Sam Bourne - The Chosen One

Over dinner, she listened politely as Telegraph Tim told the story of his life: Eton, Oxford, then straight to Kabul as a stringer, impressing the foreign desk, becoming a favourite of the new editor and eventually earning a transfer to Washington. His father, a retired general; his life, one of seamless privilege. Maggie nodded and laughed in the right places and did the occasional shake of the head, thereby exhibiting the full length of her hair, a move which tended to elicit an almost Pavlovian response in most heterosexual men.

After dinner they walked along Bourbon Street, continuing to trade speculation on the Forbes case as they watched frat boys lurch out of the multiple bars. Was Forbes a Southerner? Was he a native of New Orleans? If not, had he come here pre- or post-Katrina?

‘Can we go there?’ Maggie said suddenly.

‘Where?’ Tim replied, looking for whatever it was that had caught Maggie’s eye.

‘The house. Forbes’s house.’

‘It’s sealed off, Maggie. Crime scene and all that. No media access.’

‘I don’t mean to go in. Just to look from the outside.’

Tim, who had visited earlier that day, was only too happy to play tour guide, leading Maggie a few blocks east, turning right, then heading into the crush of antique shops, restaurants and hotels on Royal Street before they finally reached the tree-lined and residential Spain Street.

The homes were decent enough, timber-clad in pastel colours, but they were small, many of them single-storey, and without the ornate, wrought-iron balustrades that made the heart of the French Quarter as alluring as a subtropical Paris. It suggested that Forbes had been anything but wealthy.

‘There it is,’ said Tim, gesturing ahead. Ribbons of yellow-and-black police tape still barred the front porch and the three-step walk-up; there were a couple of TV satellite trucks parked outside.

Maggie gazed at it, trying to imagine the life of the man who had lived there. Who he had been and what he had wanted. Just then, she spotted some activity. A policeman was approaching and behind him what appeared to be a colleague in plain clothes. She turned to Tim – ‘Isn’t that…?’ – but he was off chatting to one of the technicians by the TV truck, asking if there had been any developments.

Maggie took another look. It was him: the thin-faced man from the Monteleone bar, now being ushered into Vic Forbes’s house, a place that was off-limits to the press. And yet he had been there, among the journalists, in what was, in effect, the media hotel. What was going on?

Tim was back at her side and Maggie said nothing. She scribbled a few lines in her notebook, then agreed that they stroll back to the Monteleone together. They re-entered the pedestrian throng of Royal Street, full of shops open to the heady spring evening. As they passed a display of scented candles and an array of gothic masks for Mardi Gras, Tim launched into a long story about the cricket club he had founded in New York, allowing Maggie to stop listening and to think.

The simplest explanation for what she had just seen was that the man was indeed a plain-clothes cop who had earlier been at the bar of the Monteleone undercover. But why? Surely he hadn’t been eavesdropping on the hacks: of what possible value could that be?

They were back at the hotel now, Maggie reluctantly agreeing to return to the Carousel Bar, where the table of international journalists had reformed, albeit with a slightly different cast list. This time, though, she insisted on whisky.

Within twenty minutes, the thin-faced man was back, once again taking a table on his own, once again pulling out his laptop as if to begin journalistic work.

Maggie excused herself from the group and, with no clear plan, strode right over to the man. ‘Excuse me,’ she began, hoping she was looming over him.

‘What is it?’ he said. American, the accent rougher than she was expecting. Not Southern; closer to New Jersey.

‘Who are you?’

‘I’ll tell you if you tell me.’ He cracked a smile, showing bad teeth.

‘My name is Liz Costello. Irish Times .’

‘Lewis Rigby. I write for the National Enquirer . Freelance.’

That was not what she was expecting. ‘As in the supermarket tabloid?’

‘Yeah, the supermarket tabloid that broke the biggest political story of the last year, thank you very much.’

‘Mark Chester’s love-child? That was you?’

‘Not me personally. But yeah. You wanna sit down?’

Maggie pulled up a chair, forming a new strategy in light of this fresh information. ‘So,’ she said, her voice friendly and collegiate now. ‘You here on the Forbes story?’

He smiled, as if licking his lips at the prospect. ‘You bet.’

‘Right,’ Maggie said slowly. ‘It’s just I had a tip that earlier today a reporter for “the Enquirer ” bribed a serving officer of the New Orleans Police Department in order to gain access to a crime scene. It didn’t sound like the kind of thing the Philadelphia Enquirer would get up to, so it must have been you. You know that’s a felony in all fifty states, with very heavy penalties.’

He turned ashen.

‘Yep. My source has hard evidence.’ The bluff was the oldest trick in the negotiator’s book. Through years of talks, Maggie had discovered that even the wiliest operators would fall for it.

‘Jesus Christ.’

‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to blab. Not to the police, not to the Enquirer .’

‘You’re not?’

‘We’ve all got a job to do.’

He let out a long gulp of air.

Maggie continued. ‘Just so long as you share whatever you’ve got with me.’

‘You gotta be kidding. There’s no way the Nat -’

‘- National Enquirer is going to want to face charges of corrupting a police officer. Too serious. Which is why you’re going to get on the phone to your friend and ask him to arrange another visit to the house. With me as your pal.’

It took him approximately five seconds to compute what he’d heard. ‘But no photographs, all right? Those are my exclusive. Otherwise I’m screwed.’

‘Deal.’

His brow remained furrowed. ‘How can I trust you not to take it somewhere else?’

‘You can’t.’ Maggie smiled. ‘But you don’t have much choice.’

He gave a short, glum nod.

‘So,’ Maggie said, gesturing for them to leave the bar. ‘When shall we do this?’

‘There’s only one time we can do this. He’s only on duty tonight. We’ll go there right now.’

New Orleans, Wednesday March 22, 23.03 CST

The TV trucks were still there but, Rigby counselled, one was local and, at this hour, off the air while the other was Japanese: nothing to worry about. Yesterday there had been two dozen. The New Orleans Police Department had been repetitive in its consistency, drilling away at the message that they were looking for no one else in connection with the death of Victor Forbes, that the admittedly bizarre circumstances of his demise all but confirmed that it was death at his own hand, whether deliberate or not was hard to determine and might never be known.

The message had seemed to penetrate. Maggie had clicked on the TV the instant she got into her hotel room after checkin: hopping channels, she had detected a change in tone. True, Fox, and the nutjobs, were still crying murder, but the mainstream voices were calmer. ‘A personal tragedy for Mr Forbes seems to have brought to an end what threatened to be a political calamity for President Baker,’ said some precociously serious twenty-something talking head from The New Republic .

Rigby insisted on waiting across the street, standing in the shadows where he would not be seen. Eventually the policeman Maggie had seen earlier – African-American and at least six foot two – came into view. Rigby stepped out to meet him. He nodded his head towards Maggie and uttered the single, reluctant word, ‘colleague’. The cop shrugged, as if to say ‘Like I give a shit’.