The 3rd Woman. Jonathan Freedland

She was in the hallway. Just there.’ He pointed towards the front door. ‘Just kind of stretched out. On her back. Arms at her side.’

      ‘And this was late at night?’

      ‘Nearly one in the morning. More than two weeks ago. She’d been out.’ Madison remembered the police estimate of Abigail’s time of death: shortly after one am. Abigail too had been out.

      ‘And do you have any idea why she would be in the hall?’

      ‘No I don’t. Even if you think my sister was some kind of junkie, which she was not, she’s waited this whole time to get home. Why wouldn’t she wait the extra two or three seconds it would take to get to her room? Or even the bathroom? The only reason it’d be out here, is someone followed her home, followed her into the house, did this thing to her – and that someone didn’t want to get caught.’

      Maddy paused, looked back towards the front door, as if taking in what Mario had just said. ‘And did she look as if she had been … hurt in any way?’

      ‘That’s it, you see. Police said there was “no sign of a struggle”. Couple of scratches here and there, but they said she could have got those anywhere.’

      Maddy girded herself for what she was about to ask. ‘Did the police suspect anything else had happened to your sister?’ She let the question hang in the air, the weight on the words ‘anything else’.

      His head sunk onto his chest. ‘No. I’m grateful for that. No.’ He looked up, his eyes conveying a question.

      ‘No,’ Maddy replied. ‘Nothing like that either … All right,’ she said finally. ‘Thank you for telling me all this. It sounds like we’ve suffered something very similar.’

      ‘Tell me, Miss Webb. Do you think the person who killed Rosario killed your sister? Is that what you’re saying?’

      ‘I don’t know.’ He looked at her with great need, an expression she recognized. It was the face she had seen in the mirror a matter of hours ago, her own need for answers reflected back at her.

      He showed her out, leading her to the front door. ‘You should have a mask on,’ he said.

      She wheeled around, feeling very suddenly exposed. Had her emotions been that obvious, written all over her face?

      ‘For the smog. I told Rosario that all the time. “You gotta wear a mask when it’s like this.”’ He paused, staring into the street, ignoring the couple touching him on the shoulder by way of a goodbye as they left the wake. ‘I was worried about her.’

      And then, as if remembering himself, he reached into his pocket for his phone. ‘I just realized, I never showed you a picture.’

      ‘Oh, I’d love that.’ This too was a familiar ritual. Every homicide Maddy had ever covered, the family always wanted to tell you stories or show you photos, to make sure you understood what they had lost. He swiped a few images, then settled on one he liked, turning the screen towards Maddy, angling it in the light.

      ‘See,’ he said. ‘She was a beautiful girl.’

      Filling the frame was a standard, college graduation photograph, a smiling young woman in mortarboard and gown. Maddy nodded her agreement that she was indeed lovely looking. But that was not what struck her with great force, settling at last the question that had nagged at her since she had embarked on that computer search nearly three hours ago. She had seen this picture online, but had assumed it was some kind of mistake. Because the woman before her, beaming from the screen of her grieving brother’s phone, was not what she had expected. In striking contrast with her brother and her aunts, Rosario Padilla had long blonde hair and skin as fine and pale as alabaster.

       Chapter 11

      Who would dominate? If you had to bet, you’d say it was the guy in the Dead T-shirt, longish hair. If they were testing ketchup or soda, he’d be the alpha dog, no doubt about it. But for this? Not so sure. Maybe the woman, overweight, polyester pants; you’d bet on her having strong views. Or the older man, retired accountant maybe. Or a dentist. If this were a jury, he’d be the foreman: prissy, stickler for the rules, president of his condo residents’ association. You’d stake your wages on it. But this was not a jury. Way more unpredictable.

      The man at his side leaned in to whisper. ‘We’ll do a dummy first,’ he said before straightening up again. They were both standing, gazing through a large, rectangular window, like engineers behind the glass in a recording studio. Except no one was making music on the other side. Instead, this scientifically selected sample of the California electorate were being paid ‘expenses’ to give up an hour of their early evening to sit in a semi-circle of hard chairs in a specially equipped room in a hotel off the 605 near Anaheim. They had come on the promise of ‘an exciting opportunity to be involved in the early stages of marketing a brand-new product!’ As always, no one had warned the members of this particular focus group that the product in question was a new political message.

      Bill Doran remembered the days when these were a novelty. The first one he witnessed seemed to him a revelation, the tool that would transform the trade plied by him and his fellow political consultants, that travelling band of mercenaries who rented out their smarts and experience to the parade of shallow, shiny inadequates and deviants who hankered after public office in the United States. Now focus groups were part of the established order. If anything they were under threat, dismissed as old school by the kids who seemed to base every judgement on the latest meme coursing through Weibo.

      Bald, barrel-chested and thick-necked and, as such, a long-time standout among the bespectacled, chess-club dweebs of the political consultant community, Doran checked his phone while the dummy was underway, a question about the pizza that had been offered and chowed down by the group. ‘I knew it,’ said the Deadhead. ‘I told my pal, Joe, I said to him, “I bet it’s pizza”. And boom! It’s pizza.’ The man chuckled to himself and Doran adjusted his expectations, predicting that this was not a man his fellow focus-groupers were likely to follow.

      ‘All right, thanks everyone,’ the facilitator was saying, a studiedly informal man in dark jeans and a pressed white shirt. ‘Moving on. First of all I want to show you a very short film. Then I’m going to be asking for your responses to a few statements. I’ll read them out and you just tell me what you think, OK? Just like we did with the pizza, all right? Everyone happy?’ There was nodding around the semi-circle, except from the Deadhead as he slowly realized he had, in fact, lost his bet with Joe.

      Doran watched as the film played on the other side of the glass, a short video primer explaining the Chinese presence on US soil. Apparently aimed at twelve year olds – The story starts on Capitol Hill … – it was ideal for this audience. Not that Doran was looking at the screen. His focus remained fixed on the faces in front of him.

      Less than three minutes later, the focus group facilitator was rising from his chair. ‘Thank you, folks. Now, as promised, I’m going to read you a series of statements and I want to get your reaction. OK, here’s the first one. “The only troops on California soil should be American troops.” Anyone want me to read that again? OK, here goes. “The only troops on California soil should be American troops.”’

      There was some spirited nodding and a rambling few sentences of assent from both the polyester trousers and the Deadhead. But then the dentist (or accountant) said, ‘We all agree with that, sure. In an ideal world, we’d only have American troops here. We all want that. But it’s not going to happen. The Treaty’s the Treaty. It’s signed, sealed and delivered. Nothing we can do about it.’

      ‘It’s too late,’ nodded a woman who, Doran guessed, had been recruited to represent the suburban married female demographic, the one they had called ‘soccer moms’ back when he was starting out in this business. Quaint, that phrase seemed now.

      Doran checked his watch. Precisely twenty-three seconds after