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

by Bourne, Sam

  ‘Oh my God, I get it! I’m so sorry, Doug. Seriously. I should have realized. You’re worried that if the senator hits Album, then Album will hit back! And – it’s OK, you don’t have to say what it is – but you obviously think he’s got some ammo. You don’t want to make an enemy of this guy, because he’s got some kompromat on the senator. Is that about right, Doug? Is that about the size of it?’

  ‘I think we should move on.’

  ‘Doug?’

  ‘Ellen, work up some language that we’re all comfortable with. Some words the senator can use. Give us some options. Now, I’m really sorry, guys, but I need to get to another meeting. Glad we could do this. Thanks, Ellen. Thank you, Dan.’

  Chapter 45

  Washington, DC

  Maggie was relieved to see that both the dongle and keypad combination still worked. No one could have blamed Natasha Winthrop’s law firm for locking their colleague out: she was, after all, sitting in a prison cell, charged with homicide. Perhaps no one had thought to do anything about it.

  As silently as she could, Maggie took the elevator, punched in another few numbers and let herself into the open-plan office, mercifully empty on the weekend, and, finally, Natasha’s room. She sat herself at the computer, powered up the machine and typed in the password.

  While she waited to be logged in, she glanced at her phone. Nothing back from Liz yet. Counselling Maggie to be patient, her sister had said in a rushed text sent while making supper for her boys, I’m a computer geek, not a fucking miracle worker. After all this time, Maggie still had no idea what magic Liz performed when she set to work with a keyboard and mouse, and therefore she had no clue how long it would take. All she knew is that she had asked Liz to look into the Gab post that started the #FindingMC exercise in mass surveillance, and at the subsequent posts that had propelled it far and wide, beyond Gab into Twitter and elsewhere. At the same time, she had also forwarded the screenshots she had taken of that rape fantasy forum and her entry on it. ‘Mid-thirties, slim, fit, long auburn hair.’ Flatters you a bit, Liz had said, by way of confirmation of receipt.

  Now the screen was filling up with the assorted folders and files that Maggie remembered from her last visit. She barely knew where to begin, as she clicked and opened the various documents, almost at random. There was the Russian folder, even its name, in Cyrillic characters, opaque to Maggie. She opened the others – personal correspondence, invitations, bills, the phone records that had led her to Aunt Peggy. She saw again the files of Natasha’s cases on Guantanamo and child separations at the border, alongside multiple environmental lawsuits.

  Maggie went back to the Russian file and found once more the document that consisted of just a single line, apparently emailed from Natasha back to herself.

  You may know a lot, but you won’t know everything.

  It might have been Natasha speaking, addressing Maggie from the other side of the computer. And there was no denying it: it was a statement of the truth.

  Maggie didn’t even know what this vast Russian file related to, not really. Some kind of contract, contained on that signed napkin, but the rest of it? She had no idea. She looked again at the file name, copying and pasting the word into Google Translate. It came back stumped, asking: Did you mean . . . ?

  Embarrassed by her ignorance of an entire alphabet, not knowing what each character represented let alone what the word meant, Maggie copied the letters on the screen onto her pad, slowly drawing each one rather than writing them down. She had no idea what word was in front of her.

  Maggie tilted back in her chair and let out a big sigh. What was she looking for, really? She hadn’t even spelled it out in her own mind, telling herself that she would know it when she saw it. Some connecting thread that would tie together what she had seen and heard today. Like one of those dot-to-dot drawings that she and Liz used to do on idle Sunday afternoons back in Quarry Street, taking pleasure as the picture materialized before their eyes. Maggie had been doing this long enough now that she trusted herself to recognize the pattern once it was in front of her. She just had to find it . . .

  But she had so little to go on. An intuition, nothing more. She pulled Natasha’s yellow legal pad over towards her and made a list:

  Chicago

  New York

  Bangalore

  London

  That was all she had. Less than an inkling.

  Maggie used the search function on Natasha’s computer and typed in ‘Bangalore’. Nothing. She tried India next, which brought a slew of files on a pollution case Natasha had fought against a multinational company based in Chennai. She searched a few of the documents for ‘Bangalore’, but apart from the corporate address of a tech company tangentially involved in the case, there was nothing.

  She began drumming her fingers on the desk at high frequency: no rhythm, just pure stress. Was this pointless? Was she running down a blind alley?

  Now, warily, but armed with the passwords Natasha had given her, she logged into Natasha’s email account. The inbox filled up, mainly with bulletins from assorted media and political organizations as well as recent messages of solidarity and support, usually titled ‘Thinking of you’ or ‘What can I do?’

  In the search field, Maggie typed in the single word, ‘Bangalore’. Eventually eleven messages appeared and she clicked through them, doing a word search on each one. A Daily Beast email, promoting a feature about life in a call centre was the first. There was another from the Guardian – this time pushing a story about a Bangalore healer who had become a local cult figure – and one more from one of Natasha’s clients. It included that document Maggie had just seen, relating to a tech company registered in the city.

  The next one was different. It was clearly personal. The subject field consisted of a date and an exclamation mark: September 20!

