The Chosen One Read online

‘All we had to do was tell people, starting that day, that Pam was not feeling well, that she’d come down with something. That she couldn’t see anyone. Then, a week or so later, we should say it was more serious. That she was being transferred to Tacoma. Still no visitors allowed. Then, a week after that, there would be an announcement of her death. He would take care of everything. We wouldn’t have to do anything, except stay home and tell people our daughter was sick.

  ‘And in return he would pay us a lot of money, more than Randall would make in a year. Hell, in five years. To show he was serious, he had one of those attaché cases with him. The kind men used to carry back then. And inside it was cash. A lot of cash. I don’t think I’d ever seen that much money in my life. And he promised there would be more.

  ‘Well, Randall threw him out, of course. Said it was blood money. How dare he? Lots of noise. But the man left the case there. Just sitting in that room in Aberdeen where Pamela should have been.

  ‘The hours went by and we were sobbing about our daughter, our little baby. But we were also looking at that money. All that money. Might have been fifty thousand dollars in that bag.’

  Now she hunched over, making small, noiseless sobs. Maggie crossed the vast space between them and placed a hand on her shoulder. Instantly, like an animal reflex, Mrs Everett grabbed it and held it tight. Raising her head, her eyes rheumy with tears, she let out a howl of anguish. ‘I said we should take the money! God curse me for it, I accepted it. I did it.’

  ‘I understand,’ Maggie said, shaken.

  ‘I believed what he said, you see. He said we could get away; we should get away. Aberdeen would only ever be a “place of death” for us. And we could use the money to set up some kind of memorial for Pamela. Perhaps a scholarship. Some way of keeping her memory alive. So we said yes. We called the number on the card. Randall made the call.

  ‘Of course we never did set up that memorial. We were too ashamed. Everyone there at the funeral, believing Pamela had suffered through a terrible illness. Imagine that, lying about your own child’s death. We deserved to be cast out. So that’s what we did. We cast ourselves out. As far away as possible. Middle of nowhere. So that we wouldn’t have to see anybody ever again. But you can’t run away from your own shame. It stays with you.’

  Maggie spoke softly. ‘The money? Did the man ever pay it?’

  Anne Everett looked up, as if jolted from a daydream. ‘Oh yes, all of it. It kept coming into the bank account, a few thousand more, piling up month after month. I can’t bring myself to spend a penny of it, of course. Nor could Randall. It’s filthy.’

  ‘And who did it come from?’

  ‘Like I said, we never knew. We were too grief-stricken to ask. Too stupid too, probably. We talked about it, of course. Wondering and guessing. Until Randall stopped talking, a few years ago. His mouth just clammed up, I guess. That’s shame for you.’

  Maggie had a question burning to get onto her tongue until it could be held back no longer. ‘And what about this…boy she was with that night? Did you ever-’

  Anne Everett shook her head furiously. ‘Never did, never wanted to. We would have killed him with our bare hands if we’d have found out who he was.’

  ‘Do you have your suspicions?’

  ‘Well, it’s funny you should ask that.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Put it this way, this last year or two, I’d been wondering when somebody would knock on that door and ask about Pamela. No one ever did, but I thought they might. I thought a journalist might come here.’

  ‘Why a journalist?’

  ‘Because of the boy my Pamela loved when she was at high school, the boy she adored until the day she died.’

  ‘What boy?’

  ‘Haven’t you guessed? I thought you’d have guessed by now.’ She looked into the bottom of her glass as if it were a deep well. ‘Pamela was in love with Stephen Baker.’

  51

  From the Daily Dish blog, posted at 18.46, Sunday March 26:

  Did you see the faces of the crowds that gathered on the Mall today? The sheer diversity of those faces? It was awe-inspiring – the reason why those of us who chose to be American citizens can feel glad, despite everything that has happened in the last insane few days, that we joined this remarkable country.

  With the minimum of advance publicity – yours truly only heard that it was happening about an hour or two before it started – we gathered this afternoon on the steps of the Capitol to send a message to Congress: Hands off our President.

