The 3rd Woman

In a chair, eating a salad out of a plastic box, was a young, white man whose scraggly beard could have denoted either hipster or loser, it was hard to tell. Maddy decided it was he who had first picked up the phone when ‘Barbara’ had called a few minutes ago. That suggested a general dogsbody rather than a ‘head of security’. Whether that was good news or bad, it was too early to tell.

‘Hi there,’ she said, her voice self-consciously higher and lighter than normal, as if to stress that she was absolutely not the same person he had spoken to earlier. ‘I’m here to review again the footage from last night?’

He munched on a fork loaded with spinach leaves, a cherry tomato squirting from the left side of his mouth and onto his shirt. He nodded, too full of food to speak, then keyed a few strokes at his computer. A second or two later, the central and largest monitor was showing a sequence on fast rewind, jerky figures moving off and on stools, taking glasses from their lips and putting them down on the counter.

‘What are we looking at?’ Maddy asked, doing her best to sound no more than professionally curious.

‘This is the bar camera,’ salad boy said, about to take another bite, nodding towards the screen for emphasis. He pressed another button, the picture now displaying the timecode and the rest of the on-screen data that had been missing until then: 12.13 am, today’s date. ‘This is what your … this is what those guys were looking at before.’

The camera was above the bar, mounted, judging from the angle, high up on the right-hand wall. It revealed the bar staff in full face, two of them, but she could see the customers in profile only. At this moment it showed five people sitting on stools, three men and two women. Laboriously, starting at the left and moving rightward, Maddy fixed on each one in turn. Middle-aged man, possibly white; middle-aged man, Asian, could be Japanese, Chinese, Korean; both turned on their stools to face a woman in a black mini-dress, sheer sleeves, hair fair, almost silver on the screen, though that could be the lights. The picture was not sharp enough to be sure, but to Maddy it looked like a classic late night scene: two businessmen hitting on an attractive single woman. The men at least were smiling; the woman had a glass in her hand.

Next to the female drinker, though visible only in profile, was a younger man: white, mid-thirties, hair brown and cut short, well-built. He was talking to the last figure on the screen who, because she was seated at the curve of the bar, had her back to the camera. Distracted by the little ménage á trois at the other end, Maddy had not noticed her at all till now.

‘Can you freeze the picture? Just here.’

Maddy looked hard. The young woman was dressed in a fitted, sparkling top. Yesterday she’d have said that was not Abigail’s style at all. But a few hours ago she had seen items in Abigail’s closet that were just like it. The hair was the right colour, blonde, though you couldn’t tell if it was Abigail-blonde, full of the sun and fresh air, or the bottled variety. It was definitely the right length though. Still, the similarity ended there. This woman’s hair was dead straight, falling in a sheet, as if it had been ironed flat. Abigail never wore her hair like that.

‘The other guys looked at this too. It’s Abigail.’

The name, spoken by a stranger, broke Maddy out of her trance of concentration. She turned to the technician, still gesturing with his fork at the frozen image. She was about to snap at him, when she remembered who she was supposed to be. She was Madison Halliday, junior police officer on an errand. She was not Maddy Webb, sister. She looked back at the screen, telling herself that this was what happened in murder cases. The victim became public property, often referred to simply by their first name – especially, it had to be said, when the victim was young and female. She could picture the headlines and TV captions she had seen over the years. The search for Tanya’s killer. Will we ever know who killed Amanda? It was a journalistic tic, and she was no less guilty of it than the rest of them.

‘Is that what, um, my colleagues said too? That that’s Abigail?’

‘Yep.’ He took another bite. ‘And me too.’

Maddy stiffened. ‘You? What do you mean?’

‘Well, I’m not here all the time. But she’s one of the regulars. I mean, was one of the regulars. Sorry. It’s just so weird.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Someone being here and then the next day, they’re gone. I know they say death is part of life, but—’

‘No, I mean I don’t follow about her being one of the regulars.’

