To Kill The Truth

by Sam Bourne

  ‘Your honour, I’m grateful. As I am to you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. How we have tried your patience these last few weeks! Myself especially. For it was I who brought this case. You could have been at home, tending your hydrangeas’ – a warm snigger at that – ‘coaching Little League, but I dragged you here for all this time. Once again, I apologize to each and every one of you.

  ‘Why did I do it? I’m not a lawyer, as you know. I’m just like you, an ordinary citizen who never set foot in one of those fancy, East Coast law schools. So why did I sue Miss Susan Liston, seated over there, for what she wrote about me in that book of hers? As you all know so well by now, I bet you could recite it in your sleep’ – at that Keane all but winked at one of the older women in the jury, who responded with a blush – ‘Miss Liston called me a “slavery denier”. I sued her in this court because I believed this made no sense. For how can you deny that which did not exist? And I hope I’ve set out the facts which convince you of that.

  ‘But that does not answer my question to you. Why did I do it? Why did I tug us from our beds and our homes and make us sit in this courtroom all these long days? I didn’t do it for my reputation or my “ego”.’ He dragged out the last word as if it were somehow exotic or at the very least modishly modern.

  ‘No, sir. I was happy in my study, with my dry, old books. I had no need of this circus. No offence, your honour. I do not seek fame or glory. I certainly don’t seek money, which is good because I’ve not made any for a long time, thanks to this case.’ More warm laughter from a corner of the public gallery.

  ‘I brought this case because I believed my state, Virginia, and my country, the United States, needed to be free of a burden we have carried for too long. Oh, not people like us’ – he gestured at the older members of the jury – ‘it’s too late for us. We’ve carried this all our lives, haven’t we? It’s got in our bones. It’s in our marrow.’ Marrah. ‘No, it’s the children I’m thinking of. The young. The next generation.

  ‘Let them grow up the way we could not: without this terrible weight of history on their backs, without this stain of “slavery” on their clothes, without this mark of Cain on their faces. They need to emerge from out of this shadow.

  ‘And a shadow is what it is, ladies and gentlemen. A ghost, a spectre.’

  A voice bellowed out from the gallery: ‘You lie! You’re a liar!’

  The judge banged her gavel and demanded order. Keane smiled, utterly unfazed.

  ‘I know that feelings run high on this topic, your honour. But the truth is the truth, the facts are the facts. And that is what I would ask you, my fellow Virginians of the jury, to focus on. Don’t be swayed by what you thought you knew about “slavery” before you came into this courtroom. Think only of the evidence that was presented to you once you were here. How Professor Barker could not rebut my contention that Twelve Years a Slave is a powerful, moving work of fiction. And remember the visit here of that wonderful lady Mrs Henderson – Mrs, I emphasize. Boy, she set me straight on that one, didn’t she?’ He gave another semi-wink towards the jury. ‘We couldn’t forget her, no sir! But she became forgetful, didn’t she. A little confused. Just like all those documents we looked at. All those contradictions and mistakes. Time and again, they revealed that what looked like a firm, clear record was instead unreliable.

  ‘Now, one last thing before you are taken from here to a room that will be sealed and quiet and away from jammering hammerjacks like myself. You will deliberate against a backdrop of disquieting events that have—’

  ‘Tread carefully, Mr Keane.’

  ‘I will, your honour, I will. There is no need to share with you the details of what’s been happening in this state, this nation and around the world. We’ll say no more than that there have been acts of violence. How’s that? Acts of violence. But I want you to cast all that far from your mind. Do not be distracted by it. We don’t know who or what is behind these acts, but none of it has anything to do with the arguments I’ve been making here before you. Nothing whatsoever. You can be appalled or worried or frightened by those acts, but it still has no bearing on the question you have been asked to decide. Was it fair for Miss Liston to call me those names? Or am I right to say that the past is not what we took it to be? That we are not the villains some of those folks – in the Ivy League colleges and in Hollywood and at the New York Times – would have us believe we were and are?