  This was the Baker Nation, the young, hopeful America that elected our young, hopeful president just months ago. They resent the notion that a cabal of Republican headbangers, together with a couple of craven Democratic enablers, might drive from office the man who represents a chance for our country at last to be the nation it was meant to be.

  The TV estimates the crowd at ten thousand. I would say, looking at it, that it appears larger than that. Even if you accept the lower figure, it is a remarkable achievement. There was next to no preparation or organization. This was the closest we might get to an organic, spontaneous demonstration of popular outrage. Call it leaderless resistance, American-style.

  Whatever you call it, let’s hope Stephen Baker-still grieving the loss of his closest aide and long-time buddy, Stuart Goldstein – could see it from his window at the White House. Let’s hope he saw it and drew strength from it. You are not alone, Mr President…

  52

  Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Sunday March 26, 22.03 PST

  The words had sent a charge of electricity through her. Pamela was in love with Stephen Baker. Those words and the wistful smile that curled Anne Everett’s lips at the thought of what might have been.

  Instantly Maggie had assumed the obvious: that Vic Forbes knew what had happened to Pamela Everett and believed that Baker had somehow been involved in her death. That was why that date – and that date alone – represented Forbes’s blanket. It was his insurance policy, it was the unexploded bomb he threatened to detonate against Baker, the one that would surely have destroyed his rival forever. Except the lithe beauty at the Midnight Lounge had got to him first, leaving him dangling in drag from the rafters of his own house.

  But none of that could explain a stranger appearing at the Everetts’ door ready to hand over serious money to protect the reputation of a lad barely out of his teens. Pamela had been a couple of years younger than Baker, Schilling had said, but even that would have made Baker no more than twenty at the time of the fire, twenty-one at most. Why would anyone go to such lengths to protect him?

  Anne Everett was watching Maggie’s face, studying her reaction. She had anticipated it even before Maggie had had the chance to form the thought in her head. ‘If you’re thinking it was him, you’re wrong,’ she said firmly. ‘Pamela was in bed with someone at the Meredith Hotel that night, but it wasn’t Stephen.’

  Maggie frowned. ‘How can you be so sure?’

  Anne Everett got to her feet. ‘Come with me.’

  She led Maggie up a narrow staircase, switching on a light at the landing. It was a naked bulb, hanging on a simple wire. So much for the fortune the Everetts had been paid to keep quiet about the death of their daughter.

  Anne Everett opened a door that instantly released a cloud of spare-room must. A wave of childhood memory crashed over Maggie, dragging her back to the attic of her granny’s house. She shivered as she looked around the room. Posters of Prince and Jimmy Connors on the wall, a teddy bear on the bed. A shelf of books and VHS tapes – including the Jane Fonda workout – several more packed with CDs.

  ‘But didn’t you move here after…?’ Maggie said, unable to finish the sentence.

  ‘Yes, we did. Randall didn’t want me to do this. He said the whole point of coming here was to move on. But…Do you have children, Ashley?’

  ‘I don’t. No.’

  ‘Well, I think most mothers would understand.’ She stared at the floor, then at the empty bed. ‘Y
ou can’t always move on. Not everyone can do it.’

  They stood in silence for a while, then Pamela’s mother crouched on the floor by the bed, lifted the valance and tugged at the drawer that was revealed beneath. Inside was a blanket, neatly folded. She looked up at Maggie. ‘Randall didn’t know about this place. Only me.’

  Beneath the blanket was a large, black-bound scrapbook. She pulled it out, then perched on the end of the bed and opened it. She patted the space next to her, encouraging Maggie to sit down. ‘Look,’ she said.

  Glued into the scrapbook was a yellowing two-page spread from the Madisonian, the newspaper of James Madison High. At the centre was that same prom picture of Pamela Everett, except this time it was surrounded by snippets of tribute, paid by former classmates. ‘You were an angel, sent down from heaven. Now you are back among the stars.’

  She turned the page, to what Maggie recognized as a cutting from the Daily World. ‘Blaze at downtown hotel,’ read the headline.

