evening, at roughly the same time – just after six pm – and always for a good twenty or twenty-five minutes. The area code was not one she recognized: 207. Maggie looked it up and saw that 207 was the code for the state of Maine.
Maggie thought of her own calls to Liz, not that there was any set pattern: Liz would call whenever she’d ‘finally got those noisy fuckers to sleep’. If Natasha had had family, that would have been the obvious explanation: that this was a Sunday-night chat with a mother or father, brother or sister. But given Natasha had no such family, this had to be someone else. Did she have a lover in Maine that she needed to keep secret? A married man perhaps? A woman? Judith?
That brought back another memory of Stuart Goldstein, back when there had been DC chatter about a young black governor with aspirations for a national career. ‘Hmm, doubt it,’ Stuart had said. When Maggie raised a puzzled eyebrow, Stuart explained that the word on the street was that the governor, though engaged to a woman, was in fact gay. Surely that was not insurmountable, in this day and age, Maggie had asked. ‘I’m told that this young man agrees with you. He believes America is ready for a gay president. And he knows America is ready for a black president. He just doesn’t think it’s ready for a black and gay president.’
Maggie thought again of Natasha Winthrop, the elusively single woman who the DC gossip columns had hailed for bringing rare glamour to the famously buttoned-up Washington scene. The same question prompted by the ‘Judith’ file now surfaced once more. Had Natasha, like that young governor, concluded that while Americans might just about be ready for a young woman as president, it was too much to ask them to accept as their commander-in-chief a young lesbian?
She was getting ahead of herself. There would be another explanation. She looked at the clock in the corner of the screen. Approaching midnight. Too late to call the number now, though she was tempted.
What was that?
Was that the click of a door closing? She closed her eyes, an instinctive attempt to listen more closely. She barely dared move.
There! A dull thud, either a door closing again or the firm tread of a footstep. Was it in this office, or just outside in the reception area? Suddenly Maggie was hyper-aware that she was in a room that didn’t belong to her, in a building she didn’t know, whose quirks and creaks were unfamiliar.
Determined to take the initiative, and perhaps to retain the element of surprise, she all but jumped out of her chair, out of Natasha’s office and into the open-plan area, illuminated after a second or two by the motion-activated lights.
She looked around. Nothing.
She called out ‘Hello?’ feeling simultaneously frightened and ridiculous.
A pause, and there it was again. The click of a door. Nearer this time.
Maggie approached the main double doors, the ones locked by a keycode, that gave out onto the reception area. Each door contained a vertical strip of glass. It meant that she’d be able to see out but also that anyone on the other side could see in.
She hung back, lis
tening. The lights went off.
Another sound, firmer this time. Nearer still.
‘Who’s there?’
Silence. And then, from the other side of the door, a thud.
Maggie peered into the dark behind her. What was on those desks that she might use to defend herself? On one, she could make out the silhouette of a pair of scissors.
Gingerly, she stepped back, landing her heel first on each step, hoping to make no sound. She drew level with the desk and reached for the scissors. They were in her grasp when, suddenly and with no warning, the door was pushed open. Behind it was a man, no doubt about it, making no attempt to disguise himself, his height a match for the door. Maggie’s fingers were now curled around the scissors, their metal cool against her skin. She stepped forward.
The motion, either his or hers, was enough to activate the lights and, as she raised her hand, she saw that the man just a few feet away from her was wearing drab navy overalls. Behind him was a trolley, stacked with broom, mop and a tray of sprays and cloths. He looked as shocked, and as terrified, as she was.
‘Hey!’ he said, uselessly.
She let out a little, and equally useless, scream. And the pair of them seemed to freeze like that for several seconds until he said, ‘You scare hell out of me.’
‘Me too,’ was all she managed.
‘What hell you doing?’ She could see he had paled with fright.
‘Working late. I’m, I’m . . . I’m sorry.’
He nodded, she nodded and the two of them backed away from each other, each returning to their work.
As she settled back in Natasha’s chair, reassured by the presence of the cleaner just beyond the door, Maggie looked at the screen once more. It took her a while to remember what she’d been looking at and longer to make any sense of it.
Ah, Natasha’s cellphone history. And the number she had dialled every Sunday night. How to turn those digits into a name? Maggie, her hands still shaking, went to one of those ‘reverse phone lookup’ sites but, as usual with any number that wasn’t a business, it drew a blank.
Back in her White House days, this would have presented no problem. The Secret Service would have cracked this in a heartbeat. But now? Jake Haynes would have his journalistic ruses, no doubt, but given the paper he worked for, he’d have a hundred ethical misgivings to overcome before he’d agree to do Maggie this favour – and, besides, he’d be too curious. Whoever this person in Maine was, Maggie was not ready to reveal his or her existence to the media.
And yet, there had to be a way. Here was the phone number. Somewhere, in a vast unseen storehouse of data, those digits would be linked to a name and address. The question was, how to crack it. Or rather who could crack it?
Just asking the question answered it. There were probably half a dozen people Maggie could think of who would be able to extract this particular nugget of information gold from the bottomless mine of rubbish that existed online. But there was only one person who Maggie could trust with the answer, whatever it was, and who – no less important – she could call at any hour of the day or night and who, though they would shout and scream and vow never to speak to her again, would still be at the end of the phone the next day and the day after that.
She dialled the number and after five rings was delighted to hear not the abrupt divert to a voicemail message but the welcome rustle of a human being picking up the phone.
‘What the absolute fuck.’