  ‘That’s now for you to decide. It’s in your hands. The Commonwealth of Virginia, the United States of America and the people of the world are watching.

  ‘Your honour, I rest my case.’

  A spontaneous burst of applause greeted Keane as he sat down, with several in the public gallery rising to their feet. In response, another group broke into a chant: Keane lies, Keane lies, Keane lies.

  And in the midst of it, calmer than the rest, was a young woman – lean, strong, athletic – whose focus had not been on William Keane but his opponent, Susan Liston. She watched Liston from above, her gaze steady. She seemed to be assessing her. Only occasionally did the woman in the gallery make the smallest, habitual movement, almost a tic – a finger reaching upward and rubbing her left eyebrow.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  The Mayflower Hotel, Washington DC, 7.23pm

  The Mayflower Hotel was beautifully lit at this time of night, the entrance all but glowing under the enormous, rippling flag of stars and stripes. Standing on the opposite side of the street, watching the cabs, limos and SUVs arrive, Maggie could see the allure. With its buxus trees posted like sentries on either side of the doors, themselves discreetly illuminated, the Mayflower could have been a chateau on the outskirts of Paris, the faded stone suggesting an old-world grandeur that Washington often aspired to but only rarely reached.

  She would have to get this right, she thought, checking again the ridge around her ankle. Putting tights on over an electronic tag had proved quite a challenge: she had snagged two pairs before gingerly getting these on. Now she just hoped the tag wasn’t too obvious. She would only have one shot; she could not blow it.

  More guests arrived, in a constant flow: the men in tuxedos, the women in gowns that usually erred towards black or safe, deep shades of purple or green. Even from here, she could see that almost all of them were white and seriously monied.

  Not for the first time, she gave thanks for Uri who had within half an hour worked out where Maggie needed to go. Whether that was through his own shoe leather, or contacts who did the digging for him, hardly mattered. He had found out.

  Maggie took a deep breath and another glance at her outfit, a black cocktail dress that had seen regular service at occasions like this. It was the one she had worn at White House dinners or diplomatic engagements, back when she was invited to those. She had once favoured the black trouser-suit, but over the years that had become the signifier for ‘staff’. Maybe it was because she was younger than most of the guests, but when, at a reception for the French foreign minister, a woman had marched over to Maggie, handed her a mink and said, ‘Would you be a dear and take this to the cloakroom for me?’ she had decided that the pant suit was over.

  She lifted her head, pushed back her shoulders and crossed the road. Confidence. It was all about confidence. She would walk into this dinner, raising funds for the Washington National Opera, as if she too were an honoured guest.

  Her stride was purposeful, but she was still stopped as soon as she was through the revolving doors.

  ‘Can I see your invitation, ma’am?’

  ‘Oh no.’ Maggie smiled warmly. ‘I’m not here for the event. I’m here to meet a guest at the hotel.’

  ‘Reception is that way, ma’am.’

  Duly ushered away from the line, Maggie then simply walked through the lobby, with its shining marble floors, twinkling chandeliers and gilt decoration, until she had rejoined the snake of guests as they headed to the Grand Ballroom. If anyone asked to see her invitation, she would say it was in her coat, now checke
d in at the cloakroom. For the sake of completeness, she then approached one of the twenty-something women – they were always twenty-something women – who were standing around with clipboards. Dressed in black pant suits.

  ‘I’m just checking – do you know if my husband arrived? Name of Smith?’

  The woman smiled keenly and started flipping pages until she came to a cluster of Smiths, which Maggie promptly skimmed through. (Of all the skills that had proved precious in the White House, reading upside down was perhaps the most valuable.) Spotting one of them as yet unticked, Maggie added, ‘Robert Smith?’

  The young woman found ‘Smith, Robert’ a half second after Maggie had seen it and then chirped, ‘Seems you’re the first to arrive! Table twenty-three.’