  Gently, Maggie inched the scrapbook closer so that she could read the story. It described a late-night fire at the Meredith Hotel, how a drill had brought all the guests out into the streets in their nightclothes as the ‘inferno gutted several storeys of the hotel, leading ceilings to collapse and walls to fall in.’ It reported ‘uncertainty at the time of writing’ over casualties. Accompanying the story was a large, if poorly printed, black-and-white photograph of the hotel front ablaze.

  Maggie looked to the top right of the cutting. March 16. Page five. The missing page.

  She could feel her head throbbing. Who had done it? Who had removed it from the microfilm? Was it Forbes, so that he would enjoy a monopoly on the evidence? Or did he know about Mrs Everett and her secret hiding place? Was this yellowing page, stuck into an album stashed away in the faithfully reconstructed bedroom of a long-dead prom queen – indeed, hidden under a blanket – his blanket?

  ‘This is what I wanted to show you,’ Mrs Everett said quietly. She turned a couple more pages of the scrapbook.

  Another complete page from The Daily World.

  ‘There he is,’ Anne Everett said with that same wistful smile.

  Sure enough, there stood a young, eager and handsome Stephen Baker shaking the hand of some older, distinguished man in oversized glasses. Below was an extended caption:

  Washington’s senior US Senator, Paul Corbyn, greets the state’s first winner of a Rhodes scholarship since Corbyn himself nearly forty years earlier. The lucky young man is Stephen Baker, graduate of James Madison High School and, this summer, Harvard University. The photograph was taken in Sen Corbyn’s Washington, DC office on March 15.

  Anne Everett said nothing as Maggie read it again. Then she looked back at the date at the top of the page: March 18. If only she had checked the archive for that date, she’d have seen it. ‘This photo proves it wasn’t him,’ Maggie said softly.

  ‘That’s right,’ Mrs Everett agreed, giving a tight little nod. ‘He was on the other side of the country that day. In Washington, DC. Last year, during the election campaign, I often wondered whether someone would knock on my door. Making accusations. That’s why I’m glad I kept this. Everyone had such high hopes for Stephen Baker. Not just in America. All round the world. Hopes for the future. But not me. My hopes are all in the past, Leslie. But I often think how different things would have been if Stephen Baker had taken Pamela out that night – instead of that, that bastard,’ she spat out the word with the venom of a woman who never swears. ‘Then my Pamela would be alive today. I am sure of it.’

  53

  New York, Sunday March 26, 23.01

  Late nights suited him. Best time to work: no email, no phone calls, no distractions. Not even a view out of the window; just darkness.

  This way his vision could be dominated by the screen on the desk. Amazing what could be done on the computer these days. Pretty much everything.

  There was a glass by the side of the keyboard, amber with whisky. But he had barely touched it. The ice had melted long ago, diluting the spirit to a paler, less enticing shade. He liked that it was there, proof that he was absorbed in his work.

  Which he was. He hadn’t heard from Maggie for a while, but that only served to motivate him further: she was clearly in a bit of trouble here, and so he was duty bound to do whatever he could to help. Besides, with Maggie it was never just duty.

  He moved the mouse across the screen and clicked open the fifty-one-second video that had, at last, caused the penny to drop. It was a crucial piece of footage; he could not quite believe he had not discovered it till now. As soon as Maggie was back in DC, he would show it to her and all would at last be clear. But why wait till then? He reached for his phone and punched in Maggie’s number and it rang and rang and then went to voicemail. Yet again. Sighing, he shoved the phone back into his trouser pocket.

  He returned to the screen and watched the video through yet again, this time noticing something new. He sat up. Was that a noise he hadn’t heard before: a metallic clang, muffled but definitely there? He spooled back and replayed the same sequence. No sound this time. Must have been outside.

  He needed to think how best to organize this material, for maximum impact. What would work best? Despite the full panoply of state-of-the-art software at his fingertips, including perhaps half a dozen first-class word-processing programs, he reached for the pad and pen and began jotting notes.

