Читать книгу The 3rd Woman - Jonathan Freedland - Страница 18

The Great Hall of the People was a landmark. The building itself was nothing special – an entrance on South Wall Street next to a vintage clothes store – but everyone knew it, thanks to the green-uniformed sentries who guarded the door, alongside two outdoor flame-heaters, in oversized peaked caps and retro People’s Liberation Army fatigues.

Maddy had only been once, but she remembered it. Beijing kitsch was the theme: heroic posters of Mao, waiters in workers’ caps, and on one wall a giant TV screen, the pixels usually flooding red, projecting patriotic slogans. Even from her vantage point in the car parked on the other side of the street, she could see the words ‘Innovation, Inclusiveness, Virtue’ in bold yellow and in English, against the rippling flag of the People’s Republic.

She guessed the place was heaving now, the long, long tables – styled after the dining hall of a Mao-era peasant farm – packed and spilling over. The Great Hall filled up early every night, serving Chinese fusion – dim sum with Waldorf salad, roast duck served with fries – to couples and irony-chasing twentysomethings before nine, then giving way to business types grabbing a midnight bite after their morning calls to Beijing and Shanghai. The food was surprisingly good for what was essentially a theme bar, good enough that even Chinese expats were known to eat here, though maybe they came for the irony too.

She stayed low in the driver’s seat, eyeing Barbara’s car, the same one the detective had once shared with Jeff Howe.

Jeff. Even the name induced a pang of guilt. The very worst thing you can do, she knew, with a man like that was to offer false hope. In fact, that was not the very worst thing. The very worst thing was to give him false hope and somehow become obligated towards him. She had managed to do both.

She had been driving back from the Padilla house, still reeling from the discovery that Rosario belonged in that category the California bureaucrats called ‘white Hispanic’ – that she, like Abigail, was a blonde. It was hardly conclusive but, coupled with the fact that Rosario, like Abigail, had no history of intravenous drug use, it should at least be of interest to the police. It might be a lead. Maddy had covered enough homicides to know that the mere possibility that they were looking for a man who had killed a similar-looking woman in a similar way would be worth checking. At the very least she should telephone Detective Barbara Miller, pass on this nugget of information – which might or might not be of relevance – and then she could leave it to them. Only then did Maddy spell out to herself what that would mean: that her beloved baby sister was the victim of a serial killer.

She had pulled over at the next rest-stop, then dug into the pocket of her jeans to extract the already crumpled business card Miller had given her when they met. The conversation had been short, the bare minimum, Maddy suspected, that would allow Miller to check the box marked ‘family support’.

Shit.

The card was the standard one, giving the general number of the LAPD switchboard. But Miller had scribbled a number on the reverse. At the time, Maddy had assumed that this would be the detective’s personal cellphone number. Except now she looked and could see that Miller had simply written on the back the same switchboard number that was printed on the front.

Maddy wondered if that was generic unhelpfulness, designed to keep any outsider at bay, or whether this was bespoke bullshit, tailormade for her. Perhaps Miller feared journalistic meddling in her investigation, but she was denying Maddy the treatment all other victims of such a serious crime would regard as their right.

Madison had let her head fall into her hands. She was so unbearably tired that the interior of the car was revolving around her. But she had to pass this information on.

The LAPD switchboard was the twenty-first-century labyrinth of the ancients: no one got out of there alive. If she was to make contact with Miller, she would need her cell.

She got out of the car, so that she could pace around it. There on the cracked asphalt, standing by a tall weed that had grown through a crack, was a trucker, baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, taking a break. He nodded in her direction. She turned away, aware that a return nod could well be interpreted as a friendliness she did not mean and that could only delay her.

She realized what it looked like. The windows of her car open, Maddy pacing around in her skinny jeans and tight sweater, albeit one with a hole below the armpit. That was the trouble with being a woman her age and not physically repulsive: you had actively to signal your lack of interest and non-availability. Otherwise any activity that for a man would be regarded as normal, human behaviour – including taking a break from driving to get a breath of fresh air – would be read as a come-on.

The trucker was still smiling, refusing to take the cue and look away. Had this man appeared before or after she got here? Was it possible he had turned off the freeway when she had? Because she had? Had he been there the last twenty minutes, watching her make her phone calls, waiting for her?

Suddenly she was seized by a feeling she had not known before, a kind of vicarious fear. She was imagining the terror that must have grasped her sister in her final moments, the fright that must have shaken her as she understood that she was about to die. Had Abigail too been pursued by a man like this? Had he followed her home, chased her up the stairs and, just when she thought she was safe and that she had eluded him, had he caught up with her, jamming his hand in the door just before it was slammed shut, shoving it open and forcing his way inside her apartment? And then …

Maddy realized she was breathing too heavily. Audibly. She looked over towards the baseball cap and, to her relief, saw that he was back in his cab, about to set off. Clasping the top of the car door, she allowed herself three more deep breaths and resolved to get a grip.