  Maggie thanked her and then pressed into the ballroom itself, a cavernous space with Versailles pretensions, from the painted domed ceiling to the elaborate balustrades on the mezzanine level above. The room was heaving, but Maggie’s gaze was now a tractor beam, searching for the top table and the woman who would be playing host.

  In retrospect it was so obvious. Tammy French had indeed been a student at Stanford, a contemporary of Crawford McNamara and an equally enthralled student of William Keane. French had left little imprint on the others, seemingly passing through without trace, never to be mentioned again in their alumni newsletters or even in the college records. And that was because Tammy French did not exist.

  Oh, as Maggie had explained to a baffled Uri over the phone, Tammy was flesh and blood, all right. But ‘Tammy French’ was a pseudonym, an alias adopted for the four years of student life, and very possibly at boarding school before that. It was a common enough ruse at the time, if by common you meant widespread among the multi-millionaire classes. When the sons and daughters of the very richest were getting kidnapped in alarming numbers, the smartest money sent its offspring out into the world, or at least to be expensively educated, incognito. Which was how ‘Tammy French’ was born, the invented creation of her always inventive father.

  From what Maggie could see, Tammy had stuck to her role perfectly. None of her student contemporaries had twigged who their classmate was. This was the age before social media, so there was no online database of images her face could be checked against, no Instagram posts that might have alerted would-be ransom-seekers to her whereabouts. A more innocent age.

  And yet, she had not been careless or fancy-free. Even on a day that was sufficiently cloudy that not one other person in William Keane’s history class had felt the need to shield their eyes from the sun as they posed for a group photograph, Tammy had worn sunglasses – ones large enough to obscure her face from view.

  Which meant that she could study unhindered, taking classes, listening to lectures, scribbling notes and having her mind expanded, by Keane especially. His radical ideas about history had influenced so many of them, shaping them for years to come. Kelly alone in his cabin; McNamara spinning his theories in his Washington townhouse. All of them were still Keane’s disciples. But only she had dared take their teacher’s gospel truly out into the world, to implement it in its most radical form. Of all people, it had been the one few of her fellow students had noticed, the one Maggie herself had passed over without even a moment’s thought.

  Perhaps, Maggie reflected now, only one person had ever noticed her: Keane himself. Maggie heard again a remark the historian had made to her that day in the Richmond law office. It had meant nothing to her at the time, and she’d ignored it. But now Keane’s voice sounded loud in her head. You remind me of one of my most interesting students. Though she wasn’t quite as bright as you. But the passion.

  Maggie was now perhaps three yards away from the top table. She watched as this group, the elite within the elite, the billionaires among millionaires, greeted each other. There was a generational divide of sorts. The older group, seventy-five and over, consisted of overweight men squeezed into black tie, their bony wives armed with Eisenhower-era hair-dos falling on semi-skeletal clavicles. While the younger rich, fifty and above, were pictures of glowing health, the men tanned and lean, silver hair trimmed short, the women sinewy, all gym arms and thick, salonned hair.

  And there, effortlessly moving between both groups, was the woman Maggie had come to see. Her dress was surprisingly old-fashioned, a taffeta number that Liz would have branded instantly as ‘meringue’. Her hair was a shade of auburn that seemed indebted to chemistry rather than nature. She was not pretty: her face was too long, her jawline too harsh for that. But she had confidence and poise and, when she rocked her head back in apparent delight, as she was doing now, she had the same flirtatious charisma Maggie had seen in that photograph.

  Hovering nearby, in regulation pant suit, was a woman Maggie identified as an assistant. Beaming brightly, Maggie approached, touching the woman’s elbow as she made her request to be introduced.

  ‘And who should I say would like to meet her?’

  Without hesitating, Maggie said, ‘Why don’t you tell her Tammy French is here?’

