The 3rd Woman. Jonathan Freedland

stranger against her neck, then dispersing around it, as if enveloping her.

      She tried to call out. Not a scream but a word. If her mouth had not been gagged it might have come out as ‘What?’

      All of that was in the first second. But now, in the moments that followed, there was time for fear. It sped through her, throbbing out from her heart through her veins, into her brain, which seemed to be filling with flashing red and yellow, and then into her legs, which became light and unsteady. But she did not fall. He had her in his grip.

      She felt him use his weight to push the apartment door, already unlocked, wide open, his shove splintering wood off the frame. Once she was bundled inside, he closed the door – deliberately not letting it slam.

      Now the scream rose, trying to force its way through her chest and into her throat, but it came up against the leather hand and seemed to be pushed back into her. She felt his left hand leave her shoulder and move, as if checking for something.

      Instinctively she tried to wriggle free, but his right arm was too strong. It held her in place, sealing her mouth at the same time.

      Now she heard a ripping noise: had he torn her clothes? The first, primeval, terror had been of death, that this man would kill her. But the second fear, coming in instant pursuit, was the horror that he would push his brute body into hers. She made a wordless calculation, a bargain almost: she would withstand a rape if he would let her live.

      But the sound she had heard was not of torn clothing. She saw his left hand hover in front of her face, a piece of wide, silver-coloured masking tape spanned between its fingers. Expertly, he placed it over her mouth, leaving not so much as a split-second in which she could emit a sound.

      Now he grabbed her wrists, containing them both in the grasp of a single hand. Still behind her, still not letting her glimpse his face, he pushed her towards the centre of the room, in front of the couch. He shoved the coffee table out of the way with one foot, then tripped her from behind, so that she was face down on the carpet with pressure on her back, a knee holding her in position.

      This is it, she thought. He’ll rip my clothes off now and do it here, like this. She told herself to send her mind elsewhere, so that she could survive what was to follow. Live through this, she thought. You can. She closed her eyes and tried to shut down. Live through this.

      But he had not finished his preparations. A strip of black cloth was placed over her eyes, then tied at the back. Next, this man – whose face she had not seen, whose voice she had not heard – flipped her over, firmly but not roughly. Perhaps he had sensed that her strategy for survival was to co-operate.

      One wrist was pulled above her head, so that she looked like a child demanding the teacher’s attention. A moment later, the wrist was encircled by a kind of plastic bracelet. Loose at first, but then she heard that distinctive zipping sound she remembered from childhood, the sound of a hardware-store cable tie. Her father would use them to bundle loose wires together, keeping them neat behind the TV set; they were impossible to break, he said. Now this man did the same to her right wrist. She was lying on the floor, gagged and blindfolded, with both her arms stretched upward and tied to a single leg of the couch.

      She willed her mind to transport itself somewhere else. But the fear was making her teeth chatter. Nausea was working its way up from her stomach and into her mouth. Please God, let this be over. Let this end, please God.

      It was all happening so fast, so … efficiently. There was no rage in this man’s actions, just purpose and method, as if this were a safety drill and he was following an established procedure. One of his hands was now on her right arm, except the touch was not the rough leather she had felt over her mouth. It was light, just a fingertip, but not human skin. Sightless, she could not be sure of the material, but the hand was close enough to her face that she could smell it. It was latex. The man was wearing latex gloves. Now a new terror seized her.

      He gripped her wrist again and then she felt it, the sharp puncture of a needle plunged into her right arm. She cried out, hearing only the sound of a muffled exclamation that seemed to come from somewhere else entirely.

      And then, in an instant, the fear melted away, to be replaced by a rapid, tingling rush, a wave of blissful comfort. She felt no pain at all, just a deep, wide, unexpected happiness. When the tape was removed from her mouth, she let out no scream. Perhaps she had succeeded in sending herself far away after all, onto the Malibu beach at dawn, where the sand was kissed by sun. Or into a clear-blue ocean. Or into a hammock on a desert island in the South Pacific. Or into a cabin in mid-winter, the amber glow warming her as she lay on the rug before a fire that popped and crackled.

      She heard the distant sound of the cable tie being cut loose, its job now done. She sensed the blindfold coming away from her face. But she felt no urge to open her eyes or move her arms, even though she was now free. Every nerve, every synapse, from her toes to her fingernails, was dedicated instead to passing messages of pleasure to her brain. Her system was flooded with goodness; she was a crowd assembling on the mountain top at the moment of the Rapture, every face grinning with delight.

      Now she felt the lightest, most fleeting sensation between her legs. A hand was peeling back her underwear. Something brushed against her. It did not penetrate. It did not even bother her. Rather something still and smooth was resting there, against her most intimate place. She felt her skin kissed by silk petals.

      A second passed and she was in the sealed, safe hiding place before any of that, floating in the fluid that could nourish her and support her and where no one could disturb her. She was in her mother’s womb, utterly content, breathing only love and love and love.

       Chapter 1

      Normally Madison Webb liked January. If you grew up used to golden California sun, winter could be a welcome novelty. The cold – not that it ever got truly cold in LA – made your nerves tingle, made you feel alive.

      Not this January, though. She had spent the month confined to a place of steel and blank, windowless walls, one of those rare corners of LA compelled to operate throughout the Chinese New Year. It never stopped, day or night. She had been working here for three weeks, twenty shifts straight, taking her place alongside the scores of seamstresses hunched over their machines. Though the word ‘seamstresses’ was misleading. As Maddy would be explaining to the LA public very soon, the word suggested some ancient, artisan skill, while in reality she and the other women were on an assembly line, in place solely to mind the devices, ensuring the fabric was placed squarely in the slot and letting the pre-programmed, robotic arm do the rest. They were glorified machine parts themselves.

      Except that machines, as she would put it in the first in a series of undercover reports on life in an LA sweatshop, would be treated better than these people, who had to stand at their work-stations for hours on end, raising their hands for a bathroom break, surrendering their phones as they arrived, lest they surreptitiously try to photograph this dingy basement where, starved of natural light and illuminated by a few naked lightbulbs, she felt her eyesight degraded by the day.

      Being deprived of her phone had presented the most obvious obstacle, Maddy reflected now, as she fed a stretch of denim through the roller, ensuring its edges aligned before it submitted to the stitching needle. She had worked with Katharine Hu, the resident tech-genius in the office and Maddy’s best friend there, to devise a concealed camera. Its lens was in the form of a button on her shirt. From there, it transmitted by means of a tiny wire to a digital recorder taped into the small of her back. It did the job well, giving a wide-angled view of everything she faced: turn 360 degrees and she could sweep the whole place. It picked up snatches of conversation with her fellow seamstresses and with Walker, the foreman – including a choice moment as he instructed one ‘bitch’ to get back to work.

      With nearly two hundred hours of recordings, she knew she had enough to run a story that would have serious impact. The camera had caught in full the incident nearly a week ago when Walker had denied one of Maddy’s co-workers a bathroom break, despite