‘Hi, Liz.’ Maggie was whispering, imagining her sister’s bedroom in Atlanta, her cramped two-bed apartment, her two young sons under their Avengers duvets in their bunk-beds just down the hall, hard-working and ever-patient husband Paul snoring heavily at her side, the alarm clock set to go off in no more than six hours. ‘I’m sorry to call you so late, I just need—’
‘You better be either dead or maimed, Maggie, so help me, God, because there is no way you can be phoning me at nearly one in the morning.’
‘It’s nowhere near—’
‘So help me, God.’
‘I’m really sorry, Liz. I was—’
‘No way, Maggie.’ Liz was doing that thing she always did when Paul was asleep next to her: shout-whispering, raising her voice to a furious register even as she sought to keep the volume down. ‘No fucking way do you get to say you’re “sorry”. Because if that was even one-bloody-quarter genuine, you wouldn’t have bloody done it, would you?’
‘No, Liz. I wouldn’t.’ A tactical retreat on Maggie’s part: suck up the punishment now, let it pass and then get what you came for. Trouble was, Liz had known her sister too long – all her life, in fact – to let her get away with that one. She was wise to it.
‘No, no. You’re not doing that thing you do. No way.’
‘What thing?’
‘When you let me rant and rave and you go all quiet. Not having that.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘I want you to think for one minute what it would be like to be me, Maggie. One minute. That’s all I ask. Imagine being responsible for two kids who’ve got to be up at ten to bloody seven in the morning, and thirty kids who I’ve got to teach from eight thirty, and how precious and bloody necessary six hours’ sleep is, if you’re me. I mean, you can do what the hell you like, because no one needs you to be up to pack their fucking Iron Man lunch box in the morning, do they. But I need to sleep.’
Maggie went quiet, even though her sister had told her not to.
‘And now you’ve given me the fright of my life because I’m worried something’s happened to you.’ A pause. ‘Has something happened to you? Not that I care.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Thank Christ for that. My heart’s pounding, you know. Fucking thumping.’
‘I’m sorry, Liz.’
‘But that just makes it worse. You don’t even have an excuse.’ Her voice moved away from the phone. ‘It’s all right, Paul honey. Go back to sleep. It’s nothing.’
Maggie spotted an opening. ‘Listen. Liz. It’ll take five minutes.’
Too soon.
‘I know what this is. This is about work, isn’t it? At one in the morning, you’d wake my sleeping children to get me to do you some favour for work. I mean . . . you know what, Maggie? You are no different to our mother. No different at all. She was a slave to the drink, and you’re a slave to the work. I’ve said it before and you’ve made me say it again: I love you, Maggie, but you’re an addict. And you need help.’
That ‘I love you’ was encouraging. It suggested they’d cleared the water ditch and the high fence and were now rounding the bend towards the home straight. Maybe she’d have to listen to a bit more character diagnosis/assassination and then she could get to her question.
‘Where’s Uri? Put him on. I want to speak to him.’
‘He’s not here. I’m not at home.’ The words hung in the air for a second as Maggie heard the cogs turning in her sister’s head. ‘Not like that. I’m in someone’s office. Someone I’m . . . helping.’
Liz dropped the shout-whisper by a couple of decibels. ‘So I was right. This is work.’
‘It is. And I need something so small, we could have done it by now. I know you need to sleep, Liz. If there was someone else I could call, I would. But I need you.’ Maggie closed her eyes tight: it was manipulative, Liz would see through it. Still, it might just work.
‘See, the thing is, if I help you, it would be like giving drink to an alcoholic. Like literally putting a bottle of Scotch in front of our ma.’
‘Oh, come on.’
‘I’ve been your enabler too long, Maggie. It’s not healthy. Not for me, not for you.’
‘I tell you what’s not healthy, and that’s being on my own in someone else’s office at one in the morning, shitting myself at every creak and thump. I want to go home. And if you do this one thing for me I can. And t
hen we can talk about what a useless fuck-up I am tomorrow.’
A long pause. The sound of Liz resettling herself in bed, pulling the duvet over her shoulder and turning on her side, to be quieter for Paul – or so Maggie pictured it.
‘One thing, Maggie. No more.’
Maggie wanted to bellow out a Yesss! But she knew better. Quietly and calmly, trying to do nothing that might make her sister change her mind, she said, ‘It’s a phone number in Maine. I want to know who it belongs to. The name and the address. And that’s it.’
More rustling down the phone. With any luck that was Liz reaching for the laptop, usually kept on the floor by the bed.
The sound of keystrokes. Then: ‘What’s the phone number?’
Maggie read it off the screen, still displaying Natasha Winthrop’s cellphone bill. The sound of more keystrokes.
She held the phone to her ear, enjoying the sounds of her sister. In the silence, it felt like company.
After perhaps two minutes, she heard her sister’s voice. ‘OK, I’m sending it to you now. Goodnight, Maggie.’
‘Thank you so much, Liz.’ When there was nothing, she added: ‘I love you.’
‘I know you do.’
As the line went dead, Maggie felt a vibration in the phone. The text message was in the dead centre of the screen, a new alert.
At first, Maggie assumed her sister had made a mistake, understandable enough in her sleep-deprived state. Otherwise, the message she had sent made no sense.
The address was straightforward enough. Pierce Pond Road, Penobscot, Maine. But given everything Natasha had said, Maggie was stumped by the name that appeared alongside it. Natasha was a woman with no family, whose sole surviving relative, her Aunt Peggy, had died a few years ago. And yet the phone number she had dialled every Sunday at six pm was registered to a name that told a different story, a name that now glowed from Maggie’s screen.
V Winthrop.