  There it was again. Not the same noise, more of a creak this time and, if anything, louder.

  ‘Hello?’

  Nothing.

  ‘Anyone there?’

  He checked the clock at the top right of the screen. Past eleven.

  He went back to the sheet of notepaper, scribbling in handwriting that no one but he could ever decipher the logical sequence as he now understood it. He imagined relaying it to Maggie, watching as a smile spread across her face, a smile of recognition as she understood the pattern he now understood. That smile could make a man fall in love with Maggie Costello.

  Reaching a knot in the clear logical line he was trying to unspool on paper, he sucked on his pen, feeling the plastic flake off into his mouth. Anticipating a choke, he reached for the watery glass of whisky, glancing at the darkness of the window as he did so.

  The sight of a man’s face peering in made him jump. Idiotically, he wondered how someone could be outside his window – here in a fifth-floor apartment.

  It took him a half-second to understand the truth. That the face staring, dead-eyed, at him was in fact a reflection of a man standing inside – and just behind him.

  By then it was too late. The man’s hands were on his shoulders, pinning him to his chair, and then on his neck. He tried to gasp but it was no good: the grip was too tight.

  His own reaction surprised him. He writhed and clawed at his attacker but the strength in this man’s hands was insuperable; there was, he could tell instantly, a professionalism to this attack that guaranteed it would succeed. Suddenly, and with horrible certainty, he knew he was going to die.

  All of this was measured in seconds. And throughout, the only face he could see was Maggie’s. Even in these desperate circumstances he registered this as a curious fact. He had not realized how much she meant to him. But suddenly all that mattered was knowing that if they were ready to kill him, they would be ready to kill her – and that thought gave him determination. Letting his hands fall as if in submission to his fate, he dug into his pocket and then, summoning the strength for a big push, gave a sharp lurch to his right to shake the man off. He knew it would not save his life, but it might at least delay his death by a moment or two.

  As his attacker stumbled backwards, he gulped down oxygen. All his concentration was on his left hand. Adept at using the phone when he wasn’t looking at it, he jabbed at the buttons. The strangling hands were back on his neck now, attempting to get a grip as he writhed, while his own left hand remained deep in his pocket, searching for the green key that would start the call. With a superhuman e
ffort he stopped himself from crying out straight away, knowing he needed to wait a few seconds for the machine to pick up and the message to play.

  Now. He would do it now.

  With his right arm he tried to lash out – backwards – at his assailant and, once again, the man had to take one hand off his victim’s neck to fend off the diversion.

  ‘Ennnnnn!’ he rasped, in what sounded like an exhalation of desperate pain.

  His attacker had forced him off the chair now and onto his knees, so that he bore the full weight of his brutal killer on his shoulders. Somehow he had to find the strength to cry out once more.

  ‘Ayyyy!’ he shouted, though the sound that emerged was more like a whisper.

  Out of frustration, perhaps, the attacker now took his hands off his prey’s neck and punched him instead, hard in the jaw. Even so, he did not flinch, instead seizing on the chance to cry out, ‘Seeeeeeeee!’

  This continued for perhaps ten more seconds, even if it felt like the longest and most terrifying hour of his life. Somehow he found the energy to force his executioner to interrupt the job of asphyxiation – even, at one point, directing a fist into the man’s balls – and to do it often enough that eventually he had cried out five times.

  It was then his strength left him. He could flail no more at the dead-eyed, grey-faced man in the cheap suit who was squeezing the life out of him. At last he surrendered, allowing him to kill him – as he had known he would.

  He ended up on the floor of his own study, curled up and lifeless.

  There was a noise outside in the hall. The attacker, unnerved by the sound of neighbours returning to the next-door apartment, moved swiftly – tearing off the top, scribbled sheet of the notepad on the desk and then using the device he had been given to wipe the computer’s hard drive.

  The knock at the door interrupted his effort to frisk the man he had just killed.

  ‘Hello? Is everything all right in there?’ The knocking continued and was getting louder.