  Chapter Forty-Six

  The Mayflower Hotel, Washington DC, 7.55pm

  Maggie watched the woman’s face as the assistant announced her surprise guest, Maggie carefully lip-reading as the name – Tammy French – was spoken and then the reaction: the mouth dropping, both ends tumbling downward first in shock and then in a curl of . . . what was it? Fury? Fear? Both, by the looks of it.

  It took less than half a second, a beat, for the rictus smile to reassert itself. Once it had, the painted, mask-like nature of that face struck Maggie afresh. The scarlet lips, the pale powder: it was part eighteenth-century courtesan, part harlequin. Maggie felt a chill in her blood: for the first time, she realized this woman terrified her.

  The assistant was approaching, her demeanour more serious now. ‘Why don’t you follow me to this side room? She’ll join you there.’

  Maggie followed the woman, walking in single file in a channel between the outermost tables and the wall. But her eyes were darting, involuntarily, from left to right. They’d almost reached the side room when, in her peripheral vision, she spotted a man on the other side of the ballroom, dressed in a plain suit, cheaper than the others here. He touched his ear, the way she had seen security personnel do a hundred times before. His pace quickened ever so slightly. Every instinct told her the same thing: this was a trap.

  Maggie turned on her heel and plunged back into the centre of the room, threading her way through the glitter and sparkle of the tables and the guests. She made two immediate calculations. First, those security guards would hesitate before shooting into a room of eleven hundred people. Second, she would be hard to pick out in a thicket of women dressed exactly like her. As she advanced towards the back of the ballroom, and not for the first time, she gave thanks for the little black dress.

  She pushed at the first door she found, which took her immediately into some kind of service area, where a cluster of busboys were polishing wine glasses and retrieving cutlery. Ahead were two doors, through one of which emerged a stream of waiters and waitresses, all clad in identical black costumes – its centrepiece the Nehru jacket, now the ubiquitous server uniform at high-end Washington events – each one carrying a tray piled with identically minimalist plates of food: little whirls of salmon and a decorous twist of dill. They came out in such a stampede that Maggie had to dart to one side, just to avoid being crushed under foot. She moved forward and pushed at the other door.

  Immediately she was hit by the steam and metallic clang of mass food production. In front of her was a long, polished counter illuminated by a series of lights dangling from above. Running the full length of the counter were two open metal shelves, behind which stood a parade of chefs, each one filling the space in front of them with plates ready to be picked up. In single file, a line of servers moved forward to pick up their consignment for despatch outside. It was a military operation.

  Maggie made an instant assessment. She wanted to get into that kitchen area,
behind the counter, but how to get past the two barriers, first the human line of waiters and then the metal structure itself?

  She moved forward, doing her best not to run but to walk with authority, as if she had every right to be in the banqueting kitchen of a major Washington hotel. She looked over her right shoulder. Shit. Just in through the same door she had taken was one of the guards, carrying a weapon and steadying himself to take aim.

  Maggie was past the counter now, with a doorway to her left. She ducked through it, where she was hit by more steam. A conveyer belt was pushing a line of plastic trays filled with champagne flutes into a tall, rectangular machine that she soon identified as an industrial dishwasher. In front of her, a squad of Latino men in overalls were grabbing at hoses dangling from the ceiling as they washed a series of enormous pots and pans. She could see another door, but that led straight back out into the kitchen: she’d be an easy target for the guard.

  She would have to head back out of this room the way she came in, this time turning left again and moving further away from the kitchen, darting between two tall, mobile racks – their slots filled with trays – on the move, before taking the first door she could see.

  A blast of frigid air announced this as the cold store, where metal shelves were stacked with oversized containers of strawberries and raspberries and cartoonishly large pots of mayonnaise. Again, there was no external door.

  ‘Get out of my way, sir.’

  She couldn’t see him, but the tone and volume of that voice told her that the security guard was moving out of the cooking area and coming this way. Maggie had no choice. In that instant, she backed out of the cold store and opened instead the next door she came to, walking straight inside.