And that’s when she turned to Jeff.

‘I need Barbara Miller’s cell,’ she said, her voice tight and short. Striving to give him no more misplaced encouragement, she sounded terse and somehow entitled instead. She took the number and could almost visualize the debt that was mounting between them.

He told her that Miller was clamming up, that she was nervous about him leaking any information on the investigation to a journalist. Madison needed to be very careful with whatever he told her, otherwise he would be exposed and compromised. It had to stay private, just between them.

Then he asked her to hold, returning sixty seconds later. That same hint of eagerness – of a man handing over the quid in expectation of the quo – in his voice.

‘I’ve just checked on the tracking system here. Barbara and Steve are at the Great Hall bar, downtown,’ he said.

‘I know that place. What are they doing there?’

‘It seems a girl matching Abigail’s description was seen there last night. With a young white male; possibly left with him. There’s a witness who says they heard an argument between them. There’s CCTV footage apparently. Miller and Agar are looking at it right now.’

So here she was, waiting in her car across the street. She worked through her options. Dash in, wade through the throng and find the security room, interrupting Barbara and Steve while they viewed the CCTV pictures? Disaster. They’d have her down as a stalker, shadowing their investigation, making it impossible to do their jobs. She could write the official complaint they would make herself. Besides, she would glean no information that way. They, and whoever was showing them the footage, would immediately clam up, demanding she tell them why and how the hell she had tracked them down there. Jeff would be disciplined – and would never tell her anything again.

And yet whatever it was they had just found out, she needed to know.

Waiting. Never her first instinct, but the only viable course for now. She would watch and wait.

Ten minutes went by, then another five and finally she could see movement by the door that suggested people coming out rather than in. Steve emerged first, talking into his cellphone. Barbara followed. Maddy sunk still lower into her seat, regretting that she was not wearing a top with a hood.

She watched the pair of detectives drive away, their vehicle unmarked, save for a white-on-black ‘W’ on the licence plate: the symbol that connoted permission to drive every day of the week. Maddy counted to ten, pressed the three digits that would keep her hidden from caller ID software, then dialled the number she had already searched and loaded onto her phone.

Three rings, then: ‘Great Hall of the People.’ The accent American, the voice male, young, bored.

Involuntarily, she closed her eyes, less to steel herself for what she was about to do than to focus on it, to concentrate all her energies on the task at hand. She lowered the pitch of her voice and spoke.

‘This is Detective Miller, my colleague and I were there just a moment ago. Sweetheart, could you put me through to the manager please?’

A short delay then a new voice, female and brisk. Damn. Women, Maddy had found, were less credulous than men. But there was no going back.

‘Hello there. My colleague and I were with y’all a few moments ago, viewing the security footage?’

‘Yes.’

‘I think there’s something we may need to review again. I wish I could come back myself, but we don’t have much time. I’m sending over one of my junior colleagues to see you, her name is Madison Halliday. Is that OK, honey? Nothing complicated, just show her what you showed me.’

She held her breath, her eyes still closed. She was wincing.

Eventually the manager spoke. ‘Is there something wrong?’

‘Nothing wrong, sweetheart. Just need a second look.’

Another delay and then, ‘OK. How long will she be?’

‘Not long at all. I’ve put Officer Halliday on it because she’s in the area already. With you in the next few minutes. Thanks, honey.’

She had been nodded through, thanks to a glimpse of the LAPD badge she had never removed from her pocketbook, kept there well over a year since Katharine had knocked it up for her, reluctantly, using a 3D printer. Madison had solemnly promised that it was for one time only, that she had no other way of doing that story – on a sex trafficking ring operating out of Long Beach – and that she would destroy it as soon as the story was done. But a fake police ID belonging to a fictitious Officer Madison Halliday was too good an asset to throw away. Without telling Katharine, Madison had saved it for a rainy day. Like today.

So the woman she guessed she had spoken to earlier stayed with a phone cradled in her neck by the reservations lectern, serving as a traffic cop for a line of would-be diners, merely glanced up, clocked the badge, then mouthed and gestured her towards a downstairs room marked ‘Private’, next to the men’s and women’s bathrooms.

Inside was a bank of four television monitors, each one flicking at intervals between different angles and locations. She could see the long tables, the bar, the kitchen, a series of what looked like small lounges, bathed in the white light of karaoke screens, and the basin area of what she supposed was the women’s bathroom. So, she noted, cameras even there.

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.