Sam Bourne - The Chosen One

‘I gotta say, guilty or innocent, your husband must be a major league asshole. Why would he drink Sprite here when he could be having vintage champagne at home?’

Maggie said nothing, following the manager down a flight of stairs, past the restrooms and through a door marked ‘Authorized Staff Only’. Inside was a corridor with three glass-panelled doors, all apparently opening onto offices.

They stopped at the third, the only one that seemed to be unlocked and whose light was on. One side was cluttered with old equipment, including what seemed to be a long-deceased fax machine, its cord coiled up like a defunct tail, while the other was dominated by four TV screens. Barely watching them, preferring to concentrate on the Puzzler magazine in front of him, was a man Maggie identified as the companion bouncer to the fridge she had seen upstairs. Perhaps he was the freezer.

‘Frank, this lady is a friend of mine,’ the manager said, setting no more than one foot in the room. ‘She wants to see the tapes from last night. Give her whatever she needs. And get her a glass of water. She’s pregnant.’

With that, she turned and gave Maggie one last look. ‘I have a twelve-year-old daughter at home. She hasn’t seen her father in ten years. You’re smarter than I was. Best of luck.’

Still bored, Frank pulled out a second swivel chair from under the work-bench that served as his desk, and nodded for Maggie to sit in it.

‘You know what time you’re looking for?’

Since she had assumed she was never going to get this far, she had not given a moment’s thought to the question. She tried to remember what Telegraph Tim had said earlier. There had been so many details, she had begun tuning out after a while. But he had told her, she was sure of it.

‘Did you hear what I said?’

‘I’m sorry. I need time to think.’

He went back to his puzzles.

Twelve thirty. The estimated time of death; Tim had mentioned it twice. But when Forbes’s evening began, there was no way of knowing. He could have been here hours earlier. Would she really have to get Frank to spool through four or five hours of CCTV footage, looking for, what, a glimpse of a man Maggie had never met, whom she had seen only on television?

Television. That was it. She had watched Forbes give that live interview on TV while she sat in Stu’s office, before the meeting in the Residence. It had been just before eight. That would have been 9pm local time. And then, nearly an hour later, they had been interrupted with the statement Forbes had just released. That made it 10pm in New Orleans.

‘Frank, is there only one entrance and exit to this building?’

Slowly, as if wrenching himself away from his Sudoku puzzle, the security guard brought his eyes to rest on Maggie. ‘For staff or guests?’

‘Guests.’

‘Hmm-hmm,’ he said, by way of affirmation.

Anticipating her next question, he added, ‘Besides, there ain’t no camera on the other one.’

‘So this one it is,’ said Maggie, grateful to have one less decision to make. She rubbed her temples: haggling with the European Union at three in the morning over the right language for a cap-and-trade clause in a climate change treaty suddenly looked like a walk in the park.

As Frank punched the buttons that would bring up last night’s recordings, Maggie’s BlackBerry chimed. A message from Stuart.

Call me urgently. Situation grave.

‘Anything here, ma’am?’

She forced herself to come back to the moment. She had to concentrate.

Until now she had only been half-watching the faces going in and out. She’d ignored groups, especially those made up of the young. She had been looking for bald, middle-aged men which, given the Midnight Lounge’s clientele, did not narrow it down much.

She looked at the time-code clock at the top left of the screen. It was just past eleven. A procession of heavy men, thin men, black men, white men, men who looked furtive, men who looked flushed, men who looked like fumbling boys, men who looked like wifebeaters – Christ, no wonder the manager had grown to hate the entire sex. And Maggie had only been staring at an hour’s worth of the Lounge’s customer base, and that was at 2x, twice normal speed.

Half-way through the second hour, at what would have been eleven thirty in real time, something caught Maggie’s eye.

It was not a man but a woman. Tall, her dark hair cut in a chic geometric bob, she instantly stood out from the rest: classier than the handful of other women the CCTV had picked up that night, who either wore the forlorn expression of the luckless wife bullied into playing along with her husband’s threesome fantasy, or radiated the drunken, tottering jollity of the hen night.

Not that Maggie could see her face; she kept her head down. But she walked elegantly. And with something else too. Purpose.

And now she could see why. Walking a pace behind her, as if tugged by an unseen rope, was a man in a flat golfer’s cap – pulled down low to conceal his face – and a dark grey suit. He looked sharply left and right as he came out, slipping a tip into the hand of the bouncer on the door as he did so. He looked left and right again, this second sweep exposing his face to the CCTV camera. There was no sound, so there was no way of knowing if he was actually panting. But his eyes were almost bugging out with what Maggie could see, even from this grainy angle, was desire.

It was only then, once she had determined that this was a man leaving the Midnight Lounge with a beautiful woman he had picked up, that she thought to identify him. But there was no doubt about it.

She asked to freeze the frame, so that she could take a good, long look at the man who had stared so knowingly from the television set last night. For there, caught on tape and on heat, was none other than Vic Forbes.

New Orleans, Thursday March 23, 00.52 CST

Trying to sound as nonchalant as she could, she asked the guard next to her about the man on the screen. ‘Do you recognize this man?’

‘That your husband?’

‘Do you recognize him?’

‘I’m not sure what I’m meant to say here, ma’am.’

‘You heard what your boss told you. You’re to help me out.’

‘I don’t know what would help you out, ma’am. For me to say I do recognize him or to say I don’t.’

‘How about you tell me the truth?’

‘He looks kinda familiar, yes.’

‘You know who that is?’ For a moment, she hesitated: was it possible this guard had seen Forbes on TV?

‘Well, I couldn’t tell you his name, if that’s what you mean, ma’am.’

‘You couldn’t?’

‘That’s not how it works here. We’re not meant to know anyone’s name. We never ask. That’s the whole point. It’s not Cheers.’

‘But you’ve seen him before?’

‘He’s been here a coupla times.’

‘A couple?’

‘OK. Bit more than a couple.’

‘Is he a regular?’

‘I’m sorry, ma’am. This must be real hard for you.’

‘So he’s a regular, yes?’

The guard nodded.

‘And what about her?’ Maggie nodded towards the frozen image on the screen. The woman was only half in shot, at the extreme right of the picture.

The guard rewound and played the sequence back at half-speed: the head down, the sharp bob of hair, the elegant figure. ‘Hard to tell,’ he said finally. He rewound the tape and stared at her intently. But the woman kept her head down, refusing to reveal her face.

‘Oh, OK. I can see who that is now.’

‘She come here often too?’

‘She works here.’

‘Here? You mean I could go talk to her?’

‘You’d have to ask the boss ’bout that. Mind you, she ain’t here today.’