  It was a group email, with Natasha one of the recipients. It had been sent by a woman called Gargi Amarnath and it read:

  Can’t wait!!! I wanted to get the earlier flight but I may have to fly later. It’s a nightmare getting out of Bangalore at that time, but wish me luck. I’ll come straight from the airport.

  The rest was more back and forth about timings, venues and arrangements for what was clearly a long-planned get-together last autumn. There were seven people on the list, including Natasha. They were all women.

  The wheels were beginning to turn. Maggie now copied Amarnath’s name and pasted it into Google.

  There was a string of what seemed to be quite technical entries, in which a G Amarnath was listed among several other names. Clicking revealed these to be court judgments.

  A few more clicks and then, at last, a longer piece in the Bangalore Mirror. Not quite a profile, it explained that Amarnath was a much-admired lawyer who had made her home in the city five years earlier, after moving there with her husband, a tech entrepreneur. Raised in the US, she practised in New York before setting up with one of Bangalore’s leading firms . . .

  Now Maggie went back to the email and scribbled down the names of the other recipients. She Googled the first name on that list and saw that that woman was still doing what Amarnath had done: working as a lawyer in New York City. She was attached to a high-powered law firm, specializing, according to the corporate website, in ‘workplace issues’.

  Maggie’s hands were beginning to tremble. She was joining the dots.

  Now she typed in the fourth name and was jolted to see that, just as she thought a pattern was emerging, here was a new dot far outside it. Like the others, Elsa Sjogran was a lawyer but she was not based in New York, Bangalore or London but Stockholm.

  With no confidence, Maggie searched for Sjogran’s name along with the words ‘rape’ and ‘Stockholm’. Nothing that made any sense, just a couple of items from several years ago about a bill going through the Swedish parliament. But then Maggie swapped the word ‘rape’ for ‘sexual assault
’ and a fresh list appeared. One was an AFP item from a few days earlier in The Local, apparently an English-language website for Swedish news.

  Housing minister August Granqvist was arrested by Stockholm police last night in connection with an alleged sexual assault at the site of the law firm charged with handling his financial affairs.

  Police had been called to the offices of Bolund, Eriksson and Sjogran after hours, by a partner at the firm, Elsa Sjogran. She told police she had walked into the office to find the minister “sexually assaulting” a junior colleague. She said, “I was an eyewitness to the attack. And used force to stop it going any further. I have given a sworn statement to the police and my colleague will be pressing charges.”

  Adrenalin throbbing through her now, Maggie went back to the email recipients list and worked at double speed, copying, pasting and searching each name until she had established a full list. All lawyers, all either directly involved in recent cases involving sexual violence or based in the places where such cases had happened. What’s more, each incident had a crucial element in common: the women had taken action.

  In New York and London, they’d used cameras to record their abusers, whether a top-ranking news executive or a five-star acclaimed chef. In Stockholm, an eyewitness had seen the crime as it was performed, an occurrence which Maggie knew – from what she’d read and from what Natasha had told her – was vanishingly rare. How had she put it? Most cases never came to trial and, if they did, the chances were high they’d end in acquittal. When it came to rape, the vast majority got off. For the obvious reason: there are never any witnesses. Except the victim, of course. ‘He said, she said.’

  These women, on different points of the globe, had upended that logic. They had made sure this crime, almost always unseen, was witnessed. It must have required meticulous planning, relying on foreknowledge of men known to be sexual predators. In the case of the TV honcho, Maggie could see exactly how that would have worked: hadn’t that Times story said that the man was notorious, using the same MO every time? It wouldn’t have been too hard to tell the newest intern to be summoned to the boss’s summer house on Long Island, to make sure her phone camera was switched on. They must have done the same with the chef in London and with the latest scumbag to be revealed by an online search, an oligarch in Moscow who got his kicks raping and beating lap dancers. In Sweden, the method had been different – involving an eyewitness, rather than a camera – but the principle had been the same. What sacrifice those young women had had to make, allowing themselves to be prey in the pursuit of evidence that would, once and for all, convict these predators. Maggie wondered if they had fully known what they were letting themselves in for, whether they had consented easily or had had to be persuaded, whether they had been victims or heroines or, as so often, both.

  What didn’t fit were the incidents on the streets of Chicago, where a known rapist had been tortured and dumped on the sidewalk, and Bangalore, where an abuser had faced similar treatment with an added sanction: death. Maggie underlined the names of the women on the email list who lived in those two cities. Why had they taken things further than the others? What linked these women in the—

  Maggie got to her feet and suddenly, as if directed by a hidden hand, attacked one of the piles of papers she had rifled through on her last visit here. It’s here, I know it.

  At breakneck speed, she was turning over papers: letters, magazines, invitations, texts of speeches, PowerPoint presentations, one after another. Once she got to the bottom of the first pile, she was drilling through the next, powering through the paper, until, close to the bottom, there it was. Just as she had remembered it.

