Tove Alsterdal - The Forgotten Dead - A dark, twisted, unputdownable thriller

‘What’s wrong? It’s OK to change your mind, if you want.’

Patrick covered his face with his hand and groaned.

‘The ring! I forgot about the ring. What an idiot I am.’

He’d been so preoccupied with mustering his courage that he’d forgotten that little, classic detail. Could I forgive him? Could I give him another chance to do it over, according to the rulebook?

I took his face in my hands. I ran my finger gently along his jaw line. I said that I didn’t want any other proposal. This was the best one I could have imagined. If he was so nervous that he’d forgotten the ring, that meant something. It was something I could believe. It was far more important than any bit of metal that existed on earth.

‘But if you insist,’ I went on, ‘the shops are still open on Canal Street.’

On the way we stopped to buy a bottle of champagne and paused to kiss in a doorway, taking so long that some bitch started yelling for the police. When we reached Chinatown, the jewellers on Canal Street had all closed up for the day. ‘Why do I need a ring?’ I said. ‘Who decided that?’ And as night fell, we staggered deeper into the red glow of Chinatown’s knick-knack shops, tattoo parlours, and disreputable clubs. I had only a vague memory of how we made it back home that night.

One year later, to the day, we were married, but it was the evening of our engagement that meant the most. Because it was only the two of us, I thought. After that his parents and all the traditions and the wedding magazines and the whole bridal package came into the picture.

Patrick’s desk chair softly moulded to my body, faintly redolent of leather. Oddly enough, I’d never sat in his chair before. I ran my hand over the dark surface of his desk. In front of me lay a desk calendar bound in leather, a Christmas present from his father, who shared Patrick’s passion for intellectual luxuries.

The page for 17 August held only a brief note.

Newark 21.05. That was the departure time for his plane. No hotel name. We always used our cell phones to call each other, never the hotel phones. It hadn’t seemed important to know where he was staying.

I took a deep breath before I pulled out the top drawer. I was reluctant to start rummaging through Patrick’s things.

Everything was in meticulous order. There were stacks of receipts. Postage stamps, insurance policies.

In the next two drawers he kept articles that he’d written, along with background material neatly sorted by topic. I quickly leafed through the piles of papers. Nothing about human trafficking. At the very bottom were the articles that had almost won him a Pulitzer Prize. He’d changed after that. Worked harder, become practically obsessed with whatever he was writing. I thought about a woman he’d interviewed for the series about the new economy. He’d found her under a bridge in Brooklyn. She talked about how she was going to get back her job as chief accountant very soon, and then she’d bring home her three kids and move back into an apartment in Park Slope. Under all the layers of clothing she carried a cell phone so the company would be able to reach her. It had neither a SIM card nor a battery. Patrick had spent three nights out there. When he came home he tossed and turned in bed, talking in his sleep. ‘You have to call Rose,’ he said. ‘You have to call Rose.’ I had pictured Rose as some secret cutie until I saw the article and realized she was the woman who lived under the bridges in Brooklyn. That was what he dreamed about at night.

I shut the last drawer, and the desk resumed its closed, orderly guise.

Hadn’t he ever mentioned the name of the hotel? Not even once?

I fixed my gaze on the row of books above his desk.

Hemingway.

Patrick had said something about Hemingway the last time he called. About the bar where he’d gone. I hadn’t paid much attention because I didn’t give a shit about Hemingway. I would never have gone to that bar, even if he’d still been alive. But Patrick had also mentioned Victor Hugo.

He was sitting at the window of the hotel and looking at … what? A grave? The place where Victor Hugo was buried.

I kicked my feet to make the chair roll across the floor to my own work area, and pressed the keyboard of my laptop. The screen woke out of sleep mode.

I’d seen Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame , both the musical and the films, but I had no idea where the author was buried.

I typed ‘Victor Hugo’ and ‘grave’ into Google and pressed search. From the first hit I recognized the name that Patrick had mentioned. The Panthéon. I clicked on Wikipedia. Panthéon was Greek for ‘all gods’. It was originally a church, but after the French Revolution it was turned into a mausoleum for national heroes. In 1851 Foucault had hung a pendulum from the dome to prove that the earth rotates. Victor Hugo was buried in crypt number twenty-four.

Impatiently I scrolled down to the technical structural details.

Patrick had said that he could see the dome from his window. The building was eighty-three metres tall. I pictured how it must rise above the rooftops. There could be hundreds of hotels that boasted of such a view.

But Patrick could also see the university through the window. The Sorbonne. Did you know people live up there under the eaves? I typed ‘Sorbonne’ and ‘Panthéon’ and ‘hotel’ in the search box.

The first hit was for the Hôtel de la Sorbonne. I felt a shiver race through my body. A feeling that Patrick was getting closer. I was pulling him towards me.

A click from the door, his footsteps across the floor, and everything would return to normal again. Breakfast and work. Watching American Idol with half an eye in the evening. Days passing, nights when I was able to sleep. The sound of him breathing next to me.

The hotel’s website appeared on the screen. ‘Near the Panthéon, the Sorbonne, and the Luxembourg Gardens’. The clock in the upper right corner of the screen told me it was approaching one a.m., which meant six in the morning in Paris. I tapped in the phone number, picturing in my mind the sun rising above ponderous stone buildings with gleaming cupolas.

‘ Hôtel Sorbonne. Bonjour .’

The voice on the phone sounded slightly groggy, half-asleep.

‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to get in touch with a guest who may be staying at your hotel.’

A lengthy and rapid reply followed.

‘Do you speak English?’ I asked. ‘I’m looking for an American named Patrick Cornwall.’

A long silence on the phone. I watched the clock change from 00.53 to 00.54. Tuesday, 23 September.

‘No Cornell.’

‘Cornwall,’ I said, enunciating carefully. ‘He’s an American journalist.’

But I heard only a buzzing sound in my ear. I wondered how Patrick could stand it over there. But he spoke fluent French, of course, so he didn’t have to put up with being treated like something the cat had dragged in.

On the website of the next hotel on the list, the Cluny Sorbonne, they boasted about speaking English. The description further said: in the heart of the Latin Quarter, within walking distance of Notre-Dame, the Panthéon, and the Louvre .