‘I explained it to your friends before. She was a regular here. In the KTV area, in the bar. Couple of nights a week, at least. Anyway, look. This is the bit I think you’re meant to look at.’

Maddy could hardly take in what she was hearing, his words ricocheting around her head, rebounding against the echo of Quincy all those hours ago. You don’t always know everything, Maddy. Not even about Abigail.

But now the monitor was showing her younger sister at a slightly clearer angle, because Abigail had turned a few degrees to speak to this man whom Maddy had branded a soldier of some kind. He was smiling, then giving a large nod. From the way Abigail’s back was moving, she would guess they were having an amicable conversation. Maybe flirting.

But then his posture stiffened. He leaned forward, said something that prompted Abigail to stand up and walk away. She disappeared out of shot on her right, then briefly appeared a half-second later in the far left of the screen, as if she had walked round the bar, past the soldier, though without looking at him, and out. The man downed his drink, scoped the room, once to his right, then to his left – where the middle-aged trio were still making each other smile – once more to his right, before placing a dollar bill on the counter and leaving too. According to the CCTV timecode that did not stop ticking, he followed Abigail out of the bar less than thirty seconds later. Out of the bar, out into the cold, LA night – and out, it seemed, to pursue Abigail.

Chapter 13

Leo Harris had sent texts, several direct messages via Weibo and, heaven help him, an email. Short of sending smoke signals from the Hollywood Hills, he didn’t know what more he could do. But Maddy had ignored them all.

It was, he reflected now – still wearing his suit, his feet up on the coffee table, his back slumped into the couch – not just sympathy for an ex-girlfriend in mourning. The term stopped him. Was she even an ex? Was that the right word, given what had happened to them? They had never had the break-up conversation; they had never really broken up. They had tried to ‘take things to the next level’ – they had moved in together – but that had not worked out and suddenly they were no longer together at all.

He never understood that dynamic, though he knew it was real. It was the same in politics. Pundits were always saying of this or that initiative that it was high risk because, if it failed, there was no going back to the status quo ante. He would nod along, but truth was, he never completely got it. Why couldn’t they go back? OK, so they tried something else, it didn’t work out, back to square one. But no, square one would be blocked off, suddenly deemed inaccessible. The conventional wisdom was adamant on this point: advance and fail and there was no going back. In an election campaign and in romance, the same stubborn rule held. But he couldn’t tell you why.

Nor could he give a precise answer to the specific question of why living together had failed. He had been the one to push for it and while Maddy never quite said no, she did not quite say yes either. He had turned up at her apartment one Sunday morning with two lattes and thirty flat, self-assembly cardboard storage boxes: no more talking, let’s just get you packed up. He figured he would learn the lesson of their first night together. He had not asked her out on a date: if he had, she would only have said no. Instead, after some City Hall event, he had simply leaned in and kissed her. That’s how they had started: no process of deliberation, just action.

But it had not been easy: even staying the night was tricky with a woman who didn’t know how to sleep. For all that, he never lost his conviction that they would find their rhythm eventually. He had imagined coming home to Madison, turning the key in the lock and finding another person already there, the apartment already warm. He had even, God help him, imagined a child – a miniature bundle of their combined energy, talent and neuroses. A little girl probably, gorgeous but crazy.

Yet now he and Madison were barely in touch. Even at this moment, as she was reeling from the most unspeakable blow, he found himself unable to find the right words. No one should lose a loved one that young, was what he had left on her voicemail. Her laughter will live on. You’ll always hear it. That’s what he had texted. Trouble was, everything sounded like a presidential address following a natural disaster. He might have been in Vanity Fair’s list of Hottest Politicos Under Thirty-Five, but he already felt as if he’d been doing this too long.

Anyway, it wasn’t just sympathy for Madison that had lodged inside him. Guilt was gnawing at him too. Leo had seen the reported time of death and he had worked out, just as he felt sure Maddy had worked out, that at or very close to the moment when the beautiful life force that was Abigail Webb was being snuffed out, he and Maddy had been engaged in their usual dance: two parts combat to one part flirtation.

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