  A home-produced invitation for what appeared to be a reunion. The date confirmed that it had taken place nearly a year earlier. It was a gathering not of schoolmates or college pals, but of colleagues from the New York District Attorney’s office. Maggie recognized the image on the front; it had lodged in her mind at the time: a blindfolded Lady Justice with scales in one hand and a martini in the other. And there was the scrawled message on the back: Where it all began! See you there, I hope. F x

  F. Maggie went to the list of names and there was a Fiona Anderson. Google established that she worked now in Moscow, but just over a decade ago she had worked in . . . the office of the District Attorney in Manhattan. One of the others was a Caroline Secker, who apparently still worked in that same office. Caroline. Maggie remembered the conversation that night at Pilgrim’s Cove, as Natasha described the colleague who had kept a close, almost obsessive eye on the sexual predators eluding justice.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.

  Maggie sat back in her chair and studied the invitation, drilling into those handwritten words as if they might yield the secrets of this group of women who had worked together all those years ago: Gargi, Fiona, Elsa, Caroline, Natasha . . .

  Now back at the keyboard, she typed all seven names into one search field and hit return. There were only a handful of references that brought up all seven. The first on the list was from two years ago:

  Criminology, justice and reform: an international colloquium

  Emory University, Georgia, February 23–25

  Maggie scanned the list of participants. She counted off the seven women, listed either as speakers or attendees. Natasha had presented a paper on whether the planet itself should be granted rights under international law; Gargi had appeared on a panel on indigenous people and pollution.

  Maggie clicked out of that entry and went to another meeting of lawyers and scholars in Paris three years earlier. There they all were again. Elsa had delivered a keynote address on ‘The law and gender’.

  The third entry scored five out of the seven names: no mention of either Winthrop or Anderson. It was a paper published eighteen months earlier for the Yale Law Review, co-authored by three of the women, with the other two cited in the footnotes. It was on the problems of prosecuting rape. Even in a skim-read one paragraph stood out:

  There is what we call “the evidence gap”. In sexual crimes, there may be copious amounts of physical evidence of sexual interaction, for example, bodily fluids, hair, DNA and the like. There may be a similar abundance of evidence of physical struggle – scratches, blood, DNA under the fingernails. And yet even that will not be considered determinative, not if the accused is running a “consensual rough sex” defense, a line of argument that has become increasingly popular in what the authors contend is an age of freely available internet pornography. Uniquely, perhaps, rape is a crime that is almost never witnessed. Witness evidence is decisive in the prosecution of many forms of crime, including violent crime. But not in crimes of sexual violence. By their nature private, away from the gaze of other people, these crimes fall into an “evidence gap”. Once there, and further beset by the numerous other obstacles that exist in rape cases, prosecution becomes difficult, conviction vanishingly rare.

  The article ended on a question:

  The legal community must ask itself whether the evidentiary threshold for such crimes is set in such a way that it can only seldom be cleared, thereby rendering prosecution functionally impossible. Has the law served, in effect, to have decriminalized all but the rarest instances of sexual violence?

  Her name might not be on the paper, Maggie thought, but that was Natasha’s voice. Maggie had heard her make that very same argument by a crackling fire in Cape Cod.

  Now the dots were in place, the lines between them forming easily. A group of women who had worked together more than a decade ago, and who had stayed in touch ever since, had all arrived at the same conclusion. In the DA’s office, they had been different ages, Natasha among the youngest. But for all of them, it seemed, these had been formative years. Working together as prosecutors, discovering together how hard it was to act against men who had forced themselves on women and girls, they would have w
atched as one rapist after another walked free.

  Maggie imagined the late-night conversations after work in New York. The same conversation continuing years later, over martinis into the small hours in Atlanta or Paris, fending off other conference delegates who wandered over to join in, these women huddling together and slowly, slowly thinking: What if there were another way? What if we were to fill that evidence gap? What if we could help women fill that gap themselves?

  Dotted all over the world, they had activated their mission at roughly the same time, equipping soon-to-be victims with the equipment and skill to capture their abusers in the very act of rape – and so bring them to justice. Information would not have been hard to come by. After all, one of their number still sat in the New York Prosecutor’s office, in touch with counterparts everywhere: Caroline with her ‘comprehensive’ files.

  And yet something had changed. Jeffrey Todd had ended up dead on Winthrop’s floor, and two men had been tortured and mutilated, one of them fatally. They had begun as a small, tight-knit network of female lawyers committed to justice. They had ended as a revenge circle – and Natasha Winthrop, who had killed her rapist ex-brother with a single, precise blow to the head, was at the dead centre of it.

  Now a half-memory slowly rose to the surface, the hint of a fact that she hardly knew she knew. Maggie went back to the Spotlight button that allowed her to search the entire computer. She typed in a single word.

  Judith

  Once again, that folder came up on the screen. She tried opening it and was blocked once more. It remained locked and impenetrable. She didn’t bother guessing the password, but the machine did tell her that this folder contained several megabytes of data. It was no empty shell.

  Now Maggie dredged up that semi-remembered fact. To check it, she brought up the browser and entered a few key words in the search field. Confirmation came in a second or